10 lb Penalty

Four

I would have expected the nervous energy of the day-long performance in Quindle to have earned my father an evening’s rest, but I had barely begun to wake up to the stamina demanded of would-be public servants. It seemed that far from a quiet top-up of batteries, he was committed to another marathon shake-hands-and-smile, not this time in the chandeliered magnificence of The Sleeping Dragon’s all-purpose hall, but in much more basic space normally used as a schooling ground for five-year-olds in Hoopwestern’s outer regions.

There were kids’ attempts at pictures pinned to corkboards all around the walls, mostly thin figures with big heads and spiky hair sticking straight out like Medusa’s snakes. There were simple notices — do not run and raise your hand — all written in self-conscious lowercase letters.

Primary colors everywhere bombarded the eyesight to saturation point, and I couldn’t believe that this sort of thing had been my own educational springboard, but it had. Another world, long left behind.

There were several rows of the temporary folding chairs that grew more and more familiar to me as the days passed, and a makeshift speaker’s platform, this time with a microphone that squeaked whenever tested, and on several other occasions when switched on or off.

The lighting was of unflattering greenish-white fluorescent strips, and there weren’t enough of them to raise spirits above depression. Limbo must look like this, I thought: and the unenticing room had in fact drawn the sort of audience you could count on fingers and toes and still have enough left over for an abacus.

Mervyn Teck met us on the doorstep looking at his watch and checking, but by good luck and asking the way (less pride on my part than shame of arriving late) we had turned up on the exact minute advertised by a scatter of leaflets.

On the table on the platform, beside the temperamental microphone, there were a gavel for calling the meeting to order and two large plates of sandwiches secured by plastic wrap.

Two or three earnest lady volunteers crowded around the candidate with goodwill, but it was plain, ten minutes after start time, that apathy, and not enthusiasm, had won the evening.

I expected my father to be embarrassed by the small turnout and to hurry through the unsatisfactory proceedings, but he made a joke of it, abandoning the microphone, and sat on the edge of the platform, beckoning the sparse and scattered congregation to come forward into the first few rows, to make the meeting more coherent.

His magic worked. Everyone moved forward. He spoke to them familiarly, as if addressing a roomful of friends, and I watched him turn a disaster into a useful exercise in public relations. By the time the sandwiches had been liberated from the plastic even the few who had come to heckle had been tamed to silence.

Mervyn Teck looked both thoughtful and displeased.

“Something the matter?” I asked.

He said sourly, “Orinda would have drawn a much better house. She’d have packed the hall. They love her here: she presents prizes to the children here every term. She buys them herself.”

“I’m sure she’ll go on doing it.”

I meant it without irony, but Mervyn Teck gave me a glance of dislike and moved away. One of the lady volunteers sweetly told me that the time of the meeting had clashed with the current rave series on the television, and that even the pubs were suffering from it on Thursday nights. Tomorrow would be different, she said. Tomorrow the Town Hall will be packed.

“Er...” I said, “what’s happening in the Town Hall?”

“But you’re his son, aren’t you?”

“Yes, but...”

“But you don’t know that tomorrow night your father goes face-to-face in a debate with Paul Bethune?”

I shook my head.

“Fireworks,” she said happily. “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

My father, when I asked him about it on the short drive back to the center of Hoopwestern, seemed full of equal relish.

“I suppose,” I said, “there’ll be more point to it than the sort of fiasco tonight could have been.”

“Every vote counts,” he corrected me. “If I won only a few tonight, that’s fine. You have to win the floaters over to your side, and they have to be persuaded one by one.”

“I’m hungry,” I said as we passed a brightly lit take-away, so we backtracked and bought chicken wings with banana and bacon, and even there my father, recognized, fell into political chat with the man deep-frying chips.

In the early morning I went out and bought a copy of the Gazette. Sleaze and Paul Bethune filled pages four and five (with photographs) but the front-page topic of concern was headlined “Juliard Shot?”

