‘Usher Rudd told my friend Alderney Wyvern – um, do you know who I mean by Alderney Wyvern?’
‘Yes again.’
‘Usher Rudd says George Juliard is not only lying about you being his legitimate son but maintains you are his catamite.’
‘His what?’ If I sounded bewildered, it was because I was. ‘What’s a… a cat of mice?’
‘You don’t know what he means?’
‘No.’
‘A catamite is a boy… a prostitute boy lover.’
I wasn’t so much outraged as astonished. In fact, I laughed.
‘Usher Rudd,’ Orinda said warningly, ‘is a tireless researcher. Don’t take him lightly.’
‘But I thought Paul Bethune was his sleaze target.’
‘Anyone is,’ Orinda said. ‘He makes up lies. He likes to destroy people. He’ll do it for money if he can, but if there’s no money in it he’ll do it for pleasure. He’s a butterfly-wing puller. Are you George Juliard’s legitimate son?’
‘I look like him, a bit.’
She nodded.
‘And he did marry my mother – in front of a lot of witnesses.’ (Disapproving witnesses, but never mind.)
The news seemed not to please her.
‘I suppose,’ I said, ‘that you would prefer Usher Rudd to be right? Then you could have got rid of my father?’
‘Alderney Wyvern says it will take more than an Usher Rudd fabrication. It’s a matter of finding a strong lever.’
She sounded fiercely bitter. Whatever Polly thought of my ability to understand unhappiness and release it, I felt lost in the maze of Orinda’s implacable grievances against my father.
‘Someone took a shot at him,’ I said.
Orinda shook her head. ‘Another lie.’
‘I was there,’ I protested.
‘So was Alderney,’ she said. ‘He saw what happened. George Juliard tripped on the cobbles and someone loosed a single shot out of high spirits and Juliard claimed it had been aimed at him! Utter rubbish. He’ll do anything for publicity.’
I thought: Orinda herself would never get under a car and unscrew a sump-plug. However careful one might be, oil would run out before one could thrust a candle into the drain. Even if she knew how and where to unscrew the plug, engine oil and Orinda’s clothes couldn’t be thought of together in a month of canvassing.
Orinda needed glasses to read a racecard: I couldn’t envisage her aiming and firing a target rifle.
Orinda might wish my father dead, but couldn’t kill him herself, and didn’t believe that anyone else had tried.
Orinda, I thought, hadn’t asked or paid anyone to get rid of her rival physically. There were limits to her hate.
I took her across the course to watch the second race from near one of the fences, to give her at least some sensation of the speed involved. Her narrow high heels tended to dig into the turf and stick, making walking difficult, which didn’t please her. I was not, I acknowledged to myself in depression, making a great success of the afternoon.
She was, though, impressed by the noise and energy of the half-ton horses soaring or crashing through the tops of the big black birch fence, and she could hear the jockeys shouting to each other and to their mounts; could see the straining legs in white breeches and the brilliant colours of the silks in the August sun. And whether she wanted me to know it or not, she did quite suddenly understand why this sort of racing fascinated the Duke and everyone else who had made the effort and the journey to the racecourse.
When the horses had surged past us again and were striving their way to the winning post, while the very air still vibrated with their passage, I said, ‘I do understand what you feel about having been passed over by the selectors.’
Orinda said unkindly, ‘You can’t possibly. You’re far too young.’
Almost in desperation I said, ‘You’ve lost what you most wanted, and it’s near to unbearable. You were looking forward to a sort of life that would be a joy every day, that would fulfil you and give you inner power to achieve your best dreams, and it’s been snatched away. You’ve been told you can’t have it. The pain of it’s brutal. Believe me, I do know.’
She stared, the green eyes wide.
