10 lb Penalty

Seven

On the Tuesday of the last full week of canvassing, my box of possessions, and my bicycle, finally arrived by carrier from Mrs. Wells.

Up in our room, my father picked with interest and curiosity through the meager debris of my life: two trophies for winning amateur ’chases the previous Easter, several photographs of me on horses and skis, and other photos from school with me sitting in one of those frozen team lineups (this one for target shooting) with the captain hugging a cup. There were also books on mathematics and racing biographies. Also clothes, but not many as, to my dismay, I was still growing.

My father extracted my passport, my birth certificate and the framed photograph of his wedding to my mother. He took the picture out of its frame and after looking at it for several long minutes he ran his finger over her face and sighed deeply, and it was the only time I’d known him to show any emotion at all about his loss.

I said incautiously, “Do you remember her? If she walked into the room now, would you know her?”

He gave me a look of such bleakness that I realized I’d asked a question of unforgivable intrusion, but after a pause all he said was, “You never forget your first.”

I swallowed.

He said, “Have you had your first?”

I felt numb, embarrassed almost beyond speech, but in the end I said truthfully, “No.”

He nodded. It was a moment of almost unbearable intimacy, the first ever between us, but he remained totally calm and matter-of-fact, and let me recover.

He sorted through some papers he had brought in a briefcase from a recent trip to London, put my own identifications in the case, snapped shut the locks and announced that we were going to call on the Hoopwestern Gazette.

We called, in fact, on the editor, who was also the publisher and proprietor of the only local daily. He was a man in shirtsleeves, harassed, middle aged, and from the tone of his front pages, censorious. He stood up from his desk as we approached.

“Mr. Samson Frazer,” my father said, calling him by name. “When we met the other evening, you asked if I thought people who vote for me are silly.”

Samson Frazer, for all his importance in Hoopwestem, was no match in power for my parent. Interesting, I thought.

“Er...” he said.

“We’ll return to that in a minute,” my father told him. “First, I have some things for you to see.”

He unlatched the briefcase and opened it.

“I have brought the following items,” he said, taking out each paper and putting it down in front of the editor. “My marriage certificate. My son’s birth certificate. Both of our passports. This photograph of my wife and myself taken outside the registry office after our wedding. On the back” — he turned the picture over — “you will see the professional photographer’s name and copyright, and the date. Here also is my wife’s death certificate. She died of complications after the birth of our son. This son, Benedict, my only child, who has been at my side during this by-election.”

The editor gave me a swift glance as if he hadn’t until that point taken note of my existence.

“You employ a person called Usher Rudd,” my father said. “I think you should be careful. He seems to be trying to cast doubt on my son’s identity and legitimacy. I’m told he has made scurrilous insinuations.”

He asked the editor just how he’d come to hear of “silly” votes when he, my father, had only used the word — and in a joke — in the privacy of his own room.

Samson Frazer froze like a dazzled rabbit.

“If I have to,” my father said, “I will send hair samples for DNA testing. My own hair, my son’s hair, and some hair from my wife, which she gave me in a locket. I hope you will carefully consider what I’ve said and what I’ve shown you.” He began methodically replacing the certificates in the briefcase. “Because I assure you,” he went on pleasantly, “if the Hoopwestern Gazette should be so unwise as to cast doubt on my son’s origins, I will sue the paper and you personally for defamation and libel, and you might quite likely wish you hadn’t done it.” He snapped the locks shut so vigorously that they sounded in themselves like a threat.

“You understand?” he asked.

The editor plainly did.

“Good,” my father said. “If you catch me in sleaze, that will be fair enough. If you try to manufacture it, I’ll hang you out by the toes.”

Samson Frazer found nothing to say.

“Good day to you, sir,” my father said.

He was in high good humor all the way back to the hotel and went upstairs humming.

“What would you say,” he suggested, “to a pact between us?”

“What sort of pact?”

He put the briefcase down on the table and drew out two sheets of plain paper.

“I’ve been thinking,” he said, “of making you a promise, and I want you to make the same promise in return. We both know how vulnerable one is to people like Usher Rudd.”

“And it’s not impossible,” I interrupted, “that he’s listening to us at this moment, particularly if he knows where we’ve just been.”

My father looked briefly startled, but then grinned.

“The red-haired dung beetle can listen all he likes. The promise I’ll make to you is not to give him, or anyone like him, any grounds ever for messy publicity. I’ll be dead boring. There will be no kiss-and-tell bimbos and no illicit payment for favors and no cheating on tax and no nasty pastimes like drugs or kinky sex...”

