10 lb Penalty

Eight

In the last room on the left a man sat behind a desk, and at first I thought with an unwelcome skipped heartbeat that he was Vivian Durridge, intent on sacking me all over again.

He looked up from his paperwork as I went in and I saw that though he wasn’t Vivian Durridge himself, he was of the same generation and of the same severe cast of mind.

He gave me no warm greeting, but looked me slowly up and down.

“Your father has gone to a great deal of trouble for you,” he said. “I hope you’re worth it.”

No reply seemed suitable, so I didn’t make one.

“Do you know who I am?” he demanded.

“I’m afraid not... sir.”

“Stallworthy.”

He waited for the name to trickle through my brain, which it did pretty fast. It was the implication of his name that slowed my reply. Too much hope was bad for the pulse.

“Er... do you mean Spencer Stallworthy, the racehorse trainer?”

“I do.” He paused. “Your father telephoned me. He wants to buy a horse and put it in training here with me, so that you can bicycle over from the university to ride it out at exercise. He asked me to enter it in amateur events so that you can ride it in races.”

He studied my face. I must have looked pretty ecstatic because a slow wintry smile lightened his heavy expression.

“I just hope,” he said, “that you can ride well enough not to disgrace my stable.”

I just hoped he hadn’t been talking to Vivian Durridge.

“Your father asked me to find a suitable horse. We discussed price, of course. I told him I train forty or so horses, and one or two of them are always for sale. I have two here at present which might fit the bill. Your father and I agreed that you should come here today and have a ride on both. You are to choose which of them you prefer. He wanted it to be a surprise for your birthday... and I see it is.”

I breathlessly nodded.

“Right. Then go out of the back door. My assistant, Jim, who brought you here, he’ll drive you along to the stables, where the horses are ready for you. So off you go, then.”

“Er...” I said. “Thank you... very much.”

He nodded and bent his head to his paperwork, and Jim, grinning widely, drove half a mile to the stable yard that was old, needed paint and had sent out winners by the dozen over the years to small races on west-country courses. Stallworthy didn’t aim for Cheltenham, Sandown or Aintree. He trained for local farmers and businessmen and ran their horses near home.

Jim stood in the yard and laconically pointed. “Tack room there.” He half turned. “Horse in number twenty-seven. OK?”

“OK.”

I took a look at the occupant of box 27 and found a heavily muscled chestnut gelding standing there, anxious it seemed to be out on the gallops. He had nice short legs, with hocks not too angular and a broad chest capable of pushing his way over or through any obstacle that came his way. More the type of a tough hardy steeplechaser than an ex-flat racer graduating to jumps.

I guessed at stamina and an unexcitability that might take a tiring amateur steadfastly towards the finish line, and if there were anything against him at first sight it was, perhaps, that he was a bit short in the neck.

Jim whistled up a groom to saddle and bridle the chestnut, though I had the impression that he had at first intended that I should do it myself.

Jim had considered me a sort of a joke. Perhaps my actual presence in the yard had converted me from joke to customer. In any case, neither Jim nor the groom saw anything but ordinary sense when I asked if I could see the chestnut being led around the yard at a walk. Somewhere along the way in my scrappy racing education I’d been told and shown by an avuncular old pro jockey that a horse that walked well galloped well. A long, slow stride bode well for long-distance ’chases. A tittupping scratchy little walker meant a nervous, scratchy little galloper.

The stride of the chestnut’s walk was long enough and slow enough to suggest a temperament that would plod forever. When he and his groom had completed two circuits of the yard I stopped him and felt his legs (no bumps from past tendon trouble) and looked in his mouth (which perhaps one shouldn’t do to a gift horse) and estimated him to be about seven years old, a good solid age for a steeplechaser.

“Where do I ride him?” I asked Jim, and he pointed to a way out of the yard that led to a gate into a vast field that proved to be the chief training ground for the whole stable. There were no wide-open downland gallops, it seemed, in that cozy part of Devon.

“You can trot or canter down to the far end,” Jim said, “and come back at a half-speed gallop. He... the chestnut... knows the way.”

I swung onto the chestnut’s back and put the toes of my unsuitable running shoes into the stirrups, lengthening the leathers while getting to know the “feel” of the big creature who would give me half speed and at least an illusion of being where I belonged.

