The Birthday Present (31 page)

“I've
decided I'm
not
coming,” I tell her.

That was yesterday. I was regretting that I told her and she was scolding me for worrying her. We had an argument, nothing unusual for her and me, ending in my going out for a walk on my own. I hadn't realized what a nice day it was. I walked up to West End Green, all the way to Child's Hill and up Pattison Road to the edge of the Heath. It was a Saturday, but even so it seemed to me there were more couples about than usual, people holding hands or walking with their arms round each other. I began to feel calmer and more peaceful (the policeman had said he would leave us in peace) than I had for months, since I was turned out of Irving Road, in fact. And when I was on my way back, heading down the Finchley Road, I saw Stu. He was cleaning the ground-floor windows of a house in Weech Road and when he saw me he raised one hand in a sort of salute. It wasn't a bit like me, I don't do things like that, but I waved back and called out, “Hi, Stu.”

He gave me a smile in return and shouted that he would see me on Monday. That is when he is next due to clean my
windows. I thought, maybe he sleeps with my name and address under his pillow. People do that sort of thing, or some do. Mummy was packing when I got back to the flat. She folds her clothes like shop assistants do and puts sheets of tissue paper between them, shoes wrapped up in tissue and her toilet bag laid on the top. When she saw me she said she would take me out for dinner “just once more.” Where would I like to go? There isn't all that wide a choice in Kilburn, to say the least, and I reminded her that she had been robbed of all the money she had with her and her credit card. We ended up going to a place in Fortune Green Road with me paying.

“It's the least you can do, Jane, considering I've been practically keeping you for the past year.”

I didn't mind all that much because I kept thinking that by the end of next week I'll be rich. Mummy said her “dreadful experience” of Friday and being “interrogated by the police” had worn her out. She went to bed ten minutes after we got back and fell asleep at once. I sat in the kitchen, planning a draft of a letter for Ivor Tesham. Once I have walked Mummy to the tube station in the morning (and bought her ticket and lent her money), I shall copy out what I shall have written neatly in my best handwriting and take it to the post. There's a post that goes on a Sunday at eleven in the morning and I shall aim to catch it, so he will get the letter on Monday. The hard part was deciding what to say. I thought I could just write baldly to him, tell him I knew exactly what he had done on May 18, 1990, and if he wanted it all kept dark, the way he has been keeping it dark for four years, he will have to pay me. But I had to find the words and every word I thought of sounded so vulgar and low, the kind of words Hebe might have used but I couldn't. Yet my future depended on it. Well, on him or on Stu. Or both of
them. I wish I could sometimes have nice dreams and then I do, a waking dream of me living with Stu and telling him I've got a private income. He doesn't even have to go on cleaning windows if he doesn't want to.

I
STOPPED THERE
and gave myself to the dream, sometimes glancing at Mummy fast asleep. I have just started again. My writing paper and envelopes and a couple of ballpoints I keep in the drawer under the one where all the bills and receipts are. I was getting out a sheet of paper and a pen when my mind rushed back to that day when I went to the Lynches' and it all flashed before my eyes, the way they say it does when you're drowning. I felt like I was drowning, because I have remembered what happened to my gas bill. Stu hadn't taken it. The idea that he might have was stupid from the start—more signs of my mind not being quite right.

I had put the bill in my bag when I went to William Cross Court. That bill and the stuff which came with it were the papers I had taken out of my bag to glance at while I was pretending to be a social worker. Sean Lynch had snatched them out of my hand and thrown them on the floor. Maybe he hadn't looked at them again. They might have ended up in a waste bin. But I couldn't believe that. He would have looked at them and read my name and my address. He had my name and address. It was like one of those anonymous phone calls people get where the caller says, “We know where you live.” Sean Lynch knew where I lived.

I
COULD WRITE
in the diary but I couldn't write the letter. After staring at the blank paper like they say authors do when they've got writer's block, I went to the window and
looked down, expecting to see Sean Lynch standing there under the street lamp, his head lifted and his eyes on the top floor of this house. No one was there but that didn't mean he hadn't been there earlier. Ought I to go to the police about him? If I had known about the gas bill earlier I would have said something about Sean to the officer who came. If I had he might have been arrested by now and locked up and not be out there, thinking up ways to get himself into this flat.