I smiled easily, amused.

“Yes,” he said, “but I want you to make the same promise to me. I want you to promise me that if I get elected you’ll do nothing throughout my political career that can get me discredited or sacked or disgraced in any way.”

“But I wouldn’t,” I protested.

“It’s easy for you to say that now while you’re young, but you’ll find life’s full of terrible temptations.”

“I promise,” I said.

He shook his head. “That’s not enough. I want us both to write it down. I want you to be able to see and remember what you promised. Of course, it’s in no way a legal document or anything pretentious like that, it’s just an affirmation of intent.” He paused, clicking a ballpoint pen while he thought, then he wrote very quickly and simply on one sheet of paper, and signed his name, and pushed the paper over for me to read.

It said: “I will cause no scandal, nor will I perform any shameful or illegal act.”

Wow, I thought. I said, not wanting this to get too serious, “It’s a bit comprehensive, isn’t it?”

“It’s not worth doing otherwise. But you can write your own version. Write what you’re comfortable with.”

I had no sense of binding myself irrevocably to sainthood.

I wrote: “I’ll do nothing that could embarrass my father’s political career or drag his name in the dust. I’ll do my best to keep him safe from any sort of attack.”

I signed my name lightheartedly and gave him the page. “Will that do?”

He read it, smiling. “It’ll do.”

He folded both pages together, then picked up the wedding photograph and positioned it facedown on the glass in its frame. He then put both of the signed pacts on the photo and replaced the back part of the frame, fastening it with its clips.

“There you are,” he said, turning the frame face up. “Every time you look at your mother and me, you’ll remember the promises behind the photo, inside the frame. Couldn’t be simpler.”

He stood the picture on the table and without fuss gave me back my birth certificate and passport.

“Keep them safe.”

“Yes.”

“Right. Then let’s get on with this election.”

Stopping only briefly to leave my identity in an envelope in the manager’s safe, we went to the new basic headquarters to collect Mervyn, pamphlets, Faith and Lavender, and start a door-to-door morning around three Hoopwestern housing estates. Lightbulb workers, they said.

Mervyn, proud of himself, had found a replacement megaphone. His friendly printer continued to furnish a torrent of JULIARDs. Mervyn for once seemed content in his world, but his day shone even brighter when Orinda arrived, declaring her readiness for the fray.

With Faith and Lavender cool and Mervyn hot, therefore six of us squeezed into the Range Rover, leaving behind Crystal (chronically anxious) and Marge (dusting and sweeping).

Only eight days after this one, I thought, and it will be over. And what will I do, I wondered, after that? There would be three or four weeks to fill before the Exeter term started. I mentally shrugged. I would be eighteen. I had a bicycle... might get to France...

I drove mechanically, stopping wherever Mervyn dictated.

Orinda had come in neat slacks and jacket, light orange-scarlet in color. As usual, gold chains. Smooth perfect makeup.

Babies got kissed. My father came across a clutch of child-minding house-husbands, factory shift workers, and learned about tungsten filaments. I chatted up a coffee-morning of old ladies who weren’t satisfied until my parent shook their hands. (Pink smiles. A blossoming of votes.) Orinda met old friends. Mervyn alerted the streets to our presence like a musically tinkling fish-and-chip van, and Faith and Lavender left no doorbell unrung.

When we drove out of the last of the estates we’d seen one or two TITMUSSes, no WHISTLE, not a BETHUNE to speak of, but many a window now proclaimed JULIARD. One could not but hope.

Mervyn and my father decided on one more long street, this time of varied and slightly more prosperous-looking houses. I, by this time, had had enough of door-to-dooring to last me several lifetimes, but as always the others seemed to have an indefatigable appetite. My father’s eyes still shone with enthusiasm and people who disagreed with his political theories left him not downcast but stimulated. He never tired, it seemed to me, of trying to convert the heathen.

Without much hope I asked Faith and Lavender if they wouldn’t prefer to say they’d done enough; how about lunch? “No, no,” they insisted with fervor, “every vote counts.”

Orinda alone seemed uneasy and withdrawn and not her usual positive and extravagant self, and in the end, while she and I waited together on the sidewalk beside the Range Rover for the others to finish galvanizing a retirement home, I asked her what was the matter.

“Nothing,” she said, and I didn’t press it, but after a moment or two she said, “Do you see that white BMW there, along the road?”

“Yes.” I frowned. “I saw it earlier, in one of the housing estates.”

“He’s following us.”

“Who’s following us? Is it Usher Rudd?”

“Oh, no.” She found the idea a surprise, which in itself surprised me. “No, not Usher Rudd. It’s Alderney Wyvern.”

It was I, then, who was surprised, and I asked, sounding astonished, “Why on earth should he follow us?”

Orinda frowned. “He’s still furious with me for supporting your father.”

“Well... I’d noticed. But why, exactly?”

“You’re too young to understand.”

“I could try.”

“Dennis used to do everything Alderney said. I mean, Alderney actually was how Dennis got advancement. Alderney would tell him what to say. Alderney is very clever, politically.”

“Why doesn’t he find a parliamentary seat for himself?”

“He says he doesn’t want to.” She paused. “To be frank, he isn’t easy to understand. But I know he expected me to be selected and to retain the seat as Dennis’s widow, and he worked on people like that creepy Leonard Kitchens, with that shudder-making mustache, to make sure I was selected. And then out of the blue the central party in Westminster decided they wanted George Juliard in Parliament, so he came and dazzled the selectors, who always listen to Polly, as a matter of course, and she fell for him like a ton of bricks... Anyway, Alderney got nowhere with your father. I sometimes think that that’s the sort of power Alderney really wants, to be able to pull the levers behind the scenes.”

It seemed to me at that moment a wacky notion. (I still had a lot to learn.)

“So now that I’ve joined your father,” Orinda said, “I’m not listening to Alderney as much. I used to do everything he suggested. We always did, Dennis and I, because Alderney would tell us such and such a thing would happen on the political scene and mostly he was right, and now I’m out with you and your father so much of the time... You’ll laugh, but I almost think he’s jealous!”

I didn’t laugh. I’d seen my father’s powerful effect on every female in Hoopwestern, from acid-tongued Lavender onwards. It wouldn’t have surprised me if he’d left a comet tail of jealousy through the constituency, except that he needed the men to vote for him as well as the women, and I’d watched him keep a tactical distance from their wives.

Alderney Wyvern, along the road, got out of his car and stood aggressively on the sidewalk, hands on hips, staring at Orinda.

“I’d better go and talk to him,” Orinda said.

I said instinctively, “No, don’t.”

She caught the alarm in my voice and smiled. “I’ve known him for years.”

I hadn’t yet come across the adult, grossly matured variety of jealousy, only the impotent rage of adolescence, but I felt intuitively that a great — and disturbing — change had taken place in A. L. Wyvern.

He had been by his own choice self-effacing on every occasion I’d seen him: quiet in manner, self-contained, behaving as if he didn’t want to be noticed. All that had now gone. The stocky figure seemed now heavier, the shoulders hunched, the face, even from a distance, visibly tense with menace. He had the out-of-control anger of a rioter, or of a militant striker.

I said to Orinda, “Stay here.”

“Don’t be silly.”

She walked confidently towards him in her brave orange-red clothes.

I could hear his voice, low and growling, but not what he said. Her reply was light and teasing. She put out a hand as if to stroke his arm affectionately, and he hit her very hard in the face.

She cried out with shock as much as pain. I ran towards her, and although Wyvern saw me coming, he hit her again, backhanded, across her nose and mouth.

She squealed, raising her hands to shield her face, trying at the same time to escape from him, but he clutched the shoulder of her jacket to prevent her running, and drew back his fist for a third blow.

She wrenched herself free. She half overbalanced. She stumbled off the sidewalk into the roadway.

The prosperous residential street that had been so peaceful and empty suddenly seemed filled with a heavy truck that bore down towards Orinda, brakes shrieking, horn blowing in banshee bursts.

Orinda tottered blindly as if disoriented, and I sprinted towards her without calculating speed or distance but simply impelled by the need of the moment.

The truck driver was swerving about, trying to miss her and actually making things worse because his direction was unpredictable. I might easily have shoved her into his path rather than out of it, but I threw myself at Orinda in a sort of twisting football tackle so that she fell half under me onto the hard surface and rolled, and the screaming black tires made skid marks an inch from our feet.

Orinda’s nose was bleeding and her eyes were overflowing with pain-induced tears, and beyond that she was dazed and bewildered. I knelt beside her, winded myself and fearful that I’d hurt her unnecessarily when the truck driver might have avoided her anyway.

The truck had stopped not far beyond us and the driver, jumping down from his cab and running towards us, was already rehearsing aggrieved innocence.

