10 lb Penalty (15 page)

On Monday and Tuesday George Juliard filled the newspapers, and enlivened some chat shows, and on Wednesday morning a miracle happened.

Mervyn had sticky-taped a new large-scale map onto the wall and was pointing out to me the roads I should drive along (feet OK by now) for Faith and Lavender to ring as yet untroubled doorbells. In the absence of a megaphone (burned) I would please occasionally toot the horn, just enough to announce our presence but
not enough,
he lectured me, to anger anyone trying to get a baby to sleep. The mothers of babies (he wagged a finger at me) swayed Xs in the polls like pendulums. Kiss a baby, win a vote. A hundred thousand politicians couldn’t all be historically wrong.

“I’ll kiss every baby in sight,” I promised recklessly.

He frowned at me, never one to take a joke. I was reminded of my father’s most recent lesson: “Never, ever make a joke to the police, they have no sense of humor. Never make a political joke, it will always be considered an insult. Always remember that umbrage can be taken at the lift of an eyebrow. Remember that if offense can possibly be given, it will be.”

I’d gazed at my father. “Are people that silly?”

“Silly,” he said with mock severity, “isn’t a word you should ever apply to people. They may be totally stupid, in fact, but if you call them silly you’ve lost their vote.”

“And you want silly people to vote for you?”

He laughed. “Don’t make jokes.”

He had gone to London on Wednesday morning when the miracle happened. There were just Mervyn, Crystal, Faith, Marge, Lavender and me in the makeshift office, just the bunch of us putting the best face possible on the lack of computer (for the totals spent on tea bags), copier (schedules for volunteers) and fax (reports from distant galaxies like Quindle).

Orinda walked in.

All business stopped.

She wore pale citrus green: pants, jacket and headband. Gold chains. She carried, beside the black lizard handbag, a substantial roll of papers.

She looked around the bare room, smiled faintly at Marge and fixed her gaze on me.

“I want to talk to you,” she said calmly. “Outside.”

I followed where she led. We stood on the sidewalk in the sun, with shoppers passing by.

“Since Saturday,” she announced, “I have been considering things. On Sunday morning, at half past eight or so, a newspaperman appeared at my house in an invasive procedure I believe is called ‘door stepping.’ ”

She paused. I nodded faintly.

“He asked if I was glad or sorry that you hadn’t been burned to death. You and your father, that is.”

“Oh.”

“It was the first I’d heard about the fire.”

“I’m surprised no one had phoned you.”

“I unplug the telephone when I sleep. I find it hard to sleep in any case.”

I said “Oh” again, vaguely.

“The journalist wanted to know my opinion of the information he’d been given that close-to-death attacks had been made on George Juliard so that he would have to retire from the candidacy, clearing the way for my return.”

She paused, studying my face, and continued. “I see that that thought isn’t new to you.”

“No, but I don’t think you did it.”

“Why not?”

“You’re hurt. You’re furious. But you wouldn’t murder.”

“When will you be eighteen?”

“In ten days.”

“Then consider this a coming-of-age present.” She thrust the roll of papers into my hands. “This is for you. It is because of you ...” She stopped abruptly, swallowing. “Use it in any way you like.”

With curiosity I unrolled the stiff sheets, having to hold them wide to prevent them rolling up again. The top one, in very large capital letters, read ORINDA NAGLE SAYS VOTE FOR JULIARD.

My mouth, I know, fell open.

“There are ten of them,” she said simply. “They’re all the same. I had them printed this morning. They’ll print dozens, if you like.”

“Orinda ...” I was all but speechless.

“You showed me ... at the races ... ,” she began, and stopped again. “You’re so very
young,
but you showed me it’s possible to bear an unbearable disappointment. You made me look into myself. Anyway, I will
not
have people thinking I would set fire to our old headquarters in order to get rid of your father, so I’ll
join
him. I’ll support him from now on in every way. I should never have listened to all those people who told me he had robbed me. I don’t know, to be really truthful, and the truth is awful... I don’t know that I wasn’t
relieved
not to be forced to go to Westminster, but I do like working in the constituency and that’s what hurts most ... that the people I’ve worked so hard for passed me over for some stranger from outside.”

