by Dick Francis
“Well ... what was the plug made of?”
“What would you think?”
I hesitated. “It had to be pretty simple. I mean, almost spur-of-the-moment, after the bullet had missed.”
“So?”
“So how about shoving a candle up the spout, and cutting it off? How about wax?”
My father peacefully tied his unexuberantly striped tie. “Foster Fordham,” he said, “will let us know.”
It was extraordinary, I thought, as we entered the Town Hall for the Bethune face-to-face confrontation, how many people I’d come to recognize in only two days.
Orinda was there, torturing herself, wearing a very short gold dress with a black feather boa that twisted around her neck and arms like the fluffy snake it was named for, and demanded admiring attention. Her green eyes flashed. An emerald-and-diamond bracelet sparkled on her wrist. No one could be unaware of her vibrant attendance.
A pace behind her, as ever, stood her shadow, whose name I remembered with an effort was A. L. Wyvern. A. L., I thought, Anonymous Lover Wyvem. He had looked uninteresting in a dinner jacket at the Sleeping Dragon dinner: in the Town Hall, in a gray suit and a blue shirt, he filled space without making an impression.
Large Mrs. Kitchens, eagle-eyed, in navy blue with purple frills, held tight to “my Leonard’s” arm and succeeded in preventing him from beaming his sickly mustache into Orinda’s airspace. Mrs. Kitchens gave me a cheery wave and a leer—and I would not let her embarrass me.
Mervyn, of course, had arrived with Crystal at his side to take notes. The three witches were helping to seat people, and Dearest Polly, at the sight of us, made an enthusiastic little run in our direction, and bore off my father like a trophy to show him the lectern behind which he was to stand on the platform. Dearest Polly, it seemed, was stage-managing the evening.
As if with a flourish of trumpets the Bethune camp arrived. There was a stir and a rustle in the hall and a sprinkle of clapping. Hooray for adultery, I thought.
Paul Bethune, seen for the first time, was a portly and portentous-looking fifty or so with a double chin and the thinning hair that might in the end confound his chances more thoroughly than a love child. He was accompanied by a busy Mervyn Teck look-alike, who was indeed his agent, and by a nervous woman who looked at the world in general in upward glances from under her eyebrows. She was shown to a seat in the front row of spectators and Dearest Polly, beckoning to me strongly, introduced me to Paul Bethune’s wife, Isobel.
Isobel emitted severe discomfort at having me to sit beside her, but I gave her my best harmless grin and told her she couldn’t want to avoid being there more than I did myself.
“I’ve only just left school,” I said. “I don’t know anything about politics. I understand this is the third campaign for you and Mr. Bethune, so you probably don’t find it as confusing as I do.”
“Oh dear,” she said. “You’re such a child, you can’t possibly know ...”
“I’m nearly eighteen.”
She smiled weakly, then suddenly stiffened to immobility, her face pale with a worse disaster than my proximity.
I said, “What’s the matter, Mrs. Bethune?”
“That man,” she murmured. “Oh God.”
I looked where she was looking, and saw Basil Rudd.
“That’s not Usher Rudd, the newspaperman,” I said, understanding. “That’s his cousin. That’s Basil Rudd. He mends cars.”
“It’s him. That beastly writer.”
“No, Mrs. Bethune. It’s his cousin. They look alike, but that’s Basil.”
To my absolute horror, she began to cry. I looked around urgently for help, but Polly was elbow-deep in wires to microphones and television cameras, and Paul Bethune, eyeing his wife’s distress, turned away deliberately with a sharply displeased grimace.
Unkind bastard, I thought. Stupid, too. A show of fondness might have earned him votes.
Isobel Bethune stumbled to her feet, searching unsuccessfully in her well-worn black handbag for something to mop up tears, and I, clumsily but with pity, offered her an arm to hold on to while I cleared a path towards the door.
