She wrenched herself free. She half-overbalanced. She stumbled off the pavement into the roadway.
The prosperous residential street that had been so peaceful and empty suddenly seemed filled with a heavy lorry that bore down towards Orinda, brakes shrieking, horn blowing in banshee bursts.
Orinda tottered blindly as if disoriented, and I sprinted towards her without calculating speed or distance but simply impelled by the need of the moment.
The lorry driver was swerving about, trying to miss her and actually making things worse because his direction was unpredictable. I might easily have shoved her into his path rather than out of it, but I threw myself at Orinda in a sort of twisting rugby-football tackle so that she fell half under me onto the hard surface and rolled, and the screaming black tyres made skid marks an inch from our feet.
Orinda’s nose was bleeding and her eyes were overflowing with pain-induced tears, and beyond that she was dazed and bewildered. I knelt beside her, winded myself and fearful that I’d hurt her unnecessarily when the lorry driver might have avoided her anyway.
The lorry had stopped not far beyond us and the driver, jumping down from his cab and running towards us, was already rehearsing aggrieved innocence.
‘She ran out straight in front of me, I didn’t have a chance. It isn’t my fault… I couldn’t help it… it isn’t my fault she’s bleeding all down her front.’
Neither Orinda nor I made any reply. It was irrelevant. It hadn’t been his fault, and no one would say it had been. The person at fault stood in shocked rage on the pavement directly across the road from us, glaring and rigid and not coming to our aid.
With breath returning I asked Orinda if she was all right. Silly question, really, when her nose was bleeding and there were other marks of Wyvern’s dangerous hands on her face. Her jacket was torn. One black shoe was off. The careful make-up was smeared and there was a slack weakness through all her body. The Orinda lying in the road looked far from the assured sophisticated flirter with cameras that I was used to; she looked a shattered, ordinary, middle-aged and rather nice woman trying to gather her wits and understand what had happened.
I leaned forward and slid an arm under her neck to see if she could sit up, and to my relief she let me help her to do that, until she was sitting in the road with her knees bent and her head and her hands on her knees.
She’d broken no bones, I thought gratefully. The fractures were internal and mental and couldn’t be mended.
She said tearfully, trying to wipe blood with her fingers, ‘Have you got a tissue?’
I hadn’t.
‘There’s one in my bag.’
Her handbag, I knew, was in the Range Rover.
‘I’ll get it,’ I said.
‘No… Benedict… don’t leave me!’
‘Call an ambulance,’ the lorry driver advised bullishly. ‘I missed her, I know I did. It’s not my fault she’s bleeding.’
‘No, it’s not,’ I agreed, standing up. ‘But you’re a big strong guy and you can help by picking up the lady and carrying her to that goldish Range Rover over there.’
‘No fear,’ he interrupted. ‘I’m not getting her blood on me, it’s not my sodding fault, she ran straight out in front of me.’
‘Yes. OK,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t your fault. But you did at least stop, so if you’d help and take her along to that vehicle, and if I just jot down your name and the firm you work for, that owns the lorry, then I’m sure you can carry on with whatever you were doing.’
‘No police,’ he said.
‘You don’t have to call the police to an accident unless someone’s been injured, and you didn’t injure this lady, as you said.’
‘Straight up? How do you know that? You’re only a boy.’
I’d learned it in the course of reading for my driving licence, but I couldn’t be bothered to explain. I bent down and tried to get Orinda to her feet, and she stood up shakily, clutching me to stop herself from falling.
I put my arms round her awkwardly. She was trembling all over. My father would simply have scooped her up and carried her to the Range Rover, but apart from my doubt of having adequate strength, I was embarrassed by the difference in our ages. Ridiculous, really. I felt protective, but unsure.
A couple of cars went by, the passengers craning their necks with curiosity.
‘Oh, come on, missus,’ the driver said suddenly, picking up her scattered shoe and putting it on for her, ‘hold onto my arm.’
