10-Lb Penalty

by 10-Lb Penalty (v4. 0) (epub)

  The extraordinary response I felt was not fear but excitement. The adrenalin rush in my blood was for fight, not flight. And whether or not he saw my reaction to him as vividly as I felt it, he pulled down the shutters on the malice visible behind the dark-framed lenses and excused himself with the briefest of courtesies to Education and Social Security: when he moved slowly away it was as if every step were consciously controlled.

  ‘Well!’ exclaimed Jill Vinicheck. ‘I know he’s never talkative, but I’m afraid he was… impolite.’

  Not impolite, I thought.

  Murderous.

  After the reception Polly, my father and I all ate in one of the few good restaurants in London that had taken the din out of dinner. One could mostly hear oneself speak.

  My father had enjoyed a buddy-buddy session with the Prime Minister and Polly said she thought the circular eyes of the Home Secretary were not after all an indication of mania.

  Didn’t the Home Secretary, I asked, keep prisoners in and chuck illegal immigrants out?

  More or less, my father agreed.

  I said, ‘Did you know there was a list on a sort of easel there detailing all the jobs in government?’

  My father, ministerially busy with broccoli that he didn’t actually like, nodded, but Polly said she hadn’t seen it.

  ‘There are weird jobs,’ I said, ‘like Minister for Former Countries and Under Secretary for Buses.’ Polly looked mystified but my father nodded. ‘Every Prime Minister invents titles to describe what he wants done.’

  ‘So,’ I said, ‘theoretically you could have a minister in charge of banning yellow plastic ducks.’

  ‘You do talk nonsense, Benedict dear,’ Polly said.

  ‘What he means,’ my father said, ‘is that the quickest way to make people want something is to ban it. People always fight to get what they are told they cannot have.’

  ‘All the same,’ I said mildly, ‘I think the Prime Minister should introduce a law banning Alderney Wyvern from drinking champagne at No. 10 Downing Street.’

  Polly and my father sat with their mouths open.

  ‘He was there,’ I said. ‘Didn’t you see him?’

  They shook their heads.

  ‘He kept over the far side of the room, out of your way. He looks a bit different. He’s older, balder. He wears spectacles. But he is revered by the Minister of Education, the Secretary of State for Social Security and the Secretary of State for Defence, to name those I am sure of. Orinda and Dennis Nagle were kindergarten stuff. Alderney Wyvern now has his hands on levers he can pull to affect whole sections of the nation.’

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ my father said.

  ‘The dear ladies of Education and Social Security told me they had a friend who would do wonders for my… er, mother’s wardrobe. He had already, they said, turned Hudson Hurst from a quasi mobster into a polished gent. What do you think they give Alderney in return?’

  ‘No,’ my father said. ‘Not classified information. They couldn’t!’

  He was scandalised. I shook my head.

  ‘What then?’ Polly asked. ‘What do they give him?’

  ‘I’d guess,’ I said, ‘that they give him attention. I’d guess they listen to him and act on his advice. Orinda said years ago that he had a terrific understanding of what would happen in politics. He would predict things and tell Dennis Nagle what to do about them and Orinda said he was nearly always right. Dennis Nagle had his feet on the upward path, and if he hadn’t died I’d think he’d be in the Cabinet by now with Wyvern at his shoulder.’

  My father pushed his broccoli aside. A good thing his broccoli farmers weren’t watching. They were agitating for a broccoli awareness week to make the British eat their greens. A law to ban excess broccoli would have had healthier results.

  ‘If he’s so clever,’ Polly asked, ‘why isn’t he in the Cabinet himself?’

  ‘Orinda told me the sort of power Alderney really wants is to be able to pull the levers behind the scenes. I thought it a crazy idea. I’ve grown up since then.’

  ‘Power without responsibility,’ my father murmured.

  ‘Allied,’ I said ruefully, ‘to a frighteningly violent temper which explodes when he’s crossed.’

