The Birthday Present Read Free Page A

wouldn't have to marry her, but I think you'd have to share your home with her. You'd have to live with her.”
    “I hate that word
home,”
he said. “In that context, I mean. Ghastly Americanism. Can't you just hear some fat woman talking about her lovely home? Oh, I'm sorry, I'm a bastard.”
    I asked him tentatively if he'd given any thought to what the press might make of all this.
    “At least you didn't say the ‘print media.' “ He laughed. “I may be a new PPS,” he said, “but I'm still a very small fish in a huge pond. My God, I've just realized, that's what ‘small fry' means, isn't it? Small fish. We live and learn. There's a pretty awful play by Barrie that Morningford Amateur Dramatic Society put on. It's called
Mary Rose
and of course I had to go and see it. Someone says, ‘We live and learn,' and the reply is, ‘We live at any rate.' It's the only good line in the play.” He smiled his small half-smile. “The press isn't interested in me having a girlfriend. Prurient they may be when it suits them, but even they allow for a bit of sex in people's lives.”
    “When the sex involves a girlfriend who's married and living with her husband?”
    “They don't know that, do they? They don't watch her house or mine. If one of them happened to be passing on the relevant evening once a fortnight, all they'd see is a beautiful blond girl coming to my block. Might be visiting anyone. Might live there.”
    “I don't know,” I said. “I just think you ought to be careful.”
    In the months to come I was to remember this conversation. It made me think about the unforeseen and how we walk all the time on that thin crust that covers terrible abysses. Things might so easily have been different from what they are if a word spoken or a word withheld hadn't changed them. If Ivor, for instance, had said “no” instead of “yes” when Jack Munro asked him to that reception in the Jubilee Room.

2
    I get my surname, Delgado, from my grandfather, who came to this country from Badajoz in the 1930s, and I sometimes think it's a blessing I seem to have inherited a thin gene along with the name, which is Spanish for
slim.
It would be a liability for the overweight to be saddled with the name. But I'm thin and tallish and otherwise in conspicuous, sallow and bespectacled—to please Iris I'm at last thinking of getting contact lenses—with an unexpectedly deep voice and, for some reason, an almost silent laugh. I laughed in my noise less way when Iris said Ivor was borrowing our house because its rafish kitschy interior was appropriate for his purpose.
    At that time we had a cottage in the country quite near Iris's family home in Ramburgh and another cottage or little house in one of the cobbled mewses of Hampstead. This was the place we were to lend Ivor. It had been a wedding present from Iris's parents, who had bought it for us with all the decor and furnishings fashionable in the 1930s, when the Hollywood Moderne style was in vogue, and unchanged bythe previous owners. Coming in from the mews, it was quite a shock. The outside of the house was nineteenth-century brickwork hung with clematis and roses, green shutters at the windows, and a lantern over the front door. Visitors walked in on chrome, black, and silver, scuffed white leather furniture (soon to be stained by Nadine and her younger brother coating it with raspberry jam and Marmite), a great mural of the New York skyline at night, and a wall-size black and yellow abstract framed in aluminium. Upstairs was worse, or the larger of the two bedrooms was. Our huge bed—was this what appealed to Ivor?—was very low, its mattress almost on the floor, which was covered in once-white shagpile. Someone before our time had spilled about a pint of coffee on it, or that was one view to take. Iris said it was more as if a former owner had given birth there. We meant to cover the stain with a rug, just as we meant to give the house a makeover when we could afford it. I