10 lb Penalty

One

Glue-sniffing jockeys don’t win the Derby.

I’d never sniffed glue in my life.

All the same, I stood before the man whose horses I rode and listened to him telling me he had no further use for my services. He sat behind his large antique paper-covered desk fidgeting with his clean fingernails. His hands were a yellowish white, very smooth.

“I have it on good authority,” he said.

“But I don’t!” I protested in bewilderment. “I’ve never sniffed glue or anything else. Certainly not cocaine. I’ve never even smoked pot. It’s not true.”

He looked at me coldly with the knowing eyes of a rich, powerful, assured and physically bulky man who had inherited a good brain and a chunk of merchant bank, and trained racehorses prestigiously out of obsession.

I was not yet eighteen at that point and, I now know, immature for my age, though of course I wasn’t aware of it at the time. I felt helpless, though, in the face of his inaccurate certainty, and had no idea how to deal with it.

“Sir Vivian...” I began with desperation, but he effortlessly cut me off with his heavier authoritative voice.

“You can clear off at once, Benedict,” he said. “I’ll not have my stable contaminated by rumors of a drug-taking jockey, even if he is an amateur and not much good.” He saw me flinch but went on relentlessly. “You’ll never be a top race rider. You’re too big, for one thing, or at least you will be in a year or two, and frankly you look clumsy on a horse. All arms and legs. In your hands, the most collected jumper turns in a sprawling performance. With that and an unsatisfactory reputation... well, I no longer want you associated with my stable.”

I stared at him numbly, hurt more deeply by his fairly brutal assessment of my lack of riding ability, which could perhaps be substantiated, rather than by the accusations of drug taking, which couldn’t.

Around me the familiar walls of his stable office seemed to recede, leaving me isolated with a thumping heart and no feeling below the ankles. All the framed photographs of past winners, all the bookshelves and the olive green wallpaper faded away. I saw only the stony face spelling out the effective end of my long-held dream of winning all races from the Grand National down.

I expect seventeen is a better age than most to be chopped off at the ambitious knees. It just didn’t feel like it at that moment of the slice of the ax.

“Outside that window,” said Sir Vivian Durridge, pointing, “a car is waiting for you. The driver says he has a message for you. He’s been waiting a good hour or more, while you’ve been out riding exercise.”

I followed the direction of his finger, and saw, some way across the raked gravel of the imposing entrance driveway to his porticoed domain, a large black car inhabited solely by a chauffeur in a peaked cap.

“Who is it?” I asked blankly.

Vivian Durridge either didn’t know or wasn’t telling. He said merely, “On your way out, you can ask him.”

“But, sir...” I began again, and dried to fresh silence in the continuing negation of his distrust.

“I advise you to clean up your act,” he said, making a gesture that directed me to leave. “And now, I have work to do.”

He looked steadfastly down at his desk and ignored me, and after a few seconds I walked unsteadily over to the high polished door with its gilded knob and let myself out.

It was unfair. I had not cried much in my life but I felt weak then and near to weeping. No one before had pitilessly accused me of something I hadn’t done. No one had so ruthlessly despised my riding. I still had a thin skin.

No other good trainer would let me into his stable if Vivian Durridge had kicked me out of his.

In a mist of bewildered misery I crossed the wide Durridge entrance hall, made my way through the heavy front door and crunched across the gravel to where the car and chauffeur waited.

I knew neither of them. The August morning sun gleamed on black spotless bodywork, and the chauf feur with the shiny black peak to his cap let down the window beside him and stretched out a black uniformed arm, silently offering me a white unaddressed envelope.

I took it. The flap was only lightly glued. I peeled it open, drew out a single white card from inside, and read the brief message.

Get in the car.

Underneath an afterthought had been added.

Please.

I looked back towards the big house from which I’d been so roughly banned and saw Vivian Durridge standing by his window, watching me. He made no movement: no reconsidering action, no farewell.

I understood none of it.

The handwriting on the card was my father’s.

I sat on the backseat of the car for almost an hour while the chauffeur drove at a slow pace through the county of Sussex, south of London, approaching finally the seaside spread of Brighton.

He would answer none of my questions except to say that he was following instructions, and after a while I stopped asking. Short of jumping out and running free at any of the few traffic-light stops, it seemed I was going to go wherever my father had ordained, and as I had no fear of him I would, from long-conditioned habit, do what he asked.

