10 lb Penalty

Two

The double shop, I found, was the regular constituency office of the party to which my father belonged. It was where Dennis Nagle, the previous member, had lately held his Saturday “surgeries,” being present himself to listen to local problems and to do his best to sort them out. Still in his fifties, he had died, poor fellow, of pancreatic cancer. His ambitious wife, Orinda, was reportedly steaming with vitriolic anger since the selection committee had passed her over in favor of my parent to fight to retain the vacated seat at the behest of the central party.

I learned about Orinda by sitting on an inconspicuous stool in a comer and listening to the three helpers describe to my father a visit the dispossessed lady had paid that day to the office.

The thinnest, least motherly help, who was also the most malicious, said with lip-curling glee, “You’d think she’d be grieving for Dennis, but she just seems furious with him for dying. She talks about ‘our constituents,’ like she always did. She says she wrote his speeches and formed his opinions. She said it was understood from when Dennis was first ill that she would take his place. She says we three are traitors to be working for you, George. She was absolutely stuttering with rage. She says if you think she’ll meekly go away, you have another think coming. And she says she is going to tonight’s dinner!”

My father grimaced.

I thought that the selection committee had probably acted with good sense.

From my stool I also learned that the main opposition party was fielding “a fat slob with zero sex appeal” against my father. His — Paul Bethune’s — party had recently picked up a couple of marginal seats in by-elections and were confident of taking Hoopwestern since “the need for change” was in the air.

In the days that followed I saw his picture everywhere: a grin above the slogan Bethune is better. Give him your X.

It made me laugh. Was he collecting divorcées?

On that first evening, though, all I learned of him was that he was a local councillor and losing his hair. Incipient baldness might in fact lose him the election, it seemed (never mind his mental suitability). America hadn’t elected a bald president since the soldier-hero Eisenhower, and few people nowadays named their babies Dwight.

I learned that votes were won by laughter and lost by dogma. I learned that the virility of George Juliard acted like a friction rub on the pink faces of his helpers.

“My son will come with me to the dinner tonight,” he said. “He can have Mervyn’s place.” Mervyn Teck, he explained, was the agent, his chief of staff, who was unavoidably detained in the midlands.

The three aroused ladies looked me over again, nodding.

“The dinner,” he explained to me briefly, “is being held at The Sleeping Dragon, the hotel straight across the square from here.” He pointed through the bow-fronted windows, showing me a multi-gabled facade, adorned with endless geraniums in hanging baskets, barely a hundred yards away. “We’ll walk over there at seven-thirty. Short reception. Dinner. Public meeting in the hall to the rear of the hotel. If we get some good hecklers, it may last until midnight.”

“You want hecklers?” I said, surprised.

“Of course. They set fire to things. Very dull otherwise.”

I asked weakly, “What do I wear?”

“Just look tidy. There’s a Front Bench bigwig coming. They wheel out the big guns to support a by-election as marginal as this. I’ll wear a dinner jacket to start with, but I’ll strip off my black tie later. Maybe unbutton my shirt a bit. See how it goes.” He smiled almost calmly, but I could sense excitement running in him deeply. He’s a fighter, I thought. He’s my father, this extraordinary man. He’s kicked my dreams away and shown me a different world that I don’t like very much, but I’ll go with him, as he wants, for a month, and I’ll do my best for him, and then we’ll see. See how it goes... as he’d said.

We walked across the square at seven-thirty, I in gray trousers and navy blazer (new from the Brighton shops), he in black tailoring that was in itself a step forward in my education.

He was received with acclaim and clapping. I smiled and smiled at his shoulder and was terribly nice to everyone, and shook hand after hand as required. No babies in sight.

“My son,” he gestured. “This is my son.”

Some of the perhaps eighty people at the reception and dinner were dressed formally like my father, others made political-equality statements like open-necked shirts and gingham with studs.

The Front Bench bigwig came with black bow sharply tied, his wife discreetly diamonded. I watched her being unpretentiously and endlessly charming to strangers, and when I in my turn was introduced to her she clasped my hand warmly and grinned into my eyes as if meeting me were a highlight of her evening. I had a long way to go, I thought, before I could put that amount of genuine and spontaneous friendliness into every greeting. I saw also that Mrs. Bigwig’s smile was worth a ballot box full of Xs.

