The Birthday Present (24 page)

“Pandora and I are engaged. We're getting married in November.”

How long had it been going on? Since she brought my TV set here, it must have been, since she walked in here and
insinuated
herself by being nice to Justin. The way to a father's heart. And it was my own fault. I felt that from the start as I lay on my bed. It was my own fault and typical of my luck. In trying to be kind, to be thoughtful, I had offered Gerry Furnal my TV to replace his broken set. I might as well have told him I had found him a wife and I might as well have invited her to seduce him.

She came upstairs after me. I had known she would—but no, I hadn't
known
it, I had still expected more consideration, more tact. We go on hoping to find the best in people, however jaundiced we are. She came up and knocked at the door. I said, “Go away,” but she didn't. She came in, her face all false concern and fake sympathy.

“I'm sorry you're so upset, Jane,” she said. “There's no need. We want you to stay. We shall need you if I go on working, as I mean to.”

I said to her to get out.

“Gerry shouldn't have told you like that,” she said. “It must have been a shock. But you'll see how little difference it will make. I know there's not much room in this house but we shall buy a bigger house and we'll see if we can give you your own living room. Jane, we can
be friends.”

That was when I struck out at her. I jumped up and hit her with my fists. She tried to seize hold of my wrists but gave up with a cry when I clawed at her face with my nails.
He
came up then, because she was screaming, and he took hold of me and said he would get the police. Of course he didn't, he wouldn't want the neighbors seeing something like that. I struck him hard across the face and then I stopped. I don't know why but the fight went out of me and I lay on my bed, sobbing. Even then they didn't leave me. There was barely room for them in the room, but they stayed, she sitting on the end of my bed and he in the one chair, and they talked all forgivingly and sweetly about how they knew I hadn't meant to attack them. I was ill, they knew I was.

“You need counseling, Jane,” she said, “and we're going to see you get it. We owe you that.” Isn't it amazing the way a man and woman only have to know each other for five minutes before they're talking about “we”?

“There was never any intention on my part,” Gerry said in his pompous way, “of asking you to
leave.”
He put his hand up to his cheek, where I had hit him. It was bright red. “We'll forget all this,” he said. “It'll be as if it had never happened. Now do stop crying.”

“I'll go down and make you a cup of tea,” she said.

I said that if she did I would throw it at her. That sent them away, but the house was so small and the walls so thin I could hear them conferring in the room next door. I could hear him saying to leave me alone, I would be better in the morning, and her saying she would stay with him, she wouldn't leave him alone to “cope with it all.” I knew then that it was she who had been in the house in my absence in Ongar, she who had given Justin the farm and had moved the jewelry boxes. I shouted something but they didn't hear me or pretended they didn't. She must have looked at the pearls and planned on wearing them when she is installed here.

The strange thing was that I slept after that. Those two had worn me out. I lay there, thinking I would have to get up and go to the bathroom, I would have to do it without them seeing me go across the landing, but the next thing I knew it was deep darkness, the street lamp that always lit this miserable cell of mine had gone out, and when I looked at my digital clock I saw it was four in the morning. Fully clothed still, I crept out to the bathroom. He had left his bedroom door open. My eyes getting used to the dark, I could see the two of them in his bed, Hebe's bed, his head on one of the pillows, hers on his shoulder. I didn't expect to sleep but I did and didn't wake again until eight.

•   •   •

“I
DON'T THINK
you need counseling,” he said to me next day when I told him I'd rather die than stay there. “You need a psychiatrist.”

I quote that to show the kind of insults they leveled at me. She told me in her patronizing way that she knew our agreement said she would have to carry on paying me rent for my flat. That was all right, she'd be happy to do that. I could see the scratches on her face I had made with my nails. I wonder how she explained them to other people. If you want to get another nanny's job, he said, I'll give you a good reference. After telling me I needed psychiatric help? I laughed at him. He went on as if I hadn't laughed and said they would forget all about last night. “Why not stay till our wedding?” he said.

