10 lb Penalty (21 page)

My father shook his head. “They didn’t at the time. Some of them are now saying unofficially that it could have been started with candles. Leonard Kitchens fiercely denies he had anything to do with it.”

“What do you think yourself?”

My father drank some wine. He was trying to indoctrinate me into liking burgundy, but to his disgust, I still liked Diet Coke better.

He said, “I think Leonard Kitchens is fanatical enough to do almost anything. It’s easy enough to think of him as a bit of a silly ass, with that out-of-proportion mustache, but it’s people with obsessions who do the real harm in the world, and if he still has a grudge against me, I want him where I can see him.”

I did my best with the wine, but I didn’t really like it.

“There’s no point in his arranging accidents for you anymore, now that you’re elected.”

My father sighed. “With people like Kitchens you can’t be sure that good sense will be in control.”

I stayed with him that night in his Canary Wharf apartment by the Thames. His big windows looked down the wide river, where once a flourish of cranes had been busy with shipping, though he himself couldn’t remember “the Docks” except as a long-ago political lever. His old office (he ran his investment-consultant business from home) gave him a two-mile walk along the Embankment to his new office in Whitehall, a leg-stretching that was clearly keeping him muscularly fit. He blazed with vigor and excitement. Even though he was my father, I felt both energized and overwhelmed by his vitality.

In a way, I deeply loved him.

In a way I felt wholly incapable of ever equaling his mental force or his determination. It took me years to realize that I didn’t have to.

 

On the morning after his maiden speech I caught the early train from Paddington to Exeter, clicketing along the rails from reflected fame to anonymity.

In Exeter, one of eight thousand residential students, I coasted through university life without attracting much attention, and absorbed reams of calculus, linear algebra, actuarial science and distribution theory towards a bachelor of science degree in mathematics with accounting: and as a short language course came with the package I also learned French, increasing my vocabulary from piste and
écurie
(“track” and “stable”) to law and order.

As often as possible I cycled to Stallworthy’s stable to ride Sarah’s Future, and on several Saturdays set off from starting gates. After the first flourish as a novice, finding winning races for a steady but unspectacular jumper proved difficult, but also-ran was fine by me: fourth, fifth, sixth, one easy fall and no tailed-offs.

On one very cold December Saturday towards the end of my first term I was standing on the stands at Taunton watching one of Stallworthy’s string scud first towards the last flight of hurdles when it crashed and fell in a cascading cartwheel of legs, and snapped its neck.

They put screens round the disaster and winched the body away, and within ten minutes I came across Stallworthy trying to comfort the female owner. Crying ladies were not Stallworthy’s specialty. He first asked me to find Jim and then canceled that instruction and simply passed the weeping woman into my arms, and told me to take her for a drink.

Many trainers went white and shook with emotion when their horses died. Stallworthy shrugged and drew a line across a page.

Mrs. Courtney Young, the bereaved owner, wiped away her tears and tried to apologize while a large bracer of gin took its effect.

“It’s all right,” I assured her. “If my horse died, I’d be devastated.”

“But you’re so young. You’d get over it.”

“I’m sure you will, too, in time.”

“You don’t understand.” Fresh tears rolled. “I let the horse’s insurance lapse because I couldn’t afford the premium, and I owe Mr. Stallworthy a lot of training fees, and I was sure my horse would win today so I could pay off my debts, and I backed it with a bookie I have an account with, and I haven’t any money to pay him. I was going to have to sell my horse anyway if he didn’t win, but now I can’t do even that. . . .”

Poor Mrs. Courtney Young.

“She’s mad,” Jim told me later, saddling Sarah’s Future. “She bets too much.”

“What will she do?”

“Do?” he exclaimed. “She’ll sell a few more heirlooms. She’ll buy another horse. One day she’ll lose the lot.”

I grieved very briefly for Courtney Young, but that evening I telephoned my father and suggested he insure Sarah’s Future.

“How did you get on today?” he asked. “I heard the results and you weren’t in the first three.”