I thought chiefly — and in a mixture of rage and unhappiness — of the scene in Durridge’s study, his words circling endlessly in memory and not getting more bearable as time went on.

The black car drifted past Regency town houses and open-fronted souvenir shops, past old grandeur and new world commercialism, and sighed to a stop on the seafront outside the main door of a large hotel of ancient French architectural pedigree with bright beach towels drying on its decorative wrought-iron balconies.

Porters appeared solicitously. The chauffeur climbed out of his seat and ceremoniously opened the door beside me and, thus prompted, I stood up into the sea air, hearing gulls crying and voices in the distance calling on the wet ebb-tide strand, smelling the salt on the wind and unexpectedly feeling the lift of spirits of the sand-castle holidays of childhood.

The chauffeur made me a small sketch of a bow and pointed at the hotel’s main door, and then, still without explaining, he returned to his driving seat and at a convenient moment inserted himself into the flow of traffic and smoothly slid away.

“Luggage, sir?” one of the porters suggested. He was barely older than I.

I shook my head. For luggage I wore the clothes suitable for first-lot August-morning exercise with the Durridge string: jodhpurs, jodhpur boots, short-sleeved sports shirt and harlequin-printed lightweight zipped jacket (unzipped). I carried by its chin-strap my shiny blue helmet. With a conscious effort I walked these inappropriate garments into the grand hotel, but I needn’t have worried: the once-formal lobby buzzed like a beehive with people looking normal in cutoff shorts, flip-flop sandals and message-laden T-shirts. The composed woman at the reception desk gave my riding clothes an incurious but definite assessment like a click on an identification parade and answered my slightly hoarse enquiry.

“Mr. George Juliard?” she repeated. “Who shall I say is asking for him?”

“His son.”

She picked up a telephone receiver, pressed buttons, spoke, listened, gave me the news.

“Please go up. Room four-twelve. The lift is to your left.”

My father was standing in an open doorway as I walked down a passage to locate four-twelve. I stopped as I approached him and watched him inspect me, as he customarily did, from my dark curly hair (impervious to straightening by water), to my brown eyes, thin face, lean frame, five foot eleven (or thereabouts) of long legs to unpolished boots: not in any way an impressive experience for an ambitious parent.

“Ben,” he said. He breathed down his nose as if accepting a burden. “Come in.”

He tried hard always to be a good father, but gave no weight to my infrequent assurances that he succeeded. I was a child he hadn’t wanted, the accidental consequence of his teenage infatuation with a woman biologically just old enough to be his own mother. On the day I went to Brighton I was almost as old as he had been when he fathered me.

Over the years I’d gleaned the details. There had been a hullabaloo in both extended families when they were told of the pregnancy, an even worse fuss (product of the times) when my mother refused an abortion, and a frosty turning of backs at the hasty (and happy) wedding.

The marriage-day photograph was the only record I had of my mother, who ironically died of preeclampsia at my birth, leaving her very young husband literally holding the baby with his envisaged bright future in ruins, so it was said.

George Juliard, however, who wasn’t considered bright for nothing, promptly rearranged his whole life, jettisoning the intended Oxford degree and career in law, persuading his dead wife’s sister to add me to her already large family of four sons, and setting forth into the City to learn how to make money. He had paid from the beginning for my keep and later for my education and had further fulfilled his duties by turning up at parent-teacher meetings and punctiliously sending me cards and gifts at Christmas and birthdays. A year ago for my birthday he’d given me an airline ticket to America so that I could spend the summer holidays on a horse farm in Virginia owned by the family of a school friend. Many fathers had done less.

I followed him into four-twelve and found without surprise that I was in the sitting room of a suite directly facing the sea, the English Channel stretching blue-gray to the horizon. When George Juliard had set out with the goal of making money, he had spectacularly hit his target.

“Have you had breakfast?” he asked.

“I’m not hungry.”

He ignored the untruth. “What did Vivian Durridge say to you?”

“He sacked me.”

“Yes, but what did he say?”

“He said I couldn’t ride and that I sniffed glue and also cocaine.”

My father stared. “He said what?”

“He said what you asked him to, didn’t he? He said he had it on good authority that I took drugs.”

