The Birthday Present (5 page)

“I think I'll get them valued, though,” she said, “and insure them, and then if they get pinched I'll get a lot of money.”

I asked her what they were going to do with the extra time on Friday night. She said she didn't know, but she was to be picked up in a car as she was walking down the Watford
Way. She had to be there at precisely seven. Hebe was famously unpunctual, so I couldn't help wondering what would happen if she turned up ten minutes late. I supposed Tesham or his driver would wait for her. It was all a million miles away from things that happen in my life. But I think that's one of the reasons why she liked me, because beside me she showed up as beautiful and popular.

“But what's the point?” I said.

She didn't know that either, but she was going to wear her new boots and a long coat over a low-cut top and miniskirt. Or maybe the boots and a long coat over nothing at all. It wouldn't be the first time.

T
HE EVENING GERRY
was taking her out to dinner I was babysitting. I am not very fond of babies, I may as well say that, though I like them better than older children. At least they are not rude or rough. But I never told her or Gerry that, as I don't suppose they would like it. Of course I am competent enough with them. I can bathe babies and I know about reading them stories and not leaving them to cry or not for too long. I don't suppose I shall ever have one of my own and that may be just as well. Like I have said, I have very few friends and I don't get out much, but I wouldn't like only being able to go out when someone else could manage to stay and look after my baby. I wouldn't like not being able to go for a walk without having a baby with me in a buggy.

Hebe and Gerry lived in a little terraced house in a street more or less between West Hendon and Edgware. HALT (the Heart and Lung Trust) has its offices in Kennington, which meant he had a long journey to work every day on the worst of all London tube lines, the Northern. First he had to get a bus to Edgware station or walk to Hendon. And
though he left work at five he seldom got home before six-thirty. I wanted to see Hebe before he got there, so I drove myself up to Irving Road on the seventeenth by six-fifteen, wished her a happy birthday, checked that everything was still all right for the Friday, and found Justin in his high chair eating very small amounts of banana and yogurt but flinging most of it about the room.

I set about cleaning it up and feeding the rest of it to him myself, something he seemed to quite like. At any rate, he didn't protest but swallowed the spoonfuls obediently. Hebe had gone upstairs to dress as soon as I got there and came down looking as impossibly glamorous as she always did in a short tight black dress and the pearls. She kissed the top of Justin's head from the back, keeping clear of the yoghurt and banana mixture.

“Oh, God, I'm so tired,” she said. “Justin's been an absolute devil all day. I'd absolutely love to stay in but not a hope and it will be a dead bore. The trouble with marriage is that after a time you've nothing left to say to each other.”

Gerry came in soon after that, saw the pearls, and asked where they came from.

“British Home Stores,” she said.

“They look lovely,” he said. “I wish I could afford to buy you real ones.”

That made me feel very uncomfortable and I'm sure I blushed. If I did, neither of them noticed. Gerry went upstairs to wash and put on a tie and change into a better jacket than the one he was wearing, and Hebe stood in front of the living-room mirror, adjusting her hair and applying more lipstick. I must say she seemed to take as much trouble over her appearance when she went out with her husband as she did when visiting Ivor Tesham. She was the sort of
woman who would redo her face if she was going to her own execution.

I cleaned Justin up a bit, took him on my knee, and began to read to him,
Spot the Dog
being his current favorite. Hebe and Gerry tried to creep out without his noticing, but of course he did and began to wail on the lines of “Justin wants Mummy,” a phrase I was to hear a lot of in the future. I got him on to the cat and dog game, which I'd successfully tried before and it worked like a charm, with him being the dog and me the back-arching, hissing, mewing cat. We had a quiet bathtime session, then more
Spot the Dog,
and Justin went to bed, falling asleep within five minutes.

At ten they came in. I didn't stay, for I had to be at work in the morning. Hebe said very pointedly in Gerry's hearing that she'd see me the next day and I nearly asked what she meant but remembered just in time. They both came to the door with me and waved as I got into the car.

I felt the premonition very strongly as I drove home, but if I am honest, and there is no point in keeping a diary if you are not honest, I didn't feel this would be the last time I ever saw her.

T
he article in a Sunday newspaper's supplement appeared only a year ago and the journalist claimed to be describing the latest craze among fashionistas. You may have seen it. Agencies were being set up to arrange these things for trendy young people, especially those whose “relationships were getting tired.” I'd only read half a paragraph when I realized that this happening, adventure, exercise, whatever you like to call it, was exactly what Ivor had thought up for Hebe's birthday present all those years before. He'd even used that very phrase. It's called “adventure sex.” An agency could charge up to thirty thousand pounds, the journalist said, depending on the accessories, additional characters, complications in the scenario, decorations and so on, to arrange an abduction of one's girlfriend. The pretend kidnappers would snatch her as she walked down a street—she would have previously been alerted as to what to expect— put her in a car with blacked-out windows, handcuff her and/or gag her, rope her ankles together, and take her to an appointed venue. There they would carry her indoors and
throw her onto a bed, ready for the instigator to walk into the room and find her waiting for him. Thirty thousand pounds. Ivor arranged his for one thousand, and half of it wasn't paid till a lot later.

It's not that I take some sort of moral stand about “adventure sex”—how anxious we are these days never to appear moral—because I don't see how morality comes into it. I've nothing against it. Sadism and masochism seem all right to me if that's what every one likes and no one minds hurting others or being hurt themselves. But, as I've said, I lack imagination. As an accountant and now a company doctor, I haven't much of it. I'm too ordinary. Dressing up and acting out fantasies I find grotesque, but to picture them doesn't shock or disturb me. It makes me laugh. Doctors and patients, tutors and schoolgirls, nuns and priests, mock rape—but I needn't go on. Though I don't suppose Ivor and Hebe did anything like that, their tastes ran along those lines and when I think about it my laughter is embarrassed. The truth probably is that if a couple of men threw a girl down on my bed to await my arrival—no, my weak imagination isn't equal to it.

T
HE WEEKENDS WE
spent at Monks Cravery were the best times of our life in those early years. The countryside was pretty but not spectacular, and as for our cottage, there are thousands like it all over England: thatched roof, oak front door with jasmine if not roses round it, timbered ceilings, lattice windows, a crooked staircase, a kitchen you have to go through to get to the bathroom. But is there any house in the world more comfortable than the English country cottage? With a log fire burning and the curtains drawn, we were blissfully happy. We had nothing to do. During the
week when we weren't there, Peggy came in to clean and her husband, Bob, did the garden. We shopped for food at a supermarket on the way down and on Saturday morning one of us drove over to Great Cravery for a newspaper. Usually we went for a long walk on Saturday afternoon, taking Na-dine with us, of course, strapped in her sling to Iris's chest or mine—to mine now that she was getting heavy.

There are many kinds of mother but only two kinds of father, the besotted and the indifferent. Tolstoy might have begun a novel like that instead of with that dodgy stuff about happy and unhappy families. I'm one of the besotted kind and I've been lucky in that all my children have been born healthy and beautiful and are growing up strong. I sometimes wish I believed in God—and the soul weighed in grams and the age we meet in heaven—so that I could have someone to thank for that. But I don't, so I thank Iris's and my good genes, a gratitude that would please Richard Dawkins.

Those Saturday-afternoon walks were the best part of the week end for me because I got to carry Nadine—if it doesn't sound too sentimental, even if it does—close to my heart. I used to feel that I could walk along like that forever, along the green lanes where all the hedges were in blossom and primroses were on the banks, sometimes saying a word to Iris, breathing the fresh, clean air and feeling through the cloth and padding the warmth of Nadine's little body. Mostly she slept, but she'd stay awake too, gazing at everything we passed with round intelligent blue eyes and when I looked down at her she'd smile her enchanting smile. We'd reach our halfway point and I always turned back reluctantly. Iris teased me about it, laughing and saying that if I couldn't bear to be parted from my daughter she wouldn't stop me bathing her that evening and sitting by her cot till she went to sleep.

