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  ‘Oh.’ I tried not to appear either astonished or annoyed, though I felt both. He went on, however, as if I’d launched into a long audible harangue.

  ‘You’ve promised yourself a gap year, is that it?’

  A gap year, so called, was the currently fashionable pause between school and university, much praised and prized in terms of growing up in worldly experience before graduating academically. A lot to be said for it… little against.

  ‘You agreed I should have a gap year,’ I protested.

  ‘I didn’t prohibit it. That’s different.’

  ‘But… can you prohibit it? And why do you want to?’

  ‘Until you are eighteen I can legally do almost anything that’s for your own good or, rather, that I consider is for your own good. You’re no fool, Ben. You know that’s a fact. For the next three weeks, until your birthday on August thirty-first, I am still in charge of your life.’

  I did know it. I also knew that though by right I would receive basic university tuition fees from the state, I would not qualify for living expenses or other grants because of my father’s wealth. Working one’s way through college, although just possible in some countries, was hardly an option in Britain. Realistically, if my father wouldn’t pay for my keep, I wouldn’t be going to university, whether Exeter or anywhere else.

  I said neutrally, ‘When I asked you, ages ago, you said you thought a gap year was a good idea.’

  ‘I didn’t know that you intended your gap year to be spent on a racecourse.’

  ‘It’s a growing-up experience!’

  ‘It’s a minefield of moral traps.’

  ‘You don’t trust me!’ Even I could hear the outraged self-regard in my voice. Too near a whine. I said more frostily, ‘Because of your example, I would keep out of trouble.’

  ‘No bribes, do you mean?’ He was unimpressed by my own shot at flattery. ‘You’d throw no races? Everyone would believe in your incorruptibility? Is that it? What about a rumour that you take drugs? Rumours destroy reputations quicker than truth.’

  I was silenced. An unproven accusation had that morning rent apart my comfortable illusion that innocence could shield one from defamation. My father would no doubt categorise the revelation as ‘growing up’.

  A knock on the door punctuated my bitter thoughts with the arrival of a breakfast designed to give me a practically guilt-free release from chronic hunger. The necessity of keeping down to a low racing weight had occasionally made me giddy from deprivation. Even as I fell on the food ravenously I marvelled at my father’s understanding of what I would actually eat and what reject.

  ‘While you eat, you can listen,’ he said. ‘If you were going to be the world’s greatest steeplechase jockey, I wouldn’t ask… what I’m going to ask of you. If you were going to be, say, Isaac Newton, or Mozart, or some other genius, it would be pointless to ask that you should give it up. And I’m not asking you to give up riding altogether, just to give up trying to make it your life.’

  Cornflakes and milk were wonderful.

  ‘I have a suspicion,’ he said, ‘that you intended your gap year to go on for ever.’

  I paused in mid munch. Couldn’t deny he was right.

  ‘So go to Exeter, Ben. Do your growing up there. I don’t expect you to get a First. A Second would be fine; a Third is OK, though I guess you’ll manage good results, as you always have done, in spite of the disadvantage of your birth date.’

  I zoomed through the bacon, tomatoes and mushrooms and accompanied them with toast. Because of the rigid education system that graded schoolchildren by age and not ability, and because I’d been born on the last day of the age-grading year (September 1st would have given me an extra twelve months), I had always been the youngest in the class, always faced with the task of keeping up. A gap year would have levelled things nicely. And he was telling me, of course, that he understood all that, and was forgiving a poor outcome in the degree stakes before I’d even started.

  ‘Before Exeter,’ he said, ‘I’d like you to work for me. I’d like you to come with me to Hoopwestern and help me get elected.’

  I stared at him, chewing slowly but no longer tasting the mouthful.

  ‘But,’ I said, swallowing, ‘I don’t know anything about politics.’

  ‘You don’t have to. I don’t want you to make speeches or any policy statements. I just want you to be with me, to be part of my scene.’

  ‘I don’t… I mean,’ I more or less stuttered, ‘I don’t understand what I could do.’

  ‘Eat your apple,’ he said calmly, ‘and I’ll explain.’

  He sat in one of the armchairs and crossed his legs with deliberation, as if he had rehearsed the next bit, and I thought that probably he had indeed gone over it repeatedly in his mind.

  ‘The selection committee who chose me as their candidate,’ he said, ‘would frankly have preferred me to be married. They said so. They saw my bachelor state as a drawback. I told them therefore that I had been married, that my wife had died, and that I had a son. That cheered them up no end. What I’m asking you to do is to be a sort of substitute wife. To come with me in public. To be terribly nice to people.’