I realized slowly, as the room filled up, that the dinner was a ticket affair; that except for the Bigwigs and my father, everyone had paid for their presence. My father, it appeared, had paid for me. One of the evening’s organizing committee was telling him he didn’t have to.

“Never accept gifts,” he had warned me on the drive from Brighton. “Gifts may look harmless, but they can come back to haunt you. Say no. Pay for yourself, understand?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Never put yourself into the position of having to return a heavy favor when you know what you’re being asked to do is wrong.”

“Don’t take sweets from strangers?”

“Exactly so.”

The organizing lady informed my father that if he had had a wife, her ticket would have been free.

He said with gentle, smiling finality, “I will pay for my son. Dearest Polly, don’t argue.”

Dearest Polly turned to me with mock exasperation. “Your father. What a man!” Her gaze slid past me and her face and voice changed from blue skies to storm. “Bugger,” she said.

I looked, of course, to see the cause of the almost comic disapproval and found it was an earnest-eyed thin woman of forty or so sun-baked summers, whose tan glowed spectacularly against a sleeveless white dress. Blonde streaked hair. Vitality plus.

Dearest Polly said “Orinda!” under her breath.

Orinda, the passed-over candidate, was doing her best to eclipse the chosen rival by wafting around the room, embracing everyone extravagantly while saying loudly, “Daaarling, we must all do our best for the party even if the selectors have made this ghastly mistake...”

“Damn her,” said Dearest Polly, who had been, she told me, a selector herself.

Everyone knew Orinda, of course. She managed to get the cameraman from the local television company to follow her around, so that her white slenderness would hog whatever footage reached the screen.

Dearest Polly quietly fumed, throwing out sizzling news snippets my way as if she would explode if she kept them in.

“Dennis was a cuddly precious, you know. Can’t think why he married that harpy. ”

Dearest Polly, herself on the angular side of cuddly, had one of those long-jawed faces from which condensed kindness and goodwill flowed forth unmistakably. She wore dark red lipstick as if she didn’t usually: it was the wrong color for her yellowish skin.

“Dennis told us he wanted us to select Orinda. She made him say it. He knew he was dying.”

Orinda flashed her white teeth at a second cameraman.

“That man’s from the Hoopwestern Gazette,” Dearest Polly said disgustedly. “She’ll make the front page.”

“But she won’t get to Parliament,” I said.

Polly’s eyes focused on me with awakening amusement. “Your father’s son, aren’t you, then! It was George’s ability to identify the essential points that swayed us in his favor. There were seventeen of us on the selection panel, and to begin with most people thought Orinda the obvious choice. I know she took it for granted...”

And she’d reckoned without Dearest Polly, I thought. Polly and others of like mind.

Polly said, “I don’t know how she has the nerve to bring her lover!”

“Er...” I said. “What?”

“That man just behind her. He was Dennis’s best friend.”

I didn’t see how being Dennis’s best friend made anyone automatically Orinda’s lover, but before I could ask, Polly was claimed away. Dennis’s best friend, a person who managed to look unremarkable even in a dinner jacket, seemed abstracted more than attentive, but he did stick faithfully to Orinda’s back: rather like a bodyguard, I thought.

I realized in consequence that Mr. Bigwig himself had a genuinely serious bodyguard, a young muscular-looking shadow whose attention was directed to the crowd, not his master.

I wondered if my father accepted that bodyguards would be the price of success as he went up his chosen ladder.

He began circling the room and gestured for me to join him, and I practiced being Mrs. Bigwig but fell far short of her standard. I could act, but she was real.

There was a general movement into the dining room next door, where too many tables laid for ten people each were crowded into too small a space. Places were allocated to everyone by name and, my father and I entering almost last, I found that not only were we not expected at the same table — he was put naturally with the Bigwigs and the Constituency Association’s chairman — but I was squeezed against a distant wall between a Mrs. Leonard Kitchens and Orinda herself.

When she discovered her ignominious location, Orinda flamed with fury like a white-hot torch. She stood and quivered and tried to get general attention by tapping a glass with a knife, but the noise was lost in the general bustle of eighty people chattering and clattering into their places. Orinda’s angry outburst barely reached farther than her knives and forks.

“This is an insult! I always sit at the top table! I demand...”

No one listened.

Through the throng I saw Dearest Polly busily settling my father into a place of honor and guessed with irony that Orinda’s quandary was Polly’s mischief.

Orinda glared at me as I hovered politely, waiting for her to sit. She had green eyes, black lashed. Stage greasepaint skin.

“And who are you?” she demanded; then bent down and snatched up the name card in front of my place. My identity left her speechless with her red mouth open.

“I’m his son,” I said lamely. “Can I help you with your chair?”

She turned her back on me and spoke to her bodyguard (lover?) best friend of her dead husband, a characterless-seeming entity with a passive face.

“Do something!” Orinda instructed him.

He glanced past her in my direction and with flat expressionless eyes dismissed me as of no consequence. He silently held Orinda’s chair for her to sit down and to my surprise she folded away most of her aggression and sat stonily and with a stiff back, enduring what she couldn’t get changed.

At school one learned a good deal about power: who had it and who didn’t. (I didn’t.) Orinda’s understated companion had power that easily eclipsed her own, all the more effective for being quiet.

Mrs. Leonard Kitchens, on my right, patted my chair with invitation and told me to occupy it. Mrs. Leonard Kitchens, large, comfortable in a loose floral dress and with the lilt of a Dorset accent on her tongue, told me that my father looked too young to have a son my size.

“Yes, doesn’t he,” I said.

Leonard himself, on her other side, bristled with a bad-tempered mustache and tried unsuccessfully to talk to Orinda across his wife and me. I offered to change places with him. His wife said sharply, “No.”

Mrs. Leonard Kitchens’s gift for small talk took us cozily through dinner (egg salad, chicken, strawberries), and I learned that “my Leonard,” her husband, was a nurseryman by trade with fanatical political beliefs and a loathing for Manchester United.

With the chicken, Mrs. Kitchens, to my surprise, mentioned that Dennis Nagle had been an undersecretary of state in the Department of Trade and Industry, not a simple back-bencher, as I had somehow surmised. If my father won the seat, he would be a long way behind Dennis in career terms.

Mrs. Leonard Kitchens spoke conspiratorily into my right ear. “Perhaps I shouldn’t tell you, dear, but Polly very naughtily changed the name cards over, so as to put Orinda next to you. I saw her. She just laughed. She’s never liked Orinda.” The semi-whispering voice grew even quieter, so as not to reach the ears on my left. “Orinda made a great constituency wife, very good at opening fetes and that sort of thing, but one has to admit she did tend to boss Dennis sometimes. My Leonard was on the selection panel and he voted for her, of course. Men always fall for her, you know.” She drew back and looked at me with her big head on one side. “You’re too young, of course.”

To my dismay I could feel myself going red. Mrs. Kitchens laughed her worldly laugh and shoveled her strawberries. Orinda Nagle ignored me throughout, while pouring out nonstop complaints to her companion, who mostly replied with grunts. I thought I would rather be almost anywhere else.

Dinner finally over, the talkative throng rose to its collective feet and transferred down a passage into the large room lit by chandeliers that made The Sleeping Dragon the area’s popular magnet for dances, weddings and — as now — political free-for-alls.

Orinda’s companion left his name card on the table, and out of not-very-strong curiosity I picked it up.

Mr. A. L. Wyvern, it said.

I let “Mr. A. L. Wyvern” fall back among the debris of napkins and coffee cups and without enthusiasm drifted along with everyone else to the rows of folding chairs set up for the meeting. I’d read somewhere that affairs like this could draw tiny crowds unworthy of the name, but perhaps because my father was new to the district, almost double the number of the diners had turned up, and the whole place buzzed with the expectation of enjoyment.

It was the first political meeting I’d attended and at that point I would have been happy if it had been my last.