“Did you ask him who his ‘good authority’ was?”

“No.” I hadn’t thought of it until too late, in the car.

“You’ve a lot to learn,” my father said.

‘ ‘It was no coincidence that you sent a car to wait for me.”

He smiled marginally, light gleaming in his eyes. He was taller than I, with wider shoulders, and in many ways inhabited an intenser, more powerful version of the body I had been growing into during the past five years. His hair was darker then mine, and curlier, a close rug on his Grecian-like head. The firmness in his face, now that he was approaching his late thirties, had been already apparent in his wedding photograph, when the gap in age had showed not at all, where the bridegroom had looked the dominant partner and the bride, smiling in her blue silk dress outside the registry office, had shone with youthful beauty.

“Why did you do it?” I asked, trying to sound more adult than bitter, and not managing it.

“Do what?”

“Get me kicked out.”

“Ah.”

He walked over to a pair of glass doors leading to a balcony and opened them, letting in the vivid coastal air and the high voices from the beach. He stood there silently for a while, breathing deeply, and then, as if making up his mind, he closed the windows purposefully and turned toward me.

“I have a proposition for you,” he said.

“What proposition?”

“It will take a good while to explain.” He lifted a telephone receiver and told the room service that whether or not breakfast had been officially over an hour ago, they were to send up immediately a tray of cereal, milk, hot toast, grilled bacon with tomatoes and mushrooms, an apple, a banana and a pot of tea. “And don’t argue,” he said to me, disconnecting, “you look as if you haven’t eaten for a week.”

I said, “Did you tell Sir Vivian that I take drugs?”

“No, I didn’t. Do you?”

“No.”

We looked at each other, virtual strangers, though as closely tied as genetically possible. I had lived according to his edicts, had been to his choice of schools, had learned to ride, to ski and to shoot because he had distantly funded my preference for those pursuits, and I had not received tickets for Bayreuth, Covent Garden or La Scala because he didn’t enthuse over time spent that way.

I was his product, as most teenage sons were of their fathers. I was also aware of his strict sense of honor, his clear vision of right and wrong and his insistence that shameful acts be acknowledged and paid for, not lied about and covered up. He was, as my four older cousins/brothers told me pityingly, a hard act to follow.

“Sit down,” he said.

The room was warm. I took off my jazzy zipped jacket and laid it on the floor with my helmet and sat in a light armchair, where he pointed.

“I have been selected,” he said, “as a candidate in the Hoopwestern by-election, in place of the sitting MP, who has died.”

“Er...” I blinked, not quickly taking it in.

“Did you hear what I said?”

“Do you mean... you are running for office?”

“Your American friend Chuck would say I’m running for office, but as this is England, I am standing for Parliament.”

I didn’t know what I should say. Great? How awful? Why? I said blunderingly, “Will you get in?”

“It’s a marginal seat. A toss-up.”

I looked vaguely around the impersonal room. He waited with a shade of impatience.

“What is the proposition?” I asked.

“Well, now...” Somewhere within him he relaxed. “Vivian Durridge treated you harshly.”

“Yes, he did.”

“Accusing you of taking drugs... That was his own invention.”

“But what for?” I asked, bewildered. “If he didn’t want me around, why didn’t he just say so?”

“He told me you would never be more than an average-standard amateur. Never a top professional jockey. What you were doing was a waste of time.”

I didn’t want to believe it. I couldn’t face believing it. I protested vehemently, “But I enjoy it.”

“Yes, and if you look honestly inside yourself, you’ll admit that a pleasant waste of time isn’t enough for you at this stage.”

“I’m not you,” I said. “I don’t have your.:. your...”

“Drive?” he suggested.

I thought it over weakly, and nodded.

“I am satisfied, though,” he said, “that you have sufficient intelligence... and... well... courage... for what I have in mind.”

If he intended to flatter me, of course he succeeded. Few young boys could throw overboard such an assessment.

“Father...” I began.

“I thought we agreed you should call me Dad.” He had insisted at parent-teacher-schoolboy meetings that I should refer to him as “Dad,” and I had done so, but in my mind he was always Father, my formal and controlling authority.

“What do you want me to do?” I said.

