10 lb Penalty

Ten

My father had discontinued the insurance of Sarah’s Future when I went to work for Weatherbys; partly, he’d said, because the horse was getting old and lessening in value and partly, punctiliously, so that if the horse were killed, Weatherbys would not have to pay up.

He would hear no apologies when I telephoned him. He briefly said, “Bad luck.”

When I went back to work two days after Towcester the man who had originally interviewed me drew up a chair at my desk and said, “We used to insure that horse of yours, of course.”

I explained why my father had let the insurance lapse.

“I didn’t come to talk to you about your loss,” the Weatherbys man said, “though you do have all my sympathy. And is your arm all right? I came to ask you whether you would be interested in transferring yourself from here into our insurance services department, to work there from now on.”

The insurance department, mainly one long room walled by books, more books and files and more files, was inhabited also by two men in their twenties. One was leaving the firm. Would I like his place?

Yes, I would.

Promotion struck the Juliards twice in one week. Another internal upheaval shuffled the cards in the government, and when the hurt feelings settled, my father had moved sideways and upwards to the Cabinet as minister for agriculture, fisheries and food.

I congratulated him.

“I would have preferred secretary of state for defense.”

“Better luck next time,” I said flippantly.

My father’s resigned sigh came down the wire. “I suppose you’ve never heard of Hudson Hurst?”

“No.”

“If you think I’m going up fast, he’s going up faster. He beat me to Defense. He’s currently the can-do-no-wrong flavor of the year with the prime minister.”

“How’s Polly?” I asked.

“You’re incorrigible.”

“I’m sure the jellied eels and the brontosaurus burgers will be safe in your hands.”

There were for once no agricultural crises looming, and both he and I spent the autumn of that year rooting ourselves comfortably in new realms.

Not a great deal to my surprise I took to insurance with energy: it not only satisfied my inclination to numbers and probabilities, but I got sent out fairly often on verification trips, to see, for instance, if the polo ponies I was asked to set a premium for actually existed.

As Evan, my co-worker and boss in the insurance department, preferred office work and computers, I did more and more of the legwork, and it seemed to be a useful arrangement all around, as I knew what good stables looked like and fast developed a nose and an instinct for the preparatory arrangements for a ripoff. Preventing insurance fraud at the planning stage became a game like chess: you could see the moves ahead and could put the knights where they would zigzag sideways for the chop.

A great advantage, it transpired, was my youth. I might not look seventeen anymore, but often at twenty-two I wasn’t taken seriously enough. A mistake.

In the normal everyday honestly intentioned work of the department, Evan (twenty-nine) and I handled bona fide policies on every sort of horse and need, from the chance of infertility in a stallion to barrenness in a mare.

We also arranged cover for stable yards, all buildings, personal accident, public liability, fire, theft and measles. Anything for everyone. As agents, we kept underwriters busy.

I did abominably miss my days’ early mornings on Sarah’s Future, but as dawn grew later and colder towards winter, I would have found, as I had the previous year, that only weekends gave me much scope.

As for riding in races, I was lucky in that: the Northamptonshire trainer who’d taken the chestnut phoned me one day to say an owner of his, a farmer, wanted a free jockey — in other words, an amateur — for a runner he thought had no chance.

Why run it, I thought? I happily took the ride and plugged away, and the horse finished third. Delighted, the farmer put me up again, and although I never actually won for him, I got handed around to his friends like a box of chocolates, and cantered down to a start somewhere most Saturdays.

It wasn’t the same without Sarah’s Future, but I wasn’t ready to try to replace him, even if I could have afforded it. One day, I thought. Perhaps. When I’d paid off the installments on a car.

I had rationalized my liking for speed. Taking intoxicating risks was normal in growing up. Warrior genes were inbred: it was necessary to fight the birch fences and the ski slopes, perhaps, in lieu of war.

Nearing Christmas, my father said we’d been invited to a reception at No. 10 Downing Street — himself, Polly and I — for the customary jolly given by the current prime minister to the members of his Cabinet and their families.

Polly wore a reasonable dress and my father hired a chauffeur, and the Juliards in good formation walked through the famous front door.

Staff greeted my father as one who belonged there. Polly had been through the portals before, but I couldn’t help but feel awed as I trod through the crimson-walled entrance hall over the black-and-white squared floor and through into the inner hall and up the historic staircase in a river of other guests. The brilliant yellow staircase wall, going up around a central well, was hung with portraits of all the past prime ministers; and I knew from the friendly way he looked at them that my father would try his best to join them one of these days.