Columns underneath said yes (eyewitnesses) and no (he wasn’t hurt). Statements from the police said nothing much (they couldn’t find a gun). Statements from onlookers, like the self-important gunshot expert, said Juliard had definitely been the object of an assassination attempt. He thought so and he was always right.

The consensus theory of the reporters (including Usher Rudd) was that resentment against Juliard was running high in the Orinda Nagle camp. The editor’s leader column didn’t believe that political assassination ever took place at so low a level. World leaders, perhaps. Unelected local candidates, never.

I walked through the town to the ring road looking for Rudd’s Repair Garage and found the staff unlocking their premises for the day. They had a large covered workshop and an even larger wire-fenced compound where jobs done or waiting stood in haphazard rows. The Range Rover was parked in that compound, sunlight already gleaming on its metallic paint.

I asked for, and reached, the manager, whose name was Basil Rudd. Thin, red-haired, freckled and energetic, his likeness to Usher Rudd made twins a possibility.

“Don’t ask,” he said, eyeing my newspaper. “He’s my cousin. I disown him, and if you’re out to be busy with your fists, you’ve reached the wrong man.”

“Well... I really came to collect that Range Rover. It’s my father’s.”

“Oh?” He blinked. “I’ll need proof of identity.”

I showed him a letter of authorization signed by my parent and also my driver’s license.

“Fair enough.” He opened a drawer, picked out a labeled ring bearing two keys and held them out for me to take. “Don’t forget to switch off the alarms. I’ll send the bill to Mr. Juliard’s party headquarters. OK?”

“Yes. Thank you. Was there anything wrong?”

He shrugged. “If there was, there isn’t now.” He consulted a spiked worksheet. “Oil change. General check. That’s all.”

“Do you think I could talk to whoever did the job?”

“Whatever for?”

“Er... I’ve got to drive my father around in that vehicle and I’ve never driven it before... and I thought I might get some tips about engine management... so I don’t overheat it by crawling along the roads canvassing door to door.”

Basil Rudd shrugged. “Ask for Terry. He did the work.”

I thanked him and sought out Terry, who gave three instant physical impressions: big, bald, belly. Brown overalls, grease-stained from his job.

He too eyed my newspaper. He spoke with venom in a powerful Dorset voice.

“Don’t mention Bobby bloody Rudd ’round here.”

I hadn’t been going to, but I said, “Why not?”

“He’ll listen to you and your missus in bed with one of them window-vibrating bugging contraptions and before you know it, never mind the sex, he’ll be printing what you said about the boss having his hand up a customer’s skirt when she brings her car in for the twentieth time to be overhauled, though there’s bugger all wrong with it in the first place. Got me sacked, Bobby did.”

“But,” I suggested, “you’re still here.”

“Yeah, see, Basil took me on because he loathes Bobby, who’s his cousin, see. It was over in Quindle I got sacked by Bobby’s dad, that’s Basil’s uncle, drunk half the time...” He broke off. “If it’s not to complain about Bobby Usher bleeding Rudd, what is it you want, lad?”

“I... er... you serviced my father’s Range Rover. What was wrong with it?”

“Apart from the fancy paintwork?” He scratched his shiny head. “Foreign body in the oil sump. I suppose you might say that. Nothing else. I gave it a good clean-out.”

“What sort of foreign body?”

He looked at me dubiously. “I don’t rightly know.”

“Well, um... how do you know it was there?”

He took his time in answering by starting at the beginning of his involvement. “A man in your party’s headquarters — said his name was Teck or some such — he phones Basil saying there might be something dicey about a fancy Range Rover they’d got there and to send someone over pronto to take a decko, so I went over there and this Mr. Teck gave me the keys and the Range Rover started at first touch, sweet as anything.”

I looked at him without comment.