He still wouldn’t answer straightaway. He looked absentmindedly out of the window and at my jacket on the floor. He fiddled with his fingers in a way that reminded me of Sir Vivian, and finally he said, “I want you to take up the place you’ve been offered at Exeter University.”

“Oh.” I tried not to appear either astonished or annoyed, though I felt both. He went on, however, as if I’d launched into a long, audible harangue.

“You’ve promised yourself a gap year, is that it?”

A gap year, so called, was the currently fashionable pause between school and university, much praised and prized in terms of growing up in worldly experience before graduating academically. A lot to be said for it... little against.

“You agreed I should have a gap year,” I protested.

“I didn’t prohibit it. That’s different.”

“But... can you prohibit it? And why do you want to?”

“Until you are eighteen I can legally do almost anything that’s for your own good or, rather, that I consider is for your own good. You’re no fool, Ben. You know that’s a fact. For the next three weeks, until your birthday on August thirty-first, I am still in charge of your life.”

I did know it. I also knew that though by right I would receive basic university tuition fees from the state, I would not qualify for living expenses or other grants because of my father’s wealth. Working one’s way through college, although just possible in some countries, was hardly an option in Britain. Realistically, if my father wouldn’t pay for my keep, I wouldn’t be going to university, whether Exeter or anywhere else.

I said neutrally, “When I asked you, ages ago, you said you thought a gap year was a good idea.”

“I didn’t know that you intended your gap year to be spent on a racecourse.”

“It’s a growing-up experience!”

“It’s a minefield of moral traps.”

“You don’t trust me!” Even I could hear the outraged self-regard in my voice. Too near a whine. I said more frostily, “Because of your example, I would keep out of trouble.”

“No bribes, do you mean?” He was unimpressed by my own shot at flattery. “You’d throw no races? Everyone would believe in your incorruptibility? Is that it? What about a rumor that you take drugs? Rumors destroy reputations quicker than truth.”

I was silenced. An unproven accusation had that morning rent apart my comfortable illusion that innocence could shield one from defamation. My father would no doubt categorize the revelation as “growing up.”

A knock on the door punctuated my bitter thoughts with the arrival of a breakfast designed to give me a practically guilt-free release from chronic hunger. The necessity of keeping down to a low racing weight had occasionally made me giddy from deprivation. Even as I fell on the food ravenously I marveled at my father’s understanding of what I would actually eat and what I would reject.

“While you eat, you can listen,” he said. “If you were going to be the world’s greatest steeplechase jockey, I wouldn’t ask... what I’m going to ask of you. If you were going to be, say, Isaac Newton, or Mozart, or some other genius, it would be pointless to ask that you should give it up. And I’m not asking you to give up riding altogether, just to give up trying to make it your life.”

Cornflakes and milk were wonderful.

“I have a suspicion,” he said, “that you intended your gap year to go on forever.”

I paused in mid-munch. Couldn’t deny he was right. “So go to Exeter, Ben. Do your growing up there. I don’t expect you to get a First. A Second would be fine; a Third is OK, though I guess you’ll manage good results, as you always have done, in spite of the disadvantage of your birth date.”

I zoomed through the bacon, tomatoes and mushrooms and accompanied them with toast. Because of the rigid education system that graded schoolchildren by age and not ability, and because I’ d been born on the last day of the age-grading year (September 1 would have given me an extra twelve months), I had always been the youngest in the class, always faced with the task of keeping up. A gap year would have leveled things nicely. And he was telling me, of course, that he understood all that, and was forgiving a poor outcome in the degree stakes before I’d even started.

“Before Exeter,” he said, “I’d like you to work for me. I’d like you to come with me to Hoopwestern and help me get elected.”

I stared at him, chewing slowly but no longer tasting the mouthful.

“But,” I said, swallowing, “I don’t know anything about politics.”

“You don’t have to. I don’t want you to make speeches or any policy statements. I just want you to be with me, to be part of my scene.”

“I don’t... I mean,” I more or less stuttered, “I don’t understand what I could do.”

“Eat your apple,” he said calmly, “and I’ll explain.”

He sat in one of the armchairs and crossed his legs with deliberation, as if he had rehearsed the next bit, and I thought that probably he had indeed gone over it repeatedly in his mind.