  I said absentmindedly, ‘To kiss babies?’

  ‘I’ll kiss the babies.’ He was amused. ‘You can chat up the old ladies, and talk football, cricket and racing to the men.’

  I thought of the wild thrill of riding in races. I thought of the intoxication of risking my neck, of pitting such skill as I had against fate and disaster, of completing the bucketing journeys without disgrace. A far cry from chatting up babies.

  I yearned for the simple life of carefree reckless speed; the gift given by horses, the gift of skis; and I was beginning to learn, as everyone has to in the end, that all of life’s pleasures have strings attached.

  I said, ‘How could anyone think I would bother with drugs when race-riding itself gives you the biggest high on earth?’

  My father said, ‘If Vivian said he would take you back, would you go?’

  ‘No.’ My answer came instinctively, without thought. Things couldn’t be the same. I had gone a long way down reality’s road in those few hours of an August Wednesday. I could acknowledge grimly that I would never be my dream jockey. I would never win my Grand National. But patting babies instead? Good grief!

  ‘Polling day,’ he said, ‘is more than three weeks before term starts at Exeter. You will be eighteen by then…’

  ‘And,’ I said, without either joy or regret, ‘I wrote to Exeter to say I wouldn’t be taking up the place they’d offered me. Even if you instruct me to go, I can’t.’

  ‘I overruled your decision,’ he told me flatly. ‘I thought you might do that. I’ve observed you, you know, throughout your young life, even if we’ve never been particularly close. I got in touch with Exeter and reversed your cancellation. They are now expecting your registration. They have arranged lodging for you on campus. Unless you totally rebel and run away, you’ll go ahead with your degree.’

  I felt a lurching and familiar recognition of this man’s power as a force that far outweighed any ordinary family relationship. Even Exeter University had done his bidding.

  ‘But, Father…’ I said feebly.

  ‘Dad.’

  ‘Dad…’ The word was wholly inappropriate both for the image of him as the conventionally supportive parent of a schoolboy and for my perception of him as something far different from an average man in a business suit.

  The Grand National, for him, I saw, was the road to Downing Street. Winning the race was the Prime Minister-ship in Number Ten. He was asking me to abandon my own unobtainable dream to help him have a chance of achieving his own.

  I looked at the untouched apple and banana and had no more appetite.

  I said, ‘You don’t need me.’

  ‘I need to win votes. You can help with that. If I weren’t totally convinced of your value as a constituent-pleaser you wouldn’t be sitting here now.’

  �
�Well…’ I hesitated, ‘to be honest, I wish I wasn’t.’

  I would have been pottering about happily in Vivian Durridge’s stable yard, untroubled in my illusions. And I would have been drifting towards a less abrupt, less brutal awakening. I would also, I supposed, have been going to be cumulatively depressed. The alternative future thrust at me now was at least challenging, not a slow slide to nowhere.

  ‘Ben,’ he said briskly, almost as if he could read my thoughts, ‘give it a try. Enjoy it.’

  He gave me an envelope full of money and told me to go out and buy clothes. ‘Get anything you need. We’re going to Hoopwestern from here.’

  ‘But my stuff –’ I began.

  ‘Your stuff, as you call it, is being packed into a box by Mrs Wells.’ Mrs Wells had rented me a room in her house along the road from the Durridge stable. ‘I’m paying her until the end of the month,’ my father said. ‘She’s quite pleased about that, though she said, you’d like to know, that you were a nice quiet boy, a pleasure to have around.’ He smiled. ‘I’ve arranged for your things to be collected. You’ll be reunited with them soon, perhaps tomorrow.’

  It was a bit, I thought, like being hit by a tidal wave, and it wasn’t the first time he had yanked me out of one easy way of life and set me down on a different path. My dead mother’s sister, Aunt Susan (and her husband Harry) who had reluctantly agreed to bring me up, had felt affronted, and said so bitterly and often, when my father plucked me out of the comprehensive school that had been ‘good enough’ for her four sons, and insisted that I take diction lessons and extra tuition in maths, my best subject, and had by one way or another seen to it that I spent five years of intensive learning in a top fee-paying school, Malvern College.

  My cousins/brothers had both envied and sneered, so that effectively I had become the ‘only’ child that I actually was, not the petted last addition to a big family.

  The father who had planned my life to the point of my unsought arrival in Brighton took it for granted that in the last three weeks of his legal guardianship I would still act as he directed.

