The Birthday Present (3 page)

The other man, Dermot Lynch, I never met. I heard his voice once when I was in Ivor's flat. He had come around to collect Ivor's car and take it away for a service. “I'll pop the keys through the door as per usual, guv,” I heard him say, and I wondered whether Ivor, who expected to be called “sir,” would object to being addressed like a police inspector in a sitcom. He can't have minded much, because Dermot Lynch was the other man he chose to carry out the birthday present.

I shall call it that now because it's as “the birthday present” that Iris and I referred to it, rather than as “the accident,” whenever we spoke of it in the future. Back in the early part of 1990, of course, we had no idea what Ivor was planning, only that he wanted our house on the nearest Friday to May seventeenth, and after a time we gathered this was Hebe's birthday. He bought her a present as well, a string of pearls, and, in an unusual display of openness, showed it to us.

“They're beautiful,” Iris said, “but the trouble with pearls is that you have to be an expert to tell whether they're worth thousands or they came from a chain store.”

“That's not the trouble,” Ivor said. “That's the point. She can wear them and Furnal won't know she didn't buy them herself.”

I
VOR WAS A
good constituency MP. Even after he got to be a minister he still went down to Ramburgh most weeks to hold his Morningford surgery on a Saturday morning. If the weekends he spent in London were usually free, the ones in Norfolk weren't. Especially in the summer, there would be an appearance to put in at some local festival or f^te and often a dinner to attend and speak at in the evening. There
was always a cause that needed his patronage or a concern one of his constituents wanted raised with the relevant minister. At the time of the birthday present or just before it was the proposal to close a local hospital, the kind of place they used to call a “cottage hospital,” he was opposing. He'd attended all the meetings of the Hands Off Our Hospital committee but he drew the line at taking part in the march through Morningford culminating in a mass demo in the town square. It was a Conservative government that supported the hospital closure and he was, after all, a Conservative whip. As he put it, he didn't want the wrong sort of limelight. He was very aware of this sort of thing, perhaps neurotically aware.

When he visited his constituency he stayed at Ramburgh House with his parents, a place considered by John and Louisa to be as much his as theirs. They had told him that when he married they would give it up to him and move into the lodge, quite an attractive but much smaller house at the eastern end of the estate. It seemed to me that they were safe for years, as marriage was the last thing on Ivor's mind.

Ramburgh House was a biggish Queen Anne place, one of those manor houses that stand in the center of the village, separated from its main street only by a narrow strip of grass and paving and approached through an arch in a high brick wall. All the land, the garden, the park, and a couple of meadows and woodland were at the rear, and the lodge stood about half a mile away, at the end of what they called the East Avenue, a lane running between a double row of lime trees. It's a measure of Ivor's old-fashioned (and slightly absurd) sense of the dignity due to the landed gentry that he called the lodge “the dower house.”

I don't suppose there is anything particularly remarkable
about the grounds—the land is flat, its only distinguishing feature the little river running between rows of alders—and the house itself gets only a terse paragraph in Pevsner's
Buildings of Norfolk.
But Ivor was very fond of the place and, if his father behaved like a squire of old, he conducted himself a bit like the heir apparent, having the vicar and his wife to dinner and dropping in on the locals to hear their complaints about rents and repairs. Now, of course, most of the locals have died and the places they lived in have become weekend cottages for Londoners.

Our own cottage was ten miles away but well within Ivor's constituency. We voted in Hampstead and we had the right to vote in local elections, though not in parliamentary ones. It wasn't easy for us to attend any of those functions Ivor spoke at, but we did manage to get along to the Morningford Eel Feast, an annual thrash in the town hall whose origins were lost in antiquity. Traditionally, only local eels were consumed, but these had become scarce over the years and it was rumored that half of those eaten at the April 1990 feast came from Thailand. I don't know if there are any eels in Thailand or if we import them if there are, but this was the story that went around the tables that year. Iris and I were able to go because the feast happens at lunchtime, so we could take Nadine with us.

Ivor made a speech, a very good speech I suppose it was, with the requisite eel jokes and stories about the glorious past of Morningford and its even more illustrious future, nothing about the hospital closure but rather a lot about the benefits the then government had brought to the town. Just the same, I wasn't sorry when Nadine started to grizzle and then to scream and we had to take her out. I heard afterward that there had been one or two sticky questions put to Ivor,
the most awkward being how long would Margaret Thatcher remain prime minister. Apparently, he got around it by heaping praise on her.

Very unusually for him, he had no engagement that evening and he came over to Monks Cravery to see us. Iris asked him how Hebe was and he said fine and he'd already told her about the pearls. This is a strange business, asking people how they are or someone close to them is. We all do it all the time, and now we're doing it even more than we did seventeen years ago. But the last thing we want is to hear about someone's state of health, and nothing is more boring than to be told in reply that they woke up feeling under the weather but they're a bit better now apart from a slight headache. No, what we expect is to hear news or details of some recent experience or escapade or even to be shocked by death and disaster. Iris wasn't anticipating anything like that, but nor was she content with Ivor's short response.

“Well, tell us, was she pleased?”

“Of course,” he said. “Who wouldn't be? She'd been telling me for months how much she loved pearls. Of course she'd be pleased.”

I mention this because those pearls figured quite importantly in what was to come. Not for a long time, not until the quiet period when it seemed the birthday present (I mean the other one) was far in the past and Ivor had begun to think it was all over. Begun to think the terrible fear was gone forever and nothing like it would ever come again, his sleepless nights and his dread of newspapers. Gerry Furnal was married to his second wife, Justin was growing up and was soon to have a half-sister. But through the years those pearls must have lain in their black leather velvet-lined case in a drawer somewhere in Gerry Furnal's house in his distant suburb or journeyed back and forth in Jane Atherton's
handbag, their presence accepted by Furnal as he accepted Hebe's other jewelry, the stuff from Oxfam shops and Costa Brava market stalls. If they weren't worth a king's ransom (are kings ever held to ransom?), their value was probably the same as that of all the Furnal furniture and equipment put together.