“Fourth. What about insurance?”

“Who arranges horse insurance?”

“Weatherbys.”

“Do you want to?”

“For your sake,” I said.

“Then send me the paperwork.”

Weatherbys, the firm that arranged insurance for horses, were the administrators for the whole of racing. It was Weatherbys who kept the records, who registered horses’ names and ownership details, including colors; Weatherbys to whom trainers sent entries for races; Weatherbys who confirmed a horse was running and sent details of racing programs to the press; Weatherbys who printed race cards in color by night and dispatched them to racecourses by morning.

Weatherbys published the fixture list, kept the Thoroughbred Stud Book and acted as a bank for the transfer of fees to jockeys, prize money to owners, anything to anyone. Weatherbys ran a safe computer database.

There wasn’t much in racing, in fact, that Weatherbys didn’t do.

It was because of mad, tearful, silly Mrs. Courtney Young that I began to think that one distant day I might apply to Weatherbys for a job.

 

In the spring of my third year of study my father came to Exeter to see me (he had been a couple of times before) and to my surprise brought with him Dearest Polly.

I had spent a week of each Christmas holiday skiing (practicing my French!) and I’d been riding and racing in every spare minute, but I also played fair and passed all my exams and assessments with reasonable grades if not with distinction, so when I saw him arrive a quick canter around the guilt reflexes raised no wincing specters, and I shook his hand (we had at least advanced that far) with uncomplicated pleasure.

“I don’t know if you realize,” my father said, “that we are fast approaching a general election.”

My immediate reaction was
Oh, God. No.
I managed not to say it aloud, but it must have been plain on my face.

Dearest Polly laughed and my father said, “This time I’m not asking you to canvass door to door.”

“But you need a bodyguard....”

“I’ve engaged a professional.”

I felt instantly jealous: ridiculous. It took me a good ten seconds to say sincerely, “I hope he’ll mind your back.”

“He’s a she. All sorts of belts in martial arts.”

“Oh.” I glanced at Polly, who looked merely benign.

“Polly and I,” my father said, “propose to marry. We came to hear if you had any objections.”

“Polly!”

“Dear Benedict. Your father is so abrupt. I would have asked you more gently.”

“I’ve no objections,” I said. “Very much the opposite.”

I kissed her cheek.

“Goodness!” she exclaimed. “You’ve grown.”

“Have you?” my father inquired with interest. “I hadn’t noticed.”

“I’ve stopped at last,” I sighed. “I’m over an inch taller and fifteen pounds heavier than I was at Hoopwestern.” Too big, I might have added, for much scope as a professional jockey, but an excellent size for an amateur.

Polly herself hadn’t changed, except that I saw with interest that the hard crimson lipstick had been jettisoned for an equally inappropriate scarlet. Her clothes still looked unfashionable even by charity shop standards, and no one had taken recent scissors to her hair. With her long face and thin, stringy body, she looked a total physical mismatch for my increasingly powerful father, but positive goodness shone out of her as always, and her sincerity, it seemed to me, was now tinged with amusement. There had never been anything gauche or self-conscious in her manner, but only the strength to be her own intelligent, uncompromising self.

More than a marriage of true minds, I thought. A marriage of true morality.

I said sincerely to my father, “Congratulations,” and he looked pleased.

“What are you doing next Saturday?” he asked.

“Racing at Chepstow.”

He was shaking his head. “I want you to stand beside me.”

“Do you mean ...,” I hesitated, “that you are marrying ... next Saturday?”

“That’s right,” he agreed. “Now that we’ve decided, and since you seem quite pleased, there’s no point in delaying. I’m going to live with Polly in her house in the woods, and I’ll also find a larger apartment in London.”

Polly, I learned by installments through that afternoon, had inherited the house in the woods from her parents, along with a fortune that set her financially free to work unpaid wherever she saw the need.

She was two years older than my father. She had never been married: a mischievous glint in her eye both forbade and answered the more intimate question.