You would think he'd hate Tesham after he caused Dermot to be what he is now, but I don't think he hates him. His mother certainly doesn't. “Mr. Tesham's been very good to us,” is what she said. Tesham must be giving them money. So did Sean attack me because he sees me as Tesham's enemy? Would he
protect
him? And what does that say about my future once I've written this letter to Tesham and maybe he tells Sean? Another thing I've thought of—Sean didn't need the gas bill. Tesham could have told him where I live.

I don't know what to do. Now, at that moment, the only thing seemed to be to go to bed, not that I thought I would sleep. I did, though, and dreamed I was back in William Cross Court, but this time Sean was reading the name and address on my gas bill and I was trembling in fear. He seized me—as he always does, over and over—and pushed me at the wall, beating my head against the bleeding heart of Jesus. Something in his face tells me he means to rape me and I screamed. I really did scream aloud, waking Mummy, who sat up, put the light on and felt my wet nightdress and took hold of my shaking hands.

“The first thing I'll do when I get you to Ongar,” she said, “is take you to my lovely GP.”

It was better in the morning but I still don't know what to do. I need someone to protect me and I begin to wonder if
Stu would protect me. If we were going out together he would look after me and if he heard there was some man intent on doing me harm he would do harm to
him
before he got the chance. He belongs to the class of people who think that way. When I see him next, which will be tomorrow, I shall be very nice to him and then I'll ask him if that offer of a drink still holds good. He will say it does and soon we shall be going out together; we shall be an item. Thinking like this makes me feel better still and I'm wondering how it will be when I've got a man of my own. Quite different from anything that has ever been, I suppose.

I would really rather not go out at all today but I shall have to take Mummy to West Hampstead tube station. Not Kil-burn, because it's rougher that way and I connect rough areas with Sean Lynch. Mummy and I hug and kiss in the station entrance, something we haven't done for years, and she says we must keep in touch every day and that she will expect me in Ongar in a week's time “at the latest.”

The walk home on my own was rather scary. Everywhere is quiet on a Sunday morning and deserted streets always make you more nervous than when there are a lot of people about. I could hear a single set of footfalls behind me and I crossed the road, but when I looked back it was an old man wearing a hat and carrying an umbrella. Still, it was a relief to reach the house and get inside my flat. Being alone again is all right too.

But I am left with my ongoing problem. I had begun looking on my approach to Ivor Tesham rather like an application for a job. There would be the application to make, then the interview with the employer, and after that his acceptance of me on his staff. A staff that perhaps included all those Lynches and even Carmen, who used to be with Lloyd Freeman. Now I had to rethink this “job.” I still wanted it, of
course; I had to have it. It was my only hope, but I had to find a different approach if I wasn't to become the victim of a particular member of that staff.

One thing is plain. I can't write my letter today. I have to wait until that other side of my life is cleared up, until I know that I am no longer alone. I once read somewhere that twice one is not two, twice one is two thousand times two, and that this is why the world will always return to monogamy. That means it's always best to be in a partnership—for protection and company. I wonder if people ever go mad when they have got someone to be with; I don't think they do.

While Mummy was here I have been putting the diary in the shoebox under the floorboard. Force of habit makes me go on doing that. I thought of putting Hebe's things there too, but they may as well stay where they are, in the case I bought specially for them inside the cupboard.

I am spending a long time this evening looking at myself in the mirror and I think I can see now what it was that made Stu fall in love with me. All the time Mummy was here I couldn't put on Hebe's clothes, but now I get them out of the cupboard and start dressing myself in them, the black underwear, the boots, the dog collar. When I imagine Stu seeing me in them I feel excited but calm too and in peace, the way the policeman promised.