Never mind that there were about twenty other Cabinet ministers with the same dream, let alone all the “shadow” ministers in the opposition: one never got to hang on that wall without ambition.

The reception was chattering away in the large formal area upstairs known as the pillared drawing room. (It had pillars. Two.)

We were greeted sweetly by Mrs. Prime Minister — her husband was bound to arrive shortly — and were wafted onwards to trays of filled glasses and tiny Christmassy mince pies surrounded with holly.

I no longer asked annoyingly for Diet Coke. I drank the prime ministerial champagne and liked it.

I knew almost no one, of course, even by sight. Polly kept me in tow for a while, though her husband had drifted away as if on wheels, greeting and laughing and making no enemies. Polly could identify all the Cabinet after eighteen months with my father, but knew none of them — as Orinda would have done — as “daaahling.”

The prime minister did arrive (he was bound to, after all) and my father saw to it that the great man shook Polly’s hand with warm recognition and mine with at least a show of interest.

“You win races, don’t you?” he asked, brow furrowed.

“Er... sometimes,” I said weakly.

He nodded. “Your father’s proud of you.”

I did, I suppose, look astounded. The prime minister, a gently rounded man with a steel handshake, gave me an ironic smile as he passed to the next group, and my father didn’t know whether or not to call him a liar.

Dearest Polly squeezed my arm. “George doesn’t say he’s proud of you. He just certainly sounds it.”

“That makes us equal.”

“You really are a dear boy, Benedict.”

“And I love you, too,” I said.

My father’s attention had purposefully wandered. “You see that man over there?”

There were about twenty men “over there.”

Polly said, “Do you mean that one with flat white hair and circular eyes? The Home Secretary?”

“Yes, dearest. But I meant the one he’s talking to. The one who’s looking presidential and suitable for high office. He’s Hudson Hurst.”

Polly shook her head. “Surely not. Hudson Hurst has an oiled black ponytail and one of those silly little black mustache-and-beard combinations that frame a man’s mouth and distract you from what he’s saying.”

“Not anymore.” My father smiled, but not with joy. “Someone must have persuaded Hudson Hurst that the topiary work was a political no-no. He’s cut off the hair and shaved off the beard. What you see now are the unadorned petulant lips of the defense secretary, God help us all.”

Five minutes later my father was putting a seemingly affectionate hand on the defense secretary’s shoulder and saying, “My dear Hud, have you met my wife and my son?”

Love thine enemies...

I hated politics.

“Hud” had a damp, cold handclasp that I supposed he couldn’t help, and if he had lately had an oiled black ponytail and a black mustache-beard mouth-circling combination, they had very likely been dyed. His present hair color was the dark-lightly-flecked-with-gray that a passing girlfriend had told me couldn’t be faked, and he’d had a cut in a swept-back and duck-tailed style straight from the films of James Bond. Distinguished. Impressive, one had to admit. It inspired trust.

My father’s own mat of natural dark, close curls was cut to display to advantage the handsome outline of his skull. Expert stuff. Ah well.

Hudson Hurst was overpoweringly pleasant to Polly. Smile and smile, I thought, remembering Hoopwestern: smile and smile and shake the hands and win the votes. He flicked me a glance, but I wasn’t important.

Sweet Mrs. Prime Minister appeared at my elbow and asked if I was having a good time.

“Oh, yes. Splendid, thank you.”

“You look a bit lost. Come with me.” She led me across to the far side of the big room and stopped beside a sharply dressed woman who reminded me strongly of Orinda. “Jill, dear, this is George Juliard’s son. Do look after him.”

Jill gave me a comprehensive head-to-toe and stared at Mrs. Prime Minister’s retreating back without enthusiasm.

“I’m really sorry,” I said, “I don’t know your name.”

“Vinicheck. Education.”

“Minister of?”

Her grim lips twitched. “Certainly.”

She was joined by another woman in the simplest and best of current fashion: another Orinda-clone. Secretary of state for social security.

She said bluntly, “Where does your mother get her clothes?”

I followed her gaze across the room and saw Polly talking unselfconsciously to the man with flat white hair and circular eyes: the home secretary. Polly’s clothes, as always, had nothing to do with popular opinion but very clearly revealed her individual character.

Jill Vinicheck (education) kindly said, “Your father may have a bright career in front of him, but your mother will have to change the way she dresses or she’ll be clawed to bits by those bitches who write about fashion in the newspapers.”

The minister of social security agreed. “Every woman in politics gets the hate treatment. Haven’t you noticed?”

“Oh, not really, no.”