“Yeah, well,” he said, scratching his bald head again. “This Teck guy said something about maybe someone took a potshot at your old man and to check that the Range Rover’s brakes hadn’t been mucked about with or anything, so I looked it all over and could see nothing wrong. No bombs, nothing like that, but anyway this Teck guy said to bring it here and do a thorough service, so I did.”

He stopped for effect. I said obligingly, “What did you find?”

“See, it was what I didn’t find.”

“I wish you’d explain.”

“No plug on the sump.”

“What?”

“Oil change. Routine service. I run the Range Rover over the inspection pit and I take a spanner to unscrew the sump plug to drain out the old oil, and there you are, no plug. No plug, I ask you. But there’s oil there, according to the dipstick. Normal. Full. So I run the engine a bit and the oil-pressure gauge reads normal, like it did on my way ‘round here, so there has to be oil circulating ’round the engine, see, so why, if the sump plug is missing, why hasn’t the oil all emptied out?”

“Well, why?”

“Because there’s something else plugging up the hole, that’s why.”

“A rag?” I suggested. “A wad of tissues?”

“Nothing like that, I don’t think. Something harder. Anyway, I poked a bit of wire into the hole and freed whatever was there and the oil poured out like it always does. Not filthy oil, mind you. It hadn’t been long since the last oil change.”

“So the plug, whatever it is, is still in the sump?”

He shrugged. “I dare say so. It won’t do much harm there. The sump drain hole’s not much bigger than a little finger.” He held up his own grimy hand. “It wasn’t a big plug, see.”

“Mm.” I hesitated. “Did you tell Basil Rudd about it?”

He shook his big head. “He’d gone home for the day when I put the work-done sheets in his office, and I didn’t think much of it. I found a new plug that fits the Range Rover and screwed it up tight. Then I filled up with clean oil, same as usual, and put the Range Rover out in the yard, where it is now. It’s all hunky-dory. You’ll have no trouble with it.”

“I’ll take it in a minute,” I said. “I’ll just go back into the office to see about settling up.”

I went into the office and asked Basil Rudd if I could telephone my father in the party headquarters and he obligingly held out the receiver to me with a be-my-guest invitation.

I said to my father, “Please, could you ask whoever it was who worked on your Range Rover last, if there was a normal plug on the oil-sump drain.” I relayed Terry’s finding and his solution to the problem.

Basil Rudd looked up sharply from a paper he was writing on and began to protest, but I smiled, said it was an unimportant inquiry, and waited for my father’s answer. He told me to stay right where I was and five minutes later was back on the line.

“My mechanic is very annoyed at any suggestion that there was any irregularity at all with any part of the Range Rover. He did a complete overhaul on Monday. So what is going on?”

“I don’t exactly know. It’s probably nothing.”

“Bring the Range Rover back. We need it today.”

“Yes,” I said.

I gave the receiver back to Basil Rudd and thanked him for the call.

“Just what is this all about?” he said.

“I don’t know enough,” I replied. “I haven’t been driving long. But I am concerned with keeping my father safe since the episode with the gun” — I waved the newspaper — “so I’m probably being fussy over nothing. But on its last overhaul there was an ordinary plug screwed into the sump drain, and yesterday there wasn’t.”

Basil Rudd showed first of all impatience and then anxiety, and finally stood up and came with me back to talk to Terry.

Terry, for a change, was scratching his brownoveralled belly.

I said, “I’m not complaining about anything here, and please don’t think I am. I do want to know what was plugging the sump, though, because I’m frankly scared of mysteries concerning anything to do with my father. So, please, how would you put a substitute plug in the drain hole, and most of all, why?”

The two motor men stood in silence, not knowing the answers.

“The oil was quite clean,” Terry said.

Another silence.

Basil Rudd said, “If you drain the new oil out again, and take the engine apart, you’ll find whatever the stopper was that Terry pushed through the sump, but that’s a very expensive procedure and not justified, I don’t think.”

Another silence.

“I’ll ask my father,” I said.