“The selection committee who chose me as their candidate,” he said, “would frankly have preferred me to be married. They said so. They saw my bachelor state as a drawback. I told them therefore that I had been married, that my wife had died, and that I had a son. That cheered them up no end. What I’m asking you to do is to be a sort of substitute wife. To come with me in public. To be terribly nice to people.”

I said absentmindedly, “To kiss babies?” “I’ll kiss the babies.” He was amused. “You can chat up the old ladies... and talk football, cricket and racing to the men.”

I thought of the wild thrill of riding in races. I thought of the intoxication of risking my neck, of pitting such skill as I had against fate and disaster, of completing the bucketing journeys without disgrace. A far cry from chatting up babies.

I yearned for the simple life of carefree, reckless speed; the gift given by horses, the gift of skis; and I was beginning to learn, as everyone has to in the end, that all of life’s pleasures have strings attached.

I said, “How could anyone think I would bother with drugs when race riding itself gives you the biggest high on earth?”

My father said, “If Vivian said he would take you back, would you go?”

“No.” My answer came instinctively, without thought. Things couldn’t be the same. I had gone a long way down reality’s road in those few hours of an August Wednesday. I could acknowledge grimly that I would never be my dream jockey. I would never win my Grand National. But patting babies instead? Good grief!

“The polling day,” he said, “is more than three weeks before term starts at Exeter. You will be eighteen by then...”

“And,” I said, without either joy or regret, “I wrote to Exeter to say I wouldn’t be taking up the place they’d offered me. Even if you instruct me to go, I can’t.”

“I overruled your decision,” he told me flatly. “I thought you might do that. I’ve observed you, you know, throughout your young life, even if we’ve never been particularly close. I got in touch with Exeter and reversed your cancellation. They are now expecting your registration. They have arranged lodging for you on campus. Unless you totally rebel and run away, you’ll go ahead with your degree.”

I felt a lurching and familiar recognition of this man’s power as a force that far outweighed any ordinary family relationship. Even Exeter University had done his bidding.

“But, Father...” I said feebly.

“Dad.”

“Dad...” The word was wholly inappropriate both for the image of him as the conventionally supportive parent of a schoolboy and for my perception of him as something far different from an average man in a business suit.

The Grand National, for him, I saw, was the road to Downing Street. Winning the race was the prime ministership in Number Ten. He was asking me to abandon my own unobtainable dream to help him have a chance of achieving his own.

I looked at the untouched apple and banana and had no more appetite.

I said, “You don’t need me.”

“I need to win votes. You can help with that. If I weren’t totally convinced of your value as a constituent-pleaser you wouldn’t be sitting here now.”

“Well...” I hesitated, “to be honest, I wish I wasn’t.”

I would have been pottering about happily in Vivian Durridge’s stable yard, untroubled in my illusions. And I would have been drifting towards a less abrupt, less brutal awakening. I would also, I supposed, have been going to be cumulatively depressed. The alternative future thrust at me now was at least challenging, not a slow slide to nowhere.

“Ben,” he said briskly, almost as if he could read my thoughts, “give it a try. Enjoy it.”

He gave me an envelope full of money and told me to go out and buy clothes. “Get anything you need. We’re going to Hoopwestern from here.”

“But my stuff,” I began.

“Your stuff, as you call it, is being packed into a box by Mrs. Wells.” Mrs. Wells had rented me a room in her house along the road from the Durridge stable. “I’m paying her until the end of the month,” my father said. “She’s quite pleased about that, though she said, you’d like to know, that you were a nice, quiet boy, a pleasure to have around.” He smiled. “I’ve arranged for your things to be collected. You’ll be reunited with them soon, perhaps tomorrow.”

It was a bit, I thought, like being hit by a tidal wave, and it wasn’t the first time he had yanked me out of one easy way of life and set me down on a different path. My dead mother’s sister, Aunt Susan (and- her husband, Harry), who had reluctantly agreed to bring me up, had felt affronted, and said so bitterly and often, when my father plucked me out of the comprehensive school that had been “good enough” for her four sons, and insisted that I take diction lessons and extra tuition in math, my best subject, and had by one way or another seen to it that I spent five years of intensive learning in a top fee-paying school, Malvern College.

My cousins/brothers had both envied and sneered, so that effectively I had become the “only” child that I actually was, not the petted last addition to a big family.

