by Dick Francis
Orinda flirted again with his lens (or with him—much the same thing) and told everyone prettily through a non-squeaking microphone that George Juliard, undoubtedly on the brink of becoming a nationally acclaimed politician, was the - best possible substitute for her beloved husband, Dennis, who had dedicated his life to the good citizens of this glorious part of Dorset.
Applause, applause. She appeared in the sitting rooms of Hoopwestern on the lunchtime television news against the only-slightly orchestrated cheers.
By the time my father returned on the train from London he’d heard of Orinda’s media conference with mixed feelings—she might be stealing his limelight or she might just be saving his life—but at another church hall meeting of the faithful that evening he embraced her in a warm hug (reciprocated) that would have been unthinkable a day earlier.
Not everyone was pleased.
Orinda’s shadow, Anonymous Lover Wyvern, followed her around like thunder. She, dressed in blackberry-colored satin and glowing with a sense of generosity and virtue, kept giving him inquiring looks as if unsure of the source of his dudgeon. In her inner release she didn’t seem to realize, as I did, albeit only slowly through the evening, that in dumping her anger at not being selected she had in some way lessened his status. He had been Dennis Nagle’s best friend, but Orinda was leaving her Dennis behind.
Dearest Polly, to my surprise, positively scowled, even though she had herself delivered Orinda to her change of heart.
“I didn’t count on such a radical about-face,” Polly complained. “She’s cast herself in the ongoing role of constituency wife! There’s no doubt she was good at it, but she isn’t George’s wife and she can’t surely imagine she can go on opening fetes and things, and I bet that’s what she’s got in mind. Whatever did you say to her at the races?”
I said, “I thought you wanted her on my father’s side.”
“Well, yes, I do. But I don’t want her going around saying all the time that she was the one we should have picked.”
“Get him into Parliament, Polly,” I said. “Put him on the escalator, then he’ll deal with Orinda and everything else.”
“How old did you say you are?”
“Eighteen at the end of next week. And it was you, dearest Polly, who said I look into people’s minds.”
She asked in some alarm, “Do you see into mine?”
“Sort of.”
She laughed uneasily, but I saw nothing but good.
One could say the opposite about Leonard Kitchens. I had come to notice that the tilt of his prominent mustache acted like a weather vane, signaling the direction of his feelings. The upward thrust that evening was combative and self-important, a combination looking for a fight. Bulky Mrs. Kitchens (in large pink flowers printed on dark blue) followed her Leonard’s progress around the meeting with anxiety for a while and then made a straight line to my side.
“Do something,” she hissed into my ear. “Tell Orinda to leave my Leonard alone.”
It seemed to me that it was the other way around, as Leonard’s mustache vibrated by Orinda’s neck, but on Mrs. Kitchens’s urgent and continuous prompting I went over to hear Leonard’s agitated and whining drift.
“I would do anything for you, Orinda, you know I would, but you’re joining the enemy and I can’t bear to see him slobbering all over you, it’s disgusting....”
“Wake up, Leonard,” Orinda said lightly, not seeing the seething lava below the faintly ridiculous exterior, “it’s a new world.”
The undercurrents might tug and eddy, but Orinda had definitely unified the party behind JULIARD; yet in our room that night my father would literally not hear a word said about her. In fact he put a finger decisively against his lips and drew me out into the passage, closing our door behind us.
“What’s up?” I asked, mystified.
“Tonight the editor of the Gazette asked me if I thought people who voted for me were silly.”
“But that’s nonsense. That’s ...” I stopped.
“Yes. Think back. When we joked about silly voters we were alone in this bedroom here. Did you repeat what we said?”
“Of course not.”
“Then how did the Gazette know?”
I stared at him, and said slowly, “Usher Rudd.”
He nodded. “Didn’t you tell me that that mechanic—Terry, isn’t that what his name is?—got sacked because Usher Rudd had listened to his pillow talk using one of those gadgets that pick up voice waves from the faint vibrations in the windows?”
“Usher Rudd,” I said furiously, “is trying to prove I’m not your son.”
“Never mind, he’s on a loser.”
“He’s following Orinda, too, not to mention the Bethunes.”
“He thinks if he flings enough mud, some will stick. Don’t give him any target.”
As the days went by one could see that Orinda’s flip-flop had most impact in Hoopwestern itself, less in Quindle, and not very much in the villages dotting the maps with a church spire, a couple of pubs and a telephone box. Cheers and clapping greeted her near home but news of her arrival to canvass in, say, Middle Lampfield (pop. 637) was more likely to be greeted with a polite “Oo? Aah” and a swift return to “Zoomerzet” cider.
More local draft cider flowed down the constituency throats than babies’ formula, and my father’s head for the frothy fruit of the apple earned him approval. We rolled every day at lunchtime from pub to pub to pub (I drove) and I got used to hearing the verdict. “A good chap, your father, he understands what we need in the countryside. Reckon I’ll vote for him. That Bethune, that they say is a certainty, he’s a town councillor, and you know what we think of them lot, thumbs down.”
My father made them laugh. He knew the price of hay. They would have followed him to the South Pole.
