10 lb Penalty (16 page)

My father extracted my passport, my birth certificate and the framed photograph of his wedding to my mother. He took the picture out of its frame and after looking at it for several long minutes he ran his finger over her face and sighed deeply, and it was the only time I’d known him to show any emotion at all about his loss.

I said incautiously, “Do you remember her? If she walked into the room now, would you know her?”

He gave me a look of such bleakness that I realized I’d asked a question of unforgivable intrusion, but after a pause all he said was, “You never forget your first.”

I swallowed.

He said, “Have you had your first?”

I felt numb, embarrassed almost beyond speech, but in the end I said truthfully, “No.”

He nodded. It was a moment of almost unbearable intimacy, the first ever between us, but he remained totally calm and matter-of-fact, and let me recover.

He sorted through some papers he had brought in a briefcase from a recent trip to London, put my own identifications in the case, snapped shut the locks and announced that we were going to call on the
Hoopwestern
Gazette.

We called, in fact, on the editor, who was also the publisher and proprietor of the only local daily. He was a man in shirtsleeves, harassed, middle aged, and from the tone of his front pages, censorious. He stood up from his desk as we approached.

“Mr. Samson Frazer,” my father said, calling him by name. “When we met the other evening, you asked if I thought people who vote for me are silly.”

Samson Frazer, for all his importance in Hoopwestem, was no match in power for my parent. Interesting, I thought.

“Er ... ,” he said.

“We’ll return to that in a minute,” my father told him. “First, I have some things for you to see.”

He unlatched the briefcase and opened it.

“I have brought the following items,” he said, taking out each paper and putting it down in front of the editor. “My marriage certificate. My son’s birth certificate. Both of our passports. This photograph of my wife and myself taken outside the registry office after our wedding. On the back”—he turned the picture over—“you will see the professional photographer’s name and copyright, and the date. Here also is my wife’s death certificate. She died of complications after the birth of our son. This son, Benedict, my only child, who has been at my side during this by-election.”

The editor gave me a swift glance as if he hadn’t until that point taken note of my existence.

“You employ a person called Usher Rudd,” my father said. “I think you should be careful. He seems to be trying to cast doubt on my son’s identity and legitimacy. I’m told he has made scurrilous insinuations.”

He asked the editor just how he’d come to hear of “silly” votes when he, my father, had only used the word—and in a joke—in the privacy of his own room.

Samson Frazer froze like a dazzled rabbit.

“If I have to,” my father said, “I will send hair samples for DNA testing. My own hair, my son’s hair, and some hair from my wife, which she gave me in a locket. I hope you will carefully consider what I’ve said and what I’ve shown you.” He began methodically replacing the certificates in the briefcase. “Because I assure you,” he went on pleasantly, “if the
Hoopwestern Gazette
should be so unwise as to cast doubt on my son’s origins, I will sue the paper and you personally for defamation and libel, and you might quite likely wish you hadn’t done it.” He snapped the locks shut so vigorously that they sounded in themselves like a threat.

“You understand?” he asked.

The editor plainly did.

“Good,” my father said. “If you catch me in sleaze, that will be fair enough. If you try to manufacture it, I’ll hang you out by the toes.”

Samson Frazer found nothing to say.

“Good day to you, sir,” my father said.

He was in high good humor all the way back to the hotel and went upstairs humming.

“What would you say,” he suggested, “to a pact between us?”

“What sort of pact?”

He put the briefcase down on the table and drew out two sheets of plain paper.

“I’ve been thinking,” he said, “of making you a promise, and I want you to make the same promise in return. We both know how vulnerable one is to people like Usher Rudd.”

“And it’s not impossible,” I interrupted, “that he’s listening to us at this moment, particularly if he knows where we’ve just been.”

My father looked briefly startled, but then grinned.

“The red-haired dung beetle can listen all he likes. The promise I’ll make to you is not to give him, or anyone like him, any grounds ever for messy publicity. I’ll be dead boring. There will be no kiss-and-tell bimbos and no illicit payment for favors and no cheating on tax and no nasty pastimes like drugs or kinky sex. ...”

