10-Lb Penalty Read online

  ‘Lucky he wasn’t,’ I said, wedging my stool next to her to keep us both anchored.

  ‘Did the noise of the gunshot make him trip?’ she asked.

  ‘No. He tripped first.’

  ‘Why are you so sure?’

  ‘Because the bang of a high-velocity bullet reaches you after the bullet itself.’

  She looked disbelieving.

  ‘I learned it in physics lessons,’ I said.

  She glanced at my beardless face. ‘How old are you?’ she asked.

  ‘Seventeen.’

  ‘You can’t even vote!’

  ‘I don’t actually want to.’

  She looked across to where my father was winning media allies with modesty and grace.

  ‘I’ve met a fair number of politicians,’ she said. ‘Your father’s different.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Can’t you feel his power? Perhaps you can’t, as you’re his son. You’re too close to him.’

  ‘I do sometimes feel it.’ It stunned me, I should have said.

  ‘Look at last night,’ Crystal went on without pausing. ‘I was there in the hall, sitting at the back. He set that place alight. He’s a natural speaker. I mean, I work here, and he had my pulse racing. Poor old Dennis Nagle, he was a nice worthy man, pretty capable in a quiet way, but he could never have got a crowd cheering and stamping their feet like last night.’

  ‘Could Orinda?’ I asked.

  Crystal was startled. ‘No, she can’t make people laugh. But don’t judge her by last night. She’s done devoted work in the constituency. She was always at Dennis’s side. She’s feeling very hurt that she wasn’t selected to follow Dennis, because until your father galvanised the selection panel she was unopposed.’

  ‘In fact,’ I said, ‘if anyone had a motive for bumping off my father, it would be her.’

  ‘Oh, but she wouldn’t!’ Crystal was honestly dismayed. ‘She can sometimes be a darling, you know. Mervyn loves her. He’s quite put out that he’s not working to get her elected. He was looking forward to it.’

  My first impression of Crystal’s sharp spikiness had been right only as regarded her outward appearance. She was kinder and more patient than she looked. I wondered if at one time she had been anorexic: I had known anorexic girls at school. The teeth of one of them had fallen out.

  Crystal’s teeth were straight and white, though seldom visible, owing to an overall serious view of life. I thought she was probably twenty-five or -six and hadn’t had enough in life to smile about.

  Mervyn Teck zig-zagged to my elbow through the busy crowd and said it was time to think about driving my father to his day’s engagements in the outlying town of Quindle. The constituency was large in area with separate pockets of concentrated inhabitation: Mervyn gave me a map with roads and destinations marked, but looked at me doubtfully.

  ‘Are you sure you’re competent enough?’

  I said, ‘Yes,’ with more confidence than I felt.

  ‘One incident like last night’s is a godsend,’ he said. ‘A car crash on top would be too much. We don’t want any whiff of accident-prone.’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  Across the room my father was dangling the Range Rover’s keys in my direction. I went over to him and took them and he, with the help of a walking stick, detached himself from the chattering well-wishers (the police and media had long gone) and limped through the office and out to the car park.

  Crowds beget crowds. There was a bunch of people outside the rear door who clapped and smiled at my father and gave him thumbs-up signs. I looked across the car park to where we had left the Range Rover on our arrival from Brighton the previous afternoon and my father asked me to fetch it over so that he wouldn’t need to hobble that far.

  I walked across to the conspicuous vehicle and stopped beside it, the keys in my hand. The sun shone again that day, gleaming on the gold-and-silver-painted garlands; and after a moment I turned away and went back to my father.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ he said, half annoyed. ‘Can’t you drive it?’

  ‘Is it insured for someone my age?’

  ‘Yes, of course. I wouldn’t suggest it otherwise. Go and fetch it, Ben.’

  I frowned and went back into the offices, ignoring his displeasure.

  ‘It’s time you went,’ Mervyn said, equally impatient. ‘You said you could drive George’s car.’

  I nodded. ‘But I’d be better in a smaller car. Like you said, we don’t want an accident. Do you have a smaller one? Could I borrow yours?’

