10-Lb Penalty Read online

  ‘You want hecklers?’ I said, surprised.

  ‘Of course. They set fire to things. Very dull otherwise.’

  I asked weakly, ‘What do I wear?’

  ‘Just look tidy. There’s a Front Bench bigwig coming. They wheel out the big guns to support a by-election as marginal as this. I’ll wear a dinner jacket to start with, but I’ll strip off my black tie later. Maybe unbutton my shirt a bit. See how it goes.’ He smiled almost calmly, but I could sense excitement running in him deeply. He’s a fighter, I thought. He’s my father, this extraordinary man. He’s kicked my dreams away and shown me a different world that I don’t like very much, but I’ll go with him, as he wants, for a month, and I’ll do my best for him, and then we’ll see. See how it goes… as he’d said.

  We walked across the square at seven-thirty, I in grey trousers and navy blazer (new from the Brighton shops), he in black tailoring that was in itself a step forward in my education.

  He was received with acclaim and clapping. I smiled and smiled at his shoulder and was terribly nice to everyone, and shook hand after hand as required. No babies in sight.

  ‘My son,’ he gestured. ‘This is my son.’

  Some of the perhaps eighty people at the reception and dinner were dressed formally like my father, others made political-equality statements like open-necked shirts and gingham with studs.

  The Front Bench bigwig came with black bow sharply tied, his wife discreetly diamonded. I watched her being unpretentiously and endlessly charming to strangers, and when I in my turn was introduced to her she clasped my hand warmly and grinned into my eyes as if meeting me were a highlight of her evening. I had a long way to go, I thought, before I could put that amount of genuine and spontaneous friendliness into every greeting. I saw also that Mrs Bigwig’s smile was worth a ballot-box full of Xs.

  I realised slowly, as the room filled up, that the dinner was a ticket affair; that, except for the Bigwigs and my father, everyone had paid for their presence. My father, it appeared, had paid for me. One of the evening’s organising committee was telling him he didn’t have to.

  ‘Never accept gifts,’ he had warned me on the drive from Brighton. ‘Gifts may look harmless, but they can come back to haunt you. Say no. Pay for yourself, understand?’

  ‘Yes, I think so.’

  ‘Never put yourself into the position of having to return a heavy favour when you know what you’re being asked to do is wrong.’

  ‘Don’t take sweets from strangers?’

  ‘Exactly so.’

  The organising lady informed my father that if he had had a wife, her ticket would have been free.

  He said with gentle, smiling finality, ‘I will pay for my son. Dearest Polly, don’t argue.’

  Dearest Polly turned to me with mock exasperation. ‘Your father. What a man!’ Her gaze slid past me and her face and voice changed from blue skies to storm. ‘Bugger,’ she said.

  I looked, of course, to see the cause of the almost comic disapproval and found it was an earnest-eyed thin woman of forty or so sun-baked summers, whose tan glowed spectacularly against a sleeveless white dress. Blonde streaked hair. Vitality plus.

  Dearest Polly said, ‘Orinda!’ under her breath.

  Orinda, the passed-over candidate, was doing her best to eclipse the chosen rival by wafting round the room embracing everyone extravagantly while saying loudly, ‘Daaarling, we must all do our best for the party even if the selectors have made this ghastly mistake…’

  ‘Damn her,’ said Dearest Polly who had been, she told me, a selector herself.

  Everyone knew Orinda, of course. She managed to get the cameraman from the local television company to follow her around, so that her white slenderness would hog whatever footage reached the screen.

  Dearest Polly quietly fumed, throwing out sizzling news snippets my way as if she would explode if she kept them in.

  ‘Dennis was a cuddly precious, you know. Can’t think why he married that harpy.’

  Dearest Polly, herself on the angular side of cuddly, had one of those long-jawed faces from which condensed kindness and goodwill flowed forth unmistakably. She wore dark red lipstick as if she didn’t usually: it was the wrong colour for her yellowish skin.

  ‘Dennis told us he wanted us to select Orinda. She made him say it. He knew he was dying.’

  Orinda flashed her white teeth at a second cameraman.

