10 lb Penalty - Dick Francis [3]
Over the years I’d gleaned the details. There had been a hullabaloo in both extended families when they were told of the pregnancy, an even worse fuss (product of the times) when my mother refused an abortion, and a frosty turning of backs at the hasty (and happy) wedding.
The marriage-day photograph was the only record I had of my mother, who ironically died of preeclampsia at my birth, leaving her very young husband literally holding the baby with his envisaged bright future in ruins, so it was said.
George Juliard, however, who wasn’t considered bright for nothing, promptly rearranged his whole life, jettisoning the intended Oxford degree and career in law, persuading his dead wife’s sister to add me to her already large family of four sons, and setting forth into the City to learn how to make money. He had paid from the beginning for my keep and later for my education and had further fulfilled his duties by turning up at parent-teacher meetings and punctiliously sending me cards and gifts at Christmas and birthdays. A year ago for my birