The Birthday Present Read Free Page B

insisted we keep the circular mirror that had lightbulbs all round its frame and reminded me of an old film magazine photograph I'd once seen of Claudette Colbert's house in Beverly Hills.
    I asked Iris what Ivor meant by “appropriate for his purpose.”
    ‘The right atmosphere,' was what he said. I didn't ask what sort of atmosphere he wanted.”
    “I don't suppose we shall ever know,” I said.
    W E'D BEEN INVITED to the theater by Ivor that evening and we looked on it as a celebration for him. He had just been made a whip. The play was
Julius Caesar,
with a famous theatrical knight as Brutus and Nicola Ross playing Calpurnia. After it was over we all went round to Nicola's dressing room to have champagne and take her out to supper. Itwasn't my business even to wish it, but I couldn't help reflecting how much better it would be if she and Ivor were still together and it was she he was thinking of living with. After a minute or two the young black actor playing Casca put his head round the door and Nicola called him in. She introduced him as Lloyd Freeman, and we were soon all talking about black people taking parts that had been intended for white actors. Was it a problem? If audiences could suspend their disbelief in middle-aged women playing Juliet and fat divas singing tubercular Mimi, why not accept a black Mark Antony? Lloyd said he was lucky to have the part he had, but he'd only got it because it was a very small one. Could we imagine him in a Pinero revival, for instance?
    We talked about black and Indian characters in books all being comic or evil up to World War II and beyond, and Othello the only serious role for a black man, and I was starting to wonder how Lloyd made a living, when he said he also drove for a minicab company in which he was a partner with a friend. Ivor was interested—Iris and I agreed afterward that he probably wanted to use one of these minicabs for taking Hebe home after their meetings—and Lloyd gave him a card. After that Lloyd went home and we went off to supper.
    I never saw him again, and I don't suppose I ever gave him a thought until the time of the accident. The papers had photographs of him too, though not so many as of Hebe. He was a good actor, and whenever I see a play on the West End stage with black people in the cast I think of him. Because the impossible, which was the view he took, has happened. I saw a black Henry V last year and a black Henry VI last week, and I thought how I might have seen Lloyd in
Julius Caesar
again, but playing Cassius this time. I never can because he's dead. It wasn't Ivor's fault that he died, but withoutIvor he'd no doubt be alive today. He was thirty-two, so he'll have to age another year when he gets to heaven.
    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