Barbara Vine - The Birthday Present

I spoke to Ivor on the phone ten minutes after I read that. He was calm but very quiet.

“We've already had them phoning,” he said.

“What, journalists?”

“Someone called. I mean, not the American ‘called,' came to the door. I slammed the door on him.”

“Will you go in?”

“To the department? Yes, of course. I must. Look, can Juliet come up to you? I don't want to leave her alone here. They're bound to come. That's for sure. I could get her out the back way before I have to go.”

I had an appointment. I was due to pay another visit to that client in Blomfield Road, Maida Vale. The last time I'd been there was when I saw Ivor and Juliet heading for Warwick Avenue tube station after they'd been to see the Lynches in William Cross Court. They should never have gone near the place but I wouldn't allow myself, even to myself, to say I told you so.

Juliet spent the day with Iris and the children and was still there when I got home. She'd spoken to Ivor several times on the phone, but the last time she'd tried he was in the House of Commons with his mobile switched off. I'd brought the evening paper in with me and, as we'd all expected, they were carrying a portrait photograph of Hebe and the windblown one of her with Justin, both of them alongside Juliet in extravagant eighteenth-century comedy clothes. She looked about twenty.

I asked her where they got that from.

“I had a part in The School for Scandal. Apt, isn't it? I'd guess Aaron gave it to them.”

“Would he do that? I thought you and he were on good terms.”

“He hates this government. It's not Ivor in particular. He'd do the same if it was anyone in the government. It's all part of this antisleaze campaign of his.”

There had been nothing about Juliet's marriage to Hunter in the morning papers but there was by the evening. Apparently with enthusiasm, he had given them an interview as well as the photograph. Yes, he knew Ivor Tesham, he'd met him on several occasions. Lloyd Freeman too. He wasn't prepared to say (he said) that he and Juliet had been divorced on Freeman's account, there were many factors that led to their breakup, but Freeman had certainly “appeared on the scene” very soon after their decree became absolute. He had moved in with her at her home in Queen's Park. Whether they were still together when the kidnap attempt was made in May 1990, he wouldn't care to say.

A double-page spread, sprinkled with photographs, was devoted to a biography of Hebe. As is usually the way with beautiful women, she had often had her picture taken. There was a wedding photograph, Hebe in clouds of white clinging to Gerry Furnal's arm. There was a postnatal photograph, Hebe in bed with her baby in her arms, and another of her in a black dress with pearls.

“The pearls, I suppose,” Iris said. “Surely Gerry Furnal didn't give them those pictures. Surely he wouldn't, not her husband.”

“Come to that, who gave them the story? Who told them all that stuff?”

I drove Juliet home at about six. I was crawling slowly along through Westminster when we saw the crowd ahead of us. It was their spilling over into Marsham Street that was causing the traffic holdup. We passed Ivor's house, necessarily slowly, and Juliet turned her head to look at them, the press pack, the media with movie cameras, the photographers. The house faced directly onto the street, with short pillars linked by a chain rather than a front garden separating it from the roadway. The reporters were inside the chain, pressed against the front wall and downstairs windows. They left only half the roadway accessible to traffic and one of them was sitting on top of a van illicitly standing on the yellow line.

“I can't go in there, Rob,” Juliet said in an unnaturally high voice.

I turned down the next street on the left, came out onto Millbank and found a place to park on the Embankment. She would have to come back with me, I said, and we'd better get hold of Ivor too. Would he be there for the evening vote? She said she was sure he would be. In the bar, probably. Her gentle, loving tone took away any sting there might have been.

“It must have been like this for Gerry Furnal,” she said, “before they thought it was Kelly Mason that Lloyd and Der-mot were after. I mean, the media outside like that, persecuting him.”

She had a mobile phone with her and from the car she called the Commons and left a message for Ivor to phone her urgently. He phoned and he turned up at our house at about eight, having taken a taxi all the way. The children, especially Nadine, enjoy having people to stay and were all over Juliet. Much as I love my daughter and my sons, I know this kind of attention can be irritating when you're anxious about something quite other, but Juliet was perfect. She behaved with them as if there was nothing she would like better than conversing with them to the exclusion of everyone else until bedtime came. Nadine insisted on taking her upstairs to see the bedroom where she and Ivor would sleep, instructing her in things she undoubtedly already knew, like how to turn on the bed lamps and which tap the hot water came out of.

Ivor and I went into the study, taking our drinks and the bottle with us. It's not really a study, at least in the sense that Iris and I do any studying in it or any work at all, but it's a quiet haven with appropriate leather armchairs and a desk of sorts, and the children aren't allowed beyond the doorway.

“No one's said a word to me in the House.”

“It's been more about Juliet than you,” I said. “It's been more about Hebe.”

“So far. My biography will start tomorrow. We'll have to go home; there's no escape. We'll just brave those people and that's all there is to it.”

“Just out of interest, why did you get to know the Lynches? You've never really told me.”

“Dermot—he was on my conscience. As soon as I knew he was going to survive. You didn't think I'd got a conscience, did you, Rob?”

That's not the sort of question I ever answer. “Now tell me why really?”

He laughed. It wasn't much of a laugh, more a dry sort of barking sound. He closed his eyes for a moment and when he opened them he smiled. “I wanted to know what sort of a state he was in, whether he could ever tell the police that I was the ‘mastermind' they were looking for. By the time I knew he couldn't I'd met Sean and his old mum, I was going to give them money and it was too fucking late.”

“There was a bit of conscience in it, then,” I said.

At that point he said something which may have been original, though it sounded like a quote: “When a politician becomes ‘the story' he's no longer any use in politics.”

IVOR ORDERED a taxi and the two of them went back to Glanvill Street at six in the morning. The press weren't there but they had turned up by seven. They mobbed Ivor when at last he came out and made Juliet cry when she appeared at a window. She thought they were going to break the window, but they didn't; they took photographs of her through the glass.

Our morning paper came after Ivor and Juliet had gone. Not Gerry Furnal but Philomena Lynch and Sheila Atherton had both given interviews. Neither mentioned the kidnap attempt. The art less Mrs. Lynch, poor woman, mother of a probable criminal and murderer and of a disabled wreck of a man, all of which the paper exploited, said how Mr. Tesham had been a friend of her son Dermot. When Mr. Tesham heard that Dermot was “a cripple” he'd come to see them with his fianceé, Miss Case, and offered Dermot a pension, which he'd been paying ever since. He was such a generous man and very good and kind, with no side to him. As for Miss Case, she was a lovely girl.

Sheila Atherton said that her daughter, the murdered girl, had worked as a children's nanny to Mr. Gerald Furnal because he had lost his wife and needed someone to look after his small son, Justin. His wife, Hebe, had been a “very close friend” of Jane's. They had been at university together. She had died in a car crash. Yes, she thought it was the car crash that took place somewhere in London on May 18, 1990, and she thought the driver was killed. But it may have been the other man who was in the car. “A colored man,” she called Lloyd, and I was surprised the newspaper printed those words.