  ‘That man’s from the Hoopwestern Gazette,’ Dearest Polly said disgustedly. ‘She’ll make the front page.’

  ‘But she won’t get to Parliament,’ I said.

  Polly’s eyes focused on me with awakening amusement. ‘Your father’s son, aren’t you, then! It was George’s ability to identify the essential points that swayed us in his favour. There were seventeen of us on the selection panel, and to begin with most people thought Orinda the obvious choice. I know she took it for granted…’

  And she’d reckoned without Dearest Polly, I thought. Polly and others of like mind.

  Polly said, ‘I don’t know how she has the nerve to bring her lover!’

  ‘Er…’ I said. ‘What?’

  ‘That man just behind her. He was Dennis’s best friend.’

  I didn’t see how being Dennis’s best friend made anyone automatically Orinda’s lover, but before I could ask, Polly was claimed away. Dennis’s best friend, a person who managed to look unremarkable even in a dinner jacket, seemed abstracted more than attentive, but he did stick faithfully to Orinda’s back: rather like a bodyguard, I thought.

  I realised in consequence that Mr Bigwig himself had a genuinely serious bodyguard, a young muscular-looking shadow whose attention was directed to the crowd, not his master.

  I wondered if my father accepted that bodyguards would be the price of success as he went up his chosen ladder.

  He began circling the room and gestured for me to join him, and I practised being Mrs Bigwig but fell far short of her standard. I could act, but she was real.

  There was a general movement into the dining-room next door, where too many tables laid for ten people each were crowded into too small a space. Places were allocated to everyone by name and, my father and I entering almost last, I found that not only were we not expected at the same table – he was put naturally with the Bigwigs and the Constituency Association’s chairman – but I was squeezed against a distant wall between a Mrs Leonard Kitchens and Orinda herself.

  When she discovered her ignominious location Orinda flamed with fury like a white-hot torch. She stood and quivered and tried to get general attention by tapping a glass with a knife, but the noise was lost in the general bustle of eighty people chattering and clattering into their places. Orinda’s angry outburst barely reached further than her knives and forks.

  ‘This is an insult! I always sit at the top table! I demand…’

  No one listened.

  Through the throng I saw Dearest Polly busily settling my father into a place of honour and guessed with irony that Orinda’s quandary was Polly’s mischief.

  Orinda glared at me as I hovered politely waiting for her to sit. She had green eyes, black lashed. Stage grease-paint skin.

  ‘And who are you?’ she demanded; then bent down and snatched up the name card in front of my place. My identity left her speechless with her red mouth open.

  ‘I’m his son,’ I said lamely. ‘Can I help you with your chair?’

  She turned her back on me and spoke to her bodyguard (lover?) best friend of her dead husband, a characterless-seeming entity with a passive face.

  ‘Do something!’ Orinda instructed him.

  He glanced past her in my direction and with flat expressionless eyes dismissed me as of no consequence. He silently held Orinda’s chair for her to sit down and to my surprise she folded away most of her aggression and sat stonily and with a stiff back, enduring what she couldn’t get changed.

  At school one learned a good deal about power: who had it and who didn’t. (I didn’t.) Orinda’s understat
ed companion had power that easily eclipsed her own, all the more effective for being quiet.

  Mrs Leonard Kitchens, on my right, patted my chair with invitation and told me to occupy it. Mrs Leonard Kitchens, large, comfortable in a loose floral dress and with the lilt of a Dorset accent on her tongue, told me that my father looked too young to have a son my size.

  ‘Yes, doesn’t he,’ I said.

  Leonard himself, on her other side, bristled with a bad-tempered moustache and tried unsuccessfully to talk to Orinda across his wife and me. I offered to change places with him: his wife said sharply, ‘No.’

  Mrs Leonard Kitchens’ gift for small talk took us cosily through dinner (egg salad, chicken, strawberries), and I learned that ‘my Leonard’, her husband, was a nurseryman by trade with fanatical political beliefs and a loathing for Manchester United.

  With the chicken Mrs Kitchens, to my surprise, mentioned that Dennis Nagle had been an Under-Secretary of State in the Department of Trade and Industry, not a simple back-bencher, as I had somehow surmised. If my father won the seat, he would be a long way behind Dennis in career terms.