“Your mother’s skirt is the wrong length. You don’t mind me telling you? I’m only being helpful. Frankly, it would be the wrong length whatever length it was, according to the fashion bitches. But you can pass on some tips to her from us, if you like.”

“Er...”

“Tell her,” Jill Vinicheck said, enjoying herself, “never to buy clothes in shops.”

Social Security nodded. “She must have them made.”

Jill Vinicheck: “Always wool or silk or cotton. Never polyester, or tight.”

“There’s a marvelous man who could make your mother really elegant, with her long, thin figure. He totally changed the way the papers write about us now. They discuss our policies, not our clothes. And he can’t do it only for women. Look at the change in Hudson Hurst! Hud frankly looked a bit of a gangster, but now he’s a statesman.”

“No time like the present,” Jill Vinicheck said with the briskness that had no doubt propelled her up the ladder. “Our wand-waving friend is here somewhere.

Why don’t we introduce him to your mother straightaway?”

“Er...” I said, “I don’t think she...”

“Oh, there he is,” said Social Security, stepping sideways and pouncing. “Let me introduce you...”

She had her hand on his arm and he turned towards her, and I came face-to-face with A. L. Wyvern.

Alderney “Anonymous Lover” Wyvern.

No wonder Education and Social Security had reminded me of Orinda. All those years ago his ideas had dressed her, too.

I knew him instantly, but it took him several seconds to add four years to my earlier appearance. Then his face hardened to ill will and he looked disconcerted, even though with my father in the Cabinet he might have considered that both he and I might be asked to the families’ Christmas reception. Maybe he hadn’t given it a thought. In any case, my presence there was to him an unwelcome surprise.

So was his, to me.

Education and Social Security were looking puzzled.

“Do you two know each other?” one of them asked.

“We’ve met,” Wyvern said shortly.

His own appearance, too, had changed. At Hoopwestern he had made a point of looking inconspicuous, of being easily forgettable. Four years later he wasn’t finding it so simple to fade into the wallpaper.

I had thought him then to be less than forty, but I now saw that to have been probably an underestimate.

His skin had begun to show a few wrinkles and his hair to recede, and he was now wearing glasses with narrow dark frames. There was still about him, though, the strong secretive aura of introverted clout.

At the Downing Street Christmas party there was no overt sign of the sleeping anger that had blazed across Orinda’s face and nearly killed her. He was not this time saying to me aloud in fury, “One day I’ll get you,” but I could see the intent rise again in his narrowed eyes as if no interval for second thoughts had existed.

The extraordinary response I felt was not fear but excitement. The adrenaline rush in my blood was to fight, not flight. And whether or not he saw my reaction to him as vividly as I felt it, he pulled down the shutters on the malice visible behind the dark framed lenses and excused himself with the briefest of courtesies to Education and Social Security: when he moved slowly away it was as if every step were consciously controlled.

“Well!” exclaimed Jill Vinicheck. “I know he’s never talkative, but I’m afraid he was... impolite.”

Not impolite, I thought.

Murderous.

After the reception Polly, my father and I all ate in one of the few good restaurants in London that had taken the din out of dinner. One could mostly hear oneself speak.

My father had enjoyed a buddy-buddy session with the prime minister and Polly said she thought the circular eyes of the home secretary were not after all an indication of mania.

Didn’t the home secretary, I asked, keep prisoners in and chuck illegal immigrants out?

More or less, my father agreed.

I said, “Did you know there was a list on a sort of easel there detailing all the jobs in government?”

My father, ministerially busy with broccoli that he didn’t actually like, nodded, but Polly said she hadn’t seen it.

“There are weird jobs,” I said, “like minister for former countries and undersecretary for buses.” Polly looked mystified but my father nodded. “Every prime minister invents titles to describe what he wants done.”

“So,” I said, “theoretically you could have a minister in charge of banning yellow plastic ducks.”

“You do talk nonsense, Benedict dear,” Polly said.

“What he means,” my father said, “is that the quickest way to make people want something is to ban it. People always fight to get what they are told they cannot have.”

“All the same,” I said mildly, “I think the prime minister should introduce a law banning Alderney Wyvern from drinking champagne at No. 10 Downing Street.”

Polly and my father sat with their mouths open.

“He was there,” I said. “Didn’t you see him?”

They shook their heads.

“He kept over to the far side of the room, out of your way. He looks a bit different. He’s older, balder. He wears spectacles. But he is revered by the minister of education, the secretary of state for social security and the secretary of state for defense, to name those I am sure of. Orinda and Dennis Nagle were kindergarten stuff. Alderney Wyvern now has his hands on levers he can pull to affect whole sections of the nation.”

“I don’t believe it,” my father said.

“The dear ladies of education and social security told me they had a friend who would do wonders for my... er... mother’s wardrobe. He had already, they said, turned Hudson Hurst from a quasi-mobster into a polished gent. What do you think they give Alderney in return?”

“No,” my father said. “Not classified information. They couldn’t!”

He was scandalized. I shook my head.

“What, then?” Polly asked. “What do they give him?”

“I’d guess,” I said, “that they give him attention. I’d guess they listen to him and act on his advice. Orinda said years ago that he had a terrific understanding of what would happen in politics. He would predict things and tell Dennis Nagle what to do about them and Orinda said he was nearly always right. Dennis Nagle had his feet on the upward path, and if he hadn’t died I’d think he’d be in the Cabinet by now with Wyvern at his shoulder.”

My father pushed his broccoli aside. A good thing his broccoli farmers weren’t watching. They were agitating for a broccoli awareness week to make the British eat their greens. A law to ban excess broccoli would have had healthier results.

“If he’s so clever,” Polly asked, “why isn’t he in the Cabinet himself?”

“Orinda told me the sort of power Alderney really wants is to be able to pull the levers behind the scenes. I thought it a crazy idea. I’ve grown up since then.”

“Power without responsibility,” my father murmured.

“Allied,” I said ruefully, “to a frighteningly violent temper which explodes when he’s crossed.”

My father hadn’t actually seen Wyvern hit Orinda. He hadn’t seen the speed and the force and the heartlessness; but he had seen the blood and tears and they alone had driven him to try to retaliate. Wyvern had wanted to damage my father’s reputation by provoking my father to hit him. I dimly understood, but still hadn’t properly worked it out, that attacking Wyvern would, in the end, destroy the attacker.

My boss Evan agreeing, I’d tied in the No. 10 Thursday evening reception with a Friday-morning trip to meet a claims inspector to see if a hay barn had burned by accident or design (accident) and was due to stay again on Friday night in London with Polly and my father before going to ride at Stratford-upon-Avon on Saturday, but en route I got a message to return to meet my father in Downing Street by two that Friday afternoon.

“I thought you might like to see more of the house,” he said cheerfully. “You can’t see a thing at those receptions.”

He had arranged for one of the household staff — called a messenger — to accompany us and show us around officially, so we went up the yellow staircase again, spending longer over the pictures, and wandered around the three large drawing rooms leading off the anteroom at the top of the stairs; the white drawing room, the green drawing room and the pillared drawing room where they’d held the reception.

The messenger was proud of the house, which he said looked better and was better looked after than at any time in its rickety history. It had once been two houses back to back (rather like the burned shops of Hoopwestern): the small Downing Street house facing one way, and a mansion to the rear of it facing the other. The interior layout over two and a half centuries had been constantly redesigned, and a modem refurbishment had bestowed overall an eighteenth-century ambience that hadn’t been there before.

“The green drawing room used to be the blue drawing room,” the messenger said happily. “All the beautiful plaster work on nearly all the ceilings is relatively new. So are the classical mantels over the doorways. It all looks now like it always should have done, and never did.”

We admired it all copiously, to his satisfaction.

“Through here,” he said, marching off into one corner of the pillared drawing room, “is the small dining room.” (It seated twelve in comfort.) “Beyond that is the State Dining Room.” (Dark-paneled walls, seats for twenty-four.)

He told us about all the paintings in all the rooms. I thought of all the past prime ministers for whom this graceful splendor had not existed, who had used this building as an office. It seemed a shame and a waste, somehow.

Back in the anteroom to the drawing rooms our guide told us, pointing, “Up those stairs is the prime minister’s private apartment, and behind that locked door is his own personal room, where no one goes unless he invites them. And downstairs” — he led the way expertly, via an elevator to the ground floor — “along this passage, as of course you know well, sir, is the anteroom to the Cabinet Room itself, sir, and I’ll leave you to show those yourself to your son, sir, and I’ll see you again just on your way out.”

My father thanked him sincerely for his trouble, and I reflected, slightly overwhelmed, that I’d never before given much of a thought to the living legacy of history my father hoped to inhabit.

The anteroom was any anteroom: just a gathering place, but with brilliant red walls.

The Cabinet Room, at the rear of the old mansion section, was long, with tall windows down one side and across one end, facing out into a peaceful-looking walled garden.

Irish terrorists had lobbed a bomb into that garden while all the cabinet ministers were in the building.

The bomb had done little damage. The grass now looked undisturbed. Peace was relative. Guy Fawkes could rise again.