  Mervyn said with obvious aggravation, ‘My car isn’t insured for drivers under twenty-one.’

  ‘Mine is, though,’ Crystal said. ‘My nineteen-year-old brother drives it. But it’s not very glamorous. Not like the Range Rover.’

  She dug the keys out of her handbag and said that Mervyn (to his impatience) would give her a lift home if we were not back by five-thirty, and would pick her up again in the morning. I thanked her with an awkward kiss on the cheek, and with Mervyn Teck repeating his disapproval, went out to rejoin my father.

  ‘I’m disappointed in you, Ben,’ he said, when Mervyn Teck explained. ‘You’d better practise in the Range Rover tomorrow.’

  ‘OK. But today, now, before we go, would you arrange for some mechanics to come here and make sure there’s nothing wrong with it?’

  ‘Of course there’s nothing wrong with it. I drove it to Brighton and back yesterday and it was running perfectly.’

  ‘Yes, but it’s been standing out in the car park all night. Last night it’s possible someone tried to shoot you. Suppose someone’s hammered a nail or two into the Range Rover’s tyres? Or anything.’ I finished self-deprecatingly, as if I thought sabotage a childish fantasy; but after a brief thoughtful silence my father said to Mervyn, ‘I’ll go in Crystal’s car. Ben can practise on the Range Rover tomorrow. Meanwhile, Mervyn, get the Range Rover overhauled, would you?’

  Mervyn gave me a sour look, but it was he, after all, who had most wanted to avoid the accident-prone label: or so he’d said.

  In Crystal’s small work-a-day box on wheels I therefore drove the candidate safely to his far-flung appointments, and again I saw and heard him shake awake the apathetic voting public, progressively attracting more and more people as his voice raised laughter and applause. His audience approved with their eyes and shouted questions, some friendly, some hostile, all of them getting thoughtful answers, lightly phrased.

  I didn’t know how much of the day’s flashing enthusiasm would actually carry the feet to the polling booths, but it was enough, my father assured me, if they didn’t walk into the opposition camp and write their X for Bethune.

  We had squeezed into Crystal’s car an invention of my father’s that was basically two wooden boxes, each a foot high, one larger than the other, that would bolt together, one on top of the other, to form an impromptu stepped platform to raise a speaker above his listeners: just enough for him to be comfortably heard, not high enough to be psychologically threatening. ‘My soapbox’ my father called it, though it was many years since such crowd-pulling structures had contained soap.

  I assembled the ‘soapbox’ in three places in the town’s scattered focal points, and at each place a crowd gathered, curious, or anti, or uncommitted, and at each place, as I unbolted, or assembled or packed away the stepped platform, people would crowd round me with (mostly) friendly enquiries.

  ‘Are you his chauffeur?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is he as knowledgeable as he seems?’

  ‘More so.’

  ‘What does he think about education?’

  I smiled. ‘He’s in favour of it.’

  ‘Yes, but –’

  ‘I can’t answer for him. Please ask him yourself.’

  They turned away and asked him, and got politically correct and truthful answers that would never be implemented without a huge increase in taxes: I was learning the economic facts as rapidly as I’d ever assimilated
quadratic equations.

  My father’s appearance in Quindle had been well publicised in advance by posters all over the town. Volunteers had distributed them and volunteers met and escorted us everywhere, their faces shining with commitment. My own commitment, I had already found, was to my father himself, not to his party nor his beliefs. My private views, if I had any, were that good ideas were scattered around, not solely the property of any shade of rosette: and of course what were to me good ideas were hateful errors to others. I didn’t embrace any single whole agenda package, and it was always those who didn’t care passionately, those who changed their minds and swung with the wind, those who felt vaguely dissatisfied, they it was who swayed one side in or another side out. The ‘floating voters’, who washed back and fore with the tide, those were my father’s target.

  Quindle, like Hoopwestern, had grown in response to industries planted in the surrounding fields; not light bulbs this time, but furniture and paint. There had then been a long policy of ‘infilling’ – the building of large numbers of small houses on every patch of vacant grass. The resulting town strained against its green belt and suffered from interior traffic snarl-ups on a standstill scale. It worked well for soapbox orators: in the summer heat cars crept past with their windows down, getting the message.

