The Birthday Present (29 page)

Nadine began to cry. More than cry, she screamed and shouted, frightened by an anger she had never heard from her mother before, and Adam gave fraternal support by joining in. It took a long time for all of them to calm down, Iris taking Nadine on her knee and promising her “a lovely pearl necklace” of her own. We all had drinks after that, gin for the grown-ups and orange juice for the children, while Ivor told us in a much more sensible and rational way that he thought the worst was over, the worst had been at the MSS reception, and there would be no more. Gerry Furnal wasn't going to talk to the newspapers.

W
HEN A COUPLE
more days had gone by and nothing else had happened, things began to look hopeful. With luck, I was thinking, we should hear no more of Gerry Furnal, when Iris read an entry in the Births column of the newspaper which had carried the birth announcements of our daughter and our two sons. Since Nadine was born, she had regularly read them and, of course, often come upon babies born to friends of ours, as happens when you're the sort of age we were then.

‘Furnal,' “ she read aloud to me, “ ‘On September first, in the Royal Free Hospital, Hampstead, to Pandora and Gerald, Ruby Anne, a half-sister for Justin.' It must be him, mustn't it?”

“I'm glad he's married again,” I said. “I hope he's happy. I always felt he'd had a raw deal.”

“So did I,” she said.

Judging by my own experiences at a time like this, Gerry Furnal would have his hands too full and his emotions too much engaged to take any more vengeful steps against Ivor. Once again he had got away with it. Knowing Ivor had given Hebe an expensive present virtually proved she had been his mistress but not that he had arranged the abduction. It was likely, anyway, that, as most people, Furnal still believed Hebe had been abducted by mistake for Kelly Mason. He would need more information than he apparently had to link it with Ivor. He wasn't a threat. But thinking like this troubled me, as I know it troubled Iris. I didn't like the situation we seemed to be living in, where we had to tick off the names of people who no longer threatened her brother and grade those remaining in order of danger quotient: Jane Atherton, the second Mrs. Furnal (?), the Lynches, Beryl Palmer, and even Juliet herself.

S
tu the window cleaner was here when Pandora phoned and told me about the baby. I don't know why she phoned. It's not as if I was dying to know. I wonder if they've realized they've given it a name rather like Hebe. Hebe, Ruby, both just four letters long, both two syllables and both ending in a “be” sound. Must be a sort of unconscious way of commemorating her on his part. I wouldn't like it if I were Pandora.

Ostensibly polishing the windows, Stu hung about listening to our conversation. When I'd put the receiver down he asked if that was a pal of mine who'd had a baby. I said that was right and it was the woman who'd lived here.

“Time you had one yourself,” he said with a sort of leer.

I didn't answer that. I said that, on the contrary, it was time he got on with his work.

“I've finished.” He put the polishing cloth in his pocket. “You want to come out for a drink?”

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. I stared at him, then shook my head. “No, thanks,” I managed to say.

“Suit yourself.” He slammed the door behind him.

What a nerve! How dared he? I looked in the mirror and saw I'd blushed quite deeply and the remains of the blush were still there. The funny thing was that I wasn't all that angry and when Mummy arrived here I told her about it, altering things round a bit, of course.

“His name's Stuart,” I said. “I hardly know him but he asked me out. Of course I'm not going.”

“I should think not,” she said, “with Callum not long dead.” She didn't want me going out with him but—typical of her—she wanted to know what Stuart did for a living.

“Something to do with glass,” I said. “His father's got a company that manufactures windows.”

“You young ones,” she said. “Have you forgotten people have surnames? You never told me Callum's surname.”

“He didn't have one,” I said. “He had a dog.” She gave me a strange look, the kind you give to people who talk to themselves or laugh without a reason for laughing. Before she could ask me what I meant, I invented, “Stuart's called Chumley-Burns.”