I might never be a great jockey, and I might at times be clumsy and uncoordinated owing to growing in spurts and changing shape myself, but I’d ridden a great many different horses in my school holidays by working for people who wanted a few horses cared for while they went away on trips. I’d begged racehorse experience from trainers, and for the past two years had ridden in any race offered: twenty-six outings to date, with three wins, two thirds and three falls.

The Stallworthy chestnut was in a good mood and let me know it by standing still patiently through the stirrup-leather lengthening and the pause while Jim sorted out a helmet in the tack room, insisting that I wear it even though it was a size too small.

The chestnut’s back was broad with muscles and I hadn’t sat on a horse for three and a half weeks; and if he’d been mean-spirited that morning he could have run away with me and made a fool of my deficient strength, but in fact he went out onto the exercise ground as quietly as an old hack.

I didn’t enjoy his trot, which was lumpy and threw me about, but his canter was like an armchair. We went in harmony down to the far end of the exercise field where the land dropped away a bit, so that the first part of the gallop home was uphill, good for strengthening legs.

At a half-speed gallop, riding the chestnut was a bit like sitting astride a launched rocket: powerful, purposeful, difficult to deflect. I reined to a slightly breathless walk and went over to where Jim waited beside the gate. “Right,” he said noncommittally, “now try the other one.”

The other horse, a bay gelding with a black mane, was of a leaner type and struck me as being more of a speed merchant than the one I’d just ridden. He carried his head higher and was more frisky and eager to set off and get into his stride. Whether that stride would last out over a distance of ground was, perhaps, doubtful.

I stood with my toes in the irons all the way down the field, letting the trot and canter flow beneath me. This was not a horse schooled to give his rider a peaceful look at the countryside; this was a fellow bred to race, for whom nothing else was of interest. At the far end of the field, instead of turning quietly, he did one of those swerving pirouettes with a dropped shoulder, a maneuver guaranteed to fling an unwary jockey off sideways. I’d seen many horses do that. I’d been flung off myself. But I was ready for Stallworthy’s bay to try it; on his part more from eagerness to gallop than from spite.

His half-speed gallop home was a battle against my arms all the way: he wanted to go much faster. Thoughtfully I slid off his back and led him to Jim at the gate.

“Right,” Jim said. “Which do you want?”

“Er...” I patted the bay’s neck. He shook his head vigorously, not in disapproval, I gathered, but in satisfaction.

“How about,” I suggested, “a look at the form books and the breeding over a sandwich in a pub?”

I was quite good at pub life after three and a half weeks with my father.

Jim briefly laughed. “I was told I was to fetch a schoolkid. You’re some schoolkid.”

“I left school last month.”

“Yeah. Makes a difference!”

With good-natured irony he collected the necessary records from inside Stallworthy’s house and drove us to a local pub where he was greeted as a friendly regular. We sat on a high-backed wooden settle and he put the form books on the table beside the beer (him) and the Diet Coke (me).

In steeplechase breeding it’s the dams that matter. A dam who breeds one winner will most likely breed others. The chestnut’s dam had never herself won, though two of her progeny had. The chestnut so far hadn’t finished nearer than second.

The bay’s dam had never even raced, but all of her progeny, except the first foal, had won. The bay had won twice.

Both horses were eight.

“Tell me about them,” I said to Jim. “What ought I to know?”

There was no way he was going to tell me the absolute truth if he had any commission coming from the sale. Horse traders were as notorious as car salesmen for filling the gearbox with chaff.

“Why are they for sale?” I asked.

“Their owners are short of money.”

“My father would need a vet’s certificate.”

“I’ll see to it. Which horse do you want?”

“I’ll talk to my father and let you know.”

Jim gave me a twisted smile. He had white eyebrows as well as white lashes. I needed to make a friend of him if I were to come often to ride exercise, so regrettably, with all my father’s wily political sense, I deliberately set about canvassing Jim’s pro-Ben vote, and thought that maybe I’d learned a few reprehensible techniques, while being willing to listen to people’s troubles and desires.

Jim told me, laughing, that he’d hitched himself to Stallworthy because he hadn’t been able to find a comparable trainer with a marriageable daughter. A good job I wasn’t Usher Rudd, I thought.

Spencer Stallworthy apparently slept on Sunday afternoons, so I didn’t see him again that day. Jim (and Bert) drove me back to Exeter by three o’clock and with a grin and a warm slap on the back he handed me over to the black car with the silent chauffeur.

“See you, then,” Jim said.

“I can hardly wait.”