There were speeches from the small row of people up on a platform. The chairman of the Constituency Association rambled on a bit. Mr. Bigwig was on his feet for twenty minutes. Mrs. Bigwig smiled approvingly throughout.

My father stood up and lightened the proceedings by making everyone laugh. I could feel my face arranging itself into Mrs. Bigwig-type soppiness and knew that in my case anyway it had a lot to do with relief. I had been anxious that he wouldn’t grab his audience, that he would embarrass me into squirming agony by being boring.

I suppose I should have known better. He told them what was right with the country, and why. He told them what was wrong with the country, and how to fix it. He gave them a palatable recipe. He told them what they wanted to believe, and he had them stamping their feet and roaring their applause.

The local TV station cameraman filmed the cheers.

Predictably, Orinda hated it. She sat rigidly, her neck as stiff as if she had an unbending rod there instead of vertebrae. I could see the sharp line of her jaw and the grim, tight muscles around her mouth. She shouldn’t have come, I thought: but perhaps she truly had believed that the selectors had made a ghastly mistake.

Dearest Polly, chief de-selector of Dennis’s widow, regarded my father euphorically, as if she had invented him herself; and indeed without her he might not have been there to seize the first rung of his destiny.

Eyes alight with the triumph of his reception, he asked for questions and, true to his intention, he stripped off his tie. He flung it on the table in front of him, and then he rounded the table so that there was nothing between him on the platform and the crowd below. He opened his arms wide, embracing them. He invited them to join him in a political adventure, to build for a better world and in particular for a better world for the constituents of Hoopwestern.

He held them in his hands. He had them laughing. His timing could have been learned from stand-up comics. He generated excitement, belief, purpose; and I, in my inconspicuous end-of-row seat, swelled with a mixture of amazement, understanding and finally pride that my parent was publicly delivering the goods.

“I’m here for you,” he said. “Come to my office across the square. Tell me your concerns, tell me what’s troubling you here in Hoopwestern. Tell me who to see, who to listen to. Tell me your history... and I’ll tell you your future. If you elect me I’ll work for you, I’ll take your wishes to Westminster, I’ll be your voice where it matters. I’ll light a bulb or two in the House of Commons...”

Laughter drowned him. The lightbulb factory fueled the town’s economy, and he wanted the lightbulb votes.

To do good one needed power, he said. Lightbulbs were so much wire and glass without power. In humans, power came from inside, not delivered and metered. Power gave light and warmth. “If you give me power, I’ll light your lamps.”

My father’s own electricity galvanized the crowd. They shouted questions, he shouted answers. He was serious where it mattered and funny everywhere else. He had horror for genocide and sympathy for cats. He dodged cornering demands and promised never to put his name to anything whose consequences he didn’t understand.

“Legislation,” he said jokingly, “often achieves exactly what it is designed to avoid. We all know it. We moan about the results. I promise not to jump into emotional deep ends on your behalf. I beg the brains and common sense of Hoopwesterners to foresee disaster and warn me. I’ll raise your voices in whispers, not shouts, because shouts annoy but whispers go around persuasively and travel sweetly to the heart of things, and lead to sensible action.”

Whether they understood him or not, they loved him.

The most dedicated hecklers of the evening proved not to be the Paul Bethune opposition supporters, several of whom had bought tickets to the dinner and who had afterwards formed an aggressive bunch on the flip-up chairs, but my father’s presumed political allies (but in fact personal enemies) Orinda Nagle- and Leonard Kitchens.

Both of them demanded firm commitments to policies they both approved. Both shouted and pointed fingers. My father answered with unfailing good humor and stuck to the party’s overall stated position: he needed also to keep the die-hard backbone votes safely in his bag.

Orinda was professional enough to see she was out-gunned, but she didn’t give up trying. Mr. A. L. Wyvern narrowed his eyes and sank his ears down into his collar. Mr. A. L. Wyvern’s influence over Dennis and Orinda waned before my eyes.