We trooped back to the office and I reported the last-resort expensive solution of dismantling the engine.

“Do nothing. Stay where you are,” my father commanded. “Just do nothing, and wait. Let me speak to Basil Rudd.”

The chitchat went on for several minutes. Basil Rudd said he thought the boy — meaning me — was making a hullabaloo over nothing much, but in the end he shrugged and said, “Yes, yes, all right.” He put down the receiver and said to me, “Your father is sending someone for the Range Rover. He wants you to stay here for now.”

Terry muttered that he had done a proper service on the Range Rover and no one could tell him different. Basil Rudd gave me a look of disfavor and said he couldn’t waste any more time, he had mountains of paperwork to see to. I didn’t exactly apologize, but I said I would wait outside in the Range Rover and walked peacefully across to where it stood in the wire-fenced compound. I disarmed the alarms, opened the door and sat behind the driving wheel, going through the systems and reading the instruction book.

I waited for over an hour until Basil Rudd appeared at the window beside me. I opened the door, stepped down to the ground and met the man accompanying the garage owner, who announced with a glint of irony that he had come to solve the mystery of the missing sump plug. His name, he said, was Foster Fordham. He looked more like a lawyer than a mechanic: no blue collar to his gray-and-white pin-striped shirt or his neat dark suit. He had straight, dark, well-brushed hair, light-framed glasses and polished black shoes.

Basil Rudd, turning away, asked Foster Fordham to report to him in the office before leaving and, watching Rudd’s departing back, Fordham, apparently bored to inertia, informed me that he was here to do my father a big favor, as normally he was a consultant engineer, not a hands-on minion.

I began to explain about the gunshot, but he interrupted that he knew all about it, and all about the missing plug.

“I work in car-racing circles,” he said. “My field is sabotage.”

I no doubt looked as inadequate as I felt in the face of his quiet assurance.

He said, “I understand that yesterday you were going to drive this vehicle from here to Quindle. How far is that?”

“About twelve miles.”

“Dual carriageway? Flat, straight roads?”

“Mostly single lane, a lot of sharp corners, and some of it uphill.”

He nodded. He said we would now take the road to Quindle and he would drive.

Perplexed but trusting, I climbed into the passenger seat beside him and listened to the healthy purr of the engine as he started up and drove off out of the garage compound onto the ring road around Hoopwestern, bound for Quindle. He drove fast in silence, watching the instrument panel as intently as the road, and said nothing until we had reached the top of the long steep incline halfway to what I thought was our destination. He stopped up there however and, still without explaining, did a U-turn and drove straight back to Rudd’s garage.

Cars flashed past, appearing fast towards us from blind comers, as they had the day before. Fordham drove faster than I’d felt safe doing in Crystal’s car, but if his field was racing, that was hardly surprising.

At the garage he told Terry to drain the engine oil into a clean container. Terry said the oil was too hot to handle. Fordham agreed to wait a little, but insisted that the oil should still be hot when it was drained.

“Why?” Terry asked. “It’s clean. I did the oil change yesterday.”

Fordham didn’t answer. Eventually, wearing heavy gloves, Terry unscrewed the sump plug and let the hot oil drain out as requested into a clean plastic five-gallon container. Fordham had him put the five-gallon container into the luggage space at the back of the Range Rover and then suggested he should screw the sump plug back into place and refill the engine with fresh, cool oil.

Terry signaled exasperation with his eyebrows but did as he was asked. Mr. Fordham, calm throughout, then told me that he had finished his investigation and suggested we say farewell to Basil Rudd and return in the Range Rover to my father’s headquarters. Basil Rudd, of course, wanted to know reasons. Fordham told him with great politeness that he would receive a written report, and meanwhile not to worry, all was well.

Fordham drove composedly to the parking lot outside of my father’s headquarters, and with me faithfully following, walked into the offices, where my father was sitting with Mervyn Teck discussing tactics.

