Barbara Vine - The Birthday Present

I was the more intelligent one, that's all. She wouldn't have cared about that. She had had beauty and self-confidence, a husband, a child, a lover, and no worries. She had never had a job, so she didn't have the fear of losing one always hanging over her. She didn't know what it was like to be me, working for an outfit that was always threatened with closure or at any rate being severely cut in size. Her husband might not earn much but he did earn it and it would go on, he would keep her for the rest of her life and to avoid working herself all she had to do was keep having babies. I realized then that he wouldn't and she wouldn't, because she was dead. All the beauty and the charm and the unearned income were over for her forever. I asked myself if I cared and I knew at once that I didn't. I was glad. I was relieved. I ought to feel happy, because all I had to worry about now was keeping the way I felt from Gerry, and keeping the truth from him too.

I drove the last mile or two and turned into Irving Road. It was one of those streets of terraces, about a hundred years old, I suppose, all the houses exactly the same, gray brickwork, slate roofs, a gable at the top and a bay window downstairs, nothing green, drearily ugly. Once, about a year before, I was driving Mummy up there to see a friend in Edgware and I pointed out Hebe's road to her, deserted but for a van driver delivering something. The place looked a uniform gray in the drizzling rain. Mummy is so out of touch she thinks young married couples all live in lovely detached houses in leafy suburbs. “He's not doing very well, is he?” she said. “That's the sort of street your grandparents lived in when I was small. Of course, it didn't last long. We moved when I was seven.”

It wasn't deserted that Saturday morning. A crowd stood outside Gerry's house, filling the tiny front garden, spilling all over the pavement, people with cameras and a single policeman. It took me a moment before I understood. This was the press. As I parked at the curb, as near to the house as I could get, reporters and cameramen swarmed up to the car and a flash went off in my face. I tried to push through the pack, their voices shouting at me, “Who are you?” “What are you doing here?” “Are you Hebe's sister?”

The normal reaction is to cover one's face even if one has nothing to hide. I picked up the scarf that was on the seat beside the paper, held it up ineffectually to my mouth and nose and got out of the car. “I'm only the babysitter,” I said.

“Would you call yourself a family friend?” someone asked.

“If you like,” I said, “but I don't know anything.” I'd have loved to talk to them, tell them the truth about Hebe and Ivor Tesham, but I knew that would be just for the momentary pleasure of it. I had an interest in the long term and I needed to remember that. I elbowed my way through the crowd to Gerry's gate, shoving aside cameras they stuck in my face. “Please let me get to the door.”

Gerry must have heard some of this, because he opened it just as I got there. The cameras homed in on him, their flashes blinding. He grabbed my hand and pulled me inside. The slamming door shook the house.

“Where's Justin?” I said with just the proper air of concern.

“My mother's been here and taken him home with her. I feel guilty about that. He ought to be with me. But he just walks up and down saying, ‘Justin wants Mummy' and it's unbearable.”

I thought he'd take me in his arms and hug me, it seemed the natural thing to do in the circumstances, but he didn't. He'd been crying and his eyes were swollen. I went into the kitchen and made us both tea. I carried it into the living room on a tray and drew the curtains to shut out the faces pressed against the glass. All the time I was telling myself, don't let it show that you're enjoying yourself, don't let him see you're excited.

“There's a police officer out there,” Gerry said, “but he says he can't do anything unless any of them breach the peace, whatever that means, or do criminal damage.”

The noise they made, a kind of threatening hum, punctuated by shouts, reminded me of the sound of distant battle I'd heard in war programs on television.

“Was it really an abduction?” I asked him.

“The police say so. It must have been. She was handcuffed, Jane. She had a scarf tied round her face. I don't really know much more, only that one of the men is dead and the other is in a very bad way in intensive care. He's unconscious and has been since it happened.”

“The lorry driver?”

“It seems not to have been his fault. He's uninjured apart from cuts and bruises. I mean, the lorry was so big and the car so comparatively small. They haven't said, of course they haven't, but the general idea seems to be that it was the fault of this man Dermot Lynch. He was the driver of the car.” He thought he was changing the subject. Maybe he thought the idea was to spare me atrocious details. “How long did you wait for her at the theater?”

“Only till it was too late to go in,” I said. “Only about a quarter of an hour.”

“You didn't phone me?”

Impossible to get out of that one without a lie. I lied. “I did try. There was no answer.”

“Odd,” he said. “I was here. What time would that have been?”

“About twenty to eight. I had to find a call box. The phone rang. Perhaps I'd got a wrong number. You know how it is— you misplace one digit.”

“That's what it must have been,” he said. “Were you worried?”

“Not really,” I said, ad-libbing. “I thought there must have been some crisis at home and I didn't want to bother you. I was going to phone this morning.”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, of course.”

It was soon after that that he began to cry. He put his hands on the arm of the chair, put his head in his hands and sobbed. I didn't know what to do so I did nothing. Probably the best thing I could have done was join him and cry myself, but I couldn't. Only actresses can make themselves cry. I remember once seeing Nicola Ross with real tears pouring down her face in some play. But I am no good at acting. I just sat there and listened to the battle hum from outside and the racking sobs inside and after a while I made more tea. When I came back with it, his crying was over and he was sitting very upright, red-eyed and hollow-cheeked.

In a voice made hoarse by all those tears, he said, “I don't under stand why anyone would want to kidnap her. What for? Not for a ransom surely. I haven't got any money. Would I live here if I had?”

“I don't know,” I said.

“I asked the police if they could have mistaken her for someone else but they said no.”

That evening, of course, they were saying yes.

I DID HIS washing. I made a casserole for his supper and Justin's and put it in the oven. The kitchen wasn't an advertisement of Hebe's housekeeping skills but I couldn't see why I should clean it up. He wouldn't notice. At midday I battled my way through the reporters and photographers— I found controlling myself and not talking to them the hardest part—drove to a supermarket at Brent Cross and shopped for him, Justin, and myself. Mrs. Furnal, a bright talkative woman, very unlike her son, brought Justin back at five, struggled through the mob, shouting to them to go away, to leave her son alone, to have some compassion and think of the child's feelings. I would have known better than to say any of that nonsense. She almost fell into the house when I opened the front door.

Justin ran ahead, calling, “Justin wants Mummy.”

Quickly recovered, Mrs. Furnal sniffed my casserole, pronounced it delicious, almost in the same breath telling me I could go home now as she meant to stay for the evening.

“Please let me know if you want me again,” I said to Gerry.