Orinda thought the villages a waste of time, and so did Mervyn.
“The bulk of the votes is in the towns,” they lectured. Dennis Nagle had been the star of the business-man circle.
“You vote for a man you play darts with,” my father said, missing double top. “I buy my own drinks, they buy theirs. Neither of us is beholden.”
Orinda didn’t like cider, and she didn’t like pubs. Lavender, surprisingly, liked both: my father, Lavender and I therefore spent several days soapboxing the outskirts in the silver-and-gold Range Rover, seeing to it (as my father said) that not a voter was left unturned.
The following week it was Orinda who nearly died.
Seven
On the Tuesday of the last full week of canvassing, my box of possessions, and my bicycle, finally arrived by carrier from Mrs. Wells.
Up in our room, my father picked with interest and curiosity through the meager debris of my life: two trophies for winning amateur ’chases the previous Easter, several photographs of me on horses and skis, and other photos from school with me sitting in one of those frozen team lineups (this one for target shooting) with the captain hugging a cup. There were also books on mathematics and racing biographies. Also clothes, but not many as, to my dismay, I was still growing.
My father extracted my passport, my birth certificate and the framed photograph of his wedding to my mother. He took the picture out of its frame and after looking at it for several long minutes he ran his finger over her face and sighed deeply, and it was the only time I’d known him to show any emotion at all about his loss.
I said incautiously, “Do you remember her? If she walked into the room now, would you know her?”
He gave me a look of such bleakness that I realized I’d asked a question of unforgivable intrusion, but after a pause all he said was, “You never forget your first.”
I swallowed.
He said, “Have you had your first?”
I felt numb, embarrassed almost beyond speech, but in the end I said truthfully, “No.”
He nodded. It was a moment of almost unbearable intimacy, the first ever between us, but he remained totally calm and matter-of-fact, and let me
recover.
He sorted through some papers he had brought in a briefcase from a recent trip to London, put my own identifications in the case, snapped shut the locks and announced that we were going to call on the Hoopwestern Gazette.
We called, in fact, on the editor, who was also the publisher and proprietor of the only local daily. He was a man in shirtsleeves, harassed, middle aged, and from the tone of his front pages, censorious. He stood up from his desk as we approached.
“Mr. Samson Frazer,” my father said, calling him by name. “When we met the other evening, you asked if I thought people who vote for me are silly.”
Samson Frazer, for all his importance in Hoopwestem, was no match in power for my parent. Interesting, I thought.
“Er ... ,” he said.
“We’ll return to that in a minute,” my father told him. “First, I have some things for you to see.”
He unlatched the briefcase and opened it.
“I have brought the following items,” he said, taking out each paper and putting it down in front of the editor. “My marriage certificate. My son’s birth certificate. Both of our passports. This photograph of my wife and myself taken outside the registry office after our wedding. On the back”—he turned the picture over—“you will see the professional photographer’s name and copyright, and the date. Here also is my wife’s death certificate. She died of complications after the birth of our son. This son, Benedict, my only child, who has been at my side during this by-election.”
The editor gave me a swift glance as if he hadn’t until that point taken note of my existence.
“You employ a person called Usher Rudd,” my father said. “I think you should be careful. He seems to be trying to cast doubt on my son’s identity and legitimacy. I’m told he has made scurrilous insinuations.”
He asked the editor just how he’d come to hear of “silly” votes when he, my father, had only used the word—and in a joke—in the privacy of his own room.
Samson Frazer froze like a dazzled rabbit.
“If I have to,” my father said, “I will send hair samples for DNA testing. My own hair, my son’s hair, and some hair from my wife, which she gave me in a locket. I hope you will carefully consider what I’ve said and what I’ve shown you.” He began methodically replacing the certificates in the briefcase. “Because I assure you,” he went on pleasantly, “if the Hoopwestern Gazette should be so unwise as to cast doubt on my son’s origins, I will sue the paper and you personally for defamation and libel, and you might quite likely wish you hadn’t done it.” He snapped the locks shut so vigorously that they sounded in themselves like a threat.
“You understand?” he asked.
The editor plainly did.
“Good,” my father said. “If you catch me in sleaze, that will be fair enough. If you try to manufacture it, I’ll hang you out by the toes.”
Samson Frazer found nothing to say.
“Good day to you, sir,” my father said.
He was in high good humor all the way back to the hotel and went upstairs humming.
“What would you say,” he suggested, “to a pact between us?”
“What sort of pact?”
He put the briefcase down on the table and drew out two sheets of plain paper.
“I’ve been thinking,” he said, “of making you a promise, and I want you to make the same promise in return. We both know how vulnerable one is to people like Usher Rudd.”
“And it’s not impossible,” I interrupted, “that he’s listening to us at this moment, particularly if he knows where we’ve just been.”
My father looked briefly startled, but then grinned.
“The red-haired dung beetle can listen all he likes. The promise I’ll make to you is not to give him, or anyone like him, any grounds ever for messy publicity. I’ll be dead boring. There will be no kiss-and-tell bimbos and no illicit payment for favors and no cheating on tax and no nasty pastimes like drugs or kinky sex. ...”