My father stood at the sight of us and limped outside with Fordham to the Range Rover. Through the window I watched them talking earnestly, then Fordham took the plastic container of oil out of the Range Rover, put it into the trunk of a Mercedes standing nearby, climbed into the driver’s seat and neatly departed.

My father, returning, told Mervyn cheerfully that there was now nothing wrong with the Range Rover and it could safely be driven all around the town.

We finally set off. I drove, feeling my way cautiously through the gears, learning the positive message of the four-wheel drive. My father sat beside me, accompanied by his walking stick. Mervyn Teck, carrying a megaphone, sat in the rear seat, squeezing his lumpy knees together to allow more space for two volunteer helpers, thin bittersweet Lavender and motherly Faith.

The rear-seaters knew their drill from much past practice, and I with eye-opening wonderment became acquainted with the hardest graft in politics, the door-to-door begging for a “yes” vote.

The first chosen residential street consisted of identical semi-detached houses with clipped garden-defining hedges and short concrete drives up to firmly closed garage doors. Some of the front windows were adorned with stickers simply announcing BETHUNE: he had worked this land before us.

“This road is awash with floaters,” Mervyn said with rare amusement. “Let’s see what we can do about turning the tide our way.”

Directing me to stop the vehicle, he untucked himself from his seat belt and, standing in the open air, began to exhort the invisible residents through the reverberating megaphone, to vote JULIARD, JULIARD, JULIARD.

I found it odd to have my name bouncing off the house fronts, but the candidate himself nodded with smiling approval.

Lavender and Faith followed Mervyn out of the car, each of them carrying a bundle of stickers printed JULIARD in slightly larger letters than BETHUNE. Taking one side of the road each, they began ringing front-door bells and knocking knockers and, where they got no response, tucking a sticker through the letter box.

If a door was opened to them they smiled and pointed to the Range Rover from where my father would limp bravely up the garden path to put on his act, at which he was clearly terrific. I crawled up the road in low gear, my father limped uncomplainingly, Mervyn activated his megaphone and Lavender and Faith wasted not a leaflet. In our slow wake we left friendly waves and a few JULIARDs in windows. By the end of the street I was bored to death, but it seemed Lavender and Faith both reveled in persuasion tactics and were counting the road a victory for their side.

After two more long sweeps through suburbia (in which at least one baby got kissed) we respited for a late sandwich lunch in a pub.

“If ever you get invited into someone’s home,” my father said (as he had been invited five or six times that morning), “you go into the sitting room and you say ‘Oh, what an attractive room!’ even if you think it’s hideous.”

Lavender, Faith and Mervyn all nodded, and I said, “That’s cynical.”

“You’ve a lot to learn.”

We were sitting by a window. I looked through it to the Range Rover parked outside in plain view and reckoned that one way or another I actually had learned a lot that morning, and that what I’d learned had probably saved a good many votes.

My father, as if following my thoughts, said lightly, “We’ll talk about it later,” but it wasn’t until we were changing before going to the Town Hall debate that he would discuss Foster Fordham.

By then I’d persuaded Mervyn to arrange a securely locked overnight garage for the Range Rover, backed by my casual parent who said mildly, “The boy’s got a point, Mervyn. It might be more satisfactory for us all. No harm, anyway, in keeping it safe from thieves,” and as the car belonged to my father himself and not to the party, he had his way.

“Foster Fordham wasn’t sure how much you understood,” he said, combing through his tightly curled dark hair and leaving it much as it had been before. “He was surprised you didn’t ask him questions.”

“Terry — the mechanic — did ask. Fordham wouldn’t answer.”

“So what do you conclude it was all about?”

“Well... if you or I or anyone else had driven the Range Rover yesterday towards Quindle, it would quite likely have crashed. Or, at least, I think so.”

My father put down his comb and with stillness said, “Go on.”