She talked all the way in broken, half-intelligible explanations. “Paul insisted I come ... I didn’t want to, but he said I might as well stab him in the back if I didn’t ... and now he’ll be so furious, but what does he expect me to do after all those pictures in the paper of him and that girl ... and she had nothing on, well, next to nothing. He wants me to smile and pretend I don’t mind, but he makes me look a fool and I suppose I am, but I didn’t know about that girl until it was in the paper, and he doesn’t deny it. He says what did I expect. . . .”
We went through the entrance hall and out into the fresh air with everyone arriving and staring at Isobel’s tears with hungry curiosity. At seven-thirty in the evening merciful dusk was still some time ahead, so I veered away from the entrance and she, wholly without resistance, came with me around the nearest corner.
The Town Hall formed one of the sides of the cobbled square. The Sleeping Dragon took up an adjoining side, with shops (and party headquarters) along the other two. Wide alleyways, which once had been open roads, led away from every corner, and on one of them lay the main Town Hall entrance doors. Along the side of the Town Hall that faced onto the square, there was a sort of cloister—a covered walkway with pillars and benches giving shelter and rest. Isobel Bethune crumpled onto one of the benches and, after a craven moment of wanting to ditch her, I sat beside her and wondered what to say.
I needn’t have worried. She compulsively went on sobbing and pouring out her unhappiness and resentment at the unfairness of things. I half listened, watching the wretchedness that twisted her lipsticked mouth, and seeing in her swelling eyes and gray-flecked hair that not long ago she’d been quite pretty, before Usher Rudd had taken a photographic sledgehammer to her complacent world.
Her sons were just as bad, she sobbed. Fifteen, seventeen, they sulked and argued with everything she said and complained nonstop. If Paul got elected it would at least take him away from home more, and, oh dear, she didn’t mean to say that, but it was either him or her—and where would she go?—she was at her wit’s end, she said.
She was on the point of a full breakdown, I thought. I had been only about twelve when my aunt Susan had screamed and yelled and slammed doors, had driven the family car across the lawn into a hedge and been taken to hospital, and had then got worse when her second son left to join a rap group and grew a beard and got AIDS. My uncle Harry had gone to my father for help, and somehow or other my parent had restored general order and put some balance back in Susan; and if it was never a rapturously happy household after that, there was no actual abuse.
I asked Isobel Bethune, “Do your sons want Mr. Bethune to be elected?”
“They just grunt. You can’t get a word out of them.” She sniffed, wiping her eyes with her fingers. “Paul thinks he would have beaten Orinda easily, but he says George Juliard is different. Oh! I’d forgotten, you’re his son! I shouldn’t talk to you like this. Paul will be so cross.”
“Don’t tell him.”
“No ... would you like a drink?” She looked across at The Sleeping Dragon. “Brandy?”
I shook my head but she said she badly needed a nerve-steadier and she wouldn’t drink alone, so I went across the square with her and drank Coke while she dealt with a double Rémy Martin on ice. We sat at a small table in the bar, which was Friday-night busy with couples.
Both of Isobel’s hands were shaking.
She left me to go and “tidy up,” returning with combed hair, freshened lipstick and powdered eyelids, still clutching a tissue but much more in control.
She ordered more brandy. I said no to Coke.
“I’m not going back to the Town Hall,” she said. “I’ll walk home from here. It’s not all that far.”
When she picked up her refilled glass, the ice still clattered and shook in her grasp.
“Could I get you a t
axi?” I asked.
She leaned across the table and put her hand on mine. “You’re a nice boy,” she said, “whoever your father is.”
There was a familiar bright flash and the whine of a film winding on and there, a few feet away, stood the other Rudd, Bobby Usher himself, grinning triumphantly and radiating ill nature in megawatts.
Isobel Bethune lunged furiously to her feet but Usher Rudd, quick at getaways, was out of the door before she could draw breath to shout. “I hate him,” she said, again near to tears. “I’ll kill him.”
I asked the barman to phone for a taxi.
“Mrs. Bethune still owes for the drinks.”
“Oh.”
“I haven’t any money,” she said. “Pay for me, there’s a dear.”
