10 lb Penalty - Dick Francis [23]
“I don’t remember him.”
“Find out if he can shoot.”
I opened my mouth to say “Wow” or “How?” and thought better of both. My father glanced at me sideways, and I felt him smile.
“I don’t think it was him,” I said.
“Why not?”
“His bullets of choice are acid ink.”
“Are you sure you want to be a mathematician? Why don’t you try writing?”
“I want to be a jockey.” Might as well walk on the moon.
“Exeter University required to know where you would spend your gap year before they offered you a deferred entry: that is to say, your going there not this October, but next year. They weren’t enthusiastic about racecourses.”
“There’s an Exeter racecourse.”
“You know damned well what they mean.”
“I don’t like politics.” Change the subject.
“Politics are the oil of the world.”
“You mean... the world doesn’t run without oil?” He nodded. “When politics jam solid, you get wars.”
“Father ...,” I said.
“Dad.”
“No. Father. Why do you want to be a politician?”
After a pause he said, “I am one. I can’t help it.”
“But you’ve never... I mean ...”
“I’ve never made a move before? Don’t think I haven’t considered it. I’ve known since I was your age or younger that one day I would try for Parliament. But I needed a solid base. I needed to prove to myself that I could make money. I needed to understand economics. And then there came a time not long ago when I said to myself ‘now or never.’ So it’s now.”
It was the longest statement about himself that he’d ever made in my hearing; and he had simplified for my sake, I thought, an urge that had taken time to ripen and had burst out fully grown at The Sleeping Dragon. The Juliard dragon was awake now and roaring and prowling up broad Whitehall towards Number 10.
Thinking about him, I lost the way home. He made no sarcastic comment when I stopped, consulted the map, worked out where I’d gone wrong and finally arrived in the parking lot from an unexpected direction; and for that forebearance alone I would have served him as an esquire to a knight. How old-fashioned could one get?
It was well after six o’clock when we reached the parking lot, which, in consequence, was almost empty. All the bordering shops had closed for the day. The late-afternoon sunshine weakened to soft gold as I pulled up and applied Crystal’s brakes.
There were dim lights in the office, but no people. I unlocked the door and we found a large note laid out prominently on Mervyn Teck’s desk.
The Range Rover is in Rudd’s Repair Garage. They thoroughly overhauled it and found nothing wrong.
Four
I would have expected the nervous energy of the day-long performance in Quindle to have earned my father an evening’s rest, but I had barely begun to wake up to the stamina demanded of would-be public servants. It seemed that far from a quiet top-up of batteries, he was committed to another marathon shake-hands-and-smile, not this time in the chandeliered magnificence of The Sleeping Dragon’s all-purpose hall, but in much more basic space normally used as a schooling ground for five-year-olds in Hoopwestern’s outer regions.
There were kids’ attempts at pictures pinned to corkboards all around the walls, mostly thin figures with big heads and spiky hair sticking straight out like Medusa’s snakes. There were simple notices—do not run and raise your hand—all written in self-conscious lowercase letters.
Primary colors everywhere bombarded the eyesight to saturation point, and I couldn’t believe that this sort of thing had been my own educational springboard, but it had. Another world, long left behind.
There were several rows of the temporary folding chairs that grew more and more familiar to me as the days passed, and a makeshift speaker’s platform, this time with a microphone that squeaked whenever tested, and on several other occasions when switched on or off.
The lighting was of unflattering greenish-white fluorescent strips, and there weren’t enough of them to raise spirits above depression. Limbo must look like this, I thought: