10 lb Penalty

Six

At the end of the afternoon I glumly drove the Range Rover back to Polly’s house in the woods, feeling that I’d wasted all her planning and not only failed to profit from an unrepeatable opportunity but had positively made things worse.

By the time Orinda and I had recrossed the course (her heels were sticking worse than ever) and regained the stewards’ room, the duke had disappeared again towards his duties. Orinda watched the third race from the viewing balcony leading out of the luncheon room, her back relentlessly turned towards me, her manner forbidding conversation.

A horse carrying a 7-lb. penalty won the race. Orinda hadn’t backed it.

When the duke returned, all smiles at the sight of her, she thanked him charmingly for his hospitality and left. She said nothing to my father or to Polly or to myself, ignoring our existence, and I survived the last three races wishing I were smaller, richer, and at the very least a genius. Settling for the obvious privileges I had seemed dreary compared with the fairy tale lost.

When Polly invited us into her house my father accepted at once.

“Cheer up,” he commanded to my silent reluctance. “No one wins all the time. Say something. You haven’t said anything for hours.”

“All right... Orinda said Usher Rudd wants to know if I’m your catamite.”

My father spluttered into the gin that Polly had poured him.

Polly said, “What’s a catamite?” but my father knew.

I said, “Usher Rudd’s trying to prove I’m not your son. If you have a marriage certificate, put it in a bank vault.”

“And your birth certificate, where’s that?”

“With my stuff at Mrs. Wells’s.”

He frowned. My things hadn’t followed me so far. He borrowed Polly’s phone and called my ex-landlady forthwith. “She’s packed everything,” he reported, “but the carriers I ordered haven’t turned up. I’ll see to it again on Monday.”

“My bicycle is at the stables.”

He caught some sense of the wreck he’d made of my aspirations, but I also saw quite clearly that he still expected me to face reality thoroughly and grow up.

“Tough it out,” he said.

“Yes.”

Polly looked from one of us to the other and said, “The boy’s doing his best for you, George.”

Leaving her in her house, I drove the Range Rover back to Hoopwestern, familiar at last with the four-wheel drive and the weight and size. I disembarked my parent at a church hall (directions from Mervyn) where he was due to meet and thank the small army of volunteers working for him and the party’s sake throughout the whole scattered area of the constituency. The volunteers had brought their families and their neighbors, and also tea, beer, wine and cake to sustain them and my father’s inexhaustible enthusiasm to energize them for the next three weeks.

“My son... this is my son.” He presented me over and over again, and I shook hands and smiled and smiled and chatted up old ladies and talked football with shaky knowledge and racing with piercing regret.

Mervyn moved from group to group with plans and lists. This ward would be canvassed tomorrow, that ward on Monday: leaflets... posters... visits... leave not one of seventy thousand voters unaware of JULIARD.

Three more weeks of it... Even with the spice of looking out for stray attacks, the campaign at that point seemed more like purgatory than appealing.

But I’d said I would do it... and I would.

I ate chocolate cake. Still no pizza.

At good-bye time I collected the Range Rover from where I’d parked it in a nearby road and was as sure as possible that no one had tampered with it that evening.

Foster Fordham had given me simple instructions on the telephone. “Always take with you a carton of dishwasher powder in a box with a spout. When you park the vehicle, sprinkle a thin line of powder on the ground from behind each front wheel back to the rear wheel on the same side. If anyone has moved the vehicle or wriggled under it in your absence, the powder will tell you. Understand?”

“Yes. Thank you.”

“Always set the alarms carefully, and disable them and start the vehicle from a distance, however short a time you’ve been away.”

I’d followed his instructions faithfully, but our sump-plug merchant had tried no other tricks. I ferried my father safely from the church hall back to the bow-fronted headquarters and left him there with Mervyn, the two of them endlessly discussing tactics, while I housed the Range Rover in its lockup and finally ran a pizza to earth in the local take-away.

Mervyn and my father absentmindedly ate half of it. Mervyn laid out dozens of stickers and leaflets in piles, ready for distribution. Yes, he said when I asked him, of course by-elections were wildly exciting, they were the peaks in his busy life. And there were the final touches to be arranged for the fund-raising fete organized for next week — such a pity Orinda wasn’t in charge of it this time...

I yawned and climbed the narrow stairs, leaving my two elders to lock up: and I woke in the night to a strong smell of smoke.

Smoke.

I sat bolt upright in bed.

Without much more than instinct I disentangled my legs from the sheets and violently shook the unconscious lump on the neighboring mattress, yelling at him, “We’re on fire” as I leapt to the half-open door to see if what I said was actually, devastatingly true.

It was.

Down the stairs there were fierce yellow leaping flames, devouring and roaring. Smoke funneled up in growing billows. Ahead of me the sitting-room blazed yellow with flames from the rear office underneath.

Gasping at once for breath in the smoke, I swiveled fast on one foot and jumped into the bathroom. If I switched on the taps, I thought, the bath and the wash-basin would overflow and help to drown the flames: I pushed the stoppers into the plug holes and opened all the taps to maximum, and I swept a large bath towel into the toilet bowl and pulled the flush, and, whisking the sopping towel into the bedroom, I closed the door against the smoke and laid the wet towel along the bottom of the door in a sort of speed near to frenzy.

“The window,” I yelled. “The bloody window’s stuck.”

The window was stuck shut with layers of paint and had been annoying my father for days. We were both wearing only underpants, and the air was growing hot. “We can’t go down the stairs.” Doesn’t he understand? I thought. He smoothly picked up the single bedroom chair and smashed it against the window. Glass broke, but the panes were small and the wooden frames barely cracked. We were above the bow windows facing the square. A second smash with the chair burst through the sticky layers of old paint and swung open both sides of the window — but underneath the fire had already eaten through the bay window’s roof and was shooting up the wall.

The bay window of the charity shop next door blazed also with manic energy. If anything, the fire next door was hotter and older and had reached the roof, with scarlet and gold sparks shooting into the sky above our heads.

I scrambled over to the door, thinking the stairs the only way out after all, but even if the wet towel was still holding back the worst of the smoke it was useless against flame. The doorknob was now too hot to touch. The whole door had fire on the far side.

I shouted with fierceness, “We’re burning. The door’s on fire.”

My father stared at me briefly across the room.

“We’ll have to take our chances and jump. You first.”

He put the damaged chair against the window wall and motioned me to climb up and leap out as far as I could.

“You go,” I said.

There were people now in the square and voices yelling, and the raucous siren of the fire engine coming nearer.

“Hurry,” my father said. “Don’t bloody argue. Jump.”

I stood on the chair and held on to the window frame. The paint on it scorched my hands.

“Jump!”

I couldn’t believe it — he was struggling into shirt and trousers and zipping up his fly.

“Go on. Jump!”

I put a bare foot on the frame, pulled myself up and leapt out with every scrap of muscle power... with strong legs and desperation: and I sailed through the flames from the bay window and missed the front burning edge of it by terrifying inches and crashed down onto the dark cobbled ground with a head-stunning, disorientating impact. I heard people yelling and felt hands grabbing me to pull me away from the fire and I was choking with smoke and winded by hitting the unyielding ground and rolling, and also fighting to free myself from the firmly clutching hands to help to cushion my father’s fall when he jumped down after me. I had no strength. Sat on the ground. Couldn’t even speak.

Incredibly there were camera flashes. People were recording our extreme danger, our closeness to dying. I felt helplessly angry. Outraged. Near to sobbing. Illogical, I dare say.

Voices were screaming to my father to jump and voices were screaming to my father not to jump, to wait for the bellowing fire engine now charging across the square, scattering onlookers and spilling people in yellow helmets.

“Wait, wait,” people screamed as firemen released their swiveling ladder to extend it to my father, but he was standing up silhouetted in the window with a reddish glow behind him. He was standing on the chair — and the door behind him was burning.

Before the ladder reached him there was an outburst of bright, sunlike flame in the room at his back and he stood on the window frame and threw himself out as I had done, flung himself through the climbing fire of the bow windows below into the darkness beyond, knowing he might break his neck and smash his skull, knowing the ground was there but unable to judge how far away: but too near. Break-your-bones near.

A camera flashed.

Two men in yellow suits like moon suits were sprinting, heavy-gloved hands outstretched, dragging as they went a circular trampoline thing for catching jumpers. No time to position it. They simply ran, and my father crashed down into them, all the figures sprawling, arms and legs flying. People crowded to help them and hid the tangle from my sight but my father’s legs had been moving with life, and he had shoes on, which he hadn’t had upstairs.

I was covered in smoky dirt and bleeding from a few cobble-induced scrapes and grazes, and I had tears running down my face, although I didn’t know I was crying: and I was dazed still and was coughing and had blisters forming on my fingers and feet, but none of it mattered. Noise and confusion filled my head. I’d aimed to keep my father safe from danger and I hadn’t even contemplated a smoke alarm.

His voice said, “Ben?”

I looked up woozily. He was standing above me; he was smiling. How could he?

Men in yellow suits unrolled hoses and poured gallons from the tanker onto the killing bow fronts. There was steam and smoke and unquenched flame: and there were people putting a red blanket around my bare shoulders and telling me not to worry. I wasn’t sure where they had come from, or what I didn’t have to worry about.

I wasn’t actually sure of anything.

“Ben,” my father said in my ear, “you’re concussed.”

“Mm?”

“They say your head hit the ground. Can you hear me?”

“No smoke alarm. My fault...”

“Ben!” He shook me. People told him not to.

“I’ll get you elected,” I said.

“Christ.”

People’s familiar faces loomed into my orbit and went away again. I thought it extraordinary that they were walking around fully dressed in the middle of the night but at one point learned that it was barely twenty minutes past eleven, not five to four. I’d gone early to bed and jumped out of the window wearing only my watch and my underpants and got the time wrong.

Amy was there, wringing her hands and weeping. Amy crying for the charity gifts lost to ashes, the ugly whatnot gone forever, still unsold. What’s a whatnot, Amy? An étagère, you know, an upright set of little shelves for filling an odd corner, bearing plates and photographs and whatnot.

And bullets?

“Oh, dear,” she said. “I left the bullet in my awful cardigan in the shop, and now I’ve lost it, but never mind, it was only a lump of old lead.”

Mrs. Leonard Kitchens patted my shoulder reassuringly. “Don’t you worry, boy, there was nothing in those old shops but junk and paper. Leaflets. Nothing! My Leonard’s here somewhere. Have you seen him? Likes a good fire, does my Leonard, but the fun’s all over now. I want to go home.”

Usher Rudd stalked his prey backwards, framing his picture, stepping back and clicking. He grinned over my blanket, took time to focus, aimed his lens.

Flash.

The cameraman from the local TV station arrived with his brighter light that was still outwatted by fire.

Mervyn wrung his hands over the lost heaps of JULIARDS. He’d barely been home half an hour before someone had phoned to warn him the charity shop was on fire.

Crystal Harley knelt beside me, dabbing bloody trickles with tissues and said worriedly, “Do you think I’d better come into work tomorrow?”

Paul and Isobel Bethune illicitly drove into the pedestrian-only precinct. Emergencies made new rules, the local councillor said, bustling towards my father, presenting a surface of urgent concern, all camaraderie for him and with hail-fellow greetings individually for the firemen.

Isobel asked me weakly if I was all right.

“Of course he’s not,” Crystal snapped. “He jumped through fire and hit the ground. What do you expect?”

“And... er... his father?”

“His father will win the seat,” Crystal said.

God bless politics, I thought.

“Paul was out at a meeting,” Isobel said. “He came home to collect me when he heard about the fire, to see if there was anything I could do to help. It always looks better if I’m with him, he says.”

Water plumed out of the huge appliance and sizzled on the flames and ran out of the building again, soaking the cobbles. I and my red blanket dripped and chilled.

Another vast tanker in the car park at the rear raised soaring fountains above the roof so that the two arcs of glittering Niagara met and married and fell together as monstrous rain. Leaflets and junk a fiery furnace; two vulnerable organisms shivering outside.

The yellow-helmets prodigally aimed their hoses at the still-dark buildings next to the blazing shops and, in time, inevitably, the ravaging tongues of fire ran out of fuel and began to diminish, to whisper instead of roar, to give up the struggle and leave the battlefield so that what fell from the sky into the square was no longer sparks but hot, clinging ash, and what assaulted the senses wasn’t heat but the acrid after-smell of burning.

Someone fetched the doctor who had seen to my father’s ankle three days earlier; he peered into my eyes with bright lights and into my ears and felt the bump on my head and bound up blisters in huge padded dressings so that they wouldn’t burst and get infected, and he agreed with my father that all a healthy boy needed was to see him in the morning.

My father solved the interim by enlisting the sympathy of the manager of The Sleeping Dragon, who gave us a bedroom and whose wife found me some clothes.

“You poor dears... you poor dears...” She mothered us, kind, but enjoying it, and both she and her husband happily welcomed the reporters from the London dailies who thronged through the doors the next day.

Usher Rudd’s admittedly brilliant photograph of my father in mid-leap with the flaming window behind him made the front pages, not only of the Hoopwestern Gazette and the next edition of the Quindle Diary (“Juliard Jinx”) but of every major paper in the land (“Juliard Jumps”) and hot on the heels of the factual news came endless comment and criticism and picking-to-pieces.

People will always tell you what you should have done. People will tell you what they would have done if they had woken in the night with fire underneath them. People will say that absolutely the first thing to do was call the fire brigade, and no one could be bothered to say how do I call the brigade when the only telephone is downstairs, surrounded by flames? How do you call a fire brigade when the telephone line has melted?

Everyone can think logically afterwards, but in the heat and the smell and the noise and the danger, analytical reasoning is more or less out of the question.

People tend to think that wildly unreasonable behavior in terrifying circumstances can be called “panic,” and forgiven, but it’s not so much panic, a form of ultimate illogical fear, but a lack of time to think things through.

Perhaps my father and I would have done differently if we had been presented with the situation as a theoretical exercise with a correct and an incorrect solution.

Perhaps we should have thrown the mattresses out of the window as a possible way of breaking our fall. Perhaps, if we could have got them through the window. As it was, we both nearly died and, as it was, we both lived, but more by luck than reason.

Don’t waste time with clothes, they’ll tell you. Better go naked into this world than clothed into the next. But they — “they,” whoever they are — haven’t jumped in front of the media’s sharpened lenses.

I thought afterwards that I should at least have dashed into the burning sitting room for my jacket and jockey’s helmet, instead of bothering with the taps. Also I should have wrapped towels around my hands and feet before grasping the window frame.

But I don’t think my father ever regretted the near-to-lethal seconds he spent in putting on his shirt and trousers. He knew in some way even in that life-or-death split second, that a photograph of him jumping half-naked from the flames would haunt his whole career. He knew, even in that fraught moment, that an orderly presentation was everything. Not even the worst that Usher Rudd could dredge up in the future ever showed George Juliard as anything but a fast-thinking headliner who was at his very best — who put his shoes on — in a crisis.

The police investigation sauntered upwards from Joe, whose mother drove a school bus, to higher ranks at county level, but the firefighters couldn’t swear the two bow-fronts had been torched and no one found a .22 rifle to match the lost-again bullet, and Foster Fordham’s report on wax in the Range Rover’s sump was judged inconclusive.

George Juliard might have been the target of three attempts on his candidature, if not on his life, but again he might not. There were no obvious suspects.

In the August doldrums for news, London editors gave the puzzle two full days of wide coverage. George Juliard shone on television nationwide. Every single voter in the Hoopwestern constituency knew who JULIARD was.

While my father dealt with publicity people and Mervyn Teck drove around like an agitated bluebottle searching for inexpensive substitute headquarters, I spent most of the Sunday sitting in an armchair by the window of our Sleeping Dragon room, letting bruises and grazes heal themselves, and looking across the square at the burned-out building opposite.

From somewhere up here, I thought, from somewhere here among the many hanging baskets of geraniums (her Leonard, the nurseryman, had designed them, Mrs. Kitchens had told me with pride), from among all these big clusters of scarlet pompoms and little blue flowers whose name I didn’t know, and from among the fluffy white flowers that filled and rounded the bright living displays decorating the whole long frontage of The Sleeping Dragon, from somewhere up here someone had aimed a .22 rifle at my father.

The marksman probably hadn’t been in this room given to us in the night, which was much farther along towards the Town Hall than the main door of the hotel from which we’d walked. A shot from where I sat would have had to take into account that the target wasn’t walking straight ahead but moving sideways. A stalker’s shot, but not a stalker’s gun.

A ricochet could of course take a bullet anywhere, but I thought it unlikely that a ricochet from where I sat would have turned and hit the charity shop.

At one point, shuffling on the padded blisters, I explored the length of the hotel’s second floor, glimpsing the square through an open doorway or two and coming to a little lounge area furnished with armchairs and small tables that I reckoned lay directly above the front hall and main door, accessible to the world. Straight ahead through the window from there was the unmarked path I’d taken with my father across the cobbles.

Anyone... anyone... if one had the nerve, could have stood among the floor-length curtains, opened the window, rested the barrel of a .22 on the windowsill and shot through the geraniums and the warm night.

My father, interested, asked the manager for the names of the people sleeping in the bedrooms on Wednesday night, but although the register was freely opened, no one familiar appeared.

“Nice try, Ben,” my father sighed; and the police had the same nice try in due course, with similar results.

By Monday morning Mervyn had rented an empty shop in a side street and borrowed a desk for Crystal and some folding chairs. The campaign hiccuped for two days while he cajoled his friendly neighborhood printer into replacement leaflet and poster production at grand-prix speed and near-to-cost prices, but by late Tuesday afternoon the indefatigable witches, Faith, Marge and Lavender, had turned the empty shop into a fully working office complete with teapot and mobile phone.

On Monday and Tuesday George Juliard filled the newspapers, and enlivened some chat shows, and on Wednesday morning a miracle happened.

Mervyn had sticky-taped a new large-scale map onto the wall and was pointing out to me the roads I should drive along (feet OK by now) for Faith and Lavender to ring as yet untroubled doorbells. In the absence of a megaphone (burned) I would please occasionally toot the horn, just enough to announce our presence but not enough, he lectured me, to anger anyone trying to get a baby to sleep. The mothers of babies (he wagged a finger at me) swayed Xs in the polls like pendulums. Kiss a baby, win a vote. A hundred thousand politicians couldn’t all be historically wrong.

“I’ll kiss every baby in sight,” I promised recklessly.

He frowned at me, never one to take a joke. I was reminded of my father’s most recent lesson: “Never, ever make a joke to the police, they have no sense of humor. Never make a political joke, it will always be considered an insult. Always remember that umbrage can be taken at the lift of an eyebrow. Remember that if offense can possibly be given, it will be.”

I’d gazed at my father. “Are people that silly?”

“Silly,” he said with mock severity, “isn’t a word you should ever apply to people. They may be totally stupid, in fact, but if you call them silly you’ve lost their vote.”

“And you want silly people to vote for you?”

He laughed. “Don’t make jokes.”

He had gone to London on Wednesday morning when the miracle happened. There were just Mervyn, Crystal, Faith, Marge, Lavender and me in the makeshift office, just the bunch of us putting the best face possible on the lack of computer (for the totals spent on tea bags), copier (schedules for volunteers) and fax (reports from distant galaxies like Quindle).

Orinda walked in.

All business stopped.

She wore pale citrus green: pants, jacket and headband. Gold chains. She carried, beside the black lizard handbag, a substantial roll of papers.

She looked around the bare room, smiled faintly at Marge and fixed her gaze on me.

“I want to talk to you,” she said calmly. “Outside.”

I followed where she led. We stood on the sidewalk in the sun, with shoppers passing by.

“Since Saturday,” she announced, “I have been considering things. On Sunday morning, at half past eight or so, a newspaperman appeared at my house in an invasive procedure I believe is called ‘door stepping.’ ”

She paused. I nodded faintly.

“He asked if I was glad or sorry that you hadn’t been burned to death. You and your father, that is.”

“Oh.”

“It was the first I’d heard about the fire.”

“I’m surprised no one had phoned you.”

“I unplug the telephone when I sleep. I find it hard to sleep in any case.”

I said “Oh” again, vaguely.

“The journalist wanted to know my opinion of the information he’d been given that close-to-death attacks had been made on George Juliard so that he would have to retire from the candidacy, clearing the way for my return.”

She paused, studying my face, and continued. “I see that that thought isn’t new to you.”

“No, but I don’t think you did it.”

“Why not?”

“You’re hurt. You’re furious. But you wouldn’t murder.”

“When will you be eighteen?”

“In ten days.”

“Then consider this a coming-of-age present.” She thrust the roll of papers into my hands. “This is for you. It is because of you...” She stopped abruptly, swallowing. “Use it in any way you like.”

With curiosity I unrolled the stiff sheets, having to hold them wide to prevent them rolling up again. The top one, in very large capital letters, read ORINDA NAGLE SAYS VOTE FOR JULIARD.

My mouth, I know, fell open.

“There are ten of them,” she said simply. “They’re all the same. I had them printed this morning. They’ll print dozens, if you like.”

“Orinda...” I was all but speechless.

“You showed me... at the races...” she began, and stopped again. “You’re so very young, but you showed me it’s possible to bear an unbearable disappointment. You made me look into myself. Anyway, I will not have people thinking I would set fire to our old headquarters in order to get rid of your father, so I’ll join him. I’ll support him from now on in every way. I should never have listened to all those people who told me he had robbed me. I don’t know, to be really truthful, and the truth is awful... I don’t know that I wasn’t relieved not to be forced to go to Westminster, but I do like working in the constituency and that’s what hurts most... that the people I’ve worked so hard for passed me over for some stranger from outside.”

She stopped talking and looked at me in a sort of desperation to see if I could possibly understand, and I understood so well that I leaned forward impulsively and kissed her on the cheek.

A camera flashed.

“I can’t believe it,” Orinda screeched. “He follows me ’round.”

Usher Rudd, with the advantage of surprise, was already scuttling away down the street to get lost in bunches of shoppers.

“He follows me, too,” I said, putting a hand on Orinda’s arm, to deter her from trying to catch him. “You warned me and I told my father... but unless Usher Rudd breaks the law it seems he can’t be stopped, and the law is still on the side of copycat Rudds.”

“But my private life is my own affair!” She glanced at me as if it were my fault that it wasn’t.

I said, “Drug dealers would be out of business if people didn’t want drugs.”

“What?”

“The so-called war on drugs is fought against the wrong people. Lock up the users. Lock up the demand. Lock up human nature.”

She looked bewildered. “What have drugs to do with Usher Rudd?”

“If people didn’t flock to buy his sleaze, he wouldn’t push it.”

“And you mean... they always will?”

She needed no answer. She followed me into the office and, after delivering her news, enjoyed a hugging session with Mervyn (no photo) and an ambiguous welcome from the three witches, who had with pink arousal transferred their effective allegiance to the new order.

“Where are you canvassing today, Mervyn?” Orinda asked, and he showed her on the map, with the unexpected result that when I drove the Range Rover ’round Hoopwestern that morning I had on board Mervyn, Orinda, Faith and Lavender, and all of Orinda’s roll of commitment flattened out as placards.

As Mervyn had telephoned the editor of the Gazette — gasps of shock at having to U-turn his anti-all politicians spin — we were greeted in the parking lot behind the burned shop by a hastily assembled crowd, by the leader-writer of the Gazette (the paper was short of news) and by the cameraman who had besottedly followed Orinda with his loving lens around the reception before the dinner a week earlier at The Sleeping Dragon.

Orinda flirted again with his lens (or with him — much the same thing) and told everyone prettily through a non-squeaking microphone that George Juliard, undoubtedly on the brink of becoming a nationally acclaimed politician, was the — best possible substitute for her beloved husband, Dennis, who had dedicated his life to the good citizens of this glorious part of Dorset.

Applause, applause. She appeared in the sitting rooms of Hoopwestern on the lunchtime television news against the only-slightly orchestrated cheers.

By the time my father returned on the train from London he’d heard of Orinda’s media conference with mixed feelings — she might be stealing his limelight or she might just be saving his life — but at another church hall meeting of the faithful that evening he embraced her in a warm hug (reciprocated) that would have been unthinkable a day earlier.

Not everyone was pleased.

Orinda’s shadow, Anonymous Lover Wyvern, followed her around like thunder. She, dressed in blackberry-colored satin and glowing with a sense of generosity and virtue, kept giving him inquiring looks as if unsure of the source of his dudgeon. In her inner release she didn’t seem to realize, as I did, albeit only slowly through the evening, that in dumping her anger at not being selected she had in some way lessened his status. He had been Dennis Nagle’s best friend, but Orinda was leaving her Dennis behind.

Dearest Polly, to my surprise, positively scowled, even though she had herself delivered Orinda to her change of heart.

