Barbara Vine - The Birthday Present

We stayed with him. Well, I did. Iris went out and bought a loaf and some smoked salmon and made sandwiches for us. Ivor ate nothing. We turned on the early-evening news and of course it was the lead story, with more pictures of the crash and photographs of Hebe and a lot more about a kidnap attempt going wrong. They put Gerry Furnal on, a shattered man in tears, the tears actually streaming down his face, who said he didn't know why anyone would kidnap Hebe as they must have known he had no money for a ransom. There was speculation about someone they called a “mastermind” behind the abduction. When he heard that bit, Ivor put his head in his hands and muttered, “Turn the fucking thing off.”

A good deal later we took Nadine home. Iris was very tired but still we talked a lot that evening about Ivor's decision not to go to the police. I suppose neither of us could understand it. Iris said that if only he'd gone to them as soon as he'd read that newspaper at lunchtime everything wouldn't exactly have been all right, but a lot better than it was turning out to be. That news story we had seen on the TV would have been very different and there was a good chance his name wouldn't have been mentioned. Without the abduction element it wasn't much more than an ordinary road crash, the kind of thing that happened all too often and does even more now.

“You don't think some journalist would have found out he was behind it?” I said.

“Possibly, but even if someone had and had printed it, the only blame which could be attached to him was—well, having an affair with a married woman. He'd have had to give the newspaper an interview saying he deeply regretted what he'd done. The death of one of those men was a tragedy, et cetera, et cetera, he was broken-hearted over Hebe Furnal's death—he's not though, is he?—and he was very sorry for the whole business. The main thing would have been to establish that there was no abduction. It was a game, a setup, and a private matter. If he'd done that, don't you think it would have blown over in a couple of days?”

“It would have damaged his political career.”

“Not much, though. Not for long. His chief whip would be cross—I think. Would he, though? Men laugh about that sort of thing. I mean, it's no laughing matter now because two people are dead, but it would have been. Still, I don't think Ivor would have been blamed much. Gerry Furnal seems a meek sort of man, awfully wretched, poor thing. Those tears were dreadful, weren't they? He wouldn't want to fight Ivor. The worst he'd do is fix up a meeting with him and make a big scene. Couldn't Ivor have weathered all that?”

“Apparently not,” I said. “I've never seen him so afraid. He was a different man.”

NO ONE EVER attempted to blackmail Ivor. Yet almost from the first he was blackmail material. Of the few people who knew about the birthday present, not one of them knew it all. Each of them knew some of it, from one aspect or another, but they could all have asked him for money, a large sum of money or a guaranteed income to keep silent, but none of them did. I'm sure this wasn't because of their loyalty to him or fondness for him which held them back, but it may have been fear. Or even a kind of diffidence. I wonder how many people there are who would try demanding money with menaces, as the legal definition has it, but for their reluctance to appear quite so base and low in their victim's eyes. Perhaps I'm being naïve. The fact remains that Ivor was an MP, a respectable man, a rich man on his way to getting richer, who had set in motion a train of reprehensible events that he very much wanted to keep secret. Still, an independent observer might have said that none of it was really his fault. Not at the beginning, at any rate.

6

We always think first of saving our own skin. I did when Gerry phoned. I was having a lie-in. Not that I had been out the night before. As usual. I'm tired at the end of the week and on Fridays I'm usually in bed by ten. Like an elderly person, as Mummy used to tell me before Callum came on the scene and she was scolding me for not finding a husband or even a boyfriend. I still like to lie in bed on Saturdays a bit later than my usual seven a.m. rising time. The phone rang at eight-thirty and I thought it was Mummy, trying to catch me because I hadn't answered when she called the night before. I was still in bed. I reached for the receiver, picked it up and heard a man say, “Jane? It's Gerry.” I didn't recognize his voice. It sounded like someone had tried to strangle him. “You won't be surprised it's me. I should have called you before, I'm sorry.”

Caution, self-protection, whatever you like to call it, is a wonderful thing. I knew something was very wrong before he spoke again.

“You must have waited hours for her.”

How did I catch on so fast? I did, or partly. “I did for a while,” I said, wondering what was coming next.

“She's dead,” he said. “I ought to break it more gently. The police were gentle with me. But the very fact that they were police was enough, standing there on the doorstep. They didn't need to say anything. It was a car crash. God knows what she was doing, walking somewhere. She should have been in the tube going off to meet you. Still, it doesn't matter.” He drew a long, shuddering gasp. “Nothing matters now.”

I don't know what made me say it. I don't offer to help people. No one helps me. “Shall I come to you? I could do things.”

“It's very kind …” he began, then, “Yes, please—would you?”

I got up and dressed, went round the corner and bought a paper, staring at the headline. Gerry hadn't said anything about an attempt to kidnap Hebe. The paper said she was handcuffed and gagged, the two men were hooded, and the car had tinted windows. It was a real drama I'd got myself into and it excited me. I don't get much excitement in my life. Ivor Tesham's name came into my head and I tried to remember what Hebe had told me about the plans for this birthday present. She was to walk along the Watford Way, where she'd be picked up by a car. Driven by Tesham or by his driver? She didn't say, perhaps she didn't know. A car had picked her up but it wasn't Tesham's. This was a real kidnap, a coincidence maybe, but nothing to do with him. He would have waited for her last night like I was supposed to have waited for her but she never came.

Driving up to West Hendon and Irving Road, I thought about the alibi I'd given, or been prepared to give, to keep Hebe from being found out. I had already lied to Gerry. The idea struck me like a splash of cold water that I might be questioned by the police and have to lie to them. Have to? Or was I to come out with the truth as to what Hebe had been up to? There wasn't much traffic about, there never was on a Saturday morning. I would be there in ten minutes. I knew I must make up my mind exactly what I was going to say when Gerry questioned me about the previous evening. It was then that I realized I didn't even know which theater was showing Life Threatening. I pulled off the A5, parked and consulted the paper I had bought. The Duke of York's—where was that? St. Martin's Lane, I guessed. I would have to say I hung about in St. Martin's Lane until it was too late to go in. Why hadn't I phoned to find out where Hebe was? I would have to think of something to explain that. It was then, as I started the car once more, that it hit me. At last it hit me. Hebe was dead. We'd met at university and been friends ever since. I'd been her bridesmaid and was Justin's godmother, though God didn't come into it much. I'd never see her again. She was gone. She was dead. I stopped the car again and switched off the engine.

I ought to have been heartbroken but I wasn't. Of course I would pretend I was when I got to Gerry's. My best friend, we saw each other at least once a week, not to mention going to all those cinemas and out for meals together. That's where she was going, he would have told the police, off to the theater with her best friend. How sweet and proper it sounded, chastely going to see a play with another girl. The paper hadn't said how she had been dressed when they found her body but maybe they didn't know, maybe the police wouldn't tell them, and I thought about how she said she might go off on her date wearing nothing under her big coat. I ought to have been sad—why wasn't I? Because, though she'd been my “friend” all these years, I'd never liked her. We call people our friends without thinking how we really feel about them, that actually we fear them or envy them. How could I have liked a woman who had everything I've never had? Did she like me? Probably not, but she liked me being plain and dull and awkward while she was such a star.