The Birthday Present (15 page)

I didn't get the job. The interviewer was a woman. She didn't look a bit like Hebe, but it was Hebe I thought of when first I walked into the room and saw her. The skirt she wore just covered her knees and she had high-heeled boots and a low-necked cleavage-showing top. Her dark hair was long, coming halfway down her back. Naturally, she wanted to know why I'd left my job at the Library of British History and when I told the truth and said I'd got the sack, she made a note on the sheet of paper she had in front of her. I couldn't tell her I was interested in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century children's costumes, because I know nothing about them, but I said as enthusiastically as I could that I was a quick learner. She seemed doubtful.

She looked me up and down then. I'd meant to wash my hair but hadn't had time and I'd thought it better to go without tights rather than wear a pair with ladders across the instep. I had hoped the hems of my brown trousers would hide my bare skin, but they didn't quite. She didn't comment but she didn't need to. All she said, after I'd had to tell her I'd never used a computer but again I could learn, was thank you for coming and she would let me know. She did, two days later, in a letter full of false regrets and excuses.

I'm sure it was my less than perfect appearance that lost me the job, but surely we should be honest in our daily lives and stick to our principles? It really annoys me the way people's looks, especially women's looks, seem to be getting more and more important as we move toward the twentyfirst
century. I just wonder if I would have been successful if I'd gone to that interview with bleached hair and lipstick and wearing some of Hebe's kinky stuff—anyway, the boots. That woman wouldn't have cared about my lack of computer skills or my not knowing when children wore pantaloons.

That afternoon I took some of the stuff out and tried the boots on. They fitted perfectly, making me inches taller. I made myself walk up the road wearing them to the paper shop and a man on a building site actually whistled at me. Back at home I fastened the dog collar round my neck and imagined Callum coming in while I was wearing the boots and had my skirt pulled up above my knees, but I had to stop and switch off. The feelings it brought on made me too uncomfortable. My whole body was throbbing.

I made myself turn to reality. The
Evening Standard
was carrying a few ads for vacancies in the kind of thing I could do and I forced myself to apply for two of them. The pearls in the drawer were starting to trouble me, almost to haunt me. They were worth so much—but not to me. And if it might look to someone else (i.e., the jeweler) as if I'd stolen them, wouldn't it look to everyone as if I had? Didn't I really know I had? Gerry had asked me to dispose of Hebe's jewels but to leave behind the valuable things. He hadn't known the pearls were valuable but he would have included them with the engagement ring and the locket and the bangle if he had known. Then I had an idea.

Suppose I were to take them back and ask him if I could keep them? Maybe he'd offered those other women, Grania and Lucy and Emily, to help themselves to a keepsake but he hadn't asked me. I could say that to him and ask for the pearls. Then it wouldn't matter if Asprey's or some small jeweler called the police, because Gerry could say he'd
given them to me. He would say it too, I knew he would, even if he was told how valuable they were.

Phoning him again wasn't on. I dreaded hearing disappointment in his voice when he realized who it was. Of course I'm used to hearing that, and not only from him, but it still hurts. I would drive up there and see him.

D
RIVING THE CAR
for the first time since Christmas, I wondered how long I could afford to keep it. The way cars depreciate and so quickly is very unfair. If I sold my flat I would get far more than I paid for it five years ago, but if I sold my car I would get a sum in hundreds rather than thousands. It wasn't worth selling it.

The evening was wet and miserable, and it's a grim drive anyway up to West Hendon. I was halfway there when I began thinking that maybe Gerry would be out, would have gone off somewhere in a taxi to meet whoever it was, and in charge of Justin would be Grania—or Emily if it was Grania he had gone out with. If that happened I would just come back and try not to calculate the cost of the petrol I had wasted. But he was in. He opened the door to me.