But I've other things to think about now, the principal one being how to get access to Ivor Tesham. Calling him and inviting him here worked last time but that was four years ago. Nothing has happened to damage him in those years and he has gone on climbing up the ladder or, as Mummy would say, gone from strength to strength. Her presence here is another reason for not inviting him. With her in the flat I can't have him here—he wouldn't come, anyway—and I don't stand a chance of getting into his place. So I have a choice, I can phone him or write to him, and to be perfectly honest (again as Mummy would say) I'm afraid to phone him. I'm afraid of that voice, that accent, on the phone, even supposing he ever answers a phone himself. Even supposing I
could get hold of his home number. I have to find out his address somehow and write to him.

But I am altogether afraid of him. Handsome, sophisticated men frighten me. I realize now that they always have and Tesham is the handsomest, most sophisticated man I've ever met. It's humiliating to remember how I had a shower and washed my hair and got dressed up when he came here, though I was determined not to. I started to enjoy it when I could see he was expecting to get the pearls, but that enjoyment was short-lived. Hebe would have said the feelings I have about him are sexual and perhaps they are, but does that mean I'd like to go to bed with him? Suppose I'd had my hair done and I was beautifully made-up as well as witty and sophisticated myself? Suppose I were sitting in a restaurant with him, his fingertips just touching mine across the table? I won't write any more about this in case I start imagining what I'd feel if I was with him in a bedroom wearing Hebe's dog collar and black leather boots and a black leather corset.

M
UMMY CAME HERE
two days ago. She was desperately worried about me, she said. I wasn't answering her letters and I left my phone on message. The only way she knew I was alive was that I was cashing the checks she sent me. All this I got from a message she left, of course. And when I tried to phone her and tell her not to come, please not to come, she left her phone on message—thus, as she said, hoisting me with my own petard.

On her previous visits, not long after my dad died, she'd wanted to “see the sights.” London is where she has always lived, yet she's never lived there. You can't call Ongar and Theydon Bois and Havering London, but what else are they? No man's land, outer suburbs, sticks. She's always lived in
one or other of them and her London has been “coming up to town” and shopping in Oxford Street. Until I took her, she hadn't been to the Tower or the National Gallery or Hyde Park. Visiting places by car was all right six or seven years ago—well, it was never really all right for me—but now the traffic is making it impossible. She still wants to, though. Or she says she does. I think trailing about by bus and tube is intended as therapy for me, to bring me “out of myself,” to do what people mean you should when they say you need to get out more.

She's come up here to take me in hand. I'm living like an old retired person, she says, an older and more retired person than even she is. Not that she ever did anything to retire from. She means to stay at least a week, she says. Every evening she takes me out for a meal to some local Italian or Chinese restaurant. This is to save me money and “give us a chance to talk over a glass of wine.” We have to share a bed, there's no choice about it. Fortunately, it's a wide bed and she sleeps deeply while I lie awake or dream of Sean Lynch coming into the bedroom in his black leather with his German shepherd dog. Mummy doesn't snore or fidget, but she always has to get up at least once in the night to go to the bathroom—normal, I suppose, in a woman her age. The annoying thing is that she thinks I'm not aware of her creeping about on tiptoe and when I say I am she tells me that I was “dead to the world.”

When we talk, which is too often to my mind, it's always about my situation and what's to be done. The best plan (her words) is for me to come to Ongar “on a permanent basis,” live with her until part of the house can be converted into a self-contained flat for me and get “a nice little job” locally.

“I've always believed you have to cut your garment according to your cloth, Jane,” she says. “It's no good having all
these high-flown ideas. It used to upset me thinking of you taking these menial jobs after your education, but I've come down to earth now. There's nothing wrong with working in a shop, it's honorable toil.”

I don't want to scream at her so I say nothing.

“Anything is better than living on the assistance.” She doesn't know it's years since that expression was in use. “When I was young people would rather starve than be supported by the government.” I wonder where she thinks the government gets the money. Doesn't she know what happens to taxes?