L
ONG AFTERWARD, WHEN
it was confession time, advice time, and desperate help-seeking time, Ivor told me about meeting Lloyd Freeman once more at a party given by Nicola Ross. Nicola was always giving parties; no reason such as an anniversary or Christmas was needed to excuse them. Iris and I had been invited but couldn't find a babysitter.

Shy people get to parties early because if they're among the first they won't have to walk in on a roomful of unknown guests. Ivor wasn't shy, far from it, and on this occasion he didn't arrive until the party had been going for about an hour. He intended, of course, to stay late. Nicola always invited too many people and the place was crowded. Ivor pushed his way through the throng, avoiding those he didn't want to talk to because they bored him, and came face-to-face with Lloyd. They talked for a minute or two, the usual how-are-you-what-have-you-been-doing stuff, Ivor said, and then he thought he might as well put his proposition to Lloyd there and then. By that time, he had already spoken to Dermot Lynch and Dermot had agreed.

A waiter hired for the occasion was going round refilling glasses and both of them had some more Merlot. In those days quite abstemious, Ivor always drank a lot at parties, though he never showed a sign of it as far as I could see. Lloyd, he said, gave him the impression of being one who stoked up on free wine when he got the chance. Ivor reminded him of
what he'd told him in Nicola's dressing room about his minicab business. Would he do a driving job for him? He needed a posh sort of car (his words), maybe a black Mercedes with blacked-out windows in the rear. It was to pick up a girl and bring her to a house in Hampstead on a Friday evening in a few weeks' time. There'd be a second driver if need be.

“It sounds okay,” Lloyd said. “How far would it be?”

“Five or six miles. No more. Five hundred pounds.”

Lloyd went quiet. “What's the catch?”

“No catch,” said Ivor, “but complications.”

“Look, why don't you call me? I've got to go. My girlfriend's looking for me.”

She came up to them, took Lloyd's arm, and pulled him away. That was the first time Ivor saw her, a very pretty dark-haired woman, but white like a Spaniard or a Portuguese, with magnificent breasts shown off in a low-cut top. The ankles weren't mentioned at that time. Ivor noticed the breasts, as any man would, and the lovely face and full red lips, but she wasn't his type and he thought, he said, of Hebe's extravagant slenderness and delicate features and cascading fair hair. He asked himself too, in that moment, what the hell he was doing longing for a woman who ought to have been there at the party with him, a married woman who wanted the best of both worlds, a husband and a lover, and who couldn't escape more than once a fortnight. But longing and reproaching himself didn't stop him going on with the birthday present.

He phoned Lloyd the following week and arranged to meet him and Dermot Lynch in a pub in Victoria. He didn't know it and neither of them had ever been there before. That was the point, I suppose. Lloyd got there first and was businesslike about the “complications,” how he and Dermot were to buy balaclavas to wear, handcuffs, and a gag for
Hebe. Dermot, who was a great gesticulator, a man who talked with his hands, rolled his eyes at this, held up a thumb, and winked when Ivor told them where they should go for these “props” and handed them money to cover it and cover too the renting of the car. He repeated his offer of five hundred pounds to pick up a woman and drive her from a point north of the North Circular Road to Hampstead. Lloyd nodded and, though Ivor didn't ask him for any undertaking, said he wouldn't tell anyone.

Two hundred and fifty pounds each now, Ivor said, and the other two hundred and fifty in cash in an envelope on the hall table inside the front door of our house. Lloyd and Dermot wouldn't need a key as he would be there himself to put the door on the latch. They all had drinks, Dermot making his thumbs-up sign again and talking more than Ivor liked about the arrangements. He laughed a lot too.

“Where d'you get an idea like that from anyway?” He shook his head in wonderment at Ivor's powers of invention.

Lloyd was rather quiet. He had just split up with his girlfriend, though Ivor knew nothing about this at the time. The two men left together in Lloyd's car.

A
nother thing Sandy Caxton told me was that they used to believe the weight of the soul when it leaves the body at the point of death is twenty-one grams. Or it may have been twenty-one ounces, I can't remember. The Neoplatonists thought the soul was located in every part of the body. I hope Sandy's fled the moment the bomb was detonated, because he was blown to unidentifiable pieces. Perhaps it became a snow-white bird and nestles under God's throne until the last day. I'm told that some Muslims believe that.

I expect you remember what happened, though perhaps not the details. Sandy had spent the night at his home in Leicestershire with his wife and their two children. They slept in the house and his resident bodyguard and his dog were in the flat over the garage, which was a converted stables. Sandy was going out on the Saturday morning to play golf with another Tory MP, a backbencher, and his agent, who lived in the next village. The bodyguard performed his usual security check at seven, scrutinizing Sandy's car, a Rover, searching the garage, his German shepherd sniffing
every corner. Because he knew his employer was going out, he fetched the car, closed the garage doors and left it on the paved area in front of the house.

Sandy got up at seven-thirty, leaving his wife, Erica, and his boy and girl asleep. He made himself a cup of tea, ate a piece of bread and marmalade, and left the house. The bodyguard had returned to his flat, but he came downstairs again when he saw Sandy coming, said good morning to him, and stood at a distance with his dog while Sandy got into the Rover. It wasn't when he turned on the ignition but when the engine started that the car blew up.

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.

I
T 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.