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  ‘What of?’ Usher Rudd, disconcerted by my father’s pleasant frankness, sounded aggressively rude.

  ‘It was a long time ago.’ My father remained civil. ‘Come on, Ben, or we’ll be late.’

  We turned away and walked three paces; and Bobby Usher Rudd, darting round and wheeling in the running shoes, came to a halt facing us, standing in our way.

  His voice was thin, malicious and triumphant. ‘I’ll get you de-selected. Orinda Nagle will have her rights.’

  ‘Ah.’ My father packed all the understanding in the world into one syllable. ‘So you rubbished Paul Bethune to give her a clear run, is that it?’

  Usher Rudd was furious. ‘She’s worth ten of you.’

  ‘She’s a lucky woman to have so many fans.’

  ‘You’ll lose.’ Usher Rudd almost danced with rage. ‘She would have won.’

  ‘Well…’ My father detoured past him with me at his heels, and Usher Rudd behind us yelled the question I would never have asked but wanted like crazy to know the answer to. ‘If your wife died long ago, what do you do for sex?’

  My father certainly heard but there wasn’t a falter in his step. I risked a flick of a glance at his face but learned nothing: he showed no embarrassment or anxiety, only, if anything, amusement.

  The lunch in the pub was up-beat, the volunteers all intoxicated with the speech stops of the morning. In the afternoon we toured a furniture factory and then a paint factory, where the candidate (leaning on his walking stick) listened intently to local problems and promised remedies if he were elected. He shook countless hands and signed countless autographs, and left behind an atmosphere of hope.

  When Mervyn Teck had made his plans he had expected it to be Orinda who charmed the woodworkers and the colour mixers, and there had been resistance in parts of the factories to the one seen as a usurper. My father defused criticism by praising Orinda steadfastly without apologising for having been chosen to take her place.

  ‘A natural-born politician,’ one of the lady volunteers said in my ear. ‘The way the country’s leaning, we’d lose this marginal seat with Orinda, though she doesn’t believe that, of course. With your father we’ve a better chance, but voters are unpredictable and can often be downright vindictive, and they mostly vote for party, not for individuals, and the sleaze accusations won’t hurt Paul Bethune much, especially with male voters who privately don’t think a spot of adultery too much of a big deal, and will think “good luck to him”. And you’d fancy women wouldn’t vote for adulterers, but they do.’

  ‘Doesn’t Usher Rudd shift the Xs from one slot to another?’

  ‘Not as much as he believes, the little weasel. It’s not the locals that pay attention to him as much as the big noises in Westminster. They’re all shit-scared of him digging into their pasts, and the higher they climb the more they hate him. Haven’t you noticed that when an MP screws up his or her reputation, it’s their own party that dumps them quickest?’

  The correct answer was no, I hadn’t noticed, because I hadn’t been looking.

  On our way back to Hoopwestern I asked my father what he thought of Usher Rudd but he yawned, said he was flaked out and his ankle hurt, and promptly went to sleep. I drove carefully, still not instinctive in traffic, and woke the candidate by a jerking halt at a red light at a crossroads.

  ‘Usher Rudd,’ he said without preamble, as if twenty minutes hadn’t passed between question and answer, ‘will burn his fingers on privacy laws.’

  I said, ‘I didn’t know there were any privacy laws.’

  ‘There will be.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Usher Rudd has red hair under that baseball cap.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘He came to the meeting after last night’s dinner. Polly pointed him out to me. He wore a black tracksuit and black trainers. Didn’t you see him?’

  ‘I don’t remember him.’

  ‘Find out if he can shoot.’

  I opened my mouth to say ‘Wow’ or ‘How?’ and thought better of both. My father glanced at me sideways, and I felt him smile.

  ‘I don’t think it was him,’ I said.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘His bullets of choice are acid ink.’

  ‘Are you sure you want to be a mathematician? Why don’t you try writing?’

  ‘I want to be a jockey.’ Might as well walk on the moon.

  ‘Exeter University required to know where you would spend your gap year before they offered you a deferred entry: that is to say, you’re going there not this October, but next year. They weren’t enthusiastic about racecourses.’

  ‘There’s an Exeter racecourse.’

  ‘You know damned well what they mean.’

  ‘I don’t like politics.’ Change the subject.

  ‘Politics are the oil of the world.’

  ‘You mean… the world doesn’t run without oil?’

  He nodded. ‘When politics jam solid, you get wars.’

  ‘Father –’ I said.

  ‘Dad.’

  ‘No. Father. Why do you want to be a politician?’

  After a pause he said, ‘I am one. I can’t help it.’

  ‘But you’ve never… I mean…’

  ‘I’ve never made a move before? Don’t think I haven’t considered it. I’ve known since I was your age or younger that one day I would try for Parliament. But I needed a solid base. I needed to prove to myself that I could make money. I needed to understand economics. And then there came a time not long ago when I said to myself “now or never”. So it’s now.’

  It was the longest statement about himself that he’d ever made in my hearing; and he had simplified for my sake, I thought, an urge that had taken time to ripen and had burst out fully grown at the Sleeping Dragon. The Juliard dragon was awake now and roaring and prowling up broad Whitehall towards Number 10.

  Thinking about him, I lost the way home. He made no sarcastic comment when I stopped, consulted the map, worked out where I’d gone wrong and finally arrived in the car park from an unexpected direction; and for that forbearance alone I would have served him as an esquire to a knight. How old fashioned could one get?

  It was well after six o’clock when we reached the car park which, in consequence, was almost empty. All the bordering shops had closed for the day. The late afternoon sunshine weakened to soft gold as I pulled up and applied Crystal’s brakes.

  There were dim lights in the office, but no people. I unlocked the door and we found a large note laid out prominently on Mervyn Teck’s desk.

  ‘The Range Rover is in Rudd’s Repair Garage. They thoroughly overhauled it, and found nothing wrong.’

  FOURTH

  I would have expected the nervous energy of the day-long performance in Quindle to have earned my father an evening’s rest, but I had barely begun to wake up to the stamina demanded of would-be public servants. It seemed that far from a quiet top-up of batteries, he was committed to another marathon shake-hands-and-smile, not this time in the chandeliered magnificence of the Sleeping Dragon’s all-purpose hall, but in much more basic space normally used as a schooling ground for five-year-olds in Hoopwestern’s outer regions.

  There were kids’ attempts at pictures pinned to cork boards all round the walls, mostly thin figures with big heads and spiky hair sticking straight out like Medusa’s snakes. There were simple notices – ‘do not run’ and ‘raise your hand’ – all written in self-conscious lower case letters.

  Primary colours everywhere bombarded the eyesight to saturation point, and I couldn’t believe that this sort of thing had been my own educational springboard; but it had. Another world, long left behind.

  There were several rows of the temporary flip-up seats that grew more and more familiar to me as the days passed, and a makeshift speaker’s platform, this time with a microphone that squeaked whenever tested, and on several other occasions when switched on or off.

  The lighting was of unflattering greenish-white fluorescent stri
ps, and there weren’t enough of them to raise spirits above depression. Limbo must look like this, I thought: and the unenticing room had in fact drawn the sort of audience you could count on fingers and toes and still have enough left over for an abacus.

  Mervyn Teck met us on the doorstep looking at his watch and checking, but by good luck and asking the way (less pride on my part than shame of arriving late) we had turned up at the exact minute advertised by a scatter of leaflets.

  On the table on the platform, beside the temperamental microphone, there was a gavel for calling the meeting to order and two large plates of sandwiches secured by cling film.

  Two or three earnest lady volunteers crowded round the candidate with goodwill, but it was plain, ten minutes after start time, that apathy, and not enthusiasm, had won the evening.

  I expected my father to be embarrassed by the small turn-out and to hurry through the unsatisfactory proceedings, but he made a joke of it, abandoning the microphone and sitting on the edge of the platform, beckoning the sparse and scattered congregation to come forward into the first few rows, to make the meeting more coherent.

  His magic worked. Everyone moved forward. He spoke to them familiarly, as if addressing a roomful of friends, and I watched him turn a disaster into a useful exercise in public relations. By the time the sandwiches had been liberated from the cling film even the few who had come to heckle had been tamed to silence.