He offered her a rock-like support, and between the two of us Orinda walked unsteadily, setting her feet down gingerly as if not sure where the ground lay. In that fashion we reached the Range Rover and installed Orinda in the front passenger seat, where she relaxed weakly and thanked the driver.
‘Hey!’ he said suddenly, surveying the highly noticeable vehicle. ‘Doesn’t this motor belong to that politician? Some funny name?’
‘Juliard.’
‘Yeah.’
‘I’m his son,’ I said. ‘This lady, that you cleverly missed hitting, and that you’ve helped just now, is a Mrs Orinda Nagle, whose husband was the MP here before he died.’
‘Cor!’ Surprise at least stopped the whine of self-justification. I reckoned he was already rehearsing a revised tale to his masters. ‘I live in Quindle,’ he said. ‘They say your father’s got no chance, the way things are, but maybe I’ll vote for him now anyway. Can’t say fairer than that!’
I wrote down his name, which he gave willingly, and the name of the furniture firm he worked for, and the telephone number, and he positively beamed at Orinda and told her not to worry, and drove off in his lorry giving us a smile – a smile – and a wave.
Alderney Wyvern, all this time, had remained as if the soles of his shoes were glued to the ground.
A few people had come out of the houses because of the noise of horn and brakes, but as there’d been no actual crash, and as Orinda had stood up and walked away, their curiosity had died quickly.
For once, with a real story to record, Usher Rudd and his lens had been missing.
My father, Mervyn, Faith and Lavender came out from a triumphant conversion of the old people’s home and exclaimed in horror at Orinda’s blood and distress. The tissue from her handbag had proved inadequate. Her tears by now were of uncomplicated misery, rolling half-mopped down her cheeks.
‘What happened?’ my father demanded of me fiercely. ‘What have you done?’
‘Nothing!’ I said. ‘I mean… nothing.’
Orinda came to my defence. ‘George, Benedict helped me… I can’t believe it…’ Her voice wailed. ‘Alderney… Alderney… h-h-hit me.’
‘He what?’
We all looked along the road to where Wyvern still pugnaciously stood his ground, and if I had needed an explanation of the emotions involved, my father didn’t. He strode off with purposeful anger towards the visibly unrepentant ex-best friend and challenged him loudly, though we couldn’t hear the actual words. Wyvern answered with equal vigour, arms waving.
‘Benedict…’ Orinda begged me, increasingly upset, ‘go and stop them.’
It was easy enough for her to say it, but they were both grown men where as I… Well, I went along there fast and caught my father’s arm as he drew back his fist for an infuriated swipe at Wyvern who was, incredibly, sneering.
My father swung round and shouted at me, raging, ‘Get out of my bloody way.’
‘The pact,’ I yelled at him. ‘Remember the pact.’
‘What?’
‘The pact,’ I insisted. ‘Don’t hit him. Father… Dad… don’t hit him.’
The scorching fury went out of his eyes as suddenly as if he were waking up.
‘He wants you to hit him,’ I said. I didn’t know how I knew or why I was so certain. It had something to do with the fact that Wyvern had remained on the spot instead of driving off, but it was mostly intuition derived from his body language. He was looking for trouble. He meant all sorts of harm to my father, not least adv
erse publicity before polling day.
My father gave me a blank look, then walked past me to go back to the Range Rover. I half turned to follow him but was grabbed and spun round by Wyvern, whose always unsmiling face was now set fast with brutal malice. If he couldn’t get what he wanted from the father, he would take it out on the son.
I hadn’t learned boxing or karate, but I did have naturally fast reflexes and, thanks to riding and ski-ing, an instinctive command of balance. Wyvern might have had weight in his fists, but I ducked and dodged two sizzling punches to the face that would have laid me out flat if they’d connected, and concentrated solely on staying on my feet.
He drove me back against the shoulder-height rough stone wall that divided a garden from the pavement, but I squirmed out of his grasp and simply ran, intent on escape and containment, not on winning any battles.
I could hear Wyvern coming after me, and saw my father with renewed fury turning back to my aid.
