Barbara Vine - The Birthday Present

She had stopped on her way to buy the paper in question and read the paragraph. “He'll read it sometime today, you know. He's bound to. You think I ought to phone him, don't you?”

“I don't know, Juliet. I just think we all ought to be prepared for him to be in a state about this. It's going to be a blow to him.”

Iris came in then with Joe in her arms. He was trying to walk by this time, though in his case walking meant getting into everything, pulling everything down from its appointed place, and generally making mayhem. Another man, if a little one, to be drawn to her beauty, he came over when she called him and sat on her knee. Iris had told me of Juliet's love for children but I'd never before seen it for myself quite as I did that day. I'd never before seen in her that characteristic of the woman who knows what children want, the bestowing on them of undivided absorbed attention. Nothing, not even Ivor's interests, would have distracted her from Joe, but within seconds he had found her handbag and begun trying to open it. Iris, of course, intervened, feebly expostulating, but Juliet wasn't having that. The handbag was opened, placed on the floor, and abandoned to Joe's excavations.

“What do you think will happen?” Juliet said.

“Let's hope nothing. If the media find out that Sean was questioned four years ago about Sandy Caxton's murder, they can't use it. But they know that. The trouble is that I can't see any reason why they shouldn't go back into their archives and resuscitate the kidnap story.”

“Because that would be about Dermot and not about Sean?”

“That's right. But I do think the chances are they'd concentrate on a kidnap attempt on Kelly Mason rather than on Hebe Furnal. It's never been finally established which woman it was they meant to abduct, or whether it was a real kidnap or a joke. And remember, no one has connected Hebe with Ivor. Ivor hasn't been mentioned. There have been stories about Kelly Mason in the papers, that she was in a psychiatric hospital on some remote island, and there was an interview with her husband saying she hadn't been well since all those threats were made. He meant she hadn't been sane.”

“You mean they're more likely to concentrate on her,” Iris said, “than on Hebe because the poor woman's gone bonkers? What utter shits they are.”

“Maybe, but that's how I think it would be.”

Nadine was at her infant school but Adam marched in then and, seeing his brother intent on removing notes, change, and credit cards from Juliet's purse, snatched it from him, grabbing the handbag with his other hand. Screams and bellows followed from Joe, triumphant laughter from Adam, admonitions from Iris, until peace was restored by Juliet's producing from the plastic bag that the newspaper was in a writing pad and case of colored pencils. In spite of having several sets of pencils and infinite sheets of paper already, Adam fell on this gift with enthusiasm, while abandoning the handbag to Joe.

“You're really good with kids,” Iris said.

“If I am I expect it's because I like them.” Juliet smiled. It was always, I'd noticed, a rather shy smile for so beautiful a woman. One expected enormous self-confidence and got diffidence instead. “Please don't say I ought to have some of my own,” she said. “I know it. I'd love to.”

Iris is notoriously outspoken. I was afraid for a moment she might ask Juliet why she didn't have some of her own, but she didn't, said only that she'd go and make coffee. Like me, she knew the answer. Ivor wouldn't want to be a father without being married first. He was a Conservative and a landowner. He must have been one of the few people left even then who still referred to children whose parents weren't married as “illegitimate.”

“So you think that may be the end of it?” Juliet said.

“Well, I do.” I'm not sure that I did. I was trying to comfort her, though I needed comfort myself. “As I say, they can't publish anything about Sean's past, whether he has any convictions or things like that. There's no apparent link with Ivor in any of this.”

“I can't believe Sean would kill anyone. Why would he?”

I said I didn't know the man. I couldn't say. But I remembered his thuggish looks from Ivor's party, the brutality in his face, and I wasn't so sure.

“The difficulty is that Ivor is the link between Jane Atherton and Sean Lynch. Any possibility that Sean's some sort of psychopath who raped and killed a woman he saw in the street and followed home isn't on, is it? It would be too much of a coincidence.”

“Are you saying Sean killed her to protect Ivor?”

“I don't know. Did she threaten him in any way? If she did, he said nothing to us about it.”

“Nor to me,” Juliet said. “I'm sure she didn't. But Sean—I know this sounds an exaggeration but it's not—Sean loves Ivor. I don't mean he just likes him or looks up to him. He said so to me once. ‘I really love that man,' he said. He loves him, he worships him. It's not too much to say he'd do anything for him.”

“Well, I hope to God he hasn't.”

“People do love him, don't they? Dermot did in his way. The way Ivor talks about him, I'd say Sandy Caxton loved him too. I do. I do love him so much.” She looked at me and this time there was no smile, diffident or otherwise. The beautiful mouth trembled and she began to cry.

Iris had just come in with the coffee. She put the tray down, went to Juliet and threw her arms round her. “Don't cry, darling, please don't. It'll be all right. It'll blow over. You'll see.”

“I don't see how it can.”

I was thinking, though I didn't say it aloud, that even if it blew over at the present time, when Sean came up for trial—nine months, ten, perhaps a year away—the man's motive must come out and there could be no other motive, it appeared, but saving Ivor from Jane Atherton's malice or greed. Or desperation or need, if I am to be fair.

“He'll be home by seven,” Juliet said. “He's bound to know by then.” Neither of us had asked, it would have been too much of an intrusion, but it was as if we had. “It sounds silly but it was love at first sight for me. The first time I saw him I thought, I want to marry that man. Well, not the first time, that was at a party, but the second. Whatever happens I'll never leave him. If he wants to get rid of me he'll have to throw me out.”

“He won't do that,” I said, though I was by no means sure he wouldn't. “Get him to give us a ring when he comes in.” We kissed her and Iris hugged her, holding her tightly for a moment. We had our answer to the question we'd so often asked. Why? What was in it for her? Not for unspoken blackmail, not for a gourmet meal ticket, but love, just love.

“I was wrong,” Iris said when she'd gone, “about her being unfaithful, wasn't I?”

IVOR DIDN'T PHONE us that evening, though he knew. He'd seen the relevant newspaper in the plane on the return flight and there were a few lines in the evening paper, rather cunning subtle lines. They said only that Dermot Lynch, driver of “a kidnap car” in which the intended victim had been Kelly Mason, having been in a “protracted coma” for a long time, had made a partial recovery. (As if kidnap, crash, and recovery were all recent history.) Juliet told us about it next morning. She called us after Ivor had gone in to the department. They had both also read the follow-up story in the right-wing daily newspaper Ivor had delivered.

This was just an account of Sean Lynch's arrest and his appearance in the magistrates' court, where he had pleaded not guilty to the charge of willful murder. There had been, of course, nothing about what led the police to him and no details about him except that he was thirty-three years old (the heavenly number) and lived in Paddington, west London. But at the foot of this brief account of the proceedings, there appeared once again the two lines about Dermot, his involvement in a suspected kidnap attempt, his long period of unconsciousness, and his “limited recovery.” Not a word about any relationship between the two men, nothing to show they had an address in common.