“This is a surprise,” he said in the sort of voice you'd use to tell someone you're sorry their dog's been run over. He asked me in but I had a feeling he'd have preferred not to. It was long past Justin's bedtime but he was still up. He was in the living room watching television or he was sitting on the sofa staring vacantly into the air above the television screen. I sat down beside him but he didn't look at me and of course he didn't speak. Gerry had lost weight and was by then painfully thin. I had taken the pearls out of the case that said Asprey's on it and put them in a box that had once contained
the nasty cheap perfume my mother had given me for my birthday. Gerry barely glanced at them.

“Perhaps you'd put them away with the locket and her ring,” he said.

I should have made my request then but I didn't. He went on talking about all his problems, how worried he was about Justin, how he'd taken him to a child psychologist who'd only said to give him time, his voice would come back eventually, and about his new responsibilities at work—I should be so lucky—and the longer hours this entailed and how sometimes he was at his wits' end. While he was speaking I had turned to Justin and just touched him on the shoulder. I thought he might throw my hand off but he didn't. It was as if a miracle had happened. He turned to me and held up his arms for me to take hold of him. I put my arms around him and lifted him onto my knee, where he sat and leaned his face against my chest. Gerry stared. He was silenced. And then an idea came to me. I'd really have liked more time in which to think about it, but I didn't have more time. The pearls had been my excuse for coming and once they were gone I would have no reason ever to see him—or Justin— again. It was now or never.

“Would you like to take me on as Justin's nanny?”

He didn't hear me the first time, or pretended he hadn't. “What?”

“Would you like me to be Justin's nanny? As a job, I mean.”

“You?” he said. “You wouldn't want to, would you? What about your own work?”

“I've lost my job,” I said, seeing no reason not to be honest.

“But you've had no training.”

“The ones you interviewed had and much good it did them.”

He smiled a little at that. He got up and turned the television off. Justin helped things by snuggling up closer to me and closing his eyes.

“If I agreed to it, how would we arrange things? You'd come here every morning at eight, say, and go home again when I got home?”

Charming. He couldn't have made it clearer how he felt about me. “That wouldn't work at all well,” I said. “I'd have to live here. I'll have no other home, because I'd have to let my flat. Think how useful it would be, having a nanny with a car. I'd have my own room. I wouldn't get in your way.”

“Oh, Jane, I didn't mean—”

Yes, you did. “Think about it,” I said, “but don't think too long. I'll take Justin up to bed now.”

I went upstairs with him in my arms and laid him in his father's bed, not bothering to undress him. Then I put the pearls back where Hebe's other jewelry was. I wasn't losing them, after all, they'd still be near me, because I'd be working here. At the bottom of the drawer, at the back, was something I hadn't noticed before. It was a cutting from a newspaper inside a clear plastic envelope, a photograph of Ivor Tesham after he won his Morningford seat in 1988. I put it in my jacket pocket. Before I went downstairs I kissed Justin, rehearsing, I suppose, for my role as his nanny.

Gerry said when I came in, “I'm very grateful. Thank you. Of course it would be on a trial basis.”

“A one-week trial,” I said. “I need to know for sure. I shall need to let my flat. And now we'd better talk about money.”

W
hen I began writing this I said I'd avoid politics as far as I could, but some political matters have to be mentioned. The by-election to fill the seat vacated by a Conservative MP's death was one of them and Ivor went up to his Suffolk constituency the weekend before to support the candidate. It wasn't he but someone else whose name I've forgotten who lost the seat by declaring that voting for anyone but the Tory candidate would be a triumph for IRA terrorism. The result of that was a victory for the Liberal Democrats. The electorate are wayward and capricious and don't care for being bullied. That much politics I do know. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth (as Bible-orientated Sandy might have said) among the Tories, who were beginning to see the increasing likelihood of the Labour Party getting in at the next general election, which was not much more than a year away. Even Ivor was worried about it, temporarily distracted from his personal concerns. He hadn't yet got in touch with Juliet Case, though he did so in the week following the by-election. Iris and I knew nothing about this.
We had never heard of Juliet Case at this time and were beginning to think that he was settling down to some sort of acceptance of the status quo. No one but, presumably, Mrs. Lynch and her son Sean and perhaps a few relatives knew what condition Dermot Lynch was in, but we supposed that if he was still in a coma after eight months the chances were that he would never come out of it. In fact, Dermot was by this time at home in Paddington with his mother and brother. He had come out of the hospital two days after Ivor saw Juliet leave William Cross Court and followed her home.