  Mervyn Teck looked both thoughtful and displeased.

  ‘Something the matter?’ I asked.

  He said sourly, ‘Orinda would have drawn a much better house. She’d have packed the hall. They love her here: she presents prizes to the children here every term. She buys them herself.’

  ‘I’m sure she’ll go on doing it.’

  I meant it without irony, but Mervyn Teck gave me a glance of dislike and moved away. One of the lady volunteers sweetly told me that the time of the meeting had clashed with the current rave series on the television, and that even the pubs were suffering from it on Thursday nights. Tomorrow would be different, she said. Tomorrow the Town Hall would be packed.

  ‘Er…’ I said, ‘what’s happening in the Town Hall?’

  ‘But you’re his son, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, but…’

  ‘But you don’t know that tomorrow night your father goes face to face in a debate with Paul Bethune?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Fireworks,’ she said happily. ‘I wouldn’t miss it for the world.’

  My father, when I asked him about it on the short drive back to the centre of Hoopwestern, seemed full of equal relish.

  ‘I suppose,’ I said, ‘there’ll be more point to it than the sort of fiasco tonight could have been.’

  ‘Every vote counts,’ he corrected me. ‘If I won only a few tonight, that’s fine. You have to win the floaters over to your side, and they have to be persuaded one by one.’

  ‘I’m hungry,’ I said as we passed a brightly lit take-away, so we backtracked and bought chicken wings with banana and bacon, and even there my father, recognised, fell into political chat with the man deep-frying chips.

  In the morning early I went out and bought a copy of the Gazette. Sleaze and Paul Bethune filled pages four and five (with photographs) but the front-page topic of concern was headlined ‘JULIARD SHOT?’

  Columns underneath said Yes (eyewitnesses) and No (he wasn’t hurt). Statements from the police said nothing much (they couldn’t find a gun). Statements from onlookers, like the self-important gunshot expert, said Juliard had definitely been the object of an assassination attempt. He thought so and he was always right.

  The consensus theory of the reporters (including Usher Rudd) was that resentment against Juliard was running high in the Orinda Nagle camp. The editor’s leader column didn’t believe that political assassination ever took place at so low a level. World leaders, perhaps. Unelected local candidates, never.

  I walked through the town to the ring road looking for Rudd’s Repair Garage and found the staff unlocking their premises for the day. They had a large covered workshop and an even larger wire-fenced compound where jobs done or waiting stood in haphazard rows. The Range Rover was parked in that compound, sunlight already gleaming on its metallic paint.

  I asked for, and reached, the manager, whose name was Basil Rudd. Thin, red-haired, freckled and energetic, his likeness to Usher Rudd made twins a possibility.

  ‘Don’t ask,’ he said, eyeing my newspaper. ‘He’s my cousin. I disown him, and if you’re out to be busy with your fists, you’ve reached the wrong man.’

  ‘Well, I really came to collect that Range Rover. It’s my father’s.’

  ‘Oh?’ He blinked. ‘I’ll need proof of identity.’

  I showed him a letter of authorisation signed by my parent and also my driving licence.

  ‘Fair enough.’ He opened a drawer, picked out a labelled ring bearing two keys and held them out for me to take. ‘Don’t forget to switch off the alarms. I’ll send the bill to Mr Juliard’s party headquarters. OK?’

  ‘Yes. Thank you. Was there anything wrong?’

  He shrugged. ‘If there was, there isn’t now.’ He consulted a spiked worksheet. ‘Oil change. General check. That’s all.’

  ‘Do you think I could talk to whoever did the job?’

  ‘Whatever for?’

  ‘Er… I’ve got to drive my father round in that vehicle and I’ve never driven it before… and I thought I might get some tips about engine management… so I don’t overheat it by crawling along the roads canvassing door to door.’

  Basil Rudd shrugged. ‘Ask for Terry. He did the work.’

  I thanked him and sought out Terry who gave three instant physical impressions: big; bald; belly. Brown overalls, grease-stained from his job.

  He too eyed my newspaper. He spoke with venom in a powerful Dorset voice.

