The Birthday Present Read Online Free PDF

The friend will have to be prepared with a story in case Hebe's husband meets her—it must be a her, mustn't it, or maybe a gay man—so that she can say how much they loved the film or the food. I can't imagine telling you I was going to the cinema when I was actually going to go to bed with another man. I don't think I could get the words out.”
    “I hope you won't go to bed with another man,” I said.
    “I'm sure I never shall, but if I did I'd tell you. Why does she stay with him? Because he keeps her? That's a bit low, isn't it?”
    “The whole thing is low,” I said, “and Ivor knows it. But he's fascinated by her. He doesn't love her, but he wants to keep on with this. It may be that she stays with Gerry what's-his-name—Furnal—not because she loves him but because he loves her. For all we know, he may have some idea of all this but begs her not to leave him. Do what she likes but not leave him.”
    Iris looked doubtful. She couldn't imagine it. “But to have that between them,” she said. “For her to know she lies to him and him to wonder if she does but be afraid to ask, what kind of marriage is that? I don't think you can be right, Rob.”
    I was wrong, as it happened. It was true that Gerry Furnal loved Hebe, but perhaps without knowing the kind ofwoman he loved. He seems to have put her on a pedestal and worshipped what he'd created. It's quite a common way of going on, but it wouldn't suit realists like me. Anyway, I doubt if I'm capable of that amount of self-delusion. I'm not well endowed with imagination. The truth came out grimly and shockingly in the end in poor Jane's diaries, if it was the truth rather than only what she saw through the distorting lens of her self-pity. As to Jane, she was the friend who agreed to deceive Gerry Furnal by supplying him, if these became necessary, with ostensible reasons for Hebe's absences, and it wasn't to be long before we heard about her from Ivor. It was Iris who first used the word, calling this then unknown person “the alibi lady.”
    “We all use it,” I remember saying, “but do we know what it means? I don't. Alibi—strange word, a sort of police word, but do the real police actually use it?”
    “It sounds Arabic.”
    I looked it up and found it was Latin for
elsewhere.
    “Well, that figures,” Iris said. “The alibi-ist will tell Gerry Furnal Hebe was with her when in fact Hebe was elsewhere with Ivor. And there'll be lots of times when she won't have to, because I don't suppose she and Gerry meet that often. I wonder how she feels about it.”
    “I imagine she tells herself her loyalty is to Hebe and not to Hebe's husband.”
    “Do you know, Rob, I'm beginning to take an unhealthy interest in all this intriguing and I think I'd better stop.”
    And stop she did. We had other things to think about. We told each other so and made a kind of pact, which we stuck to fairly well, not to speculate anymore about Ivor and his clandestine affair. We would lend him our house as we'd promised and go away and leave him to it. I had given him the key the evening he came over after Sandy Caxton's funeraland he was to put it through the letter box after he left. That isn't to say we didn't involve ourselves much more closely when things developed. We had to. Otherwise he'd have been quite alone, bearing it alone—until, that is, Juliet Case came along.
    That Friday was the first day something about poor Sandy wasn't on our daily newspaper's front page. Instead, the lead story was about the multimillionaire Damian Mason's bid to buy some north of England football team, with a picture of him, a short heavy man with a little beard, and his wife, Kelly, in shorts and a tight T-shirt. Iris was beginning to get over her flu, and I think that was the first morning she woke up feeling well. Nadine, on the other hand, was a bit fractious and cross but seemed well enough, so, after I'd made a couple of essential phone calls to clients, we set off for Monks