I salvaged from my pockets the remains of the money my father had given me in Brighton and handed her all of it.
“You pay the man for the drinks. I’m not old enough yet to buy alcohol and I’m not getting into that sort of trouble.”
Both the barman and Isobel, openmouthed, completed the sale.
Five
Back at the Town Hall the debate had passed through lukewarm and was heating towards chopping motions with the hands of the two protagonists.
A local chess champion, brought in as referee, had come to the fray with a pinging time clock and, making his own set of rules, he had decreed that each candidate would in turn answer specific questions, the answers to last a maximum of five minutes before being silenced by the time clock’s arbitration.
The format seemed to be working quite well, chiefly because both candidates knew how to speak. I was no longer surprised by my father’s ability to rouse, amuse and convince, but somehow I’d expected Paul Bethune to be as bombastic and unkind as he’d seemed to his wife. Instead he delivered dryly witty and well-prepared responses to the questions and it was only afterwards that I wondered if he’d learned his best phrases by heart and had used them before.
The Town Hall was full. The seats given by Polly to me and Isobel Bethune now held the mayor and his missus. And, glad to be less exposed, I stood by the door and watched the waves of animation and agreement and fury roll in turn across the faces of the audience, and thought that at least they were listening, and obviously cared.
There could be no winner that night. They both won. Everyone applauded and went away talking.
Orinda had several times clapped for Bethune. Leonard Kitchens kept his hands forever in his pockets. Dearest Polly’s long face glowed with goodness and pleasure, and freckly Basil Rudd looked even more like his obnoxious cousin when he smiled.
No one produced a gun.
My father and Paul Bethune shook hands.
Like star actors they left the stage last, each surrounded at once by chattering satellites, all with something to say, questions to ask, points to make. My father genuinely enjoyed it, and again his spirits were helium-ballooning as we headed back to our base.
“It’s quicker if we walk straight across the square,” my parent objected as I tried to persuade him to take to the cloister. “Why do you want to walk two sides of a triangle, not one, and you a mathematician?”
“Bullets,” I said.
“My God.” He stopped dead. “But no one would try again!”
“You’d have said no one would try the first time, but they did.”
“We don’t know for sure.”
“And the sump plug?”
He shook his head as if in general disbelief, but he made no further objection to the cloister route, and seemed not to notice that I walked between him and the well-lit open square.
He wanted to talk about the debate. He also wanted to know why I’d missed half of it and where I’d been. I told him all of Isobel’s troubles but I could feel he was barely attending: his mind and his tongue were still busy with points made and lost against the lady’s unfaithful man.
“He’s dedicated, you know. I can’t stand his politics.”
I said, “I hate what you say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.”
“Bull’s-eye. Don’t tell me all those school fees weren’t wasted.”
“Come down,” I begged. “You’re too high in the sky.”
Again he stopped walking. We had by then left the cloister and were passing dimly lit shop fronts on the way to the bay windows of first the charity gift shop and, next door, the party headquarters.
“You have no idea what it’s like to hold an audience in your hand.”
“No.” Winners at long odds got little praise, and I’d never won on a favorite.
We walked on to the doorway.
Dearest Polly waited there, puzzled. “Where have you been? You left ahead of me.”
“The boy,” my father said, pointing at me though there were precious few other boys in sight. “Benedict, my son, has this fixed idea that someone is violently seeking to put paid to my campaign, if not to my life. Dearest Polly, tell him I’ll take my chances and I don’t want him ever again to risk his own neck to preserve mine.”
“Dearest Polly,” I said—and she smiled vividly with sweetness—“this is the only father I’m ever likely to have. Persuade him to give me a real job in this election. Persuade him he needs a full-time bodyguard. Persuade him to let me try to keep him safe.”
“I don’t need a bodyguard,” he insisted. “I need you to be a social asset. Isobel Bethune is useless to Paul, but you have this extraordinary gift—which I admit I didn’t expect—of getting people to talk to you. Look at Isobel Bethune! Look at Crystal Harley! I haven’t got a word out of her and she chatters away to you. Look at Mrs. Kitchens, pouring information into your ears.”