I didn't reply to any of this. The previous evening I had tried answering, I had seen where that got me, and now I could see the only thing was to be silent. Send the two of them to Coventry. I looked at them in what I hope was dignified silence and shook my head ever so slightly. I couldn't quite bring myself to treat Justin the same way. He was an innocent child—well, he was a child. But he needed some explanation of the noise and fuss those two had made the previous night.

“I shan't be seeing you anymore, Justin,” I said. “Daddy and Pandora have been very unkind to me so I have to go. Do you understand?”

He stared at me in that disconcerting way he has. “I don't know,” he said.

That day she fetched all her stuff from my flat and I put mine into my car. We didn't speak. In silence she put the envelope with a check for my rent in it into my hand. He had gone to work without giving me the promised reference. There was no way I would dream of working as anyone
else's nanny ever again but he wasn't to know that. He forgot; he didn't bother. She had unpacked her car and I had packed mine and I was putting the front door key he'd given me two and a half years before on the hall table, when she broke her silence.

“Jane,” she said, “you need help, you really do.”

Could anything be more insulting? I didn't answer her. I got into my car and drove away, back to Kilburn. As soon as I was inside I went all round the place, looking for damage she might have done to it. And sure enough (as Mummy says) there was a burn mark from a hot dish on the draining board, a chip out of one of the bathroom tiles, and one of the window blinds was badly torn. I didn't hesitate. I took my writing materials out of the drawer below the one where I had kept the pearls and wrote Pandora a formal letter, citing the damage and telling her that, in view of it, I wouldn't be returning the deposit she had paid me.

I was in the middle of doing this when Stu, the window cleaner, let himself in. No warning, of course. He didn't even ring the bell. He told me I had turned up like a bad penny and that the woman who had just left was a “smashing-looking bird.” The first thing I had meant to do when I had finished the letter was check that Hebe's things in the case at the bottom of the cupboard were all right, but I had to postpone that for an hour until Stu had gone. I unlocked the case, lifted out the blue woolly dressing gown and found everything underneath just as I had packed it. I will say for Pandora that the flat was quite clean and tidy too. Apparently, if she is nothing else, she is quite houseproud.

H
ELP I DON'T
need but I do sometimes wonder what I have done to deserve all this. Things were really going quite well
for me (as well as they ever get, that is). I was getting on all right with Gerry and Justin, I was saving money, I was planning on replacing my car. Then came this bombshell to shatter everything. I just wish I knew
why.
I had some money in the bank, more than two thousand pounds, plus I had got her check and no deposit to return, but no more than that. Three-quarters of the rent she had paid me had gone on my mortgage. When I'd used up what money I'd got, how was I going to pay the building society?

I would have to get a job, of course I would, and soon. Not a nanny's job—I meant what I had said, never never again. That meant another library, didn't it? The one I'd worked in, the Library of British History, had closed, had disappeared altogether. You can look down lists of appointments every day for weeks before you will see one for a librarian. I had to tell Mummy and she was full of helpful suggestions. Shops and cafés in Ongar High Street were always advertising for staff, she said, having forgotten the comments she'd made on the kind of job someone with a degree merited. When I told her I hadn't yet descended to working in a shop, she suggested doing a teacher training course. If I couldn't get a grant she would pay.

“I hate children,” I said, and that was the end of that.

I went to the Job Centre. It was the most humiliating thing I had ever done but I went there. They weren't very interested when I told them I had left my last job of my own accord. But they put me on their list, telling me I was overqualified for most of the work I was likely to get. I went home and got down to answering advertisements for PAs and secretaries. Twenty letters I wrote that first week and thirty the next. Out of all that lot I got an interview for one job. It was receptionist/secretary to three solicitors working in partnership. I didn't like the look of the place, a
converted shop next door to one selling old clothes. The interview was for twelve noon. They kept me waiting ten minutes and when I said I hadn't any computer skills the woman who was interviewing me looked down her nose. There was nothing about computing skills in your ad, I said, and she said it was taken for granted, it shouldn't need to be stated.