I said, “I do think the bullet that came so near us was deliberately aimed at you, and even if it hadn’t killed you, it would have stopped your campaign if you’d been badly injured. But all the town could see that all you’d done was twist your ankle. So if anyone was looking around for another way to put a stopper on you, there was the Range Rover, just standing there unguarded all night in the parking lot, conspicuously yours and painted with silver and gold to attract attention.”

“Yes.”

“When I was taking driving lessons, which was mostly in the Easter holidays, I read a lot of motoring magazines...”

“I thought you were supposed to be revising for your A levels, your university entrance exams.”

“Um... I was riding for Sir Vivian, too. I mean, I can think in algebra. I just had to make sure I understood all the exam questions that have been set before, set in the past. I don’t mean to sound big-headed, really I don’t, but I had sort of a lot of spare mental time, so I read the motor magazines. I didn’t know you had a Range Rover — but I read about them. I read about their anti-thief devices. So when your Range Rover had stood quiet in the parking lot all night, and you had the only keys to disarm the screech alarms, then if anyone had done any harm it had to have been from outside... or underneath...” I tapered off, feeling silly, but he waved for me to go on.

“I thought the brake fluid might have been drained so that the brakes wouldn’t work,” I said. “I thought the tires might have been slashed so that you’d have a blowout when you were going fast. Things come whizzing ’round comers on that road to Quindle... you wouldn’t have much chance in a car out of control, but a Range Rover is pretty well built, like a tank — so you might be unhurt in a crash, but you might kill the people you crashed into... or at least injure them badly... and that would stop you being elected, wouldn’t it?”

My father took his time in moving, and in answering. “It wasn’t the brakes or the tires,” he said.

“It was the engine oil.”

He nodded. “Tell me what you think.”

I said, “I think Fordham knew what was wrong before he came. He said he was an expert in sabotage in motor racing, and nothing about the Range Rover surprised him. It must have seemed pretty elementary to him.”

My father, smiling, said, “I’ve known him a long time. So, what did he tell me?”

This is some sort of test, I thought. I could only guess at answers; but anyhow, I guessed. “Someone unscrewed the sump plug and removed it, and stuffed up the hole so that the oil couldn’t all run out.”

“Go on.”

“The stopper was something that would fall out later, so the oil would all drain out of the engine when it was going along, and the engine would seize up solid, and as it’s a four-wheel drive you wouldn’t be able to steer and you would be like a block of stone in the middle of the road.”

“Not bad.”

“But Terry — the mechanic — pushed the substitute plug right through into the sump like a cork in a bottle, which I honestly don’t think he should have done, and screwed in a new plug before he refilled with clean oil... like I told you on the phone.”

“Mm. So what was the substitute plug made of?” I’d been thinking about it while we drove around the suburbs. I said hesitantly, “To begin with, I thought it would be something chemical that could react with the oil and make it like jelly, or something, so that it couldn’t be pumped ’round the pistons and they would seize up in the cylinders, but that can’t have been right as the plug was in the sump when Foster Fordham drove fast towards Quindle and deliberately made the engine very hot, and he insisted on Terry draining out the clean oil again when it was still hot, so I thought that perhaps the temporary stopper had melted, and Fordham has taken the oil away to see what was in it.”

“Yes,” my father said.

“Because if it had melted away in the sump drain hole when we were on our way to Quindle yesterday, it would have taken only about a minute for all the oil to drain out and ruin the engine. When the oil was hot this morning, when Terry drained it, it ran out as thin as water.”

“Fordham says it’s an old trick. So old, it’s never attempted now in motor racing.”

“Well... what was the plug made of?”

“What would you think?”

I hesitated. “It had to be pretty simple. I mean, almost spur-of-the-moment, after the bullet had missed.”

“So?”

“So how about shoving a candle up the spout, and cutting it off? How about wax?”

My father peacefully tied his unexuberantly striped tie. “Foster Fordham,” he said, “will let us know.”

