10 lb Penalty (19 page)

The chauffeur took me not to the headquarters from where he’d collected me, but to a playing field on the edge of Hoopwestern, where, it appeared, an afternoon amalgam of fete and political rally was drawing to a close. Balloons, bouncy castle, bright plastic chutes and roundabouts had drawn children (and therefore voting parents) and car-trunk sale-type stalls seemed to have sold out of all but hideous vases.

Painted banners promised
Grand Opening by Mrs. Orinda Nagle at 3:00 and George Juliard, 3:15.
Both were still present at 5:30, shaking hands all around.

Dearest Polly saw the black car stop at the gate and hurried across dry dusty grass to greet me.

“Happy birthday, Benedict. Did you choose a horse?”

“So he told you?” I looked across the field to where he stood on the soapbox, surrounded by autograph books.

“He’s been high as a kite all day.” Polly’s own smile stretched inches. “He told me he’d brought you here to Hoopwestern originally as window dressing for the campaign, and he’d got to know you for the first time ever, and he’d wanted to give you something you would like, to thank you for all you’ve done here....”

“Polly!”

“He told me he hadn’t realized how much he’d asked you to give up, with going to university instead of racing, and that you hadn’t rebelled or walked out or cursed him ... He wanted to give you the best he could.”

I swallowed.

He saw me from across the field and waved, and Polly and I walked over and stopped just outside the hedge of autograph seekers.

“Well?” he said over their heads. “Did you like one?”

I couldn’t think of adequate words. He looked, however, at my face, and smiled at what he saw there, and seemed content with my speechlessness. He stepped off the soapbox and made his way through the offered books, signing left and right, until he was within touching distance, and there he stopped.

We looked at each other in great accord.

“Well, go on,” Polly said to me impatiently, “hug him.”

But my father shook his head and I didn’t touch him, and I realized we had no tradition between us of how to express greeting or emotion, and that until that moment there had never been much intense mutual emotion to express. Far from hugging, we had never shaken hands.

“Thanks,” I said to him.

It sounded inadequate, but he nodded: it was enough.

“I want to tell you about it,” I said.

“Did you choose one?”

“More or less, but I want to talk to you first.”

“At dinner, then.”

“Perfect.”

Orinda was smiling warmly at me, fully recovered, makeup hiding any residual marks, all traces of the shaking frightened woman in blood-spattered clothes overlaid by Constituency Wife, Mark I, the opener of fetes and natural hogger of cameras.

“Benedict daaahling!” She at least had no inhibitions about hugging and embraced me soundly for public consumption. She smelled sweetly of scent. She wore a copper-colored dress with green embroidery to match her eyes, and Polly beside me stiffened with the prehistoric reaction of Martha to butterfly.

Dearest Polly.
Dearest
Polly. I was far too young externally to show I understood her, let alone insult her by offering comforts. Dearest Polly wore remnants of the awful lipstick, a chunky necklace of amber beads and heavily strapped sandals below a muddy green dress. I liked both women, but on the evidence of their clothes, they would never equally like each other.

Instinctively I looked over Orinda’s shoulder, expecting the everlasting Anonymous Lover to be back at his post, but Wyvern had once and for all abandoned Hoopwestern as his path to influence. In his place behind Orinda loomed Leonard Kitchens with a soppy grin below his out-of-control mustache. Close on his heels came Mrs. Kitchens, looking grim.

Usher Rudd was wandering about with his intrusive malice trying to catch people photographically at a disadvantage, but interestingly when he caught my eye he pretended he hadn’t, and veered away. I had no illusions that he wished me well.

Mervyn Teck and a retinue of dedicated volunteers, stoutly declaring the afternoon a success, drove my father and me back to The Sleeping Dragon. Four days to polling day, I thought: eternity.

Over dinner in the hotel dining room I told my father about the two Stallworthy horses. A phlegmatic chestnut stayer and a sprinting excitable bay with a black mane.

“Well ...,” he said, frowning, “you love speed. You’ll take the bay. What makes you hesitate?”