But that Saturday, though it was a fine day, we didn't go for a walk. I drove over to Great Cravery in the morning, rather later than usual because we'd had a lie-in, and bought one of the so-called quality papers. I glanced at it when I got back into the car and dropped it on the passenger seat. The headline across the front page was “Crash Horror Ends Kidnap Bid” and the photograph underneath it was one of those vehicle-disaster pictures in which nothing is really recognizable, but when you look more closely you can spot something that might be a broken headlamp and perhaps a single tire lying among ripped sheets of metal. I didn't look more closely. Not then. I drove back to the cottage and laid the paper down on the kitchen table in front of Iris, who was eating toast and marmalade with Nadine on her lap.

Some people flip through newspapers, reading only the items which interest them, and others take their time, lingering over every word. I belong in the first category, though I usually pay attention to the financial pages, but Iris is a lingerer. If it had been left to me I don't suppose I would ever have read that story about a kidnap and a crash; we'd have gone for our walk, had our neighbors round for drinks, and driven home next day in contented ignorance. Iris read it. She got to the foot of the page, said, “Here, you take her, Rob,” and, handing Nadine to me, turned over to pages two and three. Her expression had grown very serious, then aghast.

“What is it?” I said. “What's the matter?”

She passed the paper over to me. It was open at page three and a glance showed me the photograph of a very pretty girl with long blond hair.

“Ivor's girlfriend is called Hebe Furnal, isn't she?”

“Yes, of course. You know she is.”

“Then that's her. She's been killed. Read it yourself. Two
men tried to abduct her but their car crashed and one of them was killed too. It's unbelievable but read it.”

W
HEN IVOR TOLD
us what had happened to him on Friday, May 18, he was still in shock but he was fairly calm. The House of Commons seldom sits on a Friday; it hadn't that day. That was why he had arranged the birthday present to take place then. In the morning, as soon as he calculated that Gerry Furnal would have left for his long bus and train journey to work, he phoned Hebe and they had their requisite phone sex, with Justin complaining in the back ground. Lunch was at the Turkish embassy, celebrating something or other, a treaty or a victory, and he got back to the flat by about half past three. He'd decided against driving up to Hampstead because even then it was difficult finding anywhere to park and, besides that, he knew he was likely to have a lot to drink, so he booked himself a taxi for six-thirty A black cab, not one of Lloyd Freeman's minicabs. Half an hour before the taxi was due he went out and bought a bottle of champagne and then, because it might not be enough, a second bottle. The five hundred pounds he'd drawn out of the bank in fifty-pound notes he divided into two and put two hundred and fifty pounds into envelopes. Then he wrote “Dermot” on one and “Lloyd” on the other.

It was just after seven when he let himself into our house. Seven was the time Hebe was supposed to be walking south along the Watford Way, where she would be picked up by Lloyd Freeman and Dermot Lynch, who would then bring her to our street, park the car, and carry her upstairs. Ivor worked out that she should be there by seven forty-five at the latest, even allowing for Friday evening's heavy traffic. He put the champagne in the fridge. He laid the two envelopes
on the hall table and went to check upstairs. Among the fairly horrible fittings in our bedroom was a very large wall clock, circular and of frosted glass with chrome hands. That clock told him it was ten past seven.

He told me all this to illustrate, I suppose, how suspenseful the waiting was and how much worse it got. Of course, at ten past seven, it hadn't really started getting suspenseful, but it did make him wonder why he'd bothered to get there so early. What was he supposed to do with himself? He started thinking about his scenario and about something he hadn't before considered. There was no doubt Hebe would arrive suitably dressed (which meant
un
suitably dressed for any normal social occasion) but what of him? He went back upstairs, took his clothes off and put on a dressing gown he found in my clothes cupboard. It was mine, it had been given to me by a predecessor of Iris's, but I had never worn it and I'd only kept it because Iris liked it and said she'd a good mind to wear it herself, though she never had. It was black silk with a vaguely Chinese pattern in gold and a gold sash. Ivor said he looked like an actor playing David in
Hay Fever.
He passed another couple of minutes admiring himself in the mirror, but even then, according to the glass clock, it was only twenty-five past seven.