  My father hadn’t actually seen Wyvern hit Orinda. He hadn’t seen the speed and the force and the heartlessness; but he had seen the blood and tears and they alone had driven him to try to retaliate. Wyvern had wanted to damage my father’s reputation by provoking my father to hit him. I dimly understood, but still hadn’t properly worked it out, that attacking Wyvern would, in the end, destroy the attacker.

  My boss Evan agreeing, I’d tied in the No. 10 Thursday evening reception with a Friday morning trip to meet a claims inspector to see if a haybarn had burned by accident or design (accident) and was due to stay again on Friday night in London with Polly and my father, before going to ride at Stratford-upon-Avon on Saturday, but en route I got a message to return to meet my father in Downing Street by two that Friday afternoon.

  ‘I thought you might like to see more of the house,’ he said cheerfully. ‘You can’t see a thing at those receptions.’

  He had arranged for one of the household staff – called a messenger – to accompany us and show us round officially, so we went up the yellow staircase again, spending longer over the pictures, and wandered round the three large drawing-rooms leading off the ante-room at the top of the stairs: the white drawing-room, the green drawing-room and the pillared drawing-room where they’d held the reception.

  The messenger was proud of the house which he said looked better and was better looked after than at any time in its rickety history. It had once been two houses back to back (rather like the burnt shops of Hoopwestern): the small Downing Street house facing one way, and a mansion to the rear of it facing the other. The interior layout over two and a half centuries had been constantly redesigned, and a modern refurbishment had bestowed overall an eighteenth-century ambience that hadn’t been there before.

  ‘The green drawing-room used to be the blue drawing-room,’ the messenger said happily. ‘All the beautiful plaster work on nearly all the ceilings is relatively new. So are the classical mantels over the doorways. It all looks now like it always should have done, and never did.’

  We admired it all copiously, to his satisfaction.

  ‘Through here,’ he said, marching off into one corner of the pillared drawing-room, ‘is the small dining-room.’ (It seated twelve in comfort.) Beyond that is the State Dining-Room.’ (Dark panelled walls, seats for twenty-four.)

  He told us about all the paintings in every room. I thought of all the past prime ministers for whom this graceful splendour had not existed, who had used this building as an office. It seemed a shame and a waste, somehow.

  Back in the ante-room to the drawing-rooms our guide told us, pointing, ‘Up those stairs is the Prime Minister’s private apartment, and behind that locked door is his own personal room where no one goes unless he invites them. And downstairs…’ he led the way expertly, via a lift to the ground floor ‘… along this passage, as of course you know well, sir, is the ante-room to the Cabinet Room itself, sir, and I’ll leave you to show those yourself to your son, sir, and I’ll see you again just on your way out.’

  My father thanked him sincerely for his trouble, and I reflected, slightly overwhelmed, that I’d never before given much of a thought to the living legacy of history my father hoped to inhabit.

  The ante-room was any ante-room: just a gathering place, but with brilliant red walls.

  The Cabinet Room, at the rear of the old mansion section, was long, with tall windows down one side and across one end, facing out into a peaceful-looking walled garden.

  Irish terrorists had lobbed a bomb into that garden while all the Cabinet ministers were in the building. The bomb had done little damage. The grass now looked undisturbed. Peace was relative. Guy Fawkes could rise again.

  Extraordinarily, Sir Thomas Knyvet, the magistrate
who arrested Guy Fawkes red-handed with his barrels of gunpowder, lived in a house on the exact spot where the developer George Downing later built No. 10.

  ‘This is where I usually sit,’ my father said, walking down the room and coming to rest behind one of the two dozen chairs. ‘That chair with arms, halfway along the table, that is the Prime Minister’s chair. It’s the only one with arms.’

  The long table down the centre of the room wasn’t rectangular but a much elongated oval, in order, my father explained, for the Prime Minister to be able to see the various members more easily.

  ‘Go on, then,’ I teased him. ‘Take the arms.’

  He was half embarrassed, half shy, but he couldn’t resist it. There was only his son to see. He crabbed sideways round the table and sat in the chair with arms; he nestled into it, resting his wrists, living the dream.

  Above and behind him on the wall hung the only picture in that room, a portrait of Sir Robert Walpole, the first to be given the title Prime Minister.

  ‘It all suits you,’ I said.

  He stood up self-consciously and said, as if to take the emotion out of the moment, ‘The chair opposite the Prime Minister is normally where the Chancellor of the Exchequer sits.’

  ‘And how many of you put your feet up on the table?’

  He gave me a disgusted look. ‘You’re not fit to be taken anywhere.’

  We returned to the front hall, my father looking at his watch. The messenger appeared as if on cue to see us off the premises, and I wondered vaguely if there were interior monitoring video cameras – which would be merely normally prudent – to trace the comings and goings of visitors.

  While we said lengthy farewells the front door opened and in walked the Prime Minister, followed by two alert young men: bodyguards.

  The Prime Minister said, ‘Hello, George,’ without surprise and glanced at his own watch revealingly. ‘Come this way. And you… er…’

  My father said, ‘Ben.’

  ‘Ben, yes. The racerider. You come too.’

  He led the way through the front hall and past the staircase into a crowded and busy office crammed with desks, office paraphernalia and people, who all stood up at his approach.

  ‘Now, Ben, you stay here with these good people while I talk to your father.’

  He went through the office, opened a door and gestured to my father to follow. The office staff gave me a chair and a friendly welcome and told me that I was in the room where all the real work got done; the running of the Prime Minister’s life as opposed to his politics.

  They told me that quiet though the house might seem on a Friday afternoon, almost two hundred people worked there in the buildings in connected offices and that someone had once counted how many times the front door of No. 10 had been opened and closed in twenty-four hours, and it was more than nine hundred.

  At length, in response to one of the constant telephone calls, I was invited through the office and into the next room in the wake of my father, and found myself in a large quiet tidy place that was part office, part sitting-room.

  My father and the Prime Minister sat in the two fattest armchairs, looking relaxed, and I was waved to join them.

  ‘Your father and I,’ the Prime Minister said, ‘have been discussing Alderney Wyvern. I’ve met him once or twice, but I’ve seen no harm in him. I know that Jill Vinicheck and other women in the Cabinet say they owe him a great deal, and Hudson Hurst, above all, has benefited from a change of presentation. I’ve seen nothing sinister or unacceptable in any of this. The man is quiet, tactful, and as far as I can see, he hasn’t put a foot wrong politically. Jill Vinicheck, in particular, has once or twice found his considered advice helpful, and certainly the Press have stopped making frivolous comments on her clothes, and take her as the serious politician that she is.’

  ‘Er…’ I said. ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Your father says that he and you have seen a different side of Alderney Wyvern. A violent side. He says you believe this capacity for violence still exists. I have to tell you that I find this hard to believe, and until I see something of it myself I have to give Wyvern the benefit of the doubt. I am sure you have both acted with the best of intentions in drawing my attention to the influence Wyvern may have with my ministers but, George, if you’ll excuse my saying so, your son is a very young man without much experience of the world, and he may be exaggerating trouble where little exists.’

  My father looked non-committal. I wondered what the Prime Minister would have thought if he himself had seen Wyvern hit Orinda. Nothing less, it seemed, was going to convince him that the outer shell of the man he’d met hid a totally different creature inside, rather like a beautiful spiky and shiny conch-shell hiding the slippery slug-like mollusc inside, a gastropod inching along on its stomach.

  The Prime Minister said, ‘I will take note and remember what you have both said, but at the moment I don’t see any real grounds for action.’

  He stood up, indicating that the meeting was over, and shook hands with my father with unabated good nature; and I remembered my father’s teaching on the very first day when I’d driven with him from Brighton to Hoopwestern, that people only believe what they want to believe. It applied, it seemed, even to prime ministers.

  After we’d left No. 10 I said glumly to my father, ‘I did you no good.’

  ‘He had to be told. He had to be warned. Even if it does my career no good, it was the right thing to do.’

  My father’s strict sense of right and wrong might destroy him yet, I thought.