“I didn’t count on such a radical about-face,” Polly complained. “She’s cast herself in the ongoing role of constituency wife! There’s no doubt she was good at it, but she isn’t George’s wife and she can’t surely imagine she can go on opening fetes and things, and I bet that’s what she’s got in mind. Whatever did you say to her at the races?”

I said, “I thought you wanted her on my father’s side.”

“Well, yes, I do. But I don’t want her going around saying all the time that she was the one we should have picked.”

“Get him into Parliament, Polly,” I said. “Put him on the escalator, then he’ll deal with Orinda and everything else.”

“How old did you say you are?”

“Eighteen at the end of next week. And it was you, dearest Polly, who said I look into people’s minds.”

She asked in some alarm, “Do you see into mine?”

“Sort of.”

She laughed uneasily, but I saw nothing but good.

One could say the opposite about Leonard Kitchens. I had come to notice that the tilt of his prominent mustache acted like a weather vane, signaling the direction of his feelings. The upward thrust that evening was combative and self-important, a combination looking for a fight. Bulky Mrs. Kitchens (in large pink flowers printed on dark blue) followed her Leonard’s progress around the meeting with anxiety for a while and then made a straight line to my side.

“Do something,” she hissed into my ear. “Tell Orinda to leave my Leonard alone.”

It seemed to me that it was the other way around, as Leonard’s mustache vibrated by Orinda’s neck, but on Mrs. Kitchens’s urgent and continuous prompting I went over to hear Leonard’s agitated and whining drift.

“I would do anything for you, Orinda, you know I would, but you’re joining the enemy and I can’t bear to see him slobbering all over you, it’s disgusting...”

“Wake up, Leonard,” Orinda said lightly, not seeing the seething lava below the faintly ridiculous exterior, “it’s a new world.”

The undercurrents might tug and eddy, but Orinda had definitely unified the party behind JULIARD; yet in our room that night my father would literally not hear a word said about her. In fact he put a finger decisively against his lips and drew me out into the passage, closing our door behind us.

“What’s up?” I asked, mystified.

“Tonight the editor of the Gazette asked me if I thought people who voted for me were silly.”

“But that’s nonsense. That’s...” I stopped.

“Yes. Think back. When we joked about silly voters we were alone in this bedroom here. Did you repeat what we said?”

“Of course not.”

“Then how did the Gazette know?”

I stared at him, and said slowly, “Usher Rudd.”

He nodded. “Didn’t you tell me that that mechanic — Terry, isn’t that what his name is? — got sacked because Usher Rudd had listened to his pillow talk using one of those gadgets that pick up voice waves from the faint vibrations in the windows?”

“Usher Rudd,” I said furiously, “is trying to prove I’m not your son.”

“Never mind, he’s on a loser.”

“He’s following Orinda, too, not to mention the Bethunes.”

“He thinks if he flings enough mud, some will stick. Don’t give him any target.”

As the days went by one could see that Orinda’s flip-flop had most impact in Hoopwestern itself, less in Quindle, and not very much in the villages dotting the maps with a church spire, a couple of pubs and a telephone box. Cheers and clapping greeted her near home but news of her arrival to canvass in, say, Middle Lampfield (pop. 637) was more likely to be greeted with a polite “Oo? Aah” and a swift return to “Zoomerzet” cider.

More local draft cider flowed down the constituency throats than babies’ formula, and my father’s head for the frothy fruit of the apple earned him approval. We rolled every day at lunchtime from pub to pub to pub (I drove) and I got used to hearing the verdict. “A good chap, your father, he understands what we need in the countryside. Reckon I’ll vote for him. That Bethune, that they say is a certainty, he’s a town councillor, and you know what we think of them lot, thumbs down.”

My father made them laugh. He knew the price of hay. They would have followed him to the South Pole.

Orinda thought the villages a waste of time, and so did Mervyn.

“The bulk of the votes is in the towns,” they lectured. Dennis Nagle had been the star of the business-man circle.

“You vote for a man you play darts with,” my father said, missing double top. “I buy my own drinks, they buy theirs. Neither of us is beholden.”

Orinda didn’t like cider, and she didn’t like pubs. Lavender, surprisingly, liked both: my father, Lavender and I therefore spent several days soapboxing the outskirts in the silver-and-gold Range Rover, seeing to it (as my father said) that not a voter was left unturned.

The following week it was Orinda who nearly died.