10 lb Penalty (25 page)

Usher Rudd, sacked by the
Hoopwestern Gazette
as a sleaze generator and definitely now
non grata
under many flags, had all the same as a freelancer found a market in weekly sex magazines on the edge of perversion.

The motto he everlastingly lived by: Sleaze Sells.

The opposition front-bencher killed himself.

Shock reverberated through Parliament and shivered in many a conscience.

He had been the “shadow” chancellor, the one who would have written the country’s budget if his party had been in power. Rudd, for all his digging, had found no cent out of place.

Leader writers, hands raised in semi-mock horror, pointed out that though adultery (like suicide) might be a sin, it was not, under British law, a crime. Hounding a man to despair—was that a sin? Was that a crime?

Usher Rudd, smirking and unrepentant, repeated his credo again and again: if people in the public eye chose to behave disgustingly in private, the public had a right to know.

Did they? What was disgusting? Who should judge? Chat shows discussed it endlessly.

Usher Rudd was either “the watchdog of the people” or a dangerous voyeur.

My father, walking with me in the woods around Polly’s house, believed Usher Rudd would now be looking for another target.

“Until he’s safely locked on to some other poor bastard,” he said. “Just you remember how he listened to us in The Sleeping Dragon, so be very careful. He had a go at us then, and we got him sacked.”

“Yes, but,” I said, “I’m certain you’ve stuck to what you wrote that day in those pacts, that you would do nothing shameful or unlawful and would cause no scandal. Usher Rudd can’t therefore touch you.”

He smiled. “Those pacts! Yes, I’ve kept my bargain. But a small thing like innocence wouldn’t stop that red-haired shit. Have you found your side of the promise difficult to keep?”

I shook my head. “I’ve kept it.”

It was undoubtedly true, though, that the pact I’d written myself had shaped and inhibited what one might call my sex life. More accurately, my lack of sex life. I’d had two brief but pretty satisfactory interludes, one at university, one in racing, but both times I’d drawn back from any deep involvement. As for promiscuity, Usher Rudd had proved a bigger threat than AIDS.

When the sun at last shone warmingly on the house in outer Wellingborough where I lived in a “granny flat” built for a dear-departed granny, the ceilings first drizzled rain from burst pipes in the attic and then fell down completely. As major replastering was obviously required, I packed my stuff again in nomadic boxes and drove them to the office, storing them in the leg room under my desk.

Evan was stripping the office of the clutter of his five-year tenure. Pinups, long lusted over, disappeared. He arranged a thousand files in easy order and gave me an index. He bequeathed me three straggly green plants suffering from sunlight deficiency.

“I can’t manage without you,” I said.

“You can always phone me.” His birdlike head inspected his non-personalized end of the room. “You won‘t, though. You’ll make your own decisions. If anyone thought you couldn’t, you wouldn’t be taking my place.”

He left in a flurry of farewell beers, and I spent the whole summer at first tiptoeing and then striding into new responsibilities, and in six swift months shed the last remnants of boy and grew in confidence and perhaps in ability until I had settled into the person I would be for the rest of my life.

When I mentioned how I felt to Polly, she said the change was obvious and that I was lucky: some people weren’t sure who they were till the far side of thirty.

My father, who’d known who he was at nineteen, had during the early summer consolidated himself in the Cabinet, and by conscientious work had converted his colleagues’ jealousy into acceptance, if not admiration. George Juliard had arrived as a political fact.

I asked him about Alderney Wyvern.

My father frowned. “I haven’t seen Wyvern anywhere since Christmas, but he’s somewhere about—though the prime minister still won’t hear a word against him. I’d say both Hudson Hurst and Jill Vinicheck are voting to his tune. They’re both apt to say on one day that they haven’t made up their minds on a point of discussion, but a couple of days later their minds and opinions are firm, and they always agree with each other ... and I think those opinions are Wyvern’s, though I’ve no way of proving it.”

“And are they good opinions?”

“Sometimes
very
good, but that’s not the point.”

 

Parliament went into summer recess. Polly and the member for Hoopwestern spent the first part of the break in the constituency, living in Polly’s house and working with Mervyn and Orinda. The four of them had settled into an energetic and harmonious team to the great benefit of all the voters, floating or not.

My father then took Polly around the world with stopovers in capital cities to learn about famine and fertilizers and freaks of climate, and came back with a fair understanding of how a billion people fed themselves on the blue planet.

I in my little world at Wellingborough computed numbers and risks and moved back into my granny flat when the new ceilings were dry.

Usher Rudd began stalking a bishop. Everyone except His Reverence sighed with relief.

I rode a winner in August and another in September.

Beneath this surface, although none of us knew it, little upheavals were growing and coalescing like cumulonimbus. My father had once said that they always killed Caesar, and when Parliament reconvened, the knives were ready to drive into the toga.

My father, worried, told Polly and me that Hudson Hurst intended to challenge the prime minister for the leadership of the party. Hudson Hurst was cozying up to each Cabinet member in turn to ask for support. With his now polished manner he was smoothly saying that the party needed a tougher, younger leader who would galvanize the nation to prepare for the big buildup towards the next general election, three years ahead.

“Alderney Wyvern,” I said, “is writing the script.”

Polly said, horrified, “He couldn’t.”

My father said, “It’s been Wyvern’s aim all along, to rule by stealth.”

“Then stop him,” Polly exclaimed.

But Hudson Hurst resigned from the Cabinet and announced to the world that a majority of the party in power was dissatisfied with the decisions being made in its name and that he could do better.

“Stop him,” Polly said again. “Oppose him.”

The three of us, sitting around the kitchen table in Polly’s house, were silenced by the suddenness and size of the task. Sure, my father had aimed if possible one day to be prime minister, but had thought of acceding peacefully after a resignation, not as a contender for the Ides of March.