My father paid tribute to Dennis Nagle. Orinda, far from placated, said that no way could an inexperienced novice like George Juliard replace her husband, however Hollywood-handsome he might be, however manly his hairy chest, however witty, quick-tongued, charismatic. None of that made up for political know-how.

Someone at the back of the hall booed. There was general laughter, a nervous release of the tension Orinda had begun to build up. The impetus swung back to my father, who sincerely thanked Orinda for her years of service to the party cause and deftly led an appreciation to her by clapping in her direction and encouraging everyone else to copy him. The clapping grew. The crowd gave generous but unaffectionate acclaim.

Orinda, to her impotent fury, was silenced and defeated by this vote of thanks. Leonard Kitchens bounced to his feet to defend her, but was shouted down. Leonard’s mustache quivered with frustration, his thick glasses flashing in the light as he swung from side to side like a wounded bull. His cozy wife looked as if she would deliver the coup de grace when she got him home.

My father courteously admired Leonard for his faithfulness and told him and everyone that if elected he would aim always for Dennis Nagle’s high and honest standard. Nothing less was worthy of the people of Hoopwestern.

He had them cheering. He exhorted them again to talk to him personally and the crowd stood and surged forward around the seats to take him at his word.

Dearest Polly chatted happily with the Bigwigs and beckoned me up onto the platform, and Mr. Bigwig, regarding the clamorous excited throng, told me that my father already had all the skills that would propel him into high office. “All he needs is luck — and to keep out of trouble,” he said.

“Trouble like Paul Bethune,” Polly said, nodding.

“What trouble?” asked Bigwig.

“Oh, dear!” Polly looked flustered. “George forbids us to attack Paul Bethune’s character. George says negative campaigning can rebound on you. Paul Bethune has a mistress with an illegitimate daughter by him, which he’s tried hard to hush up, and George won’t attack him for it.”

Mrs. Bigwig looked at me assessingly. “I suppose there’s no shadow over your birth, is there, young Ben?”

Polly assured her vehemently. “No, of course not,” and I wondered if my father, all those years ago, could possibly have reckoned that my legitimacy would one day be important to him. After what I’d learned of him that day I saw that anything was possible, but in fact I stayed as convinced as I’d always been that his marriage to my mother had been an act of natural characteristic honor. I still believed, as I always had, that he would never shirk responsibility for his actions. I knew my birth had been a mistake and, as I’d often said, I had no quarrel at all with the quality of life he’d given me since.

It was indeed midnight by the time most of the crowd left to go home. Mr. and Mrs. Bigwig had long gone, with chauffeur and bodyguard in attendance. Polly yawned with well-earned fatigue. Orinda and Mr. A. L. Wyvern were nowhere to be seen and Mrs. Leonard Kitchens had hauled her Leonard away with the rough edge of her energetic tongue.

I waited for my father to the end, not only because I had no key to get into my bedroom above the campaign headquarters but also because he would need someone to unwind with after the cheers had died away. Even at not quite eighteen I knew that triumph needed human company afterwards. I’d gone back to an empty room in Mrs. Wells’s house after three (infrequent) wins in steeplechases and had had no one to bounce around the place with, no one to hug and yell with, no one to share the uncontainable joy. That night my father needed me. A wife would have been better, but he certainly would need someone. So I stayed.

He put his arm around my shoulders.

“God,” he said.

“You’ll be prime minister,” I told him. “Mr. Bigwig fears it.”

He looked at me vaguely, his eyes shining. “Why should he or anyone fear it?”

“They always kill Caesar. You said so.”

“What?”

“You were brilliant.”

“I can do without your sarcasm, Ben.”

“No, seriously, Father...”

“Dad.”

“Dad...” I was tongue-tied. I couldn’t talk to him as Dad. Dads were people who drove you to school and threw snowballs and ticked you off for coming home late. Dads didn’t send you a ticket to ski school in a Christmas card. Dads didn’t send an impersonal fax to a hotel saying “well done” when one won a teenage downhill ski race. Dads were there to watch. Fathers weren’t.