Polly nodded, smiling. “You’re so young, you’re no threat to anyone. They all need to talk, and you’re safe.”
I said pensively, “How about Orinda? She turned her back on me at the dinner and wouldn’t say a word.”
Polly clapped her hands together with laughter. “I’ll give you Orinda. I’ll manage it again.”
“But alone,” I said. “I could talk to her if she was alone, but the Anonymous Lover never leaves her side.”
“Who?”
“A. L. Wyvern.”
“Anonymous Lover!” Polly exclaimed. “Enchanting. His name’s really Alderney, I think. He plays golf. He used to play golf with Dennis.”
She moved around smoothly, at home in the office, sorting out mugs and making coffee. I couldn’t guess her age nearer than ten years: somewhere between forty or fifty, I thought, but knew I could be wrong. She was again wearing the inappropriate crimson lipstick, this time with a green jacket over a long skirt of brownish tweed: heavy for August. Somehow, with the opaque stockings and “sensible” shoes, one would have expected her to be clumsy, but she was paradoxically graceful, as if she had once been a dancer. She had no rings on her long capable fingers and for jewelry relied on a single strand of maidenly pearls.
One could have felt sorry for Polly at first sight, I thought, but that would have been a great mistake. She had an inner certainty to go with the goodness. She carried the fuddy-duddy clothes without self consciousness. She was—I fished for the word—serene.
She said, pouring hot water onto instant-coffee granules, “I don’t see any harm in Benedict appointing himself officially to look after you. After all, he hasn’t done a bad job so far. Mervyn grumbled all over the Town Hall tonight about having to find a lockup garage because Benedict wanted one. He says he doesn’t like Benedict giving him orders.”
“It was a suggestion, not an order,” my father said.
“It felt like an order to Mervyn, therefore to him it was an order. Mervyn resents Benedict’s influence over you. Mervyn likes to be in charge.”
“Ben’s only been here two days,” my father protested.
Polly smiled. “Ten minutes was probably enough. You’re a brilliant politician on a grand scale, George, but it’s your son who sees into individual minds.”
My father looked a
t me thoughtfully.
“He’s good at it now,” Polly said, “and he’s not yet eighteen. Just wait ten years or so. You brought him here to give yourself social credibility, proving you had a son, you weren’t a bachelor, confirmed or otherwise, and you’ve found an asset you didn’t expect, so use him, George.”
She stirred the mugs of coffee and distributed it black. My father absentmindedly fished a small container out of a pocket and tapped a sweetener into his drink.
“George?” Polly prompted.
He opened his mouth to answer but before he could speak the telephone rang, and as I was nearest I picked up the receiver.
“Juliard?” a voice said.
“Benedict. Do you want my father? He’s here.”
“No. You’ll do. Do you know who you’re talking to?”
“Foster Fordham,” I said.
“Right. And have you worked out what was plugging your sump?”
“Something that would melt when the oil got really hot.”
He laughed. “I refrigerated the oil and filtered it. There were enough wax globules to make a good thick plug. There are also cotton fibers which may have been from the wick of a candle. Now let me talk to your father.”
I handed over the receiver and listened to half of a long discussion that was apparently about whether or not to report the sabotage to the police. There had been no further action that my father knew of over the rifle shot but, he thought, and his opinion persuaded, that his friend Foster should write an account of what he’d done and what he’d found, and that my father should give a copy of it to the boys in blue as a precaution.
Polly and I listened to snatches. “They don’t have the manpower for surveillance ... they won’t do it ... you can’t guard against a determined assassin ... yes ...”—my father’s gaze slid my way—“... but he’s too young ... all right, then ... we’re agreed.” He put down the receiver carefully and with deliberation and a sigh said, “Foster Fordham will write a report for the police. Ben will nanny me to the best of his ability and Mervyn will have to put up with it. And now, dearest Polly, I’m going to abandon tomorrow’s canvassing and go where I’m not expected.”