‘You don’t have to be old,’ I said. ‘You can feel it if you’re only six and you passionately want a pony and you’ve nowhere to keep it and it’s not sensible to start with. And I…’ I swallowed. I wanted to stop again, but this time found the grit for the words. ‘I wanted this.’ I swept an arm to the black fence, to the whole wide racecourse. ‘I wanted all of this. I’ve wanted to be a jockey for as long as I can remember. I’ve grown up in the belief that this would be my life. I’ve grown up feeling warm and certain of my future, and… well… this week it’s been snatched away from me. This week I’ve been told I can’t live this life, I’m not a good enough rider, I haven’t the spark to be the jockey I want to be. The trainer I was riding for told me to leave. My father says he’ll pay for me to go to university, but not for me to waste my time riding in races when I’m not going to be brilliant. It didn’t really sink in… I didn’t know how absolutely awful it would be until I came here today… but I’d like to scream, actually, and roll on the ground, and if you think you have to be old enough to be my mother to feel as you do, well, you’re wrong.’
SIXTH
At the end of the afternoon I glumly drove the Range Rover back to Polly’s house in the woods, feeling that I’d wasted all her planning and not only failed to profit from an unrepeatable opportunity but had positively made things worse.
By the time Orinda and I had recrossed the course (her heels were sticking worse than ever) and regained the Stewards’ room, the Duke had disappeared again towards his duties. Orinda watched the third race from the viewing balcony leading out of the luncheon room, her back relentlessly turned towards me, her manner forbidding conversation.
A horse carrying a 7-lb penalty won the race. Orinda hadn’t backed it.
When the Duke returned, all smiles at the sight of her, she thanked him charmingly for his hospitality and left. She said nothing to my father or to Polly or to myself, ignoring our existence, and I survived the last three races wishing I were smaller, richer, and at the very least a genius. Settling for the obvious privileges I had seemed dreary compared with the fairy-tale lost.
When Polly invited us into her house my father accepted at once.
‘Cheer up,’ he commanded to my silent reluctance. ‘No one wins all the time. Say something. You haven’t said anything for hours.’
‘All right… Orinda said Usher Rudd wants to know if I’m your catamite.’
My father spluttered into the gin that Polly had poured him.
Polly said, ‘What’s a catamite?’, but my father knew.
I said, ‘Usher Rudd’s trying to prove I’m not your son. If you have a marriage certificate, put it in a bank vault.’
‘And your birth certificate, where’s that?’
‘With my stuff at Mrs Wells.’
He frowned. My things hadn’t followed me so far. He borrowed Polly’s phone and called my ex-landlady forthwith. ‘She’s packed everything,’ he reported, ‘but the carriers I ordered haven’t turned up. I’ll see to it again on Monday.’
‘My bicycle is at the stables.’
He caught some sense of the wreck he’d made of my aspirations, but I also saw quite clearly that he still expected me to face reality thoroughly and grow up.
‘Tough it out,’ he said.
‘Yes.’
Polly looked from one of us to the other and said, ‘The boy’s doing his best for you, George.’
Leaving her in her house I drove the Range Rover back to Hoopwestern, familiar at last with the four-wheel drive and the weight and size. I disembarked my parent at a church hall (directions from Mervyn) where he was due to meet and thank the small army of volunteers working for him and the party’s sake throughout the whole scattered area of the constituency. The volunteers had brought the
ir families and their neighbours, and also tea, beer, wine and cake to sustain them and my father’s inexhaustible enthusiasm to energise them for the next three weeks.
‘My son… this is my son.’ He presented me over and over again, and I shook hands and smiled and smiled and chatted up old ladies and talked football with shaky knowledge and racing with piercing regret.
Mervyn moved from group to group with plans and lists. This ward would be canvassed tomorrow, that ward on Monday: leaflets… posters… visits… leave not one of seventy thousand voters unaware of JULIARD.
Three more weeks of it… Even with the spice of looking out for stray attacks, the campaign at that point seemed more like purgatory than appealing.
But I’d said I would do it… and I would.
I ate chocolate cake. Still no pizza.
At goodbye time I collected the Range Rover from where I’d parked it in a nearby road and was as sure as possible that no one had tampered with it that evening.