  ‘Don’t mention Bobby bloody Rudd round here.’

  I hadn’t been going to, but I said, ‘Why not?’

  ‘He’ll listen to you and your missus in bed with one of them window-vibrating bugging contraptions and before you know it, never mind the sex, he’ll be printing what you said about the boss having his hand up a customer’s skirt when she brings her car in for the twentieth time to be overhauled, though there’s bugger all wrong with it in the first place. Got me sacked, Bobby did.’

  ‘But,’ I suggested, ‘you’re still here.’

  ‘Yeah, see, Basil took me on because he loathes Bobby, who’s his cousin, see. It was over in Quindle I got sacked by Bobby’s dad, that’s Basil’s uncle, drunk half the time…’ He broke off. ‘If it’s not to complain about Bobby Usher bleeding Rudd, what is it you want, lad?’

  ‘I… er… you serviced my father’s Range Rover. What was wrong with it?’

  ‘Apart from the fancy paintwork?’ He scratched his shiny head. ‘Foreign body in the oil sump. I suppose you might say that. Nothing else. I gave it a good clean-out.’

  ‘What sort of foreign body?’

  He looked at me dubiously. ‘I don’t rightly know.’

  ‘Well, um… how do you know it was there?’

  He took his time in answering by starting at the beginning of his involvement. ‘A man in your party’s headquarters – said his name was Teck or some such – he phones Basil saying there might be something dicey about a fancy Range Rover they’d got there and to send someone over pronto to take a decko, so I went over there and this Mr Teck gave me the keys and the Range Rover started at first touch, sweet as anything.’

  I looked at him without comment.

  ‘Yeah, well,’ he said, scratching his bald head again. ‘This Teck guy said something about maybe someone took a pot shot at your old man and to check that the Range Rover’s brakes hadn’t been mucked abut with or anything, so I looked it all over and could see nothing wrong. No bombs, nothing like that, but anyway this Teck guy said to bring it here and do a thorough service, so I did.’

  He stopped fo
r effect. I said obligingly, ‘What did you find?’

  ‘See, it was what I didn’t find.’

  ‘I wish you’d explain.’

  ‘No plug on the sump.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oil change. Routine service. I run the Range Rover over the inspection pit and I take a spanner to unscrew the sump-plug to drain out the old oil, and there you are, no plug. No plug, I ask you. But there’s oil there, according to the dipstick. Normal. Full. So I run the engine a bit and the oil pressure gauge reads normal, like it did on my way round here, so there has to be oil circulating round the engine, see, so why, if the sump-plug is missing, why hasn’t the oil all emptied out?’

  ‘Well, why?’

  ‘Because there’s something else plugging up the hole, that’s why.’

  ‘A rag?’ I suggested. ‘A wad of tissues?’

  ‘Nothing like that, I don’t think. Something harder. Anyway, I poked a bit of wire into the hole and freed whatever was there and the oil poured out like it always does. Not filthy oil, mind you. It hadn’t been long since the last oil change.’

  ‘So the plug, whatever it is, is still in the sump?’

  He shrugged. ‘I dare say so. It won’t do much harm there. The sump drain-hole’s not much bigger than a little finger.’ He held up his own grimy hand. ‘It wasn’t a big plug, see.’

  ‘Mm.’ I hesitated. ‘Did you tell Basil Rudd about it?’

  He shook his big head. ‘He’d gone home for the day when I put the work-done sheets in his office, and I didn’t think much of it. I found a new plug that fits the Range Rover and screwed it up tight. Then I filled up with clean oil, same as usual, and put the Range Rover out in the yard, where it is now. It’s all hunky-dory. You’ll have no trouble with it.’

  ‘I’ll take it in a minute,’ I said. ‘I’ll just go back into the office to see about settling up.’

  I went into the office and asked Basil Rudd if I could telephone my father in the party headquarters and he obligingly held out the receiver to me with a be-my-guest invitation.

  I said to my father, ‘Please could you ask whoever it was who worked on your Range Rover last if there was a normal plug on the oil-sump drain.’ I relayed Terry’s finding and his solution to the problem.