I had been back in my flat for six weeks and I'd applied for getting on for a hundred jobs when, looking through what the classifieds in the
Standard
had to offer, I came upon, under Marriages, the announcement of Gerry Furnal's to Pandora Anne Flint. I'd heard the phrase “reopening old wounds” but I had never really felt it applied to myself till then. I felt those wounds opening on my arms and legs and Gerry Furnal rubbing salt into them. Had he ever thought for one moment what he was doing to me, forcing me to leave, driving me to give up my job? I had sacrificed everything for him, abandoned an
intellectual
post in a distinguished library, looked after his child, cooked his meals and done his housework, not to mention removing the disgusting perverted clothes his precious wife had worn to titillate her lover. And had I breathed a word to him about the stuff I had found? Had I told him what she was really like? No, I had not. Had I mentioned her lover or even hinted she had one? Again, no, no, I had not. Rather, I had listened to him going on and on about how wonderful she was, how good, what a marvelous mother, and handed out so much sympathy that it made me sick to think of it.

What a hypocrite he is. The moaning about Hebe I had to listen to went on evening after evening for
months,
how he could never think of another woman, but three years later—a mere three years later—he had taken up with my
tenant. How shallow must he be to have fallen for a woman who looks superficially, for that's all it is, like his late wife? I wondered what Hebe would think of him if she knew. Maybe she does know. There may be an afterlife—who am I to say? Gerry used to tell Justin she was in heaven, watching over him from up in the sky. Perhaps she is watching us all—Gerry Furnal, poor little Justin, me, and even her lover, Ivor Tesham—and drawing her own conclusions.

Life is unfair. That's the first thing I ever remember Mummy saying to me. I must have been about four. “Life is unfair, Jane,” she said. “You have to get used to that.” I think of it now when I contrast the lives of Ivor Tesham and me. I don't suppose for a moment he knows what it is to apply for job after job and get either one of two possible results: no reply at all or a reply saying the position has been filled. Of course he hasn't. Rich, powerful relatives got him jobs. Influential people gave him a helping hand into Parliament. Private incomes came along so that when bribery and corruption were the only possible ways for him to get advancement, he had the means to bribe and to corrupt. I always read the Births, Marriages, and Deaths in the paper. That's how I knew about Gerry Furnal's marriage. That's how I knew Ivor Tesham's father had died:
John Hamilton Tesham, suddenly at home, beloved husband of Louisa and dear father of Ivor and Iris …
I suppose he left his son a fortune. No one has ever left me anything. My mother's house in Ongar must be worth half a million. What's the betting, when she dies, someone will get planning permission to build an estate on her doorstep and halve the selling price?

I am sitting down now in my bedsitter—for Stu was right, what else is it?—looking through the scrapbook. I've gone right back to the beginning and the newspaper cuttings of
the accident in which Hebe died. There are four of them, the same scene of carnage and destruction shot from different angles. I can see torn and twisted metal, ripped tires, shattered glass and glass splinters and great shards of glass, but no bodies or body parts, no spatterings or splashes or lakes of blood. The only thing to give any sign that human beings were in that car, that human beings died in that car, is part of a coat or jacket draped over the back of a ruined seat. Had they taken the bodies away by the time those pictures were taken? Had they cut the driver out of the wreckage and removed him, broken and bleeding, to some emergency room? I don't know and I don't suppose anyone can tell me.

I've written my own captions to these photographs. One of them says:
The remains of the black Mercedes driven by Dermot Lynch, of Paddington, west London.
I had forgotten his name. No wonder, really, after all I have been through. I have had other things to think about, to say the least. Now, though, I have nothing to think about except getting a job, getting money, to stay alive. No, that's an exaggeration. I shan't die. All that will happen to me is that I shall give up this place, the building society will foreclose, and I'll go and live with my mother. It's not an exaggeration to say that would be a fate worse than death.

If I dwell too much on that I won't have the strength and the energy to write any more job applications. I won't make it to the interview I've got tomorrow, receptionist in the front office of a firm making breeze blocks in Craven Park, wherever that is. So I turn the pages of the scrapbook, past the photograph the
Daily Express
used of the gun they found in the car, until I come to the first photo of Ivor Tesham. Of course there is nothing, there never was anything, to connect him with the crash.