Barbara Vine: The Birthday Present

When she said that, I had a sense of foreboding. Things would go wrong. My premonition told me things would go disastrously wrong. I would have to be careful. That was when I decided to record events. I am not going to use a notebook but sheets of paper and clip them together as I go and put them in a shoebox, which I shall keep in the only real cupboard I have in this tiny flat. And if I move one day I shall take it with me. Shoeboxes are a nuisance and these days most shops ask you when you buy a pair of shoes if you want the box. Hardly anyone does want it, which makes one wonder what the shops do with all those hundreds, thousands, millions of boxes. The last pair of shoes I bought they made me take the box—I shan't go there again—and that's how I happen to have one to keep this record in.

Using this box is quite appropriate, because when I bought those shoes Hebe was with me and she bought a pair of boots. Maybe I should say I was with Hebe, because that's the way it always felt. The boots were black patent leather with very high heels and they laced all the way up the front to the knee.

“You won't be able to walk in them,” I said.

She laughed. “I don't want to walk in them, Janey. I want to lie down in them.”

Remarks like that embarrass me. I don't know where to look.

We went to have a coffee and that was when she started telling me about the kinds of things she did with Ivor Tesham. Dressing up, acting out fantasies it was mostly, and that was all right, I suppose, but her descriptions of what after all amounted to S&M made me feel uncomfortable. Perhaps it was partly because it all seemed so distant from Gerry, who is a rather proper sort of person. Or so I thought then. I didn't really know. But nothing that's happened since has made me change my view. I asked her if she was in love with Ivor.

“I don't think so,” she said. “But would I know if I was? I do fancy him like crazy. But as for love—I thought I was in love with Gerry when I married him and maybe I was, but it didn't last.”

I asked her why she stayed with him.

“I tell myself it wouldn't be right to take Justin away from his dad, but I don't know if that's really the reason. I've never had a job, you know. Well, of course you know. I married Gerry straight after finals and then Justin came along. What could I do?”

“Your degree's in media studies,” I said, another obvious remark.

“Like a million other people's. I wouldn't know how to get a job on a paper or in TV or whatever. I'm only good at one thing. I'd be a great whore, but I'd rather go on as I am.”

I reverted to the boots. Surely she wouldn't let Gerry see them? They had cost three times as much as my shoes.

“Oh, Ivor will pay for them,” she said. “After all, they're for his pleasure,” and she drew out the soft sibilant of that sensual word, rolling it on her tongue. “So would you be an angel and give me an alibi for May eighteenth?”

I said I would. “But your birthday's the seventeenth.”

“I've got to go out with Gerry that night.” She made a face. “You're babysitting—remember? It's a bore, but marriage is a bore. You have to face it.”

I had nothing to say to that. “I've got a feeling that something bad is going to happen. Can't you make it another night?”

“Oh, Janey, you and your premonitions. Ivor wants to make it the eighteenth and I can't exactly tell him it won't suit you. Besides, I've already told Gerry that you and I are going to the theater.”

Without even asking me. I ought to be used to it, it's the way most people treat me. Starting with Mummy, they all know that if I am not with them I'm not likely to be going anywhere. It's a funny thing really. You read in the papers about young people going to raves and clubs, out every night, being promiscuous, drinking too much and taking drugs. Well, I'm young, but I don't even know what a rave is. I could count on the fingers of one hand how many men have asked me out, and as for the number who have wanted to see me again—well, I won't go on. There's no point.

In actual fact, I have seldom had to give Hebe an alibi. I hardly ever saw Gerry, so I wasn't around for him to ask me if we'd had a good time at the Odeon or a nice dinner at the Café Rouge. He never actually checked. I mean he never rang up and asked if Hebe had really been with me. Probably he suspected nothing. Not then. It took a good deal to make him even mildly suspicious, for he had a trusting nature. Did my conscience trouble me? I used to have one, but maybe I don't anymore. Spending so much of the time alone deadens things, and one of the things it kills is conscience. It makes you simply not care anymore.

I'd never done this sort of thing before, and in fact I did very little of it for Hebe. Of course I promised various things, like not to answer the phone if it rang when she and I were supposed to be out somewhere but to put it on message, and to be aware of when and where Gerry thought we had gone so that if we did meet I could confirm our date. But that only happened twice, him asking what the film he thought we'd been to had been like and another time how Mummy was—she'd been in the hospital—when I took Hebe to see her. I didn't even have to lie about that. I only had to say that my mother was getting on well.

So it wasn't too much of a strain and it only happened once every two or three weeks. I made myself take an interest in Hebe's love affair and I looked up Ivor Tesham in a directory called Dod's. I was working then in the Library of British History in Gower Street and it's full of directories and dictionaries, so there were plenty of places where I could find his name, but Dod's was the most comprehensive. He sounded rich and the photograph that accompanied the short biography made him look very handsome, unless the camera lied, which it sometimes does. He had one of those sardonic faces that women find attractive, very dark eyes, and black hair. Looking at his picture, I wondered if he would ever get to be prime minister one day and that face would be famous. Hebe said he was very ambitious, though as far as I could tell she knew nothing about politics and cared less.

But I was talking about May 18. The play Hebe had told Gerry she and I would be seeing was called Life Threatening. I never got to see it. I don't even know what it's about, and I can't remember who wrote it, except that it was some new, very young playwright and was supposed to be very sexy and crude. But the name I can never forget, and every time I hear or read that phrase— life-threatening comes in newspapers quite often—it resonates with me, so that I see Hebe's face and hear her voice again and think of the way she died.

She had picked that play because it's very long—it ran for about three hours—so Gerry wouldn't wonder what was going on if she didn't come in till after midnight. I asked her what the scenario was for that evening with her and Ivor that she was going to be with him so much longer than usual and she said he was fixing up a birthday treat for her, her birthday present.

“I thought the pearls were your birthday present,” I said.

She'd told me about them, said he'd already given them to her and what a clever present this was because no one (meaning Gerry) would know whether they were valuable or if they came from some high-street jeweler's.

“I think I'll get them valued, though,” she said, “and insure them, and then if they get pinched I'll get a lot of money.”

I asked her what they were going to do with the extra time on Friday night. She said she didn't know, but she was to be picked up in a car as she was walking down the Watford Way. She had to be there at precisely seven. Hebe was famously unpunctual, so I couldn't help wondering what would happen if she turned up ten minutes late. I supposed Tesham or his driver would wait for her. It was all a million miles away from things that happen in my life. But I think that's one of the reasons why she liked me, because beside me she showed up as beautiful and popular.