  Mrs Leonard Kitchens spoke conspiratorily into my right ear. ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t tell you, dear, but Polly very naughtily changed the name cards over, so as to put Orinda next to you. I saw her. She just laughed. She’s never liked Orinda.’ The semi-whispering voice grew even quieter, so as not to reach the ears on my left. ‘Orinda made a great constituency wife, very good at opening fêtes and that sort of thing, but one has to admit she did tend to boss Dennis sometimes. My Leonard was on the selection panel and he voted for her, of course. Men always fall for her, you know.’ She drew back and looked at me with her big head on one side. ‘You’re too young, of course.’

  To my dismay I could feel myself going red. Mrs Kitchens laughed her worldly laugh and shovelled her strawberries. Orinda Nagle ignored me throughout, while pouring out non-stop complaints to her companion, who mostly replied with grunts. I thought I would rather be almost anywhere else.

  Dinner finally over, the talkative throng rose to its collective feet and transferred down a passage into the large room lit by chandeliers which made the Sleeping Dragon the area’s popular magnet for dances, weddings and – as now – political free-for-alls.

  Orinda’s companion left his name card on the table, and out of not-very-strong curiosity I picked it up.

  Mr A. L. Wyvern, it said.

  I let ‘Mr A. L. Wyvern’ fall back among the debris of napkins and coffee cups and, without enthusiasm, drifted along with everyone else to the rows of folding chairs set up for the meeting. I’d read somewhere that affairs like this could draw tiny crowds unworthy of the name, but perhaps because my father was new to the district, almost double the number of the diners had turned up, and the whole place buzzed with the expectation of enjoyment.

  It was the first political meeting I’d attended and at that point I would have been happy if it had been my last.

  There were speeches from the small row of people up on a platform. The chairman of the Constituency Association rambled on a bit. Mr Bigwig was on his feet for twenty minutes. Mrs Bigwig smiled approvingly throughout.

  My father stood up and lightened the proceedings by making everyone laugh. I could feel my face arranging itself into Mrs Bigwig-type soppiness and knew that in my case anyway it had a lot to do with relief. I had been anxious that he wouldn’t grab his audience, that he would embarrass me into squirming agony by being boring.

  I suppose I should have known better. He told them what was right with the country, and why. He told them what was wrong with the country, and how to fix it. He gave them a palatable recipe. He told them what they wanted to believe, and he had them stamping their feet and roaring their applause.

  The local TV station cameraman filmed the cheers.

  Predictably, Orinda hated it. She sat rigidly, her neck as stiff as if she had an unbending rod there instead of vertebrae. I could see the sharp line of her jaw and the grim tight muscles round her mouth. She shouldn’t have come, I thought: but perhaps she truly had believed that the selectors had made a ghastly mistake.

  Dearest Polly, chief de-selector of Dennis’s widow, regarded my father euphorically, as if she had invented him herself; and, indeed, without her he might not have been there to seize the first rung of his destiny.

  Eyes alight with the triumph of his reception he asked for questions and, true to his intention, he stripped off his tie. He flung it on the table in front of him, and then he rounded the table so that there was nothing between him on the platform and the crowd below. He opened his arms wide, embracing them. He invited them to join him in a political adventure, to build for a better world and in particular for a better world for the constituents of Hoopwestern.

  He held them in his hands. He had them laughing. His timing could have been learned from stand-up comics. He generated excitement, belief, purpose; and I, in my inconspicuous end-of-row seat, I swelled with a mixture of amazement, understanding and finally pride that my parent was publicly delivering the goods.

  ‘I’m here for you,’ he said. ‘Come to my office across the square. Tell me your concerns, tell me what’s troubling you here in Hoopwestern. Tell me who to see, who to listen to. Tell me your history… and I’ll tell you your future. If you elect me I’ll work for you, I’ll take your wishes to Westminster, I’ll be your voice where it matters. I’ll light a bulb or two in the House of Commons…’

  Laughter drowned him. The light-bulb factory fuelled the town’s economy, and he wanted the light-bulb votes.