  Among the blizzard of VOTE JULIARD posters there were some for TITMUSS and WHISTLE and, of course, many for BETHUNE IS BETTER. GIVE HIM YOUR X. Bethune’s notices on the whole looked tattered, and I found it wasn’t merely because it was three days since he’d stomped inner Quindle on his own soapbox tour, but because the local weekly paper, the Quindle Diary, had hit the newsagents with ‘Bethune for Sleaze’ as its headline.

  One of the volunteers having tucked the Quindle Diary under my elbow, I read the front page, as who wouldn’t.

  ‘As our representative in Westminster, do we want an adulterer who says he upholds the family values to which this newspaper in this young town is dedicated? Do we believe the promises of one who can’t keep a solemn vow?’

  I read to the end and thought the whole tone insufferably pompous, but I didn’t suppose it would do the Bethune camp much good.

  At each of his three ascents of the soapbox, my father was bombarded with demands that he should at least deplore the Bethune hypocrisy, and at each place, carefully sidestepping the loaded come-ons, he attacked Bethune and his party only for their political aims and methods.

  His restraint didn’t altogether please his own army of volunteers.

  ‘George could demolish Bethune if he would only take a hatchet to his character,’ one of them complained. ‘Why won’t he do it?’

  ‘He doesn’t believe in it,’ I said.

  ‘You have to play the aces you’re given.’

  ‘Not five aces,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘He would think it cheating.’

  The volunteer raised his eyes to heaven but changed his approach. ‘You see that thin man standing near your father, writing in a notebook?’

  ‘Do you mean the one in a pink jogging suit and a baseball hat on backwards?’

  ‘I do indeed. He’s called Usher Rudd. He writes for the Hoopwestern Gazette and his column is also syndicated to the Quindle Diary. It’s he who wrote the personal attacks on Paul Bethune. He’s been following Bethune around ever since his party chose him as their candidate. Rudd’s a highly professional siever of mud. Never, never trust him.’

  I said in apprehension, ‘Does my father know who he is?’

  ‘I told George that Usher Rudd would be bound to turn up again, but he doesn’t always look the same. The pink overalls and baseball cap are new.’

  ‘Usher Rudd’s an unusual name.’

  The volunteer laughed. ‘He’s really young Bobby Rudd, always a menace. His mother was Gracie Usher before she married a Rudd. The Rudd family have a string of repair garages, for anything from bicycles to combine harvesters, but fixing cars isn’t to young Bobby’s taste. He calls himself an investigative journalist. More like a muck-raker, I’d say.’

  I said tentatively, ‘Was he at the dinner last night?’

  ‘That big do at the Sleeping Dragon? He would have been for a certainty. He’ll be furious that the gunshot and all that happened was too late for today’s Gazette. The Gazette is only twenty-four pages long, mostly advertisements, sports results, local news and re-hashed world events. Everyone buys it for the dirt Rudd digs up. He was a rotten peeping tom as a little boy, always had his snotty nose glued to people’s windows, and he hasn’t got better with time. If you want to have sex with the vicar, don’t do it in Quindle.’

  I said dryly, ‘Thanks for the advice.’

  He laughed. ‘Beware of Bobby Rudd, that’s all.’

  With the present crowd listening to my galvanic father with devouring eyes as much as persuadable ears, I slowly strolled round to guard his back; I was some poor sort of guardian to my parent, I thought with self-condemnation, if I left him wide open to repeat bullets or other jokers.

  I did my best to look purposeless, but clearly failed with that message as Usher Rudd, also as if guileless, came to stand casually beside me. His baseball cap advertised vigorous sports goods, as did his footwear, and he wore between, from neck to ankle, a soft rose-pink loose exercise suit of nylon-like fabric which, instead of hiding the thinness of his body inside, gave an impression that the arms and legs functioned on a system of articulated rods. I, in my jeans and T-shirt, looked almost invisibly ordinary.

  ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘Where is the Juliard battle-wagon?’

