Barbara Vine - The Birthday Present

Flying metal and glass struck the bodyguard. Apparently, he didn't move but just stood there as if turned to stone. The dog, covered with blood and trembling, began to howl. The bodyguard stayed frozen there until Erica Caxton came running screaming out of the front door and then he ran to her, crying, “Don't look, don't look,” but there was nothing to see if she had looked, only metal and glass and bits of clothing and blood, blood everywhere. The children, aged fourteen and sixteen, slept through it all.

IT WAS THE lead item in all the news programs that day and the lead story in all the Sunday papers and Monday's papers. An hour after it happened the IRA announced in their usual way that they were responsible. Ivor was very upset. I could say disproportionately upset, but perhaps not. Sandy Caxton was fifteen years older than Erica and, though not quite his contemporary, had been a friend of John Tesham's since before Ivor and Iris were born. Ivor and his parents went to the funeral, but I stopped Iris going as she wasn't well and she was relieved that I had.

The funeral was a highly emotional affair, attended by most of the country's great and good. Among the coffin bearers were three Cabinet ministers and two university vice-chancellors. Though May, it was a bitterly cold day, a north wind driving the rain and the trees in the little village churchyard swaying and lashing their branches like angry arms, as Ivor put it. They played “The Dead March” in Saul, this being Sandy's favorite piece of music, and it seems he was particularly fond of the story of Saul, Samuel, and the Witch of Endor. There's no accounting for tastes. Why, incident ally, do we always talk about Handel arias and other music being “in” Saul or Theodora or whatever it is, when they are “from” if it's works by Mozart, say, or Beethoven? Nobody has ever been able to tell me.

Ivor came up to Hampstead after the funeral, accepted a stronger drink than usual, brandy with a splash of soda, and said in gloomy tones that he was so depressed by what had happened that he felt like postponing or even canceling the birthday present. But he couldn't do that. He'd fixed it up with Hebe to see her on Friday the eighteenth and arranged things with Lloyd and Dermot.

Iris said surely he'd be better by that time, it was nearly two weeks off. And it was only his usual assignation with Hebe, wasn't it, apart from its taking place in our house and her being fetched by car?

“Not quite usual,” Ivor said, putting on his secretive look but not the little smile this time. “There will be complications. But I'll tell you all about it when it's over.”

“Not all about it, I hope.”

“You know what I mean,” Ivor said, using a phrase I'd never heard from him before, his use of which I put down to his feeling low.

He didn't stay long but went off to Old Pye Street in a taxi, saying he had a lot of paperwork to get through before the following morning. After he'd gone Iris said, “I do wonder about this Hebe, this mystery woman. What do you think she says to her husband when she goes off on these jaunts? Does she tell him she's going to the cinema? I should think she must do, because I can't think of anywhere else a respectable young woman with a husband and a child could go to on her own. I mean, could say she was going to on her own.”

I said I supposed she might say she was going somewhere with a friend. To have a meal, for instance, or even to a club.

“Then the friend must be an accomplice. The friend will have to be prepared with a story in case Hebe's husband meets her—it must be a her, mustn't it, or maybe a gay man—so that she can say how much they loved the film or the food. I can't imagine telling you I was going to the cinema when I was actually going to go to bed with another man. I don't think I could get the words out.”

“I hope you won't go to bed with another man,” I said.

“I'm sure I never shall, but if I did I'd tell you. Why does she stay with him? Because he keeps her? That's a bit low, isn't it?”

“The whole thing is low,” I said, “and Ivor knows it. But he's fascinated by her. He doesn't love her, but he wants to keep on with this. It may be that she stays with Gerry what's-his-name—Furnal—not because she loves him but because he loves her. For all we know, he may have some idea of all this but begs her not to leave him. Do what she likes but not leave him.”

Iris looked doubtful. She couldn't imagine it. “But to have that between them,” she said. “For her to know she lies to him and him to wonder if she does but be afraid to ask, what kind of marriage is that? I don't think you can be right, Rob.”

I was wrong, as it happened. It was true that Gerry Furnal loved Hebe, but perhaps without knowing the kind of woman he loved. He seems to have put her on a pedestal and worshipped what he'd created. It's quite a common way of going on, but it wouldn't suit realists like me. Anyway, I doubt if I'm capable of that amount of self-delusion. I'm not well endowed with imagination. The truth came out grimly and shockingly in the end in poor Jane's diaries, if it was the truth rather than only what she saw through the distorting lens of her self-pity. As to Jane, she was the friend who agreed to deceive Gerry Furnal by supplying him, if these became necessary, with ostensible reasons for Hebe's absences, and it wasn't to be long before we heard about her from Ivor. It was Iris who first used the word, calling this then unknown person “the alibi lady.”

“We all use it,” I remember saying, “but do we know what it means? I don't. Alibi—strange word, a sort of police word, but do the real police actually use it?”

“It sounds Arabic.”

I looked it up and found it was Latin for elsewhere.

“Well, that figures,” Iris said. “The alibi-ist will tell Gerry Furnal Hebe was with her when in fact Hebe was elsewhere with Ivor. And there'll be lots of times when she won't have to, because I don't suppose she and Gerry meet that often. I wonder how she feels about it.”

“I imagine she tells herself her loyalty is to Hebe and not to Hebe's husband.”

“Do you know, Rob, I'm beginning to take an unhealthy interest in all this intriguing and I think I'd better stop.”

And stop she did. We had other things to think about. We told each other so and made a kind of pact, which we stuck to fairly well, not to speculate anymore about Ivor and his clandestine affair. We would lend him our house as we'd promised and go away and leave him to it. I had given him the key the evening he came over after Sandy Caxton's funeral and he was to put it through the letter box after he left. That isn't to say we didn't involve ourselves much more closely when things developed. We had to. Otherwise he'd have been quite alone, bearing it alone—until, that is, Juliet Case came along.

That Friday was the first day something about poor Sandy wasn't on our daily newspaper's front page. Instead, the lead story was about the multimillionaire Damian Mason's bid to buy some north of England football team, with a picture of him, a short heavy man with a little beard, and his wife, Kelly, in shorts and a tight T-shirt. Iris was beginning to get over her flu, and I think that was the first morning she woke up feeling well. Nadine, on the other hand, was a bit fractious and cross but seemed well enough, so, after I'd made a couple of essential phone calls to clients, we set off for Monks Cravery. Before we left, Iris changed the sheets on our huge low bed and, though I said not to bother, covered up the coffee or birthing stain with a rug from Nadine's room.

It was a lovely day, the first really fine day of spring.

4

I started writing this down because I had a premonition. It was when Hebe asked me to give her an alibi. She has been asking me to give her alibis for a long time and I always do, but this one was different. It was more important than any I had given her in the past. For one thing, I would have to provide it for longer than usual and the occasion was her birthday. I mean that where she was going and what she was doing were her birthday present.