10 lb Penalty - Dick Francis [10]
“Dennis was a cuddly precious, you know. Can’t think why he married that harpy. ”
Dearest Polly, herself on the angular side of cuddly, had one of those long-jawed faces from which condensed kindness and goodwill flowed forth unmistakably. She wore dark red lipstick as if she didn’t usually: it was the wrong color for her yellowish skin.
“Dennis told us he wanted us to select Orinda. She made him say it. He knew he was dying.”
Orinda flashed her white teeth at a second cameraman.
“That man’s from the Hoopwestern Gazette,” Dearest Polly said disgustedly. “She’ll make the front page.”
“But she won’t get to Parliament,” I said.
Polly’s eyes focused on me with awakening amusement. “Your father’s son, aren’t you, then! It was George’s ability to identify the essential points that swayed us in his favor. There were seventeen of us on the selection panel, and to begin with most people thought Orinda the obvious choice. I know she took it for granted....”
And she’d reckoned without Dearest Polly, I thought. Polly and others of like mind.
Polly said, “I don’t know how she has the nerve to bring her lover!”
“Er ... ,” I said. “What?”
“That man just behind her. He was Dennis’s best friend.”
I didn’t see how being Dennis’s best friend made anyone automatically Orinda’s lover, but before I could ask, Polly was claimed away. Dennis’s best friend, a person who managed to look unremarkable even in a dinner jacket, seemed abstracted more than attentive, but he did stick faithfully to Orinda’s back: rather like a bodyguard, I thought.
I realized in consequence that Mr. Bigwig himself had a genuinely serious bodyguard, a young muscular-looking shadow whose attention was directed to the crowd, not his master.
I wondered if my father accepted that bodyguards would be the price of success as he went up his chosen ladder.
He began circling the room and gestured for me to join him, and I practiced being Mrs. Bigwig but fell far short of her standard. I could act, but she was real.
There was a general movement into the dining room next door, where too many tables laid for ten people each were crowded into too small a space. Places were allocated to everyone by name and, my father and I entering almost last, I found that not only were we not expected at the same table—he was put naturally with the Bigwigs and the Constituency Association’s chairman—but I was squeezed against a distant wall between a Mrs. Leonard Kitchens and Orinda herself.
When she discovered her ignominious location, Orinda flamed with fury like a white-hot torch. She stood and quivered and tried to get general attention by tapping a glass with a knife, but the noise was lost in the general bustle of eighty people chattering and clattering into their places. Orinda’s angry outburst barely reached farther than her knives and forks.
“This is an insult! I always sit at the top table! I demand ...”
No one listened.
Through the throng I saw Dearest Polly busily settling my father into a place of honor and guessed with irony that Orinda’s quandary was Polly’s mischief.
Orinda glared at me as I hovered politely, waiting for her to sit. She had green eyes, black lashed. Stage greasepaint skin.
“And who are you?” she demanded; then bent down and snatched up the name card in front of my place. My identity left her speechless with her red mouth open.
“I’m his son,” I said lamely. “Can I help you with your chair?”
She turned her back on me and spoke to her bodyguard (lover?) best friend of her dead husband, a characterless-seeming entity with a passive face.
“Do something!” Orinda instructed him.
He glanced past her in my direction and with flat expressionless eyes dismissed me as of no consequence. He silently held Orinda’s chair for her to sit down and to my surprise she folded away most of her aggression and sat stonily and with a stiff back, enduring what she couldn’t get changed.
At school one learned a good deal about power: who had it and who didn’t. (I didn’t.) Orinda’s understated companion had power that easily