  ELEVENTH

  After Christmas that year several things happened that changed a lot of lives.

  First of all, on New Year’s Eve, a wide tongue of freezing air licked down from the Arctic Circle and froze solid all of Canada, all of northern Europe, and all of the British Isles. Weathermen stopped agitating about global warming and with equally long faces discussed permafrost. No one seemed to mention that when Stonehenge was built in around 3000 B.C. the prevailing climate was warm, and no one remembered that, in the nineteenth century, Britain was so cold in the winters that on the Thames in London, they skated, held fairs and roasted oxen.

  In the houses of that time people huddled in wing chairs with their feet on footstools to avoid draughts, and women wore a dozen layers of petticoats.

  In the winter when I was twenty-two it rained ice on top of snow. People skated on their lawns and built igloos for their children. Diesel oil congealed to jelly. All racing came to a halt, except on a few specially built all-weather tracks, but even they had to be swept clear of snow. Owners cursed as their training bills kept rolling in, professional jockeys bit their fingernails and amateurs were grounded.

  Claims for frost damage avalanched into Weatherbys, and in the middle of all this Evan, my boss, announced that he was leaving the firm to join a growing insurance company as managing director. I expected Weatherbys to replace him, over my head, but instead they told him to spend his three months’ notice teaching me his job. I thought I was too young, even by Weatherbys’ standards, but they seemed oblivious to my date of birth and merely told me that in following Evan I had a great deal to live up to.

  Evan, tall, thin and with a bird-like head on a long neck, had taken over a department that had formerly acted mainly as a convenience for racing’s owners and trainers, and in five years had fertilised it with imagination and invention into an agency major by any standard.

  In his last three months, in addition to our ordinary busy work, he took me to meet personally all the underwriters he fixed deals with on the telephone, so that in the end I could wander round the ‘boxes’ at Lloyds knowing and being known in the syndicates and speaking their language.

  He taught me scams. ‘Beware the friendship scam,’ he said.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Two friends conspire,’ he told me, amused. ‘One friend has a horse with something fatally wrong, a kidney ailment, say. OK? Instead of calling in a vet, Friend A sends his sick fe
llow to the sales. Friend B buys the sick animal at auction, insuring his purchase onwards from the fall of the hammer. Fall-of-the-hammer insurance was introduced to cover accidents like a million-pound colt stumbling on its way out of the sale ring and breaking a leg. Fall-of-the-hammer insurance comes into effect before a vet’s inspection, see? So Friend B buys and insures a dud horse from the fall-of-the-hammer. Friend A acts all innocent… ‘would never have sold such a horse if I’d known…’ Friend B humanely kills his dud and collects the insurance. Friends A and B split the proceeds.’ He laughed. ‘You’ve a nose for crooks, Ben. You’ll do all right.’

  During that same three months my father became the front man in an ongoing fish war, discussing at international high level who could take how many fish of such and such a species of such and such a size out of any particular area of the world’s oceans. With wit and understanding, and by going to sea himself in freezing salt-crusted net-festooned seasickness factories, he learned the gripes and the legitimate arguments of men who lived close to Davy Jones and his ever-ready locker.

  The Press took notice. Headlines appeared: ‘JULIARD HOOKS AGREEMENT’ and ‘JULIARD IN JAPAN’.

  People in insurance began to say, ‘This Juliard person – no relation of yours, I suppose?’

  ‘My father.’

  ‘Seems to be doing a good job for my fish and chips.’

  Fish and chips – the potatoes in agriculture – put my father on the map.

  A television station sent a cameraman to sea with him: the cameraman, though sick the whole time, shot fearsomely memorable footage of my father hanging half-overboard in oilskins above the breaking waves and grinning.

  Schoolchildren recognised pictures of ‘the Fish Minister’ instantly: his Cabinet colleagues didn’t like it.

  One of the top tabloids dug up the five-year-old stunning photograph of my father in mid-jump from the burning constituency office and printed it big in a centre-page spread extolling virility and presence of mind and the ‘hands-on’ policy out on the deep blue sea.