Extraordinarily, Sir Thomas Knyvet, the magistrate who arrested Guy Fawkes red-handed with his barrels of gunpowder, lived in a house on the exact spot where the developer George Downing later built No. 10.

“This is where I usually sit,” my father said, walking down the room and coming to rest behind one of the two dozen chairs. “That chair with arms, halfway along the table, that is the prime minister’s chair. It’s the only one with arms.”

The long table down the center of the room wasn’t rectangular but a much elongated oval, in order, my father explained, for the prime minister to be able to see the various members more easily.

“Go on, then,” I teased him. “Take the arms.”

He was half-embarrassed, half-shy, but he couldn’t resist it. There was only his son to see. He crabbed sideways around the table and sat in the chair with arms; he nestled into it, resting his wrists, living the dream.

Above and behind him on the wall hung the only picture in that room, a portrait of Sir Robert Walpole, the first to be given the title prime minister.

“It all suits you,” I said.

He stood up self-consciously and said, as if to take the emotion out of the moment, “The chair opposite the prime minister is normally where the chancellor of the exchequer sits.”

“And how many of you put your feet up on the table?”

He gave me a disgusted look. “You’re not fit to be taken anywhere.”

We returned to the front hall, my father looking at his watch. The messenger appeared as if on cue to see us off the premises, and I wondered vaguely if there were interior monitoring video cameras — which would be merely normally prudent — to trace the comings and goings of visitors.

While we said lengthy farewells the front door opened and in walked the prime minister, followed by two alert young men: bodyguards.

The prime minister said “Hello, George” without surprise and glanced at his own watch revealingly. “Come this way. And you... er...”

My father said, “Ben.”

“Ben, yes. The race rider. You come, too.”

He led the way through the front hall and past the staircase into a crowded and busy office crammed with desks, office paraphernalia and people, who all stood up at his approach.

“Now, Ben, you stay here with these good people while I talk to your father.”

He went through the office, opened a door and gestured to my father to follow. The office staff gave me a chair and a friendly welcome and told me that I was in the room where all the real work got done; the running of the prime minister’s life as opposed to his politics.

They told me that quiet though the house might seem on a Friday afternoon, almost two hundred people worked there in the buildings in connected offices and that someone had once counted how many times the front door of No. 10 had been opened and closed in twenty-four hours, and it was more than nine hundred.

At length, in response to one of constant telephone calls, I was invited through the office and into the next room in the wake of my father, and found myself in a large, quiet, tidy place that was part office, part sitting room.

My father and the prime minister sat in the two fat-test armchairs, looking relaxed, and I was waved to join them.

“Your father and I,” the prime minister said, “have been discussing Alderney Wyvern. I’ve met him once or twice, but I’ve seen no harm in him. I know that Jill Vinicheck and other women in the Cabinet say they owe him a great deal, and Hudson Hurst, above all, had benefited from a change of presentation. I’ve seen nothing sinister or unacceptable in any of this. The man is quiet, tactful, and as far as I can see, he hasn’t put a foot wrong politically. Jill Vinicheck, in particular, has once or twice found his considered advice helpful, and certainly the press have stopped making frivolous comments on her clothes, and take her as the serious politician that she is.”

“Er...” I said. “Yes, sir.”

“Your father says that he and you have seen a different side of Alderney Wyvern. A violent side. He says you believe this capacity for violence still exists. I have to tell you that I find this hard to believe, and until I see something of it myself I have to give Wyvern the benefit of the doubt. I am sure you have both acted with the best of intentions in drawing my attention to the influence Wyvern may have with my ministers but, George, if you’ll excuse my saying so, your son is a very young man without much experience of the world, and he may be exaggerating trouble where little exists.”

My father looked noncommittal. I wondered what the prime minister would have thought if he himself had seen Wyvern hit Orinda. Nothing less, it seemed, was going to convince him that the outer shell of the man he’d met hid a totally different creature inside, rather like a beautiful spiky and shiny conch shell hiding the slippery sluglike mollusk inside: a gastropod inching along on its stomach.

The prime minister said, “I will take note and remember what you have both said, but at the moment I don’t see any real grounds for action.”

He stood up, indicating that the meeting was over, and shook hands with my father with unabated good nature, and I remembered my father’s teaching on the very first day when I’d driven with him from Brighton to Hoopwestern, that people believe only what they want to believe. It applied, it seemed, even to prime ministers.

After we’d left No. 10 I said glumly to my father, “I did you no good.”

“He had to be told. He had to be warned. Even if it does my career no good, it was the right thing to do.”

My father’s strict sense of right and wrong might destroy him yet, I thought.