  I suppose, looking back, that many boys of seventeen would have complained and rebelled. All I can say is that they weren’t dealing with a trusted and proven benevolent tyranny: and since I knew he meant me the opposite of harm, I took the envelope of money and spent it in the Brighton shops on clothes I thought his constituents would have voted for if they’d been judging a candidate by his teenage son’s appearance.

  We left Brighton soon after three in the afternoon, and not in the morning’s overpowering black car with the unnervingly silent chauffeur (obeying my father’s ‘no explanation’ instructions, it seemed) but in a cheerful metallic coffee-coloured Range Rover with silver and gold garlands of daisy-like flowers in metal paint shining along the sides.

  ‘I’m new in the constituency,’ my father said, grinning. ‘I need to get myself noticed and recognised.’

  He could hardly be missed, I thought. Heads turned to watch us all along the south coast. Even so, I was unprepared for Hoopwestern (in Dorset), where it seemed that every suitable pole and tree bore a placard saying simply ‘VOTE JULIARD’. No one in the town could avoid the message.

  He had driven the advertisement-on-wheels from Brighton, with me sitting beside him on the front seat, and on the way he gave me non-stop instruction on what I should say and not say, do and not do, in my new role.

  ‘Politicians,’ he said, ‘should seldom tell the whole truth.’

  ‘But –’

  ‘And politicians,’ he went on, ‘should never lie.’

  ‘But you told me always to tell the truth.’

  He smiled sideways at my simplicity. ‘You better damn well tell me the truth. But people as a rule believe only what they want to believe, and if you tell them anything else they’ll call you a trouble-maker and get rid of you and never give you your job back, even if what you said is proved spot on right by time.’

  I said slowly, ‘I suppose I do know that.’

  ‘On the other hand, to be caught out in a lie is political death, so I don’t do it.’

  ‘But what do you say if you’re asked a direct question and you can’t tell the truth and you can’t tell a lie?’

  ‘You say “how very interesting” and change the subject.’

  He drove the Range Rover with both speed and caution, the way he lived his whole life.

  ‘During the next weeks,’ he said, ‘people will ask you what I think about this and that. Always say you don’t know, they’d better ask me themselves. Never repeat to anyone anything I’ve said, even if I’ve said it in public. OK?’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘Remember this election is a contest. I have political enemies. Not every smiling face is a friend.’

  ‘Do you mean… don’t trust anyone?’

  ‘That’s exactly what I mean. People always kill Caesar. Don’t trust anyone.’

  ‘But that’s cynical!’

  ‘It’s the first law of self-preservation.’

  I said, ‘I’d rather be a jockey.’

  He shook his head in sorrow. ‘I’m afraid you’ll find that every world has its share of villains and cheats, jockeys not excepted.’

  He drove into the centre of Hoopwestern, which proved to be one of those old indigenous market towns whose ancient heart had been petrified into a quaint cobbled pedestrian precinct, with the raw pulse of modern commerce springing up in huge office buildings and shopping malls on three sides around a ring road.

  ‘This used to be a farming community,’ my father said neutrally. ‘Farming is now an industry like the factory here that makes light bulbs and employs more people. I need the light-bulb votes.’

  His campaign headquarters, I found, were in a remarkable back-to-back hybrid house with an old bay-windowed frontage facing the cobbled square and a box-like featureless shop behind, one of a row looking out over a half-acre of car park. The house, with basic living accommodation for him (and me) upstairs, had once been a shoe store (now bankrupt because of an aggressive local mall) and was the twin of the place next door to it, a charity gift shop.

  The political headquarters bustled with earnest endeavour, brightly coloured telephones, a click-clacking floor-standing photocopier, constant cups of tea, desks, computers, maps on the walls with coloured pins in, directories in heaps, envelopes by the carton-load and three middle-aged women enjoying the fuss.

  We had parked in the car park and walked to the unmistakable glass-fronted premises where it not only said VOTE JULIARD in huge letters but displayed three large pictures of my father, all of them projecting a good-natured, intelligent, forward-looking person who would do an excellent job at Westminster.

  The three women greeted him with merry cries of pleasure and a stack of problems.

  ‘This is my son,’ he said.

  The merry smiles were bent my way. They looked me up and down. Three witches, I thought.

  ‘Come in, dear,’ one of them said. ‘Cup of tea?’

  SECOND

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

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

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

  My father grimaced.

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

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

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

  It made me laugh. Was he collecting divorcées?

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

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

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

  The three aroused ladies looked me over again, nodding.

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