It was extraordinary, I thought, as we entered the Town Hall for the Bethune face-to-face confrontation, how many people I’d come to recognize in only two days.

Orinda was there, torturing herself, wearing a very short gold dress with a black feather boa that twisted around her neck and arms like the fluffy snake it was named for, and demanded admiring attention. Her green eyes flashed. An emerald-and-diamond bracelet sparkled on her wrist. No one could be unaware of her vibrant attendance.

A pace behind her, as ever, stood her shadow, whose name I remembered with an effort was A. L. Wyvern. A. L., I thought, Anonymous Lover Wyvern. He had looked uninteresting in a dinner jacket at the Sleeping Dragon dinner: in the Town Hall, in a gray suit and a blue shirt, he filled space without making an impression.

Large Mrs. Kitchens, eagle-eyed, in navy blue with purple frills, held tight to “my Leonard’s” arm and succeeded in preventing him from beaming his sickly mustache into Orinda’s airspace. Mrs. Kitchens gave me a cheery wave and a leer — and I would not let her embarrass me.

Mervyn, of course, had arrived with Crystal at his side to take notes. The three witches were helping to seat people, and Dearest Polly, at the sight of us, made an enthusiastic little run in our direction, and bore off my father like a trophy to show him the lectern behind which he was to stand on the platform. Dearest Polly, it seemed, was stage-managing the evening.

As if with a flourish of trumpets the Bethune camp arrived. There was a stir and a rustle in the hall and a sprinkle of clapping. Hooray for adultery, I thought.

Paul Bethune, seen for the first time, was a portly and portentous-looking fifty or so with a double chin and the thinning hair that might in the end confound his chances more thoroughly than a love child. He was accompanied by a busy Mervyn Teck look-alike, who was indeed his agent, and by a nervous woman who looked at the world in general in upward glances from under her eyebrows. She was shown to a seat in the front row of spectators and Dearest Polly, beckoning to me strongly, introduced me to Paul Bethune’s wife, Isobel.

Isobel emitted severe discomfort at having me to sit beside her, but I gave her my best harmless grin and told her she couldn’t want to avoid being there more than I did myself.

“I’ve only just left school,” I said. “I don’t know anything about politics. I understand this is the third campaign for you and Mr. Bethune, so you probably don’t find it as confusing as I do.”

“Oh dear,” she said. “You’re such a child, you can’t possibly know...”

“I’m nearly eighteen.”

She smiled weakly, then suddenly stiffened to immobility, her face pale with a worse disaster than my proximity.

I said, “What’s the matter, Mrs. Bethune?”

“That man,” she murmured. “Oh God.”

I looked where she was looking, and saw Basil Rudd.

“That’s not Usher Rudd, the newspaperman,” I said, understanding. “That’s his cousin. That’s Basil Rudd. He mends cars.”

“It’s him. That beastly writer.”

“No, Mrs. Bethune. It’s his cousin. They look alike, but that’s Basil.”

To my absolute horror, she began to cry. I looked around urgently for help, but Polly was elbow-deep in wires to microphones and television cameras, and Paul Bethune, eyeing his wife’s distress, turned away deliberately with a sharply displeased grimace.

Unkind bastard, I thought. Stupid, too. A show of fondness might have earned him votes.

Isobel Bethune stumbled to her feet, searching unsuccessfully in her well-worn black handbag for something to mop up tears, and I, clumsily but with pity, offered her an arm to hold on to while I cleared a path towards the door.

She talked all the way in broken, half-intelligible explanations. “Paul insisted I come... I didn’t want to, but he said I might as well stab him in the back if I didn’t... and now he’ll be so furious, but what does he expect me to do after all those pictures in the paper of him and that girl... and she had nothing on, well, next to nothing. He wants me to smile and pretend I don’t mind, but he makes me look a fool and I suppose I am, but I didn’t know about that girl until it was in the paper, and he doesn’t deny it. He says what did I expect...”