Although he knew nothing about it at the time, this marked a turnaround in Ivor's fortunes. And when he did know, and knew the condition Dermot Lynch was in, things began to go better for him. He had aged in the preceding months and got very thin. One day in January, when I was having a drink with him in the Commons and he'd gone off to vote, a Lib Dem I knew slightly came up to me and asked me if my brother-in-law had cancer. He didn't put it quite like that but that was what he meant. From the moment (from the day, rather) Ivor found out about Dermot, his health and appearance improved and this in spite of his working harder at this point than he'd ever worked in his life.

What had happened was that he'd phoned Juliet Case, told her he'd met Lloyd a few times but only learned of her existence very recently. He owed Lloyd a sum of money he had believed he would never now be able to repay but thought it right that she should have it. How much screwing up of his courage this took, he didn't say. For some reason he expected a sharp rejoinder but she was, to use his own word, “charming.” She had a beautiful voice and he wasn't surprised to know she had been to RADA. She invited him to her home but, being reluctant to make his way up to “darkest Queen's Park” again, as he put it, he asked her to have dinner
with him. Iris says that this was always Ivor's answer to any problem with a woman. He asked her out to dinner.

N
OW, OF COURSE,
I don't know exactly what they said to each other in that restaurant. I only know what Ivor told me, what he necessarily précised for me. So I have constructed their conversation from what he said and my knowledge of him (and later on of Juliet), but I think it's accurate enough. I did know Ivor very well and this is pretty much how it would have been.

By this time, apparently, he had forgotten that she had seen him before. When he had come away from her front door after checking the doorbells, he had seen her looking at him out of her front window. But, as I say, he'd forgotten, and he was surprised when she recognized him immediately. He had only just come into the restaurant himself and was giving his name to the girl who kept the bookings list when Juliet came up to him, held out her hand, and said, “Juliet Case.”

Then he did remember but he said nothing about their previous encounter. He was, he said, admiring her. He wondered how he could ever in his own mind have labeled her “big.” She had a perfect figure, an hourglass figure. The plain black dress, decorously calf-length but startlingly low-cut, he said, was just right. The ankles, which he'd remarked on while he was following her half across London, looked even finer and more delicate this evening. He could easily make a fetish of those ankles, he said, and knowing enough about Ivor and fetishes, I had no doubt of it. Her thick black curls were piled high on her head but she was very lightly made-up, her fine dark eyes as nature formed them, and she wore no jewelry but pearl earrings.

Those earrings reminded him of the pearls he had given
Hebe, an act of generosity he now regretted. She asked for a dry martini and Ivor had one too, though he was well known for never drinking the stuff except when he was in New York and could have it in the Oak Room at the no longer extant Plaza Hotel. He had come to hand over a check for a thousand pounds, which, now he was sitting opposite her and admiring her attractions, he was finding rather difficult to do. They had been talking of Aaron Hunter, the subject of her ex-husband having been raised by Juliet, who asked Ivor if they had met while appearing on the same television program. She had seen it and was now struck by the coincidence. Had Ivor seen him in his new play, a revival of O'Neill's
Anna Christie?
Ivor hadn't, and he apparently had to restrain himself from asking her if she'd come and see it with him. But that would have been premature. He had to get this business of the money over first and get over as well the delicate business of asking her about Dermot Lynch. That, after all, was the purpose of their being there. She was so friendly, so charming, and—well,
sweet,
that he wondered if he was going to be able to do it at all. But he was getting used to doing difficult awkward things, as a minister has to be. He took the check in its envelope out of his pocket and handed it to her.

“I want you to have this. It's what I owed Lloyd.”

He had rather hoped she wouldn't open it then and there but she did. She looked at the check, lifted her eyes to him and said quite slowly, “But you only owed him a quarter of this.”