I smiled easily, amused.
“Yes,” he said, “but I want you to make the same promise to me. I want you to promise me that if I get elected you’ll do nothing throughout my political career that can get me discredited or sacked or disgraced in any way.”
“But I wouldn’t,” I protested.
“It’s easy for you to say that now while you’re young, but you’ll find life’s full of terrible temptations.”
“I promise,” I said.
He shook his head. “That’s not enough. I want us both to write it down. I want you to be able to see and remember what you promised. Of course, it’s in no way a legal document or anything pretentious like that, it’s just an affirmation of intent.” He paused, clicking a ballpoint pen while he thought, then he wrote very quickly and simply on one sheet of paper, and signed his name, and pushed the paper over for me to read.
It said: “I will cause no scandal, nor will I perform any shameful or illegal act.”
Wow, I thought. I said, not wanting this to get too serious, “It’s a bit comprehensive, isn’t it?”
“It’s not worth doing otherwise. But you can write your own version. Write what you’re comfortable with.”
I had no sense of binding myself irrevocably to sainthood.
I wrote: “I’ll do nothing that could embarrass my father’s political career or drag his name in the dust. I’ll do my best to keep him safe from any sort of attack.”
I signed my name lightheartedly and gave him the page. “Will that do?”
He read it, smiling. “It’ll do.”
He folded both pages together, then picked up the wedding photograph and positioned it facedown on the glass in its frame. He then put both of the signed pacts on the photo and replaced the back part of the frame, fastening it with its clips.
“There you are,” he said, turning the frame faceup. “Every time you look at your mother and me, you’ll remember the promises behind the photo, inside the frame. Couldn’t be simpler.”
He stood the picture on the table and without fuss gave me back my birth certificate and passport.
“Keep them safe.”
“Yes.”
“Right. Then let’s get on with this election.”
Stopping only briefly to leave my identity in an envelope in the manager’s safe, we went to the new basic headquarters to collect Mervyn, pamphlets, Faith and Lavender, and start a door-to-door morning around three Hoopwestern housing estates. Lightbulb workers, they said.
Mervyn, proud of himself, had found a replacement megaphone. His friendly printer continued to furnish a torrent of JULIARDs. Mervyn for once seemed content in his world, but his day shone even brighter when Orinda arrived, declaring her readiness for the fray.
With Faith and Lavender cool and Mervyn hot, therefore six of us squeezed into the Range Rover, leaving behind Crystal (chronically anxious) and Marge (dusting and sweeping).
Only eight days after this one, I thought, and it will be over. And what will I do, I wondered, after that? There would be three or four weeks to fill before the Exeter term started. I mentally shrugged. I would be eighteen. I had a bicycle ... might get to France...
I drove mechanically, stopping wherever Mervyn dictated.
Orinda had come in neat slacks and jacket, light orange-scarlet in color. As usual, gold chains. Smooth perfect makeup.
Babies got kissed. My father came across a clutch of child-minding house-husbands, factory shift workers, and learned about tungsten filaments. I chatted up a coffee-morning of old ladies who weren’t satisfied until my parent shook their hands. (Pink smiles. A blossoming of votes.) Orinda met old friends. Mervyn alerted the streets to our presence like a musically tinkling fish-and-chip van, and Faith and Lavender left no doorbell unrung.
When we drove out of the last of the estates we’d seen one or two TITMUSSes, no WHISTLE, not a BETHUNE to speak of, but many a window now proclaimed JULIARD. One could not but hope.
Mervyn and my father decided on one more long
street, this time of varied and slightly more prosperous-looking houses. I, by this time, had had enough of door-to-dooring to last me several lifetimes, but as always the others seemed to have an indefatigable appetite. My father’s eyes still shone with enthusiasm and people who disagreed with his political theories left him not downcast but stimulated. He never tired, it seemed to me, of trying to convert the heathen.
Without much hope I asked Faith and Lavender if they wouldn’t prefer to say they’d done enough; how about lunch? “No, no,” they insisted with fervor, “every vote counts.”
Orinda alone seemed uneasy and withdrawn and not her usual positive and extravagant self, and in the end, while she and I waited together on the sidewalk beside the Range Rover for the others to finish galvanizing a retirement home, I asked her what was the matter.
“Nothing,” she said, and I didn’t press it, but after a moment or two she said, “Do you see that white BMW there, along the road?”
“Yes.” I frowned. “I saw it earlier, in one of the housing estates.”
“He’s following us.”
“Who’s following us? Is it Usher Rudd?”
“Oh, no.” She found the idea a surprise, which in itself surprised me. “No, not Usher Rudd. It’s Alderney Wyvern.”
It was I, then, who was surprised, and I asked, sounding astonished, “Why on earth should he follow us?”
Orinda frowned. “He’s still furious with me for supporting your father.”
“Well ... I’d noticed. But why, exactly?”
“You’re too young to understand.”
“I could try.”
“Dennis used to do everything Alderney said. I mean, Alderney actually was how Dennis got advancement. Alderney would tell him what to say. Alderney is very clever, politically.”
“Why doesn’t he find a parliamentary seat for himself?”