Foster Fordham had given me simple instructions on the telephone. ‘Always take with you a carton of dishwasher powder in a box with a spout. When you park the vehicle, sprinkle a thin line of powder on the ground from behind each front wheel back to the rear wheel on the same side. If anyone has moved the vehicle or wriggled under it in your absence, the powder will tell you. Understand?’
‘Yes. Thank you.’
‘Always set the alarms carefully, and disable them and start the vehicle from a distance, however short a time you’ve been away.’
I’d followed his instructions faithfully, but our sump-plug merchant had tried no other tricks. I ferried my father safely from the church hall back to the bow-fronted headquarters and left him there with Mervyn, the two of them endlessly discussing tactics, while I housed the Range Rover in its lock-up and finally ran a pizza to earth in the local take-away.
Mervyn and my father absentmindedly ate half of it. Mervyn laid out dozens of stickers and leaflets in piles, ready for distribution. Yes, he said when I asked him, of course by-elections were wildly exciting, they were the peaks of an agent’s busy life. And there were the final touches to be arranged for the fund-raising fête organised for next week – such a pity Orinda wasn’t in charge of it this time…
I yawned and climbed the narrow stairs, leaving my two elders to lock up: and I woke in the night to a strong smell of smoke.
Smoke.
I sat bolt upright in bed.
Without much more than instinct I disentangled my legs from the sheets and violently shook the unconscious lump on the neighbouring mattress, yelling at him, ‘We’re on fire!’ as I leapt to the half-open door to see if what I said was actually, devastatingly true.
It was.
Down the stairs there were fierce yellow leaping flames, devouring and roaring. Smoke funnelled up in growing billows. Ahead of me the sitting-room blazed yellow with flames from the rear-office underneath.
Gasping at once for breath in the smoke, I swivelled fast on one foot and jumped into the bathroom. If I switched on the taps, I thought, the bath and the washbasin would overflow and help to drown the flames: I pushed the stoppers into the plug-holes and opened all the taps to maximum: and I swept a large bath towel into the toilet bowl and pulled the flush. Whisking the sopping towel into the bedroom, I closed the door against the smoke and laid the wet towel along the bottom of the door with a sort of speed near to frenzy.
‘The window,’ I yelled. ‘The bloody window’s stuck.’
The window was stuck shut with layers of paint and had been annoying my father for days. We were both wearing only underpants, and the air was growing hot. ‘We can’t go down the stairs.’ Doesn’t he understand? I thought. He smoothly picked up the single bedroom chair and smashed it against the window. Glass broke, but the panes were small and the wooden frames barely cracked. We were above the bow windows facing the square. A second smash with the chair burst through the sticky layers of old paint and swung open both sides of the window – but underneath the fire had already eaten through the bay window’s roof and was shooting up the wall.
The bay window of the charity shop next door blazed also with manic energy. If anything the fire next door was hotter and older and had reached the roof, with scarlet and gold sparks shooting into the sky above our heads.
I scrambled over to the door, thinking the stairs the only way out after all, but even if the wet towel was still holding back the worst of the smoke it was useless against flame. The door knob was now too hot to touch. The whole door had fire on the far side.
I shouted with fierceness, ‘We’re burning. The door’s on fire.’
My father stared at me briefly across the room.
‘We’ll have to take our chances and jump. You first.’
He put the damaged chair against the window wall and motioned me to climb up and leap out as far as I could.
‘You go,’ I said.
There were people now in the square and voices yelling, and the raucous siren of the fire engine coming nearer.
‘Hurry,’ my father said. ‘Don’t bloody argue. Jump.’
I stood on the chair and held onto the window frame. The paint on it scorched my hands.
‘Jump!’
I couldn’t believe it – he was struggling into shirt and trousers and zipping up his fly.
‘Go on. Jump!’
I put a bare foot on the frame, pulled myself up and leapt out with every scrap of muscle power… with strong legs and desperation: and I sailed through the flames from the bay window and missed the front burning edge of it by terrifying inches and crashed down onto the dark cobbled ground with a head-stunning disorientating impact. I heard people yelling and felt hands grabbing me to pull me away from the fire and I was choking with smoke and winded by hitting the unyielding ground and rolling, and also fighting to free myself from the firmly clutching hands to help to cushion my father’s fall when he jumped down after me. I had no strength. Sat on the ground. Couldn’t even speak.