She didn’t intend, she said, to make a wasteland of Orinda Nagle’s life. Orinda and Mervyn Teck had been running the constituency day to day and making a success of it. Polly didn’t hunger to open fetes or flirt with cameras. She would organize, as always, from behind the scenes. And she would be listened to, I thought, where influence mattered.

Six days later she and my father married in the ultimate of quiet weddings. I stood by my father and Polly was supported by the duke who’d lured Orinda to the races, and all of us signed the certificates.

The bride wore brown with a gold-and-amber necklet given by my father, and looked distinguished. A photographer, at my request, recorded the event. A discreet paragraph appeared in
The Times.
The
Hoopwestern Gazette
caught up with the story later. Mr. and Mrs. George Juliard, after a week in Paris, returned to Hoopwestern to keep the lightbulb workers faithful.

I still disliked politics and I was extremely grateful that the approach of my final exams made it impossible for me to repeat my by-election stint.

There were many politically active students at Exeter, but I kept my head down with them, too, and led a double life only on Stallworthy’s gallops and various racetracks. I won no races that spring, but the sensation of speed was all that mattered: and, in an oddity of brain activity, the oftener I raced, the more clearly I understood second-order differential equations.

The general election swelled and broke under me like a Pacific surf, and my father, along with his party, were returned to power. A small majority, but enough.

No one shot at him, no one plugged his sump drain with wax, no one set fire to Polly’s house, and no one let the martial arts expert earn her fee.

Suspicion of shooting and arson still lay heavily on Leonard Kitchens, but no one could accuse him of anything this time as his formidable and unforgiving wife insisted on his taking her on a double Mediterranean cruise. They were in Athens on polling day.

Poor Isobel Bethune had been right: Paul Bethune’s party dumped him as a candidate in favor of a worthy woman magistrate. Though it was no longer hotly scandalous news, Paul Bethune’s roving eye had settled again outside his home, and Isobel, at last fed up with it, had shed her marriage and her sullen sons and gone to live with her sister in Wales.

Polly kept me informed, her humor dry. My father couldn’t have married anyone better.

I told him to beware of bikini-clad bimbos falling artistically into his lap with Usher Rudd in attendance for accusations of sleaze. Hadn’t I heard, he asked, that Usher Rudd had been sacked by the
Gazette
for manufacturing sleaze where it didn’t exist? Usher Rudd, my father cheerfully said, was now telephoto-lens-stalking a promiscuous front-bencher of the opposition.

When the party in power reassembled after the whole country had voted, there was a major reshuffle of jobs. To no one’s surprise at Westminster, my father’s career skipped upward like helium and he became a minister of state in the Ministry of Transport, one step down from a seat in the Cabinet.

I had the best photograph of his wedding to Polly framed, and stood it beside the one of him and my mother. I took the pacts we’d signed out of my mother’s frame and read them thoughtfully, and put them back. They seemed to belong to a different life. I had indeed grown up at Exeter, and I’d had “the first” that I would never forget: but the basic promises of those pacts had so far been kept, and although now it might seem a melodramatic statement, I knew that if it ever became necessary, I would indeed defend my father against any form of attack.

I took my final exams and, sensing that I’d probably done enough to gain a bachelor of science degree of a reasonable standard, I wrote to Weatherbys and asked for a job.

They replied, what job?

Any, I wrote. I could add, subtract and work computers, and I had ridden in races.

Ah,
that
Juliard. Come for an interview, they said.

Weatherbys, a family business started in 1770 and currently servicing racing in increasingly inventive and efficient ways, stood quietly in red brick surrounded by fields, trees and peaceful countryside near the small ancient town of Wellingborough, sixty miles northwest of London in the county of Northamptonshire.

Inside, the atmosphere of the furiously busy secretariat was notably calm and quiet also. Knowing the vast scope and daily pressure of the work being done there, I suppose I’d expected something like the clattering frenzy of an old-fashioned newspaper office, but what I walked into was near to silence, with rows of heads bent over computer monitors and people walking among them with thoughtfulness, not scurrying, carrying papers and boxes of disks.