I yelled at him in frenzy, ‘Get in the Range Rover. Get in the vehicle,’ and he wavered and turned again and marvellously did as I said.
Three steps from the Range Rover I stopped running and swung round fast to face Wyvern, in whom calculation had never been wholly overwhelmed by emotion: he sized up the gallery he was playing to – Orinda, my father, Mervyn, Faith and Lavender – and under the glare of all those sets of eyes he abruptly conceded that further attack would have legal consequences he wouldn’t relish and stopped a bare six paces from where I stood.
The venom in his expression shrivelled the saliva in my mouth.
‘One day,’ he said, ‘I’ll get you one day.’
But not today, I thought; and today was all that mattered.
He took a few steps backwards, his face smoothing out to its customary flatness, then he turned and walked towards his car as if nothing had happened. Easing into the driver’s seat he started the engine and drove collectedly away with no burning of tyres or other histrionics.
He left a lot of speechlessness in and around the Range Rover.
In the end Mervyn, clearing his throat, said, ‘Orinda needs a doctor.’
Orinda disagreed. ‘I need a tissue.’
Faith and Lavender between them produced some crumpled white squares. Orinda wiped her face, looked in a small mirror and moaned at the wreck it revealed. ‘I’m not going anywhere like this.’
‘The police…?’ suggested Faith.
‘No,’ Orinda said, and no one argued.
With everyone subdued I drove the Range Rover back to the headquarters where my father transferred himself and Orinda into her nearby parked car and set off to her home, with me following to bring him back.
He was silent for the whole of the return journey, but as I braked to a halt at the end of it he said, finally, ‘Orinda thinks you saved her from being run over by the lorry.’
‘Oh.’
‘Did you?’
‘The lorry driver missed us.’
He insisted I tell him what had happened.
‘Her eyes were watering,’ I explained. ‘She couldn’t see where she was going.’
I made as if to get out of the vehicle, but he stopped me.
‘Wait.’ He seemed to be searching for words and not finding them.
I waited.
He said in the end, ‘I’m afraid I’ve let you in for more than I expected.’
I half laughed. ‘It hasn’t been boring.’
He went to Quindle with Mervyn early on the following Saturday to undertake an all-embracing round of the town’s suburbs and, because of a dinner that evening and yet more commitments on the Sunday morning, he stayed in Quindle overnight.
That Sunday was my eighteenth birthday. My father had told me he would leave me a birthday card with Crystal, and I was to go along at nine in the morning to collect it. He would return that afternoon, he said, and we would dine together that evening to celebrate. No more political meetings, he said. Just the two of us, with champagne.
When I arrived at the party office at nine the door was locked and fifteen minutes passed before Crystal arrived and made her way inside. Yes, she agreed, my father had left me a card: and many happy returns and all that.
She took an envelope out of the desk and gave it to me, and inside I found a card with a joke on it about growing old, and nothing else. ‘Yours, Dad,’ he’d written.
‘George said,’ Crystal told me, ‘that you are to go out into the street and find a black car with a chauffeur in it. And don’t ask me what it’s about, George wouldn’t tell me, but he was smiling fit to crack his cheeks. So off you go, then, and find the car.’
‘Thanks, Crystal.’
She nodded and waved me off, and I went outside and found the black car and the chauffeur a hundred yards away, patiently parked.
The chauffeur without speaking handed me a white envelope, unaddressed.
The card inside read ‘Get in the car.’
And underneath, ‘Please.’
With a gleam and a breath of good spirits I obeyed the instructions.
It wasn’t much of a surprise when the chauffeur (not the same man as before, nor the same car) refused to tell me where we were going. It was, however, clear shortly that the direction was westwards and that many signposts distantly promised Exeter.
The chauffeur aimed at the heart of that city and pulled up outside the main doors of its grandest hotel. As before, the car’s rear door was ceremoniously opened for me to step out and again, smiling broadly (not in the script), he pointed silently towards the interior and left me to the uniformed porters enquiring sniffily about my luggage.