“She ran out straight in front of me, I didn’t have a chance. It isn’t my fault... I couldn’t help it... it isn’t my fault she’s bleeding all down her front.”

Neither Orinda nor I made any reply. It was irrelevant. It hadn’t been his fault, and no one would say it had been. The person at fault stood in shocked rage on the sidewalk directly across the road from us, glaring and rigid and not coming to our aid.

With breath returning I asked Orinda if she was all right. Silly question, really, when her nose was bleeding and there were other marks of Wyvern’s dangerous hands on her face. Her jacket was torn. One black shoe was off. The careful makeup was smeared and there was a slack weakness all through her body. The Orinda lying in the road looked far from the assured sophisticated flirter with cameras that I was used to; she looked a shattered, ordinary, middle-aged and rather nice woman trying to gather her wits and understand what had happened.

I leaned forward and slid an arm under her neck to see if she could sit up, and to my relief she let me help her do that, until she was sitting in the road with her knees bent and her head and her hands on her knees.

She’d broken no bones, I thought gratefully. The fractures were internal and mental and couldn’t be mended.

She said tearfully, trying to wipe blood with her fingers, “Have you got a tissue?”

I hadn’t.

“There’s one in my bag.”

Her handbag, I knew, was in the Range Rover.

“I’ll get it,” I said.

“No... Benedict... don’t leave me.”

“Call an ambulance,” the truck driver advised bullishly. “I missed her, I know I did. It’s not my fault she’s bleeding.”

“No, it’s not,” I agreed, standing up. “But you’re a big strong guy and you can help by picking up the lady and carrying her to that goldish Range Rover over there.”

“No fear,” he interrupted. “I’m not getting her blood on me, it’s not my sodding fault, she ran straight out in front of me.”

“Yes. OK,” I said. “It wasn’t your fault. But you did at least stop, so if you’d help and take her along to that vehicle, and if I just jot down your name and the firm you work for, that owns the truck, then I’m sure you can carry on with whatever you were doing.”

“No police,” he said.

“You don’t have to call the police to an accident unless someone’s been injured, and you didn’t injure this lady, as you said.”

“Straight up? How do you know that? You’re only a boy.”

I’d learned it in the course of reading for my driving license, but I couldn’t be bothered to explain. I bent down and tried to get Orinda to her feet, and she stood up shakily, clutching me to stop herself from falling.

I put my arms around her awkwardly. She was trembling all over. My father would simply have scooped her up and carried her to the Range Rover, but apart from my doubt of having adequate strength, I was embarrassed by the difference in our ages. Ridiculous, really. I felt protective, but unsure.

A couple of cars went by, the passengers craning their necks with curiosity.

“Oh, come on, missus,” the driver said suddenly, picking up her scattered shoe and putting it on for her, “hold on to my arm.”

He offered her a rocklike support, and between the two of us Orinda walked unsteadily, setting her feet down gingerly as if not sure where the ground lay. In that fashion we reached the Range Rover and installed Orinda in the front passenger seat, where she relaxed weakly and thanked the driver.

“Hey!” he said suddenly, surveying the highly noticeable vehicle. “Doesn’t this motor belong to that politician? Some funny name?”

“Juliard.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m his son,” I said. “This lady, that you cleverly missed hitting, and that you’ve helped just now, she is Mrs. Orinda Nagle, whose husband was the MP here before he died.”

“Cor!” Surprise at least stopped the whine of self-justification. I reckoned he was already rehearsing a revised tale to his masters. “I live in Quindle,” he said. “They say your father’s got no chance, the way things are, but maybe I’ll vote for him now anyway. Can’t say fairer than that!”

I wrote down his name, which he gave willingly, and the name of the furniture firm he worked for, and the telephone number, and he positively beamed at Orinda and told her not to worry, and drove off in his truck giving us a smile — a smile — and a wave.

Alderney Wyvern, all this time, had remained, as if the soles of his shoes were glued to the ground.

A few people had come out of the houses because of the noise of horn and brakes, but as there’d been no actual crash, and as Orinda had stood up and walked away, their curiosity had died quickly.

For once, with a real story to record, Usher Rudd and his lens had been missing.

My father, Mervyn, Faith and Lavender came out from a triumphant conversion of the retirement home and exclaimed in horror at Orinda’s blood and distress. The tissue from her handbag had proved inadequate. Her tears by now were of uncomplicated misery, rolling half-mopped down her cheeks.