The future had spectacularly clarified. My father, instead of giving me a monthly allowance, had through my teens sent me one lump sum at Christmas to last me for the year: consequently I had enough saved away both to find myself a temporary lodging within cycling distance of Spencer Stallworthy and to immerse my brain in the racing press.

The chauffeur took me not to the headquarters from where he’d collected me, but to a playing field on the edge of Hoopwestern, where, it appeared, an afternoon amalgam of fete and political rally was drawing to a close. Balloons, bouncy castle, bright plastic chutes and roundabouts had drawn children (and therefore voting parents) and car-trunk sale-type stalls seemed to have sold out of all but hideous vases.

Painted banners promised Grand Opening by Mrs. Orinda Nagle at 3:00 and George Juliard, 3:15. Both were still present at 5:30, shaking hands all around.

Dearest Polly saw the black car stop at the gate and hurried across dry dusty grass to greet me.

“Happy birthday, Benedict. Did you choose a horse?”

“So he told you?” I looked across the field to where he stood on the soapbox, surrounded by autograph books.

“He’s been high as a kite all day.” Polly’s own smile stretched inches. “He told me he’d brought you here to Hoopwestern originally as window dressing for the campaign, and he’d got to know you for the first time ever, and he’d wanted to give you something you would like, to thank you for all you’ve done here...”

“Polly!”

“He told me he hadn’t realized how much he’d asked you to give up, with going to university instead of racing, and that you hadn’t rebelled or walked out or cursed him... He wanted to give you the best he could.”

I swallowed.

He saw me from across the field and waved, and Polly and I walked over and stopped just outside the hedge of autograph seekers.

“Well?” he said over their heads. “Did you like one?”

I couldn’t think of adequate words. He looked, however, at my face, and smiled at what he saw there, and seemed content with my speechlessness. He stepped off the soapbox and made his way through the offered books, signing left and right, until he was within touching distance, and there he stopped.

We looked at each other in great accord.

“Well, go on,” Polly said to me impatiently, “hug him.”

But my father shook his head and I didn’t touch him, and I realized we had no tradition between us of how to express greeting or emotion, and that until that moment there had never been much intense mutual emotion to express. Far from hugging, we had never shaken hands.

“Thanks,” I said to him.

It sounded inadequate, but he nodded: it was enough.

“I want to tell you about it,” I said.

“Did you choose one?”

“More or less, but I want to talk to you first.”

“At dinner, then.”

“Perfect.”

Orinda was smiling warmly at me, fully recovered, makeup hiding any residual marks, all traces of the shaking frightened woman in blood-spattered clothes overlaid by Constituency Wife, Mark I, the opener of fetes and natural hogger of cameras.

“Benedict daaahling!” She at least had no inhibitions about hugging and embraced me soundly for public consumption. She smelled sweetly of scent. She wore a copper-colored dress with green embroidery to match her eyes, and Polly beside me stiffened with the prehistoric reaction of Martha to butterfly.

Dearest Polly. Dearest Polly. I was far too young externally to show I understood her, let alone insult her by offering comforts. Dearest Polly wore remnants of the awful lipstick, a chunky necklace of amber beads and heavily strapped sandals below a muddy green dress. I liked both women, but on the evidence of their clothes, they would never equally like each other.

Instinctively I looked over Orinda’s shoulder, expecting the everlasting Anonymous Lover to be back at his post, but Wyvern had once and for all abandoned Hoopwestern as his path to influence. In his place behind Orinda loomed Leonard Kitchens with a soppy grin below his out-of-control mustache. Close on his heels came Mrs. Kitchens, looking grim.

Usher Rudd was wandering about with his intrusive malice trying to catch people photographically at a disadvantage, but interestingly when he caught my eye he pretended he hadn’t, and veered away. I had no illusions that he wished me well.

Mervyn Teck and a retinue of dedicated volunteers, stoutly declaring the afternoon a success, drove my father and me back to The Sleeping Dragon. Four days to polling day, I thought: eternity.

Over dinner in the hotel dining room I told my father about the two Stallworthy horses. A phlegmatic chestnut stayer and a sprinting excitable bay with a black mane.

“Well...” he said, frowning, “you love speed. You’ll take the bay. What makes you hesitate?”

“The horse I want has a name that might disturb you. I can’t change his name: one isn’t allowed to after a Thoroughbred has raced. I won’t have that horse unless it’s OK with you.”

He stared. “What name could possibly disturb me so much?”