My luggage this time again consisted of what I wore: a white long-sleeved sweatshirt, new blue jeans, and well-tried running shoes. With undoubtedly more self-confidence than at Brighton I walked into the grand lobby and asked at the reception desk for George Juliard.
The receptionist pressed buttons on a computer.
‘Sorry, no one called Juliard staying at the hotel.’
‘Please check again.’
She checked. Gave me a professional smile. Still no one called Juliard, past, present or future.
I was definitely not this time in sawn-off shorts and message-laden T-shirt land. Even on the last summer Sunday of August, business suits here prevailed. Ladies were fifty. In a cathedral city, people had been to church. The chauffeur, I gloomily concluded, had taken me to the wrong place.
The hotel’s entrance lobby bulged at one side into a glass-roofed conservatory section with armchairs and green plants, and I sat there for a while considering what I should do next. Had my father intended me to get to know Exeter before I went to its university?
Or what?
After about half an hour a man dressed much as I was myself, though a good ten years older, appeared in the lobby. He looked around and drifted unhurriedly in my direction.
‘Juliard?’ he said. ‘Benedict?’
‘Yes.’ I stood up, taller than he by an inch or two, which seemed to surprise him. He had yellow-blond hair, white eyelashes and outdoor skin. A man of strong muscles, self-confident, at home in his world.
‘I’m Jim,’ he said. ‘I’ve come to collect you.’
‘Who are you?’ I asked. ‘Where are we going?’
He smiled and said merely, ‘Come on.’
He led the way out of the hotel and round a few corners, fetching up beside a dusty dented red car that contained torn magazines, screwed-up sandwich papers, coffee-stained polystyrene cups and a mixed-parentage dog introduced as Bert.
‘Disregard the mess,’ Jim said cheerfully, sweeping crumpled newspapers off the front passenger seat onto the floor. ‘Happy birthday, by the way.’
‘Uh… thanks.’
He drove the way I’d been taught not to; jerking acceleration and sudden brakes. Start and stop. Impulse and caution. I would have gone a long way with Jim.
It turned out to be only eight miles westward, as far as I could judge. Out of the city, past a signpos
t to Exeter University’s Streatham Campus (home among much else of the department of mathematics), deep into rural Devon, with heavy thatched roofs frowning over tiny-windowed cottages.
Jim jerked to a halt in front of a larger example of the basic pattern and pointed to a heavy wooden front door.
‘Go in there,’ he instructed. ‘Down the passage, last room on the left.’ He grinned. ‘And good luck.’
I was quite glad to be getting out of his car, even if only to stop the polymorphous Bert from licking my neck.
‘Who lives here?’ I asked.
‘You’ll find out.’
He left me with a simple choice: to do as I’d been told or find a way of returning to Exeter. Alice down the bleeding rabbit hole, I thought.
I opened the heavy door and went along the passage to the last room on the left.
EIGHTH
In the last room on the left a man sat behind a large desk, and at first I thought with an unwelcome skipped heart-beat that he was Vivian Durridge, intent on sacking me all over again.
He looked up from his paperwork as I went in and I saw that though he wasn’t Vivian Durridge himself he was of the same generation and of the same severe cast of mind.
He gave me no warm greeting, but looked me slowly up and down.
‘Your father has gone to a great deal of trouble for you,’ he said. ‘I hope you’re worth it.’
No reply seemed suitable, so I didn’t make one.
‘Do you know who I am?’ he demanded.
‘I’m afraid not… sir.’
‘Stallworthy.’
He waited for the name to trickle through my brain, which it did pretty fast. It was the implication of his name that slowed my reply. Too much hope was bad for the pulse.
‘Er… do you mean Spencer Stallworthy, the racehorse trainer?’
‘I do.’ He paused. ‘Your father telephoned me. He wants to buy a horse and put it in training here with me, so that you can bicycle over from the university to ride it out at exercise. He asked me to enter it in amateur events so that you can ride it in races.’
He studied my face. I must have looked pretty ecstatic because a slow wintry smile lightened his heavy expression.
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