The Birthday Present

by Barbara Vine

ISBN: 9780670917624

Published: 2008

Mention his name and most people will say, 'Who?' while the rest think for a bit and ask if 'he wasn't the one who got involved in all that sleaze back whenever it was . . .'' It's late spring of 1990 and a love affair is flourishing between Ivor Tesham, a thirty-three-year-old rising star of Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government, and Hebe Furnal, a stunning North London housewife stuck in a tedious, passionless marriage. What excitement Hebe lacks at home, however, is amply compensated for by the well-bred and intensely attractive Tesham - an irrepressible womanizer with an appetite for self-advancement. On the eve of Hebe's twenty-eighth birthday, Tesham decides to give her a present to remember- something far more memorable than the costly string of pearls he's already lavished upon her, involving a fashionable new practice known as 'adventure sex'. A man arranges for his unsuspecting but otherwise willing girlfriend to be snatched from the street, bound and gagged, and...