  Puzzled, I answered, ‘We came in a different car.’

  ‘I’m Usher Rudd.’

  His accent was unreconstructed Dorset, his manner confident to arrogant. He had unexcited blue eyes, sandy lashes and dry freckled skin: the small-boy menace who had peeped through windows still lived close to the surface and made me for once feel older than my years.

  ‘What’s your name?’ he demanded, as I made no response.

  ‘Benedict,’ I said.

  ‘Ben,’ he asserted, nodding his recognition, ‘Ben Juliard.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘How old are you?’ He was abrupt, as if he had a right to the information.

  ‘Seventeen,’ I said without offence. ‘How old are you?’

  ‘That’s none of your business.’

  I gazed at him with a perplexity that was at least half genuine. Why should he think he could ask questions that he himself would not answer? I had a lot to learn, as my father had said; but I instinctively didn’t like him.

  Close behind my back my father was answering the sort of questions it was proper he should be asked: where did he stand on education, foreign policy, taxes, the dis-united kingdom and the inability of bishops to uphold the ten commandments? ‘Shouldn’t sins be modernised?’ someone shouted. Moses was out of date.

  My father, who certainly lived by ‘thou shalt not’ rather than by ‘what can I get away with?’ replied with humour, ‘By all means pension off Moses if you would like your neighbour to covet your ox and your ass and carry off your wife and your lawn mower…’

  The end of his sentence drowned in laughter and cheers, and for fifteen more minutes he had them spellbound, feeding them political nuggets in nourishing soup, producing a performance without microphone or footlights that they would never forget. All my life people would say to me, ‘I heard your father speak in Quindle,’ as if it had been a revelation in their existence: and it wasn’t altogether what he said that mattered, I reckoned, but his whole, honest, joyous, vigorous presentation.

  Against the final applause, Usher Rudd said to me, ‘Birthday?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your birthday?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, what?’

  ‘Yes, I do have a birthday.’

  He thought me dim. ‘What’s your mother’s name?’ he said.

  ‘Sarah.’

  ‘Her last name?’


  ‘Yes. She’s dead.’

  His expression changed. His gaze grew thoughtful and flicked downward to the Quindle Diary that I held rolled in my hand. I saw him understand the obtuseness of my answers.

  ‘Bethune deserves it,’ he said sharply.

  ‘I don’t know anything about him,’ I said.

  ‘Then read my column.’

  ‘Even then…’

  ‘Everyone has secrets,’ he declared with relish. ‘I just find them out. I enjoy doing it. They deserve it.’

  ‘The public has a right to know?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course they do. If someone is setting themselves up to make our laws and rule our lives they shouldn’t sleaze it off with dirty sex on the side, should they?’

  ‘I haven’t thought about it.’

  ‘If old George is hiding dirty secrets, I’ll find them out. What’s your mother’s name?’

  ‘Sarah. She’s dead.’

  He gave me a bitter antagonistic glare.

  ‘I’m sure you do a good detective job,’ I said mildly. ‘My mother’s name was Sarah Juliard. Married. Dead. Sorry about that.’

  ‘I’ll find out,’ he threatened.

  ‘Be my guest.’

  My father disengaged himself from eager clutching voters and turned to say he was ready for his lunch engagement: a volunteers’ gathering in a pub.

  ‘This,’ I said, indicating the inhabitant of the pink tracksuit and the energetic shoes and baseball hat, ‘is Usher Rudd.’

  ‘Nice to know you,’ my father said, automatically ready to shake hands. ‘Do you work for the party, er… Usher?’

  ‘He writes for newspapers,’ I said. I unrolled the Quindle Diary so he could see the front page. ‘He wrote this. He wants me to tell him my mother’s name.’

  I was getting to know my father. Twenty-four hours earlier I wouldn’t have been aware that a tiny tensing of muscles and a beat of silence meant a fizzingly fast assessment of unwelcome facts. Not only powerful but dauntingly rapid: not only analytical but an instant calculator of down-the-line consequences. Some brain.

  He smiled politely at Usher Rudd. ‘My wife’s name was Sarah. Unfortunately she died.’