After a pause I said flatly, “Sarah’s Future.”

“Ben!”

“His dam was Sarah Jones; his sire Bright Future. It’s good breeding for a jumper.”

“The bay...?”

“No,” I said. “The chestnut. He’s the one I want. He’s never won yet, though he’s been second. A novice has a wider — a better — choice of a race. Apart from that, he felt right. He’d look after me.”

My father absentmindedly crumbled a bread roll to pieces.

“You,” he said eventually, “you are literally Sarah’s future. Let’s say she would be pleased. I’ll phone Stallworthy in the morning.”

Far from slackening off during the run-up to polling day, the Juliard camp spent the last three days in a nonstop whirl.

I drove the Range Rover from breakfast to bedtime. I drove to Quindle three times, and all around the villages. I screwed together and unclipped the soapbox until I could do it in my sleep. I loaded and unloaded boxes of leaflets. I made cooing noises at babies and played ball games with kids and shook uncountable hands and smiled and smiled and smiled.

I thought of Sarah’s Future, and was content.

On the last evening, Wednesday, my father invited all his helpers and volunteers to The Sleeping Dragon for a thank-you supper. Along in a room off the Town Hall, Paul Bethune was doing the same.

The Bethune cavalcade had several times crossed our path, their megaphone louder, their traveling circus larger, their campaign vehicle not a painted Range Rover but a roofless double-decker bus lent from his party headquarters. Bethune’s message followed him everywhere: “Dennis Nagle was out of touch, old-fashioned. Elect Bethune, a local man, who knows the score.”

A recent opinion poll in the constituency had put Bethune a few points ahead. Titmuss and Whistle were nowhere.

The Gazette had trumpeted merely, “An End to Sleaze,” and waffled on about “the new morality” without defining it. Though by instinct a Bethune man, the editor had let Usher Rudd loose and thereby both increased his sales and scored an own-goal. The editor, I thought in amusement, had dug his own dilemma.

My father thanked his faithful workers.

“Whatever happens tomorrow,” he said, “I want you to know how much I appreciate all you’ve done... all the time you’ve given... your tireless energy... your friendly good nature. I thank our agent, Mervyn, for his excellent planning. We’ve all done our best to get the party’s message across. Now it’s up to the voters to decide.”

He thanked Orinda for rallying to his side. “... all the difference in the world to have her support... immensely generous... reassuring to the faithful...”

Orinda, splendid in gold chains and emerald green, looked modest and loved it.

Polly, beside me, made a noise near to a retch.

I stifled a quivering giggle.

“Don’t think I’ve forgotten,” she said to me severely, “that it was you who changed Orinda from foe to angel. I bear it only because the central party wants to use your father’s talents. Get him in, they said. Just like you, they more or less told me to put his feet on the escalator, and he would rise all the way.”

But someone, I thought, had tried to prevent that first step onto the escalator. Had perhaps tried. A bullet, a wax plug, an unexplained fire. If someone had tried to halt him by those means and hadn’t left it to the ballot box... then who? No one had seriously tried to find out.

The speeches done, my father came over to Polly and me, his eyes gleaming with excitement, his whole body alive with purpose. His strong facial bones shouted intelligence. His dark hair curled with healthy animal vigor.

“I’m going to win this by-election,” he said, broadly smiling. “I’m going to win. I can feel it.”

His euphoria fired everyone in the place to believe him, and lasted in himself through breakfast the next morning. The glooms crowded in with his second cup of coffee and he wasted an hour in doubt and tension, worrying that he hadn’t worked hard enough, that there was more he could have done.

“You’ll win,” I said.

“But the opinion polls...”

“The people who compile the opinion polls don’t go ’round the village pubs at lunchtime.”

“The tide is flowing the wrong way...”

“Then go back to the City and make another fortune.”

He stared and then laughed, and we set out on a tour of the polling stations, where the volunteers taking exit polls told him they were pretty even, but not to lose hope.

Here and there we came across Paul Bethune on a similar mission with similar doubts. He and my father were unfailingly polite to each other.

The anxiety went on all day and all evening. After weeks of fine weather it rained hard that afternoon. Both sides thought it might be a disaster. Both sides thought it might be to their advantage. The rain stopped when the lightbulb workers poured out of the day shift and detoured to the polling booths on their way home.

The polls closed at ten o’clock and the counting began.

My father stood in our bedroom window staring out across the cobbled square to the burned-out shell of the bow-fronted shops.