She stopped talking and looked at me in a sort of desperation to see if I could possibly understand, and I understood so well that I leaned forward impulsively and kissed her on the cheek.

A camera flashed.

“I can’t
believe
it,” Orinda screeched. “He follows me ’round.”

Usher Rudd, with the advantage of surprise, was already scuttling away down the street to get lost in bunches of shoppers.

“He follows me, too,” I said, putting a hand on Orinda’s arm, to deter her from trying to catch him. “You warned me and I told my father ... but unless Usher Rudd breaks the law it seems he can’t be stopped, and the law is still on the side of copycat Rudds.”

“But my private life is my own affair!” She glanced at me as if it were my fault that it wasn’t.

I said, “Drug dealers would be out of business if people didn’t want drugs.”

“What?”

“The so-called war on drugs is fought against the wrong people. Lock up the users. Lock up the demand. Lock up human nature.”

She looked bewildered. “What have drugs to do with Usher Rudd?”

“If people didn’t flock to buy his sleaze, he wouldn’t push it.”

“And you mean ... they always will?”

She needed no answer. She followed me into the office and, after delivering her news, enjoyed a hugging session with Mervyn (no photo) and an ambiguous welcome from the three witches, who had with pink arousal transferred their effective allegiance to the new order.

“Where are you canvassing today, Mervyn?” Orinda asked, and he showed her on the map, with the unexpected result that when I drove the Range Rover ’round Hoopwestern that morning I had on board Mervyn, Orinda, Faith and Lavender, and all of Orinda’s roll of commitment flattened out as placards.

As Mervyn had telephoned the editor of the
Gazette
—gasps of shock at having to U-turn his anti-all politicians spin—we were greeted in the parking lot behind the burned shop by a hastily assembled crowd, by the leader-writer of the Gazette (the paper was short of news) and by the cameraman who had besottedly followed Orinda with his loving lens around the reception before the dinner a week earlier at The Sleeping Dragon.

Orinda flirted again with his lens (or with him—much the same thing) and told everyone prettily through a non-squeaking microphone that George Juliard, undoubtedly on the brink of becoming a nationally acclaimed politician, was the - best possible substitute for her beloved husband, Dennis, who had dedicated his life to the good citizens of this glorious part of Dorset.

Applause, applause. She appeared in the sitting rooms of Hoopwestern on the lunchtime television news against the only-slightly orchestrated cheers.

By the time my father returned on the train from London he’d heard of Orinda’s media conference with mixed feelings—she might be stealing his limelight or she might just be saving his life—but at another church hall meeting of the faithful that evening he embraced her in a warm hug (reciprocated) that would have been unthinkable a day earlier.

Not everyone was pleased.

Orinda’s shadow, Anonymous Lover Wyvern, followed her around like thunder. She, dressed in blackberry-colored satin and glowing with a sense of generosity and virtue, kept giving him inquiring looks as if unsure of the source of his dudgeon. In her inner release she didn’t seem to realize, as I did, albeit only slowly through the evening, that in dumping her anger at not being selected she had in some way lessened his status. He had been Dennis Nagle’s best friend, but Orinda was leaving her Dennis behind.

Dearest Polly, to my surprise, positively scowled, even though she had herself delivered Orinda to her change of heart.

“I didn’t count on such a radical about-face,” Polly complained. “She’s cast herself in the ongoing role of constituency wife! There’s no doubt she was good at it, but she
isn’t
George’s wife and she can’t surely imagine she can go on opening fetes and things, and I bet that’s what she’s got in mind. Whatever did you say to her at the races?”

I said, “I thought you wanted her on my father’s side.”

“Well, yes, I do. But I don’t want her going around saying all the time that
she
was the one we should have picked.”

“Get him into Parliament, Polly,” I said. “Put him on the escalator, then he’ll deal with Orinda and everything else.”

“How
old did you say you are?”

“Eighteen at the end of next week. And it was you, dearest Polly, who said I look into people’s minds.”

She asked in some alarm, “Do you see into mine?”

“Sort of.”