I smiled easily, amused.

“Yes,” he said, “but I want
you
to make the same promise to me. I want you to promise me that if I get elected you’ll do nothing throughout my political career that can get me discredited or sacked or disgraced in any way.”

“But I wouldn’t,” I protested.

“It’s easy for you to say that now while you’re young, but you’ll find life’s full of terrible temptations.”

“I promise,” I said.

He shook his head. “That’s not enough. I want us both to write it down. I want you to be able to see and remember what you promised. Of course, it’s in no way a legal document or anything pretentious like that, it’s just an affirmation of intent.” He paused, clicking a ballpoint pen while he thought, then he wrote very quickly and simply on one sheet of paper, and signed his name, and pushed the paper over for me to read.

It said: “I will cause no scandal, nor will I perform any shameful or illegal act.”

Wow, I thought. I said, not wanting this to get too serious, “It’s a bit comprehensive, isn’t it?”

“It’s not worth doing otherwise. But you can write your own version. Write what you’re comfortable with.”

I had no sense of binding myself irrevocably to sainthood.

I wrote: “I’ll do nothing that could embarrass my father’s political career or drag his name in the dust. I’ll do my best to keep him safe from any sort of attack.”

I signed my name lightheartedly and gave him the page. “Will that do?”

He read it, smiling. “It’ll do.”

He folded both pages together, then picked up the wedding photograph and positioned it facedown on the glass in its frame. He then put both of the signed pacts on the photo and replaced the back part of the frame, fastening it with its clips.

“There you are,” he said, turning the frame faceup. “Every time you look at your mother and me, you’ll remember the promises behind the photo, inside the frame. Couldn’t be simpler.”

He stood the picture on the table and without fuss gave me back my birth certificate and passport.

“Keep them safe.”

“Yes.”

“Right. Then let’s get on with this election.”

Stopping only briefly to leave my identity in an envelope in the manager’s safe, we went to the new basic headquarters to collect Mervyn, pamphlets, Faith and Lavender, and start a door-to-door morning around three Hoopwestern housing estates. Lightbulb workers, they said.

Mervyn, proud of himself, had found a replacement megaphone. His friendly printer continued to furnish a torrent of JULIARDs. Mervyn for once seemed content in his world, but his day shone even brighter when Orinda arrived, declaring her readiness for the fray.

With Faith and Lavender cool and Mervyn hot, therefore six of us squeezed into the Range Rover, leaving behind Crystal (chronically anxious) and Marge (dusting and sweeping).

Only eight days after this one, I thought, and it will be over. And what will I do, I wondered, after that? There would be three or four weeks to fill before the Exeter term started. I mentally shrugged. I would be eighteen. I had a bicycle ... might get to France...

I drove mechanically, stopping wherever Mervyn dictated.

Orinda had come in neat slacks and jacket, light orange-scarlet in color. As usual, gold chains. Smooth perfect makeup.

Babies got kissed. My father came across a clutch of child-minding house-husbands, factory shift workers, and learned about tungsten filaments. I chatted up a coffee-morning of old ladies who weren’t satisfied until my parent shook their hands. (Pink smiles. A blossoming of votes.) Orinda met old friends. Mervyn alerted the streets to our presence like a musically tinkling fish-and-chip van, and Faith and Lavender left no doorbell unrung.

When we drove out of the last of the estates we’d seen one or two TITMUSSes, no WHISTLE, not a BETHUNE to speak of, but many a window now proclaimed JULIARD. One could not but hope.

Mervyn and my father decided on one more long street, this time of varied and slightly more prosperous-looking houses. I, by this time, had had enough of door-to-dooring to last me several lifetimes, but as always the others seemed to have an indefatigable appetite. My father’s eyes still shone with enthusiasm and people who disagreed with his political theories left him not downcast but stimulated. He never tired, it seemed to me, of trying to convert the heathen.

Without much hope I asked Faith and Lavender if they wouldn’t prefer to say they’d done enough; how about lunch? “No, no,” they insisted with fervor, “every vote counts.”