“What happened?” my father demanded of me fiercely. “What have you done?”

“Nothing!” I said. “I mean... nothing.”

Orinda came to my defense. “George, Benedict helped me... I can’t believe it...” Her voice wailed. “Alderney... Alderney... h-h-hit me.”

“He what?”

We all looked along the road to where Wyvern still pugnaciously stood his ground, and if I had needed an explanation of the emotions involved, my father didn’t. He strode off with purposeful anger towards the visibly unrepentant ex-best friend and challenged him loudly, though we couldn’t hear the actual words. Wyvern answered with equal vigor, arms waving.

“Benedict...” Orinda begged me, increasingly upset, “go and stop them.”

It was easy enough for her to say it, but they were both grown men whereas I... Well, I went along there fast and caught my father’s arm as he drew back his fist for an infuriated swipe at Wyvern who was, incredibly, sneering.

My father swung around and shouted at me, raging, “Get out of my bloody way.”

“The pact,” I yelled at him. “Remember the pact.”

“What?”

“The pact,” I insisted. “Don’t hit him. Father... Dad... don’t hit him.”

The scorching fury went out of his eyes as suddenly as if he were waking up.

“He wants you to hit him,” I said. I didn’t know how I knew or why I was so certain. It had something to do with the fact that Wyvern had remained on the spot instead of driving off, but it was mostly intuition derived from his body language. He was looking for trouble. He meant all sorts of harm to my father, not least adverse publicity before polling day.

My father gave me a blank look, then walked past me to go back to the Range Rover. I half turned to follow him but was grabbed and spun ’round by Wyvern, whose always unsmiling face was now set fast with brutal malice. If he couldn’t get what he wanted from the father, he would take it out on the son.

I hadn’t learned boxing or karate, but I did have naturally fast reflexes and, thanks to riding and skiing, an instinctive command of balance. Wyvern might have had weight in his fists, but I ducked and dodged two sizzling punches to the face that would have laid me out flat if they’d connected, and concentrated solely on staying on my feet.

He drove me back against the shoulder-height rough stone wall that divided a garden from the sidewalk, but I squirmed out of his grasp and simply ran, intent on escape and containment, not on winning any battles.

I could hear Wyvern coming after me, and saw my father with renewed fury turning back to my aid.

I yelled at him in frenzy, “Get in the Range Rover. Get in the vehicle,” and he wavered and turned again and marvelously did as I said.

Three steps from the Range Rover I stopped running and swung around fast to face Wyvern, in whom calculation had never been wholly overwhelmed by emotion: he sized up the gallery he was playing to — Orinda, my father, Mervyn, Faith and Lavender — and under the glare of all those sets of eyes he abruptly conceded that further attack would have legal consequences he wouldn’t relish and stopped a bare six paces from where I stood.

The venom in his expression shriveled the saliva in my mouth.

“One day,” he said, “I’ll get you one day.”

But not today, I thought, and today was all that mattered.

He took a few steps backwards, his face smoothing out to its customary flatness, then he turned and walked towards his car as if nothing had happened. Easing into the driver’s seat he started the engine and drove collectedly away with no burning of tires or other histrionics.

He left a lot of speechlessness in and around the Range Rover.

In the end Mervyn, clearing his throat, said, “Orinda needs a doctor.”

Orinda disagreed. “I need a tissue.”

Faith and Lavender between them produced some crumpled white squares. Orinda wiped her face, looked in a small mirror and moaned at the wreck it revealed. “I’m not going anywhere like this.”

“The police...?” suggested Faith.

“No,” Orinda said, and no one argued.

With everyone subdued, I drove the Range Rover back to the headquarters, where my father transferred himself and Orinda into her nearby parked car and set off to her home, with me following to bring him back.

He was silent for the whole of the return journey, but as I braked to a halt at the end of it he said finally, “Orinda thinks you saved her from being run over by the truck.”

“Oh.”

“Did you?”

“The truck driver missed us.”

He insisted I tell him what had happened.

“Her eyes were watering,” I explained. “She couldn’t see where she was going.”

I made as if to get out of the vehicle, but he stopped me.

“Wait.” He seemed to be searching for words and not finding them.

I waited.

He said in the end, “I’m afraid I’ve let you in for more than I expected.”

I half laughed. “It hasn’t been boring.”

He went to Quindle with Mervyn early on the following Saturday to undertake an all-embracing round of the town’s surburbs and, because of a dinner that evening and yet more commitments on the Sunday morning, he stayed in Quindle overnight.