O
n my way to the tube at Mansion House, I bought the
Evening Standard
at the station entrance but I did no more than glance at the headline. Another murder was what registered with me, a woman in Kilburn this time. I'd got a seat and found myself next to a City acquaintance, someone I'd got to know quite well over the years, and we talked until he got out at Temple. It was several weeks since I'd seen Ivor. He'd called my office earlier and left a message for me, one of those bland messages that nevertheless seem to carry with them an undercurrent of urgency. Drinking with Ivor, or occasionally watching Ivor drink, was a commonplace in my life but this time I had a slight sense of foreboding. I got out of the train at Westminster, leaving the
Standard,
which might have told me what I should be worrying about, on the seat beside me.

He took me into the Pugin Room, a crowded place that is really just inside the Lords and which peers say the Commons stole from them about a hundred years ago and refuse to give back. Ivor got a table at the back overlooking the
river, in spite of pretending to despise the view, which he said was all right if you like looking at St. Thomas's Hospital, where parliamentarians go to die. The river was rolling along at a swift pace, black, glittering, and choppy. It was cold out there and looked it. I said I'd have claret but Ivor didn't hesitate before ordering a double Scotch for himself.

“I shouldn't,” he said, “but I need it.”

I asked him what was wrong.

“Have you seen the news or a paper?”

“I left my
Standard
in the train,” I said.

“You didn't recognize the murdered girl's name?”

I said I hadn't read it. These things were too horrible to dwell on.

Ivor looked round in a hunted way. He dropped his voice. “The murdered girl is Jane Atherton. She was Hebe's friend. I used to call her the alibi lady.”

There was nothing to say.

“I'll get you the paper.”

He soon came back with it. Jane Atherton's body had been found in her own flat by her mother. Though they had made an arrangement to keep in touch every day, the mother hadn't heard from Jane since she left her the previous Sunday. Getting no reply to her phone calls and by then very anxious, she had come back to London on the Wednesday and got the police to force a way into the flat. Jane was lying on her bed with a knife in her back. She had been raped.

“It's disturbed me a bit, Rob.”

I thought for a moment—a very short moment—that he meant it had distressed him. She was a woman, she had met a dreadful death, she was only thirty-something. I should have known him better.

“I mean, has her death any connection with me? Anything
to do with what happened to Hebe? I can't really see why it should have, but naturally I can't help being a bit disquieted. These things have a motive, don't they? Some thug doesn't just come up to a woman at random and bash her over the head. Or does he?”

It's fear of being a prig, being
seen
to be a prig, that stops a lot of us taking a moral stand. People haven't always been like this. Until well into the twentieth century men at least seemed to have no objection to telling a friend that he was a cad who infringed some unwritten code. But it's all gone now and though I told myself that was nearly the breaking-up-with-Ivor point for me, I said and did nothing. I might have thought of getting to my feet, saying that I couldn't stand any more of this and walking out, but I didn't. After all, I'd been there before. Several times. Besides, I wasn't sure if I could find my way out of the labyrinth that is the Palace of Westminster. I sat there very still and kept quiet. If he noticed he gave no sign of it.

“Unreasonable of me to think the way I'm thinking.”

I said in a tone I hoped was chilly but probably wasn't, “Which way are you thinking?”

Ivor made a face. The room was full now, everyone talking at the tops of their voices. He edged his chair nearer mine. “Well, if she told people about it. I mean friends of hers who were also friends of Hebe's. It's quite likely she did. She wouldn't have kept that to herself, but of course she didn't know that much. Be that as it may, Rob, and to be absolutely frank with you, what's worrying me is that the police may want to talk to me.”

I asked him why. Why would they?

“Look at it this way. They'll talk to her friends. They may talk to Gerry Furnal, he of the pearls, right? They'll
certainly talk to her mother. Her mother found the body. If she was close to her mother, she'll have told her about me and Hebe.”

“It's four years ago,” I said. They'd have had better, more topical and pressing things to talk about. “People in your sort of situation get paranoid. You're paranoid. Do you really think a woman whose daughter's been raped and stabbed to death is going to tell the police that she supplied an alibi to a friend who's been dead for four years? She's going to tell them that this friend was having an affair with you? And suppose she does—are they going to think you had a motive for
killing
her? Come on, Ivor.”