Remnants of the meeting came up with shining faces to add congratulations. He took his arm off my shoulder and shook their hands, friendly and positive to all; and I had a vision of them going around for the next four weeks saying “Juliard, a very good man, just what we need... Vote Juliard, couldn’t do better.” The ripple from that night would reach the Hoopwestern boundaries and eddy along its roads.

My father slowly came down a little from his high and decided he’d done enough for one day. We left the hall, returned to the hotel and eventually through a harmony of “Good Nights” made our way out into the warm August night to walk across to the dimly lit bow-front opposite.

There were streetlights around the square and the hotel lights at our back, but underfoot the decorative cobbles were dark and lumpy. In icy winters, I learned later, elderly people tended to skid on them and fall and crunch their bones; and on that euphoric night my father tripped on the uneven surface and went down forward on one knee, trying not to topple entirely and not managing it.

At exactly the same moment there was a loud bang and a sharp zzing and a scrunch of glass breaking.

I bent down over my father and saw in the light that his eyes were stretched wide with anxiety and his mouth grim and urgent with pain.

“Run,” he said. “Run for cover. God dammit, run.”

I stayed where I was, however.

“Ben,” he said, “for God’s sake. That was a gunshot.”

“Yes, I know.”

We were halfway across the square, easy immobile targets. He struggled to get to his feet and told me again to run: and for once in my life I made a judgment and disobeyed him.

He couldn’t put his weight on his left ankle. He half rose and fell down again and beseeched me to run.

“Stay down,” I told him.

“You don’t understand...” His voice was anguished.

“Are you bleeding?”

“What? I don’t think so. I twisted my ankle.”

People ran out of the hotel, drawn by the bang that had reechoed around the buildings fringing the square. People came over to my father and me and stood around us, curious and unsettled, noncomprehension wrinkling their foreheads.

There was confusion and people saying “What happened? What happened?” and hands stretching down to my father to help him up, cushioning him with a lot of well-meaning concern and kindness.

When he was well surrounded he did finally take my arm and lean on other people and pull himself to his feet: or rather, to his right foot, because putting his left foot down caused him to exclaim with strong discomfort. He began to be embarrassed rather than frightened and told the crowding well-wishers that he felt stupid, losing his footing so carelessly. He apologized. He said he was fine. He smiled to prove it. He cursed mildly, to crowd approval.

“But that noise,” a woman said.

Heads nodded. “It sounded like...”

“Not here in Hoopwestern...”

“Was it... a gun?”

An important-looking man said impatiently, “A rifle shot. I’d know it anywhere. Some madman...”

“But where? There’s no one here with a gun.”

Everyone looked around, but it was far too late to see the rifle, let alone the person taking potshots.

My father put his arm around my shoulders again, but this time for a different, more practical sort of support, and cheerfully indicated to everyone that we should set off again to finish the crossing of the square.

The important-looking man literally shoved me out of the way, taking my place as crutch and saying in his loud authoritative way, “Let me do this. I’m stronger than the lad. I’ll have you over to your office in a jiffy, Mr. Juliard. You just lean on me.”

My father looked over his shoulder to where I now stood behind him and would have protested on my behalf, I could see, but the change suited me fine and I simply waved for him to go on. The important-looking man efficiently half carried my hopping father over the remaining stretch of square, the bunch of onlookers crowding around with murmurs of sympathy and helpful suggestions.

I walked behind my father. It came naturally to do that. There was a high voice calling then, and I turned to find Polly running towards us, stumbling on the cobbles in strappy sandals and sounding very distressed.

“Ben... Ben... has George been shot?”

“No, Polly.” I tried to reassure her. “No.”

“Someone said George had been shot.” She was out of breath and full of disbelief.

“Look, he is there.” I took her arm and pointed. “There. Hopping. And hopping mad with himself for twisting his ankle and needing someone to help him along.”

Polly’s arm was vibrating with the inner shakes, which only slowly abated when she could see that indeed George was alive and healthily swearing.

“But... the shot...”

I said, “It seems someone did fire a gun at the same moment that he tripped on the cobbles, but I promise you he wasn’t hit. No blood.”

“But you’re so young, Ben.” Her doubts still showed.