The father who had planned my life to the point of my unsought arrival in Brighton took it for granted that in the last three weeks of his legal guardianship I would still act as he directed.

I suppose, looking back, that many boys of seventeen would have complained and rebelled. All I can say is that they weren’t dealing with a trusted and proven benevolent tyranny: and since I knew he meant me the opposite of harm, I took the envelope of money and spent it in the Brighton shops on clothes I thought his constituents would have voted for if they’d been judging a candidate by his teenage son’s appearance.

We left Brighton soon after three in the afternoon, and not in the morning’s overpowering black car with the unnervingly silent chauffeur (obeying my father’s “no explanation” instructions, it seemed) but in a cheerful metallic coffee-colored Range Rover with silver and gold garlands of daisylike flowers in metal paint shining along the sides.

“I’m new in the constituency,” my father said, grinning. “I need to get myself noticed and recognized.”

He could hardly be missed, I thought. Heads turned to watch us all along the south coast. Even so, I was unprepared for Hoopwestern (in Dorset), where it seemed that every suitable pole and tree bore a placard saying simply VOTE JULIARD. No one in the town could avoid the message.

He had driven the advertisement-on-wheels from Brighton, with me sitting beside him on the front seat, and on the way he gave me nonstop instruction on what I should say and not say, do and not do, in my new role.

“Politicians,” he said, “should seldom tell the whole truth.”

“But...”

“And politicians,” he went on, “should never lie.”

“But you told me always to tell the truth.”

He smiled sideways at my simplicity. “You better damn well tell me the truth. But people as a rule believe only what they want to believe, and if you tell them anything else they’ll call you a troublemaker and get rid of you and never give you your job back, even if what you said is proved spot on right by time.”

I said slowly, “I suppose I do know that.”

“On the other hand, to be caught out in a lie is political death, so I don’t do it.”

“But what do you say if you’re asked a direct question and you can’t tell the truth and you can’t tell a lie?”

“You say ‘how very interesting’ and change the subject.”

He drove the Range Rover with both speed and caution, the way he lived his whole life.

“During the next weeks,” he said, “people will ask you what I think about this and that. Always say you don’t know, they’d better ask me themselves. Never repeat to anyone anything I’ve said, even if I’ve said it in public. OK?”

“If you say so.”

“Remember this election is a contest. I have political enemies. Not every smiling face is a friend.”

“Do you mean... don’t trust anyone?”

“That’s exactly what I mean. People always kill Caesar. Don’t trust anyone.”

“But that’s cynical!”

“It’s the first law of self-preservation.”

I said, “I’d rather be a jockey.”

He shook his head in sorrow. “I’m afraid you’ll find that every world has its share of villains and cheats, jockeys not excepted.”

He drove into the center of Hoopwestern, which proved to be one of those old indigenous market towns whose ancient heart had been petrified into a quaint, cobbled pedestrian precinct, with the raw pulse of modern commerce springing up in huge office buildings and shopping malls on three sides around a ring road.

“This used to be a farming community,” my father said neutrally. “Farming is now an industry like the factory here that makes lightbulbs and employs more people. I need the lightbulb votes.”

His campaign headquarters, I found, were in a remarkable back-to-back hybrid house with an old bay-windowed frontage facing the cobbled square and a boxlike featureless shop behind, one of a row looking out over a half-acre of parking lot. The house, with basic living accommodations for him (and me) upstairs, had once been a shoe store (now bankrupt because of an aggressive local mall) and was the twin of the place next door to it, a charity gift shop.

The political headquarters bustled with earnest endeavor, brightly colored telephones, a click-clacking floor-standing photocopier, constant cups of tea, desks, computers, maps on the walls with colored pins in, directories in heaps, envelopes by the carton-load and three middle-aged women enjoying the fuss.

We had parked in the parking lot and walked to the unmistakable glass-fronted premises where it not only said VOTE JULIARD in huge letters but displayed three large pictures of my father, all of them projecting a good-natured, intelligent, forward-looking person who would do an excellent job at Westminster.

The three women greeted him with merry cries of pleasure and a stack of problems.

“This is my son,” he said.

The merry smiles were bent my way. They looked me up and down. Three witches, I thought.

“Come in, dear,” one of them said. “Cup of tea?”