  To do good one needed power, he said. Light bulbs were so much wire and glass without power. In humans, power came from inside, not delivered and metered. Power gave light and warmth. ‘If you give me power, I’ll light your lamps.’

  My father’s own electricity galvanised the crowd. They shouted questions, he shouted answers. He was serious where it mattered and funny everywhere else. He had horror for genocide and sympathy for cats. He dodged cornering demands and promised never to put his name to anything whose consequences he didn’t understand.

  ‘Legislation,’ he said jokingly, ‘often achieves exactly what it is designed to avoid. We all know it. We moan about the results. I promise not to jump into emotional deep ends on your behalf. I beg the brains and common sense of Hoopwesterners to foresee disaster and warn me. I’ll raise your voices in whispers, not shouts, because shouts annoy but whispers go round persuasively and travel sweetly to the heart of things, and lead to sensible action.’

  Whether they understood him or not, they loved him.

  The most dedicated hecklers of the evening proved not to be the Paul Bethune opposition supporters, several of whom had bought tickets to the dinner and who had afterwards formed an aggressive bunch on the flip-up chairs, but my father’s presumed political allies (but in fact personal enemies), Orinda Nagle and Leonard Kitchens.

  Both of them demanded firm commitments to policies they both approved. Both shouted and pointed fingers. My father answered with unfailing good humour and stuck to the party’s overall stated position: he needed also to keep the die-hard backbone votes safely in his bag.

  Orinda was professional enough to see she was outgunned, but she didn’t give up trying. Mr A. L. Wyvern narrowed his eyes and sank his ears down into his collar. Mr A. L. Wyvern’s influence over Dennis and Orinda waned before my eyes.

  My father paid tribute to Dennis Nagle. Orinda, far from placated, said that no way could an inexperienced novice like George Juliard replace her husband, however Hollywood-handsome he might be, however manly his hairy chest, however witty, quick-tongued, charismatic. None of that made up for political know-how.

  Someone at the back of the hall booed. There was general laughter, a nervous release of the tension Orinda had begun to build up. The impetus swung back to my father, who sincerely thanked Orinda for her years of service to the party cause and deftly led an appreciation to her by clapping in her direction and encouragi
ng everyone else to copy him. The clapping grew. The crowd gave generous but unaffectionate acclaim.

  Orinda, to her impotent fury, was silenced and defeated by this vote of thanks. Leonard Kitchens bounced to his feet to defend her, but was shouted down. Leonard’s moustache quivered with frustration, his thick glasses flashing in the light as he swung from side to side like a wounded bull. His cosy wife looked as if she would deliver the coup de grâce when she got him home.

  My father courteously admired Leonard for his faithfulness and told him and everyone that if elected he would aim always for Dennis Nagle’s high and honest standard. Nothing less was worthy of the people of Hoopwestern.

  He had them cheering. He exhorted them again to talk to him personally and the crowd stood and surged forward round the seats to take him at his word.

  Dearest Polly chatted happily with the Bigwigs and beckoned me up onto the platform, and Mr Bigwig, regarding the clamorous excited throng, told me that my father already had all the skills that would propel him into high office. ‘All he needs is luck – and to keep out of trouble,’ he said.

  ‘Trouble like Paul Bethune,’ Polly said, nodding.

  ‘What trouble?’ asked Bigwig.

  ‘Oh dear!’ Polly looked flustered. ‘George forbids us to attack Paul Bethune’s character. George says negative campaigning can rebound on you. Paul Bethune has a mistress with an illegitimate daughter by him which he’s tried hard to hush up and George won’t attack him for it.’

  Mrs Bigwig looked at me assessingly. ‘I suppose there’s no shadow over your birth, is there, young Ben?’

  Polly assured her vehemently. ‘No, of course not,’ and I wondered if my father, all those years ago, could possibly have reckoned that my legitimacy would one day be important to him. After what I’d learned of him that day I saw that anything was possible, but in fact I stayed as convinced as I’d always been that his marriage to my mother had been an act of natural characteristic honour. I still believed, as I always had, that he would never shirk responsibility for his actions. I knew my birth had been a mistake and, as I’d often said, I had no quarrel at all with the quality of life he’d given me since.