Incredibly there were camera flashes. People were recording our extreme danger, our closeness to dying. I felt helplessly angry. Outraged. Near to sobbing. Illogical, I dare say.
Voices were screaming to my father to jump and voices were screaming to my father not to jump, to wait for the bellowing fire engine now charging across the square, scattering onlookers and spilling people in yellow helmets.
‘Wait, wait,’ people screamed as firemen released their swivelling ladder to extend it to my father, but he was standing up silhouetted in the window with a reddish glow behind him. He was standing on the chair – and the door behind him was burning.
Before the ladder reached him there was an outburst of bright sunlike flame in the room at his back and he stood on the window frame and threw himself out as I had done, flung himself through the climbing fire of the bow windows below into the darkness beyond, knowing he might break his neck and smash his skull, knowing the ground was there but unable to judge how far away: but too near. Break-your-bones near.
A camera flashed.
Two men in yellow suits like moonsuits were sprinting, heavy-gloved hands outstretched, dragging as they went a circular trampoline thing for catching jumpers. No time to position it. They simply ran, and my father crashed down into them, all the figures sprawling, arms and legs flying. People crowded to help them and hid the tangle from my sight but my father’s legs had been moving with life, and he had shoes on, which he hadn’t had upstairs.
I was covered in smoky dirt and bleeding from a few cobble-induced scrapes and grazes, and I had tears running down my face, although I didn’t know I was crying: and I was dazed still and was coughing and had blisters forming on my fingers and feet, but none of it mattered. Noise and confusion filled my head. I’d aimed to keep my father safe from danger and I hadn’t even contemplated a smoke alarm.
His voice said, ‘Ben?’
I looked up woozily. He was standing above me; he was smiling. How could he?
Men in yello
w suits unrolled hoses and poured gallons from the tanker onto the killing bow-fronts. There was steam and smoke and unquenched flame: and there were people putting a red blanket round my bare shoulders and telling me not to worry. I wasn’t sure where they had come from, or what I didn’t have to worry about.
I wasn’t actually sure of anything.
‘Ben,’ my father said in my ear, ‘you’re concussed.’
‘Mm?’
‘They say your head hit the ground. Can you hear me?’
‘No smoke alarm. My fault…’
‘Ben!’ He shook me. People told him not to.
‘I’ll get you elected,’ I said.
‘Christ.’
People’s familiar faces loomed into my orbit and went away again. I thought it extraordinary that they were walking around fully dressed in the middle of the night but at one point learned that it was barely twenty minutes past eleven, not five to four. I’d gone early to bed and jumped out of the window wearing only my watch and my underpants and got the time wrong.
Amy was there, wringing her hands and weeping. Amy crying for the charity gifts lost to ashes, the ugly what-not gone for ever, still unsold. What’s a what-not, Amy? An étagère, you know, an upright set of little shelves for filling an odd corner, bearing plates and photographs and what not.
And bullets?
‘Oh dear,’ she said. ‘I left the bullet in my awful cardigan in the shop, and now I’ve lost it, but never mind, it was only a lump of old lead.’
Mrs Leonard Kitchens patted my shoulder reassuringly. ‘Don’t you worry, boy, there was nothing in those old shops but junk and paper. Leaflets. Nothing! My Leonard’s here somewhere. Have you seen him? Likes a good fire, does my Leonard, but the fun’s all over now. I want to go home.’
Usher Rudd stalked his prey backwards, framing his picture, stepping back and clicking. He grinned over my blanket, took time to focus, aimed his lens.
Flash.
The cameraman from the local TV station arrived with his brighter light that was still out-watted by fire.
Mervyn wrung his hands over the lost heaps of JULIARDS. He’d barely been home half an hour before someone had phoned to warn him the charity shop was on fire.
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