Barbara Vine - The Birthday Present

I've known him since he was a small boy in Ramburgh and I was five years older. Though we moved away when I was eight, I was born in that village, as were Ivor and my wife. They look a lot alike, Ivor and Iris, and he is three years her senior. They are both tall and dark and slender. Sandy Caxton said Iris had the face of an Israelite princess, Rachel weeping for her children, though the only Jewish blood she and Ivor have came into the family in the early nineteenth century. I'm told Ivor was very good-looking, but I'm no judge of that. When he and I walked into a restaurant or a bar together I've seen women turn and look, and I'm pretty sure they weren't staring at me.

When all this happened he had been “seeing” (as he put it) Hebe Furnal for about a year. Prior to that an actress called Nicola Ross had been his girlfriend, and when the end came they parted amicably. I don't know why they did or why it was amicable, though Iris told me it had nothing to do with Hebe's coming onto the scene. She seemed to think the Nicola Ross affair wasn't exciting enough for Ivor. They were both single and unattached. Some said they were made for each other. Nicola, who he always called Nixie, was a suitable woman for an MP to be going about with, a handsome blonde with an increasingly successful career, a year or two older than he. He had even taken her to Ramburgh House to meet his parents, but he had never quite reached the point of moving in with her or asking her to move in with him. That was his way, though. He had never lived with a woman. Then came the break-up and Hebe Furnal. When he asked if he could borrow our house (for a never fully explained purpose) he told me how they had met.

“It was at a reception in the Jubilee Room,” he said. “I don't know if you've ever been in there. It's up a grim sort of flight of stairs at the far end of Westminster Hall. We were waiting for the seven o'clock vote and I'd nothing to do. Jack Munro said why not come along to this reception. It was being given in aid of a charity called HALT—the Heart and Lung Trust.”

“I heard someone make one of those appeals for them on the radio,” I said.

“Yes, well, Jack said I might as well come along and get a free drink, which means the gnat's piss which passes for Sauvignon in the Jubilee Room. Anyway, I went. The HALT fund-raiser's a man called Gerry Furnal, but I never met him. I met his wife instead.”

He smiled that little reminiscent smile of his.

“Go on,” I said.

“You know how these things sort of hit you. She's got the most amazing legs, as long as some women are high, if you see what I mean. And a lot of other things too. Her hair's a very pale blond and it reaches to her waist. I didn't lose any time. I went up to her and said, ‘Ivor Tesham. How do you do?' and she said, ‘Hebe Furnal. I do very well, thanks, a lot better than I did five minutes ago.' Here was a woman after my own heart, I thought, so I pointed to the monitor up on the wall and I said, ‘You see that green screen up there? Well, in about five minutes a bell will come up on that, the word Division will appear in white letters and I'll have to go and vote.' ‘Then I'd better give you my phone number, hadn't I?' she said. ‘Have you got a good memory?' ‘Marvelous,' I said, and just as she gave it to me the green bell appeared. I ran down the stairs and all the way across Westminster Hall, repeating that phone number over and over, with the division bell ringing, and I leapt up the stairs and along the corridor into the Members' Lobby. I was still saying that number in my head as I went to vote, but I picked up a bit of paper as I passed through and wrote it down.

“And that was the start of it. I phoned her next day. We manage to meet about once a fortnight and I'm going to have to do some thing about that, but meanwhile will you lend me your house for a Friday night somewhere around May seventeenth?”

“Sure,” I said. “We always go to Norfolk on Fridays anyway.”

I hadn't hesitated. He wasn't just my brother-in-law but a great friend too. I didn't say to myself, this is a married woman living with her husband that you're encouraging Ivor to sleep with. By lending him your house you're facilitating an illicit love affair. Of course I didn't. I didn't say, you're helping to make an innocent husband unhappy and perhaps deprive a small child of his mother. One never does say things like that. I didn't even think them. Our house in Hampstead was very suitable for clandestine goings-on, ideal really.

He and Hebe Furnal usually met at his flat in Westminster. It was a long way for her to come from where she lived, somewhere up in West Hendon, the far side of the North Circular Road. The “sticks,” Ivor called it and sometimes the “boondocks.” I never saw her house and, for that matter, nor did he. Before she left for their meetings she had to wait for the HALT fund-raiser to get home, because someone had to be with her little boy, Justin. Ivor told me on another occasion that he and Hebe had more phone sex than actual sex, every day in fact, and even this was sabotaged—his word, his PPS to a Defence Secretary's word—by interventions from two-year-old Justin shouting, “Don't talk, Mummy, don't talk.”

I've said I didn't hesitate about lending him our house, but did I approve? Did Iris? She certainly didn't and she told him so. I tried not to be judgmental, and what I felt wasn't any sort of moral condemnation but rather something that was near to physical distaste. It made me squeamish to think of this girl, this young mother—I don't know why her being a young mother should make it worse, but somehow it did—going home from Ivor to her husband in a taxi paid for by Ivor and deceiving her husband with tales of the cinema she'd been to or the meal she'd had with a girlfriend. Going perhaps from Ivor's lovemaking to her husband's within the same few hours. And I simply didn't understand. I didn't understand why he'd want to do this or she would. I'd have understood even less if I'd known then the kind of things they did, she and Ivor, their games and dressing up and enactments. Iris, who did understand without sympathizing, explained to me, or tried to, how it was as if Ivor and she had found each other out of all the world, two people with exactly the same tastes, the same feverish desires, the same breathless greed. Love? I don't think so. I only know it was nothing like what Iris and I had and have.

FOR THE BEST part of the nineteenth century, a Tesham had rep resented Morningford in Parliament. Then there was a long period of Liberal members until Ivor's grandfather had the seat from 1959, when Ivor was two, until 1974. The man who succeeded him died while at the Conservative Party Conference in 1987, Ivor stood in the consequent by-election and won by a majority of just nine thousand. He was thirty-one, young to be in Parliament, exception ally so, and very ambitious. A former president of the Oxford Union, he was something of an orator, made a memorable maiden speech, and would have been on his feet at every available opportunity but for Sandy Caxton advising him not to speak too often. Members notice excessive eloquence and remark on it, not always favorably.

In 1989 he was made PPS to the Secretary of State for Defence. In case you're like I was and don't know what that means, those letters stand for Parliamentary Private Secretary and set the holder of the office on the first rung of the ladder of political achievement. With luck and hard work, he would next be made a whip and then junior minister. Ivor played down his functions, as people in his position usually do, and said it meant dogsbody, someone who ran errands and kept himself au fait with his minister's diary, but you could see he was elated by the appointment.

The media weren't quite so intrusive or so savage as they are today, but they were watchful, especially of young Conservative hopefuls. There had been scandals and sleaze. Margaret Thatcher had been prime minister a long time and, as always when long terms seem to be endlessly protracted, coups are talked of and plots and rebellions. But you'll remember all this and whatever I'm telling you, it's not a political assessment.