She laughed uneasily, but I saw nothing but good.

One could say the opposite about Leonard Kitchens. I had come to notice that the tilt of his prominent mustache acted like a weather vane, signaling the direction of his feelings. The upward thrust that evening was combative and self-important, a combination looking for a fight. Bulky Mrs. Kitchens (in large pink flowers printed on dark blue) followed her Leonard’s progress around the meeting with anxiety for a while and then made a straight line to my side.

“Do something,” she hissed into my ear. “Tell Orinda to leave my Leonard alone.”

It seemed to me that it was the other way around, as Leonard’s mustache vibrated by Orinda’s neck, but on Mrs. Kitchens’s urgent and continuous prompting I went over to hear Leonard’s agitated and whining drift.

“I would do
anything
for you, Orinda, you know I would, but you’re joining the enemy and I can’t bear to see him slobbering all over you, it’s disgusting....”

“Wake up, Leonard,” Orinda said lightly, not seeing the seething lava below the faintly ridiculous exterior, “it’s a new world.”

The undercurrents might tug and eddy, but Orinda had definitely unified the party behind JULIARD; yet in our room that night my father would literally not hear a word said about her. In fact he put a finger decisively against his lips and drew me out into the passage, closing our door behind us.

“What’s up?” I asked, mystified.

“Tonight the editor of the Gazette asked me if I thought people who voted for me were silly.”

“But that’s nonsense. That’s ...” I stopped.

“Yes. Think back. When we joked about silly voters we were alone in this bedroom here. Did you repeat what we said?”

“Of course not.”

“Then how did the
Gazette
know?”

I stared at him, and said slowly, “Usher Rudd.”

He nodded. “Didn’t you tell me that that mechanic—Terry, isn’t that what his name is?—got sacked because Usher Rudd had listened to his pillow talk using one of those gadgets that pick up voice waves from the faint vibrations in the windows?”

“Usher Rudd,” I said furiously, “is trying to prove I’m not your son.”

“Never mind, he’s on a loser.”

“He’s following Orinda, too, not to mention the Bethunes.”

“He thinks if he flings enough mud, some will stick. Don’t give him any target.”

As the days went by one could see that Orinda’s flip-flop had most impact in Hoopwestern itself, less in Quindle, and not very much in the villages dotting the maps with a church spire, a couple of pubs and a telephone box. Cheers and clapping greeted her near home but news of her arrival to canvass in, say, Middle Lampfield (pop. 637) was more likely to be greeted with a polite “Oo? Aah” and a swift return to “Zoomerzet” cider.

More local draft cider flowed down the constituency throats than babies’ formula, and my father’s head for the frothy fruit of the apple earned him approval. We rolled every day at lunchtime from pub to pub to pub (I drove) and I got used to hearing the verdict. “A good chap, your father, he understands what we need in the countryside. Reckon I’ll vote for him. That Bethune, that they say is a certainty, he’s a town councillor, and you know what we think of them lot, thumbs down.”

My father made them laugh. He knew the price of hay. They would have followed him to the South Pole.

Orinda thought the villages a waste of time, and so did Mervyn.

“The bulk of the votes is in the towns,” they lectured. Dennis Nagle had been the star of the business-man circle.

“You vote for a man you play darts with,” my father said, missing double top. “I buy my own drinks, they buy theirs. Neither of us is beholden.”

Orinda didn’t like cider, and she didn’t like pubs. Lavender, surprisingly, liked both: my father, Lavender and I therefore spent several days soapboxing the outskirts in the silver-and-gold Range Rover, seeing to it (as my father said) that not a voter was left unturned.

The following week it was Orinda who nearly died.

On the Tuesday of the last full week of canvassing, my box of possessions, and my bicycle, finally arrived by carrier from Mrs. Wells.

Up in our room, my father picked with interest and curiosity through the meager debris of my life: two trophies for winning amateur ’chases the previous Easter, several photographs of me on horses and skis, and other photos from school with me sitting in one of those frozen team lineups (this one for target shooting) with the captain hugging a cup. There were also books on mathematics and racing biographies. Also clothes, but not many as, to my dismay, I was still growing.