That Sunday was my eighteenth birthday. My father had told me he would leave me a birthday card with Crystal, and I was to go along at nine in the morning to collect it. He would return that afternoon, he said, and we would dine together that evening to celebrate. No more political meetings, he said. Just the two of us, with champagne.

When I arrived at the party office at nine the door was locked and fifteen minutes passed before Crystal arrived and chattered her way inside. Yes, she agreed, my father had left me a card: and many happy returns and all that.

She took an envelope out of the desk and gave it to me, and inside I found a card with a joke on it about growing old, and nothing else. “Yours, Dad,” he’d written.

“George said,” Crystal told me, “that you are to go out into the street and find a black car with a chauffeur in it. And don’t ask me what it’s about, George wouldn’t tell me, but he was smiling fit to crack his cheeks. So off you go, then, and find the car.”

“Thanks, Crystal.”

She nodded and waved me off, and I went outside and found the black car and the chauffeur a hundred yards away, patiently parked.

The chauffeur without speaking handed me a white envelope, unaddressed.

The card inside read, Get in the car.

And underneath, Please.

With a gleam and a breath of good spirits I obeyed the instructions.

It wasn’t much of a surprise when the chauffeur (not the same man as before, or the same car) refused to tell me where we were going. It was, however, clear shortly that the direction was westward and that many signposts distantly promised Exeter.

The chauffeur aimed at the heart of that city and pulled up outside the main doors of its grandest hotel. As before, the car’s rear door was ceremoniously opened for me to step out and again, smiling broadly (not in the script), he pointed silently towards the interior and left me to the uniformed porters inquiring sniffily about my luggage.

My luggage this time again consisted of what I wore: a white long-sleeved sweatshirt, new blue jeans and well-tried running shoes. With undoubtedly more self-confidence than at Brighton I walked into the grand lobby and asked at the reception desk for George Juliard.

The receptionist pressed buttons on a computer.

“Sorry, no one called Juliard staying at the hotel.”

“Please check again.”

She checked. Gave me a professional smile. Still no one called Juliard, past, present or future.

I was definitely not this time in cutoff shorts and message-laden T-shirt land. Even on the last summer Sunday of August, business suits here prevailed. Ladies were fifty. In a cathedral city, people had been to church. The chauffeur, I gloomily concluded, had taken me to the wrong place.

The hotel’s entrance lobby bulged at one side into a glass-roofed conservatory section with armchairs and green plants, and I sat there for a while considering what I should do next. Had my father intended me to get to know Exeter before I went to its university?

Or what?

After about half an hour a man dressed much as I was myself, though a good ten years older, appeared in the lobby. He looked around and drifted unhurriedly in my direction.

“Juliard?” he said. “Benedict?”

“Yes.” I stood up, taller than he by an inch or two, which seemed to surprise him. He had yellow-blond hair, white eyelashes and outdoor skin. A man of strong muscles, self-confident, at home in his world.

“I’m Jim,” he said. “I’ve come to collect you.”

“Who are you?” I asked. “Where are we going?”

He smiled and said merely, “Come on.”

He led the way out of the hotel and around a few comers, fetching up beside a dusty dented red car that contained torn magazines, screwed-up sandwich papers, coffee-stained polystyrene cups and a mixed-parentage dog introduced as Bert.

“Disregard the mess,” Jim said cheerfully, sweeping crumpled newspapers off the front passenger seat onto the floor. “Happy birthday, by the way.”

“Uh... thanks.”

He drove the way I’d been taught not to; jerking acceleration and sudden brakes. Start and stop. Impulse and caution. I would have gone a long way with Jim.

It turned out to be only eight miles westward, as far as I could judge. Out of the city, past a signpost to Exeter University’s Streatham Campus (home among much else of the department of mathematics), deep into rural Devon, with heavy thatched roofs frowning over tiny-windowed cottages.

Jim jerked to a halt in front of a larger example of the basic pattern and pointed to a heavy wooden front door.

“Go in there,” he instructed. “Down the passage, last room on the left.” He grinned. “And good luck.”

I was quite glad to be getting out of his car, even if only to stop the polymorphous Bert from licking my neck.

“Who lives here?” I asked.

“You’ll find out.”

He left me with a simple choice: to do as I’d been told or find a way of returning to Exeter. Alice down the bleeding rabbit hole, I thought.

I opened the heavy door and went along the passage to the last room on the left.