“The horse I want has a name that might disturb you. I can’t change his name: one isn’t allowed to after a Thoroughbred has raced. I won’t have that horse unless it’s OK with you.”

He stared. “What name could possibly disturb me so much?”

After a pause I said flatly, “Sarah’s Future.”

“Ben!”

“His dam was Sarah Jones; his sire Bright Future. It’s good breeding for a jumper.”

“The bay ...?”

“No,” I said. “The chestnut. He’s the one I want. He’s never won yet, though he’s been second. A novice has a wider—a better—choice of a race. Apart from that, he felt right. He’d look after me.”

My father absentmindedly crumbled a bread roll to pieces.

“You,”
he said eventually,
“you
are literally Sarah’s future. Let’s say she would be pleased. I’ll phone Stallworthy in the morning.”

 

Far from slackening off during the run-up to polling day, the Juliard camp spent the last three days in a nonstop whirl.

I drove the Range Rover from breakfast to bedtime. I drove to Quindle three times, and all around the villages. I screwed together and unclipped the soapbox until I could do it in my sleep. I loaded and unloaded boxes of leaflets. I made cooing noises at babies and played ball games with kids and shook uncountable hands and smiled and smiled and smiled.

I thought of Sarah’s Future, and was content.

On the last evening, Wednesday, my father invited all his helpers and volunteers to The Sleeping Dragon for a thank-you supper. Along in a room off the Town Hall, Paul Bethune was doing the same.

The Bethune cavalcade had several times crossed our path, their megaphone louder, their traveling circus larger, their campaign vehicle not a painted Range Rover but a roofless double-decker bus lent from his party headquarters. Bethune’s message followed him everywhere: “Dennis Nagle was out of touch, old-fashioned. Elect Bethune, a local man, who knows the score.”

A recent opinion poll in the constituency had put Bethune a few points ahead. Titmuss and Whistle were nowhere.

The
Gazette
had trumpeted merely, “An End to Sleaze,” and waffled on about “the new morality” without defining it. Though by instinct a Bethune man, the editor had let Usher Rudd loose and thereby both increased his sales and scored an own-goal. The editor, I thought in amusement, had dug his own dilemma.

My father thanked his faithful workers.

“Whatever happens tomorrow,” he said, “I want you to know how much I appreciate all you’ve done ... all the time you’ve given ... your tireless energy ... your friendly good nature. I thank our agent, Mervyn, for his excellent planning. We’ve all done our best to get the party’s message across. Now it’s up to the voters to decide.”

He thanked Orinda for rallying to his side. “... all the difference in the world to have her support ... immensely generous ... reassuring to the faithful ...”

Orinda, splendid in gold chains and emerald green, looked modest and loved it.

Polly, beside me, made a noise near to a retch.

I stifled a quivering giggle.

“Don’t think I’ve forgotten,” she said to me severely, “that it was you who changed Orinda from foe to angel. I bear it only because the central party wants to use your father’s talents. Get him
in,
they said. Just like you, they more or less told me to put his feet on the escalator, and he would rise all the way.”

But someone, I thought, had tried to prevent that first step onto the escalator. Had
perhaps
tried. A bullet, a wax plug, an unexplained fire. If someone had tried to halt him by those means and hadn’t left it to the ballot box ... then
who?
No one had seriously tried to find out.

The speeches done, my father came over to Polly and me, his eyes gleaming with excitement, his whole body alive with purpose. His strong facial bones shouted intelligence. His dark hair curled with healthy animal vigor.

“I’m going to win this by-election,” he said, broadly smiling. “I’m going to win. I can feel it.”

His euphoria fired everyone in the place to believe him, and lasted in himself through breakfast the next morning. The glooms crowded in with his second cup of coffee and he wasted an hour in doubt and tension, worrying that he hadn’t worked hard enough, that there was more he could have done.

“You’ll win,” I said.

“But the opinion polls ...”

“The people who compile the opinion polls don’t go ’round the village pubs at lunchtime.”