Orinda alone seemed uneasy and withdrawn and not her usual positive and extravagant self, and in the end, while she and I waited together on the sidewalk beside the Range Rover for the others to finish galvanizing a retirement home, I asked her what was the matter.

“Nothing,” she said, and I didn’t press it, but after a moment or two she said, “Do you see that white BMW there, along the road?”

“Yes.” I frowned. “I saw it earlier, in one of the housing estates.”

“He’s following us.”

“Who’s following us? Is it Usher Rudd?”

“Oh, no.” She found the idea a surprise, which in itself surprised me. “No, not Usher Rudd. It’s Alderney Wyvern.”

It was I, then, who was surprised, and I asked, sounding astonished, “Why on earth should he follow us?”

Orinda frowned. “He’s still furious with me for supporting your father.”

“Well ... I’d noticed. But why, exactly?”

“You’re too young to understand.”

“I could try.”

“Dennis used to do everything Alderney said. I mean, Alderney actually was how Dennis got advancement. Alderney would tell him what to say. Alderney is very clever, politically.”

“Why doesn’t he find a parliamentary seat for himself?”

“He says he doesn’t want to.” She paused. “To be frank, he isn’t easy to understand. But I know he expected me to be selected and to retain the seat as Dennis’s widow, and he worked on people like that creepy Leonard Kitchens, with that shudder-making mustache, to make sure I was selected. And then out of the blue the central party in Westminster decided they wanted George Juliard in Parliament, so he came and dazzled the selectors, who always listen to Polly, as a matter of course, and she fell for him like a ton of bricks.... Anyway, Alderney got nowhere with your father. I sometimes think that that’s the sort of power Alderney really wants, to be able to pull the levers behind the scenes.”

It seemed to me at that moment a wacky notion. (I still had a lot to learn.)

“So now that I’ve joined your father,” Orinda said, “I’m not listening to Alderney as much. I used to do everything he suggested. We always did, Dennis and I, because Alderney would tell us such and such a thing would happen on the political scene and mostly he was right, and now I’m out with you and your father so much of the time.... You’ll laugh, but I almost think he’s
jealous!”

I didn’t laugh. I’d seen my father’s powerful effect on every female in Hoopwestern, from acid-tongued Lavender onwards. It wouldn’t have surprised me if he’d left a comet tail of jealousy through the constituency, except that he needed the men to vote for him as well as the women, and I’d watched him keep a tactical distance from their wives.

Alderney Wyvern, along the road, got out of his car and stood aggressively on the sidewalk, hands on hips, staring at Orinda.

“I’d better go and talk to him,” Orinda said.

I said instinctively, “No, don’t.”

She caught the alarm in my voice and smiled. “I’ve known him for years.”

I hadn’t yet come across the adult, grossly matured variety of jealousy, only the impotent rage of adolescence, but I felt intuitively that a great—and disturbing—change had taken place in A. L. Wyvern.

He had been by his own choice self-effacing on every occasion I’d seen him: quiet in manner, self-contained, behaving as if he didn’t want to be noticed. All that had now gone. The stocky figure seemed now heavier, the shoulders hunched, the face, even from a distance, visibly tense with menace. He had the out-of-control anger of a rioter, or of a militant striker.

I said to Orinda, “Stay here.”

“Don’t be silly.”

She walked confidently towards him in her brave orange-red clothes.

I could hear his voice, low and growling, but not what he said. Her reply was light and teasing. She put out a hand as if to stroke his arm affectionately, and he hit her very hard in the face.

She cried out with shock as much as pain. I ran towards her, and although Wyvern saw me coming, he hit her again, backhanded, across her nose and mouth.

She squealed, raising her hands to shield her face, trying at the same time to escape from him, but he clutched the shoulder of her jacket to prevent her running, and drew back his fist for a third blow.

She wrenched herself free. She half overbalanced. She stumbled off the sidewalk into the roadway.

The prosperous residential street that had been so peaceful and empty suddenly seemed filled with a heavy truck that bore down towards Orinda, brakes shrieking, horn blowing in banshee bursts.