“Even a tiny kid could tell you there’s no blood.” I said it teasingly, but I guess it was my own relief that finally convinced her. She walked beside me and followed the pied-piper-like procession to the headquarters’ door, where my father produced a key and let everyone in.

He hopped across to his swivel chair behind his accustomed desk and, consulting a list, telephoned the local police.

“They’ve had several complaints already,” he told everyone, putting down the receiver. “They’re on their way here. Letting off a firearm... disturbing the peace... that sort of thing.”

Someone said, “What you need is a doctor...” and someone else arranged for one to come. “So kind. You’re all so bloody kind,” my father said.

I left the hubbub and went to the open door, looking across the square to The Sleeping Dragon, which perversely had every eye wide open, with people leaning out of upstairs windows and people standing in brightly lit doorways below.

I remembered the “zzing” of the passing bullet and thought of ricochets. My father and I had been steering a straight line from hotel to headquarters; and if the bullet had been aimed at him, and if he’d stumbled at the exact second that the trigger was squeezed, and if the bullet’s trajectory had been from upstairs somewhere in The Sleeping Dragon (and not from downstairs because there were still too many people about), and if the bullet had smashed some glass so that I heard the tinkle, then why was every pane of the window in the bow-fronted headquarters intact?

Because, I told myself, the whole thing had been a coincidence. The bullet had not been intended to stop George Juliard’s political career before it started. Of course not. Dramatics were childish.

I turned to go back inside, and saw for an instant a flash of light on broken glass down on the ground.

It was a window of the charity shop next door that had been hit.

Zzing. Ricochet. Smash. The straight trajectory could have been deflected by the curve of a cobble. A rifle bullet traveling straight and true would very likely have gone straight through glass without breaking it, but a wobbling bullet... that might set up glass-smashing vibrations.

The police arrived at the parking-lot side of the headquarters, and the doctor also. Everyone talked at once.

The doctor, bandaging, said he thought the injury a strain, not a break. Ice and elevation, he prescribed. The police listened to the self-important man’s view on gunshots.

I stood to one side and at one point found my father looking at me through the throng, his expression both surprised and questioning. I smiled at him a bit, and the window of line of sight closed again as people moved.

I did tell a junior-looking uniformed policeman that the glass of the charity shop’s bow-front was broken, and he did come outside to look. But when I tentatively mentioned ricochets he looked quizzical and asked how old I was. I had done a bit of rifle shooting at school, I said. He nodded, unimpressed, and made a note. I followed when he returned to join his colleagues.

Dearest Polly stood at my father’s side and listened to everything worriedly. A man with a camera flashed several pictures. Considering that no one had actually been shot, the fuss went on for a long time and it was nearly two o’clock when I finally closed and bolted the doors, front and back, and switched off a few of the lights.

My father decided to go upstairs backwards, sitting down. He would accept only minimal help and winced himself in and out of the bathroom and into one of the single beds in the bedroom. I was to sleep on the pull-out sofa-bed in the small sitting room, but I ended up lying on the second single bed, next to my father, half-dressed and not at all sleepy.

I had in the past twenty hours hummed along from Mrs. Wells’s house on my bicycle and ridden a canter on grassy sunlit Downs. I’d had my life torn apart and entered a new world, and for long minutes I’d wondered if I would collect a bullet in the back. How could I sleep?

I switched off the bedside light.

In the dark, my father said, “Ben, why didn’t you run?”

After a pause I answered. “Why did you tell me to?”

“I didn’t want you to get shot.”

“Mm. Well, that’s why I didn’t run. I didn’t want you to get shot.”

“So you stood in the way...?”

“More fun than patting babies.”

“Ben!”

After a while, I said, “I’d say it was a .22 rifle, the sort used for target shooting. I’d say it was a high-velocity bullet. I know that noise well. If a .22 bullet hits you in the body, it quite likely won’t kill you. You need to hit the head or the neck to be most probably lethal. All I did was shield your head.”

There was a silence from the other bed. Then he said, “I’d forgotten you could shoot.”

“I was on the school team. We were taught by one of the country’s best marksmen.” I smiled in the dark. “You paid for it, you know.”