“Stop worrying,” I said. As if he could.

“I was head-hunted, you know,” he said. “The party leaders came to me and said they wanted to harness my economic skills for the good of the country. What if I’ve let them down?”

“You won’t have,” I assured him.

He smiled twistedly. “They offered me a marginal seat to see what I was made of. I was flattered. Serves me right.”

“Father...”

“Dad.”

“Okay, Dad. Good men do lose.”

“Thanks a lot.”

We went in time along the square to the Town Hall where, far from offering peace, the atmosphere was electric with hope and despair. Paul Bethune, surrounded by hugely rosetted supporters, was trying hard to smile. Isobel Bethune, in dark brown, tried to merge into the woodwork.

Mervyn talked to Paul Bethune’s agent absentmindedly and I would have bet neither of them heard what the other was saying.

Usher Rudd took merciless photographs.

There was a smattering of applause at my father’s entrance, and both Polly (in pinkish gray) and Orinda (in dramatic glittering white) sailed across the floor to greet him personally.

“George, daaahling,” Orinda crowed, offering her smooth cheek for a kiss. “Dennis is with us, you know.”

George daaahling looked embarrassed.

“It’s going quite well, George,” Polly said, giving succor. “First reports say the town votes are fairly even.”

The counting was going on under all sorts of rigorous supervision. Even those counting the Xs weren’t sure who had won.

My father and Paul Bethune looked as calm as neither was feeling.

The hall gradually filled with supporters of both sides. After midnight, getting on for one o’clock, the four candidates and their close supporters appeared on the platform, shuffling around with false smiles. Paul Bethune looked around irritably for his wife, but she’d hidden herself successfully in the crowd. Orinda stood on the platform close beside my father as of right and no one questioned it, though Polly, beside me on the floor, fumed that it should be me up there, not that... that...

Words failed her.

My father told me afterwards that the result had been whispered to the candidates before they faced the world, presumably so that neither would burst into tears, but one couldn’t have guessed it from their faces.

Finally the returning officer (whose function was to announce the result) fussed his way onto the center stage, tapped the microphone to make sure it was working (it was), grinned at the television cameras and rather unnecessarily asked for silence.

He strung out his moment of importance by looking around as if to make sure everyone was there on the platform who should be and finally, slowly, in a silence broken only by a throng of heartbeats, read the result.

Alphabetically.

Bethune... thousands.

Juliard... thousands.

Titmuss... hundreds.

Whistle... sixty-nine.

It took a moment to sink in. Staring down a preliminary cheer from the floor, the returning officer completed his task.

George Juliard is therefore elected...

The rest was drowned in cheers.

Polly worked it out. “He won by just under two thousand. Bloody well done.”

Polly kissed me.

Up on the stage Orinda was loudly kissing the new MP.

It was too much for Dearest Polly, who left my side to go to his.

I found poor, sad Isobel Bethune at my elbow instead.

“Look at that harridan with your father, pretending it was she who won the votes.”

“She did help, to be fair.”

“She would never have won on her own. It was your father who won the election. And my Paul lost. He positively lost. Your father never mentioned that bimbo of his, not once, though he could have done, but the public never forget those things. Sleaze sticks, you know.”

“Mrs. Bethune...”

“This is the third time Paul’s contested the seat,” she told me hopelessly. “We knew he would lose to Dennis Nagle the last two times, but this time the party said he was bound to win, with the way the recent by-elections have been swinging in our favor, and with the other party ignoring Orinda and bringing in a stranger and they’ll never let Paul stand again. He’s lost worse than ever this time with everything on his side, and it’s that horrid Usher Rudd’s fault and I could kill him...” She smothered her face in a handkerchief as if to shut out the world and, stroking my arm, mumbled, “I’ll never forget your kindness.”

Up on the stage her stupid husband still looked self-satisfied.

A month ago, I thought, I hadn’t known the Bethunes existed.

Dearest Polly had bloomed unseen.

I hadn’t heard of Orinda, or of Alderney Wyvern.

I hadn’t met Mrs. Kitchens or her fanatical, unlovable Leonard, and I hadn’t known plump, efficient Mervyn or worried Crystal. I never did know the last names of Faith or Marge or Lavender, but I was certain even then that I would never forget the mean-spirited red-haired terror whose delight in life was to find out people’s hidden pleasures in order to destroy them. Bobby Usher bleeding Rudd.