She talks as if she's a hundred and workhouses still exist, instead of only a bit over sixty. But when she says that about the government I smile to myself, because that's just what I mean to do, be supported by at any rate one member of the government. While she drones on about working in a shop in Ongar High Street or being a mother's help (“Goodness knows, you've had the experience, Jane”) or a traffic warden, I think about the letter I'm going to write to Ivor Tesham, a very discreet and subtle letter, hinting at connections and links, just mentioning Lloyd Freeman and slipping in Hebe's name. I'll suggest we meet to talk about old times, but first I'll drop the name of a famous journalist who specializes in digging dirt about well-known people and say I know him. I don't, but I easily may do in the future. I have now forced myself to think only about the actions I shall take, not about my feelings and my fears.

Mummy talks about the flat she's planning. I am to have a bedroom, a living room, a kitchen, and a bathroom. The house has three floors, the top one being smaller than the lower two, and it's “absolutely perfect” for conversion. The short landing will become my hallway and all that has to be done is put the front door in at the top of the stairs.

“Are you listening, Jane?”

I tell her that of course I am, though more than half my mind has been on how I'm going to find which house Tesham lives at in Glanvill Street. Perhaps I can take Mummy to see the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben and after I've told her I'm not queuing up to go inside, we could take a little walk along the streets behind Millbank. Maybe go and look at that church they call Queen Anne's Footstool. There's bound to be something on the house or outside the house to show he lives there—but is there? I've seen his car, but that was four years ago and he may have a different one or it may be in a garage. Perhaps either he or Carmen will show themselves at a window. I hope it's not a very long street or we'll be all day about it. And when I say “we” I have to remember that Mummy knows nothing about this and mustn't know.

“You haven't heard a word from this Stuart,” she says. “Hasn't he got a phone?”

I
HAVE SEEN
Sean Lynch again.

It doesn't really matter because I'm sure he didn't see me. It happened like this. Mummy and I went to Westminster and when we'd been in the Abbey I suggested having a look at St. John's Church, Smith Square. Then we went along Great Smith Street and turned down Glanvill Street. It's grand, like everywhere else around there, somber and ancient and somehow
political.
I wonder how Carmen likes it. Well, I expect I'd like it if living there cost me nothing and I had all found for me. She's not afraid of him. But then she's what men call beautiful and I suppose beautiful women aren't afraid of handsome men. They are theirs by right, only what they deserve. Stu is what I deserve, I suppose.

But we couldn't find Tesham's house. I say “we,” though of course Mummy didn't know what I was looking for. No one looked out of any windows; no one came out of any of the houses. The place was still and quiet and empty but for a ginger cat sitting on top of a pillar and it was as still as everything else in the street, its eyes shut. We went home on a series of buses. Mummy enjoyed it, gazing out of the window at government buildings and shops and theaters and pubs and dirty back streets. Bored by the snail's-pace progress, I pondered ways of getting Tesham's address, ignoring Mummy's proddings and suggestions that I should look at some particular architectural monstrosity or exotic shop-window display. Of course I had already looked for Tesham in the phone book, while knowing he wouldn't yet be there. He wasn't. I'd even thought he might have his phone in Carmen's name, but Case wasn't there either. Wasn't there something called the electoral register? I wondered where such a thing was kept and if the public were allowed to look at it.

The second bus we got on was a mistake. I soon realized it was taking us too far west. I tried to tell Mummy we'd have to get off in a minute and find one going in the Camden Town direction, but she was too absorbed in looking at the Lebanese restaurants in the Edgware Road to take any notice. It was then that, at last obeying her command to “just look at that one and that woman in a veil,” I leaned across her and brought my face to the window. Walking toward the Edgware Road from a side street was Sean Lynch.

I shouldn't have been surprised. He lived just round the corner. Perhaps it was more shock than surprise, as I'd often in the past weeks congratulated myself on the likelihood that I'd never have to set eyes on him again. He was in his black leather gear, just as he'd been when he'd thrown me out of
the flat in William Cross Court. Perhaps he always dressed like that, changing only the T-shirt and the jeans. I withdrew my head, sat back, feeling beads of sweat sting my upper lip.

“What's the matter with you, Jane?” At last my mother had taken her eyes off the outside and was peering at me in a concerned and very intrusive way. “Your hands are shaking. I really wonder sometimes if you're quite well. When did you last see your GP?”