Free The Birthday Present by Barbara Vine Page B

Sunday morning, his arms full of Sunday papers. Our reception of the news hadn't been the wholehearted congratulations on his escape he had expected.
    “Whatever,” he said dismissively “Have you seen a paper yet? Have you seen the news on television? It's extraordinary. This chap Damian Mason has been getting anonymous letters threatening to kill his wife if he doesn't give up buying whatever-it-is United football team. He even had one threatening to abduct her. I imagine he told the police it wasn't Hebe but his wife poor old Dermot and Lloyd were after. I feel like going up there and shaking his hand.”
    “I wouldn't,” said Iris.
    “Of course I won't.”
    I had picked up the
Sunday Times
and was looking at the photo graph of Kelly Mason, a pretty blonde not all that unlike Hebe.
    “You can see the resemblance,” I said.
    “To Hebe? Oh, please. You jest.” He had an irritating habit of saying this, like some minor character in Shakespeare, instead of “you must be joking.” I don't think I'd ever disliked my brother-in -law so much, though I knew my antipathy wouldn't last. “Hebe was beautiful,” he said. “She had a delicate, ethereal sort of beauty. Actually, I can't bear to think of that damaged, spoilt. That really distresses me.”
    It was at this point that Nadine, who had been asleep upstairs, let out a disgruntled cry. I went up to her, glad of the chance to get away. When I came back with her in my arms, Iris was asking what Kelly Mason would have been doing walking down the Watford Way at seven in the evening or any other time. Wouldn't she more likely have been in her Lamborghini in Hampstead Garden Suburb?
    “It's actually a Porsche she has,” Ivor said, laughing. He could laugh. His bouncing from frightened gloom into adrenaline-fueled ebullience was almost manic. “Apparently, her mother lives in one of those roads off the Watford Way. She'd been there on Friday—in the Porsche of course— and was safe at home when they thought they were abducting her.”
    Iris corrected him. “When the police
think
they thought they were abducting her, you mean.”
    “You know, if I wasn't convinced of your sisterly devotion, I'd begin to think you rather resented my escape from disgrace. That's what the press call people in my position who've come to grief, you know, ‘the disgraced MP.' Is that what you'd like?”
    I'd had enough of this, so I took Nadine into the kitchen, where I laid her down on a counter and performed that task which, in the eyes of women's magazine journalists and nannies, is supposed to be the test of good fatherhood: I changed her nappy. She kicked and smiled and laughed, andas always I was lost in adoration. She is almost eighteen now, gratifying me with her splendid A-level results, four passes at A grade, and it says something for her good sense that if she heard this, my talking about her as a baby would provoke no more from her than an amused, “Oh, Dad.”
    Though richer and neither more nor less beautiful, Kelly Mason hasn't enjoyed such good fortune, such love or happy family life. She knew nothing beforehand about the anonymous letters—her husband had kept them from her—but she knew when she read those Sunday papers. They called her a “Checkout Chick” and a “Supermarket Cinderella” because she worked for Tesco when Damian Mason first saw her. He was in there buying a packet of crisps and two hundred cigarettes. It was his first ever visit to a supermarket and probably his last and he fell in love with her. Everyone said she was lucky. He took her to some South Pacific island on their honeymoon and bought her a big house (the papers called it a mansion) in Hampstead Garden Suburb.
    She had always been nervous, a shy diffident sort of girl. The journalists who interviewed her after the attempted abduction mocked her cruelly for having no O levels (GCSEs were called O levels when she was at school), for wearing high heels with white jeans, for enjoying