My father, considering loyalty to be a paramount virtue, went to Downing Street and declared himself the prime minister’s man. The prime minister, however, seeing that the party wanted a change, decided it was time to go just as soon as a new leader was elected. The way was now clear for my father to declare himself as a candidate for the ultimate job. The battle was now joined.

 

On a harmless-looking Tuesday morning in October I went into Weatherbys as usual and found that no one would look at me. Puzzled but unalarmed, I made my way into my office and found that someone had kindly—or unkindly—left on my desk a copy of
SHOUT!
open at the center pages.

SHOUT!
was the weekly magazine that regularly printed Usher Rudd’s most virulent outbursts.

There was a photograph, not of my father, but of myself, dressed as a jockey.

The headline in huge letters read,
DOPE!

Underneath it said,
Jockey son of George Juliard, self-aggrandizing minister of agriculture, fisheries and food, was fired for snorting cocaine, says trainer.

In disbelief I read the trailing paragraphs:

 

His father, the magazine pointed out, had entered the ring in the power struggle currently rending apart the Cabinet. How could George Juliard proclaim himself a paragon of all the virtues (including family values) when he had failed as a parent himself, as his only child was a drug addict?

I felt as I had in Vivian Durridge’s study on that morning five years earlier; numb from the ankles down. It hadn’t been true that I had ever sniffed glue or cocaine or anything else, and it still wasn’t true, but I wasn’t fool enough now to think that everyone would believe me.

I picked up the magazine and, with eyes speculatively following every step I took, went to see the chairman, the working boss of Weatherbys, in his office. He sat at his desk. I stood before him.

I needn’t have taken the magazine with me. He had a copy of it already on his desk.

“It’s not true,” I said flatly.

“If it’s not true,” the chairman asked, “why on earth would Vivian Durridge say it is? Vivian Durridge is one of the most highly respected men in racing.”

“If you’ll give me the day off, I’ll go and ask him.”

He stared up at me, considering.

“I think,” I said, “that this is an attack on my father, more than on myself. This article was written by a journalist called Usher Rudd who tried to discredit my father once before, in fact five years ago, when he first stood for Parliament in a by-election. My father complained to the editor of the newspaper and Usher Rudd was sacked. This looks like revenge. You’ll see that this article says my father is involved in a power struggle in the Party and, well, he is. Whoever wins the struggle will be the next prime minister. Usher Rudd is determined it won’t be George Juliard.”

The chairman still said nothing.

“When I applied here for a job,” I said, “Sir Vivian sent you a reference about me, and, oh”—I remembered in a blinding flash of joy—“he sent me a letter, which I’ll show you.” I turned towards the door. “It is actually here in this building, in the insurance office.”

I didn’t wait for him to comment but hurried back to the long insurance office and retrieved the cardboard box full of my stuff from under my desk. I simply hadn’t bothered to take it back to my reconstructed room and clutter the place up again with bits and pieces. Somewhere in that box were my father’s wedding photos with wives one and two.

In the frame behind the picture of himself and Polly the letter from Vivian Durridge was as clean and fresh as the day I received it.

As a precaution, I made several copies of the letter and put them in one file among hundreds, and took the original to the chairman.

He had already, fair man that he was, retrieved from his records the short “To whom it may concern” reference that Sir Vivian had spontaneously sent. It was lying on his desk on top of the magazine.

I handed him the letter, which he read twice.

“Sit down,” he said, pointing to the chair opposite his desk. “Tell me what happened.”

“Five years ago”—it seemed a lifetime—“like it says in the letter, my father wanted to make me face the reality that I would never be a top jockey.”

I told the chairman about the car and the chauffeur, and the hotel in Brighton facing the sea. I told him that my father had asked me to give him family background to help with his by-election campaign.

The chairman listened and at the end asked, “Who, besides you and your father, knew that Vivian Durridge had accused you of drug taking?”

“That’s just it,” I said slowly. “I certainly told no one, and I don’t think my father did, either. Will you let me go and find out?”

He looked at the letter again, and at the reference and at the magazine article with its malice and lies, and made up his mind.

“I’ll give you a week,” he said. “Ten days. Whatever it takes. Before you came, Evan was second in command to an insurance specialist who is now on our board of directors. He will do your job until you come back.”

I was grateful and speechless in the face of his generosity. He merely waved me away with a gesture towards the door and, looking back as I left, I saw him slide the magazine, the letter, and the reference into a drawer in his desk and lock it.

Back in my own office the telephone was ringing. My father’s voice said, “What the hell’s going on? What does Vivian Durridge think he’s doing? I can’t get any answer from his telephone.”

The reason he couldn’t get any answer from Vivian Durridge’s telephone, I discovered three hours later, was because he was not in his own home.

The gravel in the drive was tidily raked. The porticoed front of the near-mansion spoke as usual of effortless wealth, but no one answered the doorbell.

Along in his stable yard there were no horses, but the head groom, who lived in an adjoining cottage, was pottering aimlessly about.

He recognized me without hesitation, though it was over five years since I’d left.

“Well, Ben,” he said, scratching his head, “I never knew you took drugs.”

He was old and small and bandy-legged and had loved and been loved by the great beasts in his care. The life he’d lived in their service had pathetically gone, leaving him without anchor, without purpose, with only a fading mental scrapbook of victories past.

“I never did take drugs,” I said.

“No, I wouldn’t have thought so, but if Sir Vivian says...”

“Where is he?” I asked. “Do you know?”

“He’s ill, of course.”

“Ill?”

“He’s gone in the wits, poor old man. He was walking around the yard with me one day at evening stables, same as usual, when all of a sudden he clapped a hand to his head and fell down, and I got the vet to him.”