Barbara Vine - The Birthday Present

But I am left with my ongoing problem. I had begun looking on my approach to Ivor Tesham rather like an application for a job. There would be the application to make, then the interview with the employer, and after that his acceptance of me on his staff. A staff that perhaps included all those Lynches and even Carmen, who used to be with Lloyd Freeman. Now I had to rethink this “job.” I still wanted it, of course; I had to have it. It was my only hope, but I had to find a different approach if I wasn't to become the victim of a particular member of that staff.

One thing is plain. I can't write my letter today. I have to wait until that other side of my life is cleared up, until I know that I am no longer alone. I once read somewhere that twice one is not two, twice one is two thousand times two, and that this is why the world will always return to monogamy. That means it's always best to be in a partnership—for protection and company. I wonder if people ever go mad when they have got someone to be with; I don't think they do.

While Mummy was here I have been putting the diary in the shoebox under the floorboard. Force of habit makes me go on doing that. I thought of putting Hebe's things there too, but they may as well stay where they are, in the case I bought specially for them inside the cupboard.

I am spending a long time this evening looking at myself in the mirror and I think I can see now what it was that made Stu fall in love with me. All the time Mummy was here I couldn't put on Hebe's clothes, but now I get them out of the cupboard and start dressing myself in them, the black underwear, the boots, the dog collar. When I imagine Stu seeing me in them I feel excited but calm too and in peace, the way the policeman promised.

26

On my way to the tube at Mansion House, I bought the Evening Standard at the station entrance but I did no more than glance at the headline. Another murder was what registered with me, a woman in Kilburn this time. I'd got a seat and found myself next to a City acquaintance, someone I'd got to know quite well over the years, and we talked until he got out at Temple. It was several weeks since I'd seen Ivor. He'd called my office earlier and left a message for me, one of those bland messages that nevertheless seem to carry with them an undercurrent of urgency. Drinking with Ivor, or occasionally watching Ivor drink, was a commonplace in my life but this time I had a slight sense of foreboding. I got out of the train at Westminster, leaving the Standard, which might have told me what I should be worrying about, on the seat beside me.

He took me into the Pugin Room, a crowded place that is really just inside the Lords and which peers say the Commons stole from them about a hundred years ago and refuse to give back. Ivor got a table at the back overlooking the river, in spite of pretending to despise the view, which he said was all right if you like looking at St. Thomas's Hospital, where parliamentarians go to die. The river was rolling along at a swift pace, black, glittering, and choppy. It was cold out there and looked it. I said I'd have claret but Ivor didn't hesitate before ordering a double Scotch for himself.

“I shouldn't,” he said, “but I need it.”

I asked him what was wrong.

“Have you seen the news or a paper?”

“I left my Standard in the train,” I said.

“You didn't recognize the murdered girl's name?”

I said I hadn't read it. These things were too horrible to dwell on.

Ivor looked round in a hunted way. He dropped his voice. “The murdered girl is Jane Atherton. She was Hebe's friend. I used to call her the alibi lady.”

There was nothing to say.

“I'll get you the paper.”

He soon came back with it. Jane Atherton's body had been found in her own flat by her mother. Though they had made an arrangement to keep in touch every day, the mother hadn't heard from Jane since she left her the previous Sunday. Getting no reply to her phone calls and by then very anxious, she had come back to London on the Wednesday and got the police to force a way into the flat. Jane was lying on her bed with a knife in her back. She had been raped.

“It's disturbed me a bit, Rob.”

I thought for a moment—a very short moment—that he meant it had distressed him. She was a woman, she had met a dreadful death, she was only thirty-something. I should have known him better.

“I mean, has her death any connection with me? Anything to do with what happened to Hebe? I can't really see why it should have, but naturally I can't help being a bit disquieted. These things have a motive, don't they? Some thug doesn't just come up to a woman at random and bash her over the head. Or does he?”

It's fear of being a prig, being seen to be a prig, that stops a lot of us taking a moral stand. People haven't always been like this. Until well into the twentieth century men at least seemed to have no objection to telling a friend that he was a cad who infringed some unwritten code. But it's all gone now and though I told myself that was nearly the breaking-up-with-Ivor point for me, I said and did nothing. I might have thought of getting to my feet, saying that I couldn't stand any more of this and walking out, but I didn't. After all, I'd been there before. Several times. Besides, I wasn't sure if I could find my way out of the labyrinth that is the Palace of Westminster. I sat there very still and kept quiet. If he noticed he gave no sign of it.

“Unreasonable of me to think the way I'm thinking.”

I said in a tone I hoped was chilly but probably wasn't, “Which way are you thinking?”

Ivor made a face. The room was full now, everyone talking at the tops of their voices. He edged his chair nearer mine. “Well, if she told people about it. I mean friends of hers who were also friends of Hebe's. It's quite likely she did. She wouldn't have kept that to herself, but of course she didn't know that much. Be that as it may, Rob, and to be absolutely frank with you, what's worrying me is that the police may want to talk to me.”

I asked him why. Why would they?

“Look at it this way. They'll talk to her friends. They may talk to Gerry Furnal, he of the pearls, right? They'll certainly talk to her mother. Her mother found the body. If she was close to her mother, she'll have told her about me and Hebe.”

“It's four years ago,” I said. They'd have had better, more topical and pressing things to talk about. “People in your sort of situation get paranoid. You're paranoid. Do you really think a woman whose daughter's been raped and stabbed to death is going to tell the police that she supplied an alibi to a friend who's been dead for four years? She's going to tell them that this friend was having an affair with you? And suppose she does—are they going to think you had a motive for killing her? Come on, Ivor.”

“Keep your voice down,” he said, very nervous. “I didn't mean that—well, maybe I did. I just don't like any of it. Oh, God, there's a division. Don't go. I'll come back.”

The green bell had come up on the screen. Here, on the threshold of both Houses, the Commons division bell and the Lords division bell were equally audible. Those of us not summoned were left behind. Looking out at the black water, the lights, the disturbed curdy sky, I asked myself what was the worst that could happen and came up with nothing much. Jane Atherton's mother wouldn't blacken her dead daughter's name by telling anyone, let alone the police, that she supplied an alibi to help a friend commit adultery. In spite of this, if the police found out that Jane had once had a friend who was involved four years ago with a Conservative MP … But no, it was too absurd to consider, too far-fetched, too much the product of what had become a neurosis.