Barbara Vine - The Birthday Present

We'd been in the kitchen and hadn't noticed a lull in the pandemonium outside. It was half past six. When I opened the front door all the reporters had gone. There was just one cameraman remaining and he was about to leave, loading his equipment into the boot of his car. I was rather disappointed, because I kept wondering if one of them would eventually force his way into the house or climb up to the half-open bedroom window. But it wasn't to be, as Mummy would say. The phone rang and Gerry went to answer it. It was the police to tell him there had been a new development and they would call on him “shortly,” but I didn't know that at the time. I said to his mother to say good-bye to him for me. I tried to kiss Justin but he jerked his cheek away and then I left. Halfway to Kilburn, where I live, I decided I was going to phone Ivor Tesham. I'd find his number somehow and I'd call him. Why? I don't know really, but I felt that I needed to speak to him. I could feel the adrenaline racing through my veins, or whatever it does, something that seldom happens to me.

Oddly perhaps, I didn't think much about why the press had removed themselves from outside Gerry's house. I was naïve, I suppose, I didn't know much about that sort of thing, and I thought they'd given up because it was getting late, it was Saturday night and they weren't finding out anything new. When I got into my flat the first thing I did was turn on the TV and I caught the tail end of the news and about two minutes devoted to the crash, the abduction, and the serious condition of Dermot Lynch. They had a shot of Gerry at his front door with a tearful Justin in his arms and one of me running with a scarf held up to my face.

The phone rang twice in ten minutes. I didn't answer it but I guessed it was Mummy. Like the way I have premonitions, I can always guess when it's Mummy who phoned. She didn't leave a message and I knew why. She wanted to get hold of me herself and talk for hours about the kidnap, something she knew she could only do when she was paying for the call. When I'd poured myself a glass of wine and drunk about a third of it, I got the phone book and looked up Ivor Tesham. I didn't expect him to be there, I thought he'd be ex-directory, but there he was: I. H. Tesham, 140b Old Pye Street, SW1. Finding him had been quick. Bracing myself to dial that number took longer. The adrenaline had gone back to wherever it came from, so I drank some more wine, took a deep breath, and dialed the number. Of course I was fairly confident he wouldn't be there, not on Saturday night, and I preferred to think of him getting the message I'd leave and feeling he'd perhaps have to phone me. He answered.

Not with his number or his name, not with “Hello” but a simple cool, “Yes?”

I took a deep breath. “Mr. Tesham,” I said, “my name is Jane Atherton. Hebe was my friend. I have been with her husband all day and now I'm at home I thought you might want to talk to me. I mean, I know you arranged for Hebe to be picked up last night. I thought there might be things you wanted to know.”

Silence. It endured so long that I thought for one moment that she might have made it up. She was a fantasist. Maybe she had some other lover, some ordinary man, but to make me envious had told me it was this glamorous MP. The pearls were fake, she'd bought them herself at some cheap place.

“Mr. Tesham?”

At last he spoke. “I think you must have been her alibi.”

“Yes.”

“A rare occurrence for me, but I am at a loss for words.”

“I don't mean to upset you,” I said, remembering what Mrs. Furnal had advised about compassion. It doesn't come naturally to me.

He laughed. It was a laugh without amusement. “What are you going to do?”

“I don't understand,” I said.

“Really? Let me be more explicit. Do you have information you want to pass on to the—er, the authorities? Mr. Furnal? Perhaps you'd be good enough to tell me.”

I didn't know what he meant. Did he think I was threatening him? My excitement died and the tears I couldn't shed when Gerry was crying pricked my eyelids now. A cold drop ran down my cheek. I could cry for myself.

“I'm not going to tell anyone,” I said. “I don't know anything to tell anyone. All I know is that you sent a car that was meant to pick Hebe up last night.”

“Ah,” he said. “I think you've confused things, Miss Atherton. A car picked Hebe up last night, but it had nothing to do with me. The two men inside it intended to abduct her. Does that clear things up for you?”

It was he who confused me. He made me feel the way good-looking sophisticated men always do, even when I can only hear them. I said, “Yes, thank you,” and to that I added, “I'm sorry.”

I really cried then. Great tearing sobs. I'd made a fool of myself. On a high all day, I had dropped down into the depths in the space of the three minutes the call lasted. Why I should have remembered at this point how Hebe had humiliated me, I don't know. Unless it was because he had done the same. Back into my mind came her kindly suggestions that such and such a boring man, some colleague of Gerry's, their next-door neighbor who lived with his mother, the elderly widower who was my boss at the library, might be persuaded to fancy me. That was what led to me inventing Callum. I started wondering if she had liked going about with me because seeing us together pointed up her beauty by contrast to me. So I cried and drank some more wine and went to bed, only to get up again when the phone rang.

Mummy, of course. Was it my friend all that stuff on the news was about? The girl who lived in that rather squalid house in the middle of nowhere?

“That's a bit rich from someone who lives in Ongar,” I said.

“Please don't start by being rude to me, Jane. I've been ringing and ringing you all day. The least you can do is tell me if this thing on the television is true.”

So I told her what my day had been like, with special reference to how upset I was at losing my best friend.

“Well, really, Jane, I would have thought I was your best friend. I'm sure no one does more for you than I do.”

That I ignored and went on a bit about Gerry being devastated, a word she uses a lot herself, and poor little Justin. I'd done the shopping for them, I said, and cooked and now I was exhausted, so if she wouldn't mind I'd ring off. The phone rang again almost immediately and of course I thought it was her, wanting to reprove me for being offhand. It wasn't, it was Gerry.

The police had been and had told him they had reason to believe that Hebe had been abducted by mistake for someone else, a far more likely victim, the wife of a multimillionaire. That was why the press had gone. This news would be in the newspapers next day and on the television.

If I could spare the time, would I come up to Irving Road again tomorrow? I hesitated and then I said of course I would. There wouldn't be the excitement there had been today. The media people would now be outside the multimillionaire's place, wherever that was.

I said I had come down from my high and dropped into the depths, but now I sank even lower. I suppose that unconsciously I'd been thinking, certainly hoping, that Ivor Tesham might have been in some way responsible, but now I knew he couldn't be. It was a real kidnap and the woman they meant to abduct was someone else, someone who maybe looked like Hebe but that was all.

Why had I said I'd go up to Irving Road again? What was in it for me? The fact was I had nothing else to do and that is true for me on most Sundays. As I lay down in bed again I had another premonition, a very powerful one this time. “Premonition” means something bad to come, though, doesn't it? This wouldn't be bad but maybe a real future for me. Like I often do, I saw it in pictures—one single picture really. I was in the house in Irving Road, in the living room, and Gerry was there sitting in the other armchair. All the photographs he keeps of Hebe about the place had gone and I had a wedding ring on my finger.