Barbara Vine - The Birthday Present

It's an account of a rise and a fall.

A COUPLE OF weeks after the birthday, Ivor asked me to dinner in the Churchill Room, a Commons dining room on the ground floor off the corridor that leads to the terrace. He said no one else would be invited; he wanted to talk to me about a matter that had nothing to do with politics or the Commons. It soon emerged that my advice was to be asked about the Hebe Furnal affair.

As I've said, he'd decided against buying her a flat and to continue in the unsatisfactory way they were carrying on their illicit meetings. He had already asked to borrow our house at some time in May, which was four months ahead, and when he mentioned it again I was a bit apprehensive. I thought he might be going to ask if he could use it on a regular basis. But I soon saw that this wasn't what he wanted. He had his own flat. The difficulty was not that they had nowhere to go—he could after all have used a hotel—but that for most of the time Hebe was Justin-bound.

“It's supposed to be the way to keep a relationship from flagging,” I said. “I mean, making it hard to meet and the meetings few and far between.”

“I hate that word relationship,” he said, looking peevish. “Sorry, but the very sound of it puts a damper on things. Think of meeting someone you're mad about, like I am about Hebe, and saying, ‘I want to have a relationship with you.' Do you think people actually say that?”

That made me laugh. I said I didn't know, I wouldn't be surprised.

“Anyway, our affair isn't flagging. It doesn't get the chance to flag. I don't think it would if we met every day. Not that there's any prospect of that, the way things are.” He paused and gave me a sidelong look. “I haven't asked her yet, but I'm thinking about it—I mean of asking her to leave Gerry Furnal.”

“And move in with you?” Remembering his time with Nicola Ross, I was surprised, but it turned out that this wasn't in his mind at all.

“Not exactly,” he said, looking at me and looking away. “I've decided against buying, but I thought of renting a place for her.”

“You mean she's to leave her husband and not live with you but live in a rented love nest? And what about the little boy?”

I was very child-conscious at the time; still am, but in a more level-headed way. In the spring of 1990, when Nadine was six months old, my eyes were caught by every baby and infant I passed in the street. I couldn't read about child cruelty in the papers. I couldn't look at those pictures the NSPCC put out in their publicity. Someone took Iris and me to the opera, it was Peter Grimes, and I had to go outside when it got to that bit about Grimes being at his exercise and he's beating the boys. So my mind went at once to two-year-old Justin Furnal.

“She'd bring him with her, you know,” I said.

“Do you think she would?” he said. “I hadn't thought of that. It would be a bit of a drawback.”

I'm very fond of Ivor, but I wasn't then. As sometimes happened, I came near to disliking him for a moment or two. I'd be aware of his charm and that sort of dashing reckless quality he had, and then he'd say something to turn it all around, almost shocking me.

“Even supposing she left her husband, and it doesn't seem to me you've any reason to think she would, what happens next? Furnal and she would get divorced surely and she'd get custody of Justin.” I used his name because calling him “the child” was distasteful.

“But would she, Rob? I mean, she'd have been the one committing adultery.”

I told him he was supposed to be a lawyer and hadn't he ever heard of no-fault divorce? Unless she was a criminal or a druggie she'd get custody, never mind how saintly Gerry Furnal might be.

“I hadn't thought of that,” he said. “I couldn't stand having that child around. It's bad enough when we're talking on the phone.” He seemed not to notice my slight recoil. I took a deep swig of my wine. “If Gerry divorced her I'd have to marry her, wouldn't I?”

“Ivor,” I said, “for someone so advanced in your sexual tastes”—I remembered in time I'd better not admit to knowing what Iris had told me in confidence—”you're surprisingly old-fashioned. A mistress in a love nest, a clandestine love affair, and now you think you'd have to save her honor. Of course you wouldn't have to marry her, but I think you'd have to share your home with her. You'd have to live with her.”

“I hate that word home,” he said. “In that context, I mean. Ghastly Americanism. Can't you just hear some fat woman talking about her lovely home? Oh, I'm sorry, I'm a bastard.”

I asked him tentatively if he'd given any thought to what the press might make of all this.

“At least you didn't say the ‘print media.' “ He laughed. “I may be a new PPS,” he said, “but I'm still a very small fish in a huge pond. My God, I've just realized, that's what ‘small fry' means, isn't it? Small fish. We live and learn. There's a pretty awful play by Barrie that Morningford Amateur Dramatic Society put on. It's called Mary Rose and of course I had to go and see it. Someone says, ‘We live and learn,' and the reply is, ‘We live at any rate.' It's the only good line in the play.” He smiled his small half-smile. “The press isn't interested in me having a girlfriend. Prurient they may be when it suits them, but even they allow for a bit of sex in people's lives.”

“When the sex involves a girlfriend who's married and living with her husband?”

“They don't know that, do they? They don't watch her house or mine. If one of them happened to be passing on the relevant evening once a fortnight, all they'd see is a beautiful blond girl coming to my block. Might be visiting anyone. Might live there.”

“I don't know,” I said. “I just think you ought to be careful.”

In the months to come I was to remember this conversation. It made me think about the unforeseen and how we walk all the time on that thin crust that covers terrible abysses. Things might so easily have been different from what they are if a word spoken or a word withheld hadn't changed them. If Ivor, for instance, had said “no” instead of “yes” when Jack Munro asked him to that reception in the Jubilee Room.

2

I get my surname, Delgado, from my grandfather, who came to this country from Badajoz in the 1930s, and I sometimes think it's a blessing I seem to have inherited a thin gene along with the name, which is Spanish for slim. It would be a liability for the overweight to be saddled with the name. But I'm thin and tallish and otherwise in conspicuous, sallow and bespectacled—to please Iris I'm at last thinking of getting contact lenses—with an unexpectedly deep voice and, for some reason, an almost silent laugh. I laughed in my noise less way when Iris said Ivor was borrowing our house because its rafish kitschy interior was appropriate for his purpose.

At that time we had a cottage in the country quite near Iris's family home in Ramburgh and another cottage or little house in one of the cobbled mewses of Hampstead. This was the place we were to lend Ivor. It had been a wedding present from Iris's parents, who had bought it for us with all the decor and furnishings fashionable in the 1930s, when the Hollywood Moderne style was in vogue, and unchanged by the previous owners. Coming in from the mews, it was quite a shock. The outside of the house was nineteenth-century brickwork hung with clematis and roses, green shutters at the windows, and a lantern over the front door. Visitors walked in on chrome, black, and silver, scuffed white leather furniture (soon to be stained by Nadine and her younger brother coating it with raspberry jam and Marmite), a great mural of the New York skyline at night, and a wall-size black and yellow abstract framed in aluminium. Upstairs was worse, or the larger of the two bedrooms was. Our huge bed—was this what appealed to Ivor?—was very low, its mattress almost on the floor, which was covered in once-white shagpile. Someone before our time had spilled about a pint of coffee on it, or that was one view to take. Iris said it was more as if a former owner had given birth there. We meant to cover the stain with a rug, just as we meant to give the house a makeover when we could afford it. I insisted we keep the circular mirror that had lightbulbs all round its frame and reminded me of an old film magazine photograph I'd once seen of Claudette Colbert's house in Beverly Hills.