“The tide is flowing the wrong way....”

“Then go back to the City and make another fortune.”

He stared and then laughed, and we set out on a tour of the polling stations, where the volunteers taking exit polls told him they were pretty even, but not to lose hope.

Here and there we came across Paul Bethune on a similar mission with similar doubts. He and my father were unfailingly polite to each other.

The anxiety went on all day and all evening. After weeks of fine weather it rained hard that afternoon. Both sides thought it might be a disaster. Both sides thought it might be to their advantage. The rain stopped when the lightbulb workers poured out of the day shift and detoured to the polling booths on their way home.

The polls closed at ten o’clock and the counting began.

My father stood in our bedroom window staring out across the cobbled square to the burned-out shell of the bow-fronted shops.

“Stop worrying,” I said. As if he could.

“I was head-hunted, you know,” he said. “The party leaders came to me and said they wanted to harness my economic skills for the good of the country. What if I’ve let them down?”

“You won’t have,” I assured him.

He smiled twistedly. “They offered me a marginal seat to see what I was made of. I was
flattered.
Serves me right.”

“Father ...”

“Dad.”

“Okay, Dad. Good men do lose.”

“Thanks a lot.”

We went in time along the square to the Town Hall where, far from offering peace, the atmosphere was electric with hope and despair. Paul Bethune, surrounded by hugely rosetted supporters, was trying hard to smile. Isobel Bethune, in dark brown, tried to merge into the woodwork.

Mervyn talked to Paul Bethune’s agent absentmindedly and I would have bet neither of them heard what the other was saying.

Usher Rudd took merciless photographs.

There was a smattering of applause at my father’s entrance, and both Polly (in pinkish gray) and Orinda (in dramatic glittering white) sailed across the floor to greet him personally.

“George, daaahling,” Orinda crowed, offering her smooth cheek for a kiss. “Dennis is with us, you know.”

George daaahling looked embarrassed.

“It’s going quite well, George,” Polly said, giving succor. “First reports say the town votes are fairly even.”

The counting was going on under all sorts of rigorous supervision. Even those counting the Xs weren’t sure who had won.

My father and Paul Bethune looked as calm as neither was feeling.

The hall gradually filled with supporters of both sides. After midnight, getting on for one o’clock, the four candidates and their close supporters appeared on the platform, shuffling around with false smiles. Paul Bethune looked around irritably for his wife, but she’d hidden herself successfully in the crowd. Orinda stood on the platform close beside my father as of right and no one questioned it, though Polly, beside me on the floor, fumed that it should be me up there, not that ... that ...

Words failed her.

My father told me afterwards that the result had been whispered to the candidates before they faced the world, presumably so that neither would burst into tears, but one couldn’t have guessed it from their faces.

Finally the returning officer (whose function was to announce the result) fussed his way onto the center stage, tapped the microphone to make sure it was working (it was), grinned at the television cameras and rather unnecessarily asked for silence.

He strung out his moment of importance by looking around as if to make sure everyone was there on the platform who should be and finally, slowly, in a silence broken only by a throng of heartbeats, read the result.

Alphabetically.

Bethune ... thousands.

Juliard ... thousands.

Titmuss ... hundreds.

Whistle ... sixty-nine.

It took a moment to sink in. Staring down a preliminary cheer from the floor, the returning officer completed his task.

George Juliard is therefore elected ...

The rest was drowned in cheers.

Polly worked it out. “He won by just under two thousand. Bloody well done.”

Polly kissed me.

Up on the stage Orinda was loudly kissing the new MP.

It was too much for Dearest Polly, who left my side to go to his.

I found poor, sad Isobel Bethune at my elbow instead.

“Look at that
harridan
with your father, pretending it was
she
who won the votes.”

“She did help, to be fair.”

“She would never have won on her own. It was
your father
who won the election. And my Paul lost. He positively lost. Your father never mentioned that bimbo of his, not once, though he could have done, but the public never forget those things. Sleaze sticks, you know.”