We went through the entrance hall and out into the fresh air with everyone arriving and staring at Isobel’s tears with hungry curiosity. At seven-thirty in the evening merciful dusk was still some time ahead, so I veered away from the entrance and she, wholly without resistance, came with me around the nearest corner.

The Town Hall formed one of the sides of the cobbled square. The Sleeping Dragon took up an adjoining side, with shops (and party headquarters) along the other two. Wide alleyways, which once had been open roads, led away from every corner, and on one of them lay the main Town Hall entrance doors. Along the side of the Town Hall that faced onto the square, there was a sort of cloister — a covered walkway with pillars and benches giving shelter and rest. Isobel Bethune crumpled onto one of the benches and, after a craven moment of wanting to ditch her, I sat beside her and wondered what to say.

I needn’t have worried. She compulsively went on sobbing and pouring out her unhappiness and resentment at the unfairness of things. I half listened, watching the wretchedness that twisted her lipsticked mouth, and seeing in her swelling eyes and gray-flecked hair that not long ago she’d been quite pretty, before Usher Rudd had taken a photographic sledgehammer to her complacent world.

Her sons were just as bad, she sobbed. Fifteen, seventeen, they sulked and argued with everything she said and complained nonstop. If Paul got elected it would at least take him away from home more, and, oh dear, she didn’t mean to say that, but it was either him or her — and where would she go? — she was at her wit’s end, she said.

She was on the point of a full breakdown, I thought. I had been only about twelve when my aunt Susan had screamed and yelled and slammed doors, had driven the family car across the lawn into a hedge and been taken to hospital, and had then got worse when her second son left to join a rap group and grew a beard and got AIDS. My uncle Harry had gone to my father for help, and somehow or other my parent had restored general order and put some balance back in Susan; and if it was never a rapturously happy household after that, there was no actual abuse.

I asked Isobel Bethune, “Do your sons want Mr. Bethune to be elected?”

“They just grunt. You can’t get a word out of them.” She sniffed, wiping her eyes with her fingers. “Paul thinks he would have beaten Orinda easily, but he says George Juliard is different. Oh! I’d forgotten, you’re his son! I shouldn’t talk to you like this. Paul will be so cross.”

“Don’t tell him.”

“No... would you like a drink?” She looked across at The Sleeping Dragon. “Brandy?”

I shook my head but she said she badly needed a nerve-steadier and she wouldn’t drink alone, so I went across the square with her and drank Coke while she dealt with a double Rémy Martin on ice. We sat at a small table in the bar, which was Friday-night busy with couples.

Both of Isobel’s hands were shaking.

She left me to go and “tidy up,” returning with combed hair, freshened lipstick and powdered eyelids, still clutching a tissue but much more in control.

She ordered more brandy. I said no to Coke.

“I’m not going back to the Town Hall,” she said. “I’ll walk home from here. It’s not all that far.”

When she picked up her refilled glass, the ice still clattered and shook in her grasp.

“Could I get you a taxi?” I asked.

She leaned across the table and put her hand on mine. “You’re a nice boy,” she said, “whoever your father is.”

There was a familiar bright flash and the whine of a film winding on and there, a few feet away, stood the other Rudd, Bobby Usher himself, grinning triumphantly and radiating ill nature in megawatts.

Isobel Bethune lunged furiously to her feet but Usher Rudd, quick at getaways, was out of the door before she could draw breath to shout. “I hate him,” she said, again near to tears. “I’ll kill him.”

I asked the barman to phone for a taxi.

“Mrs. Bethune still owes for the drinks.”

“Oh.”

“I haven’t any money,” she said. “Pay for me, there’s a dear.”

I salvaged from my pockets the remains of the money my father had given me in Brighton and handed her all of it.

“You pay the man for the drinks. I’m not old enough yet to buy alcohol and I’m not getting into that sort of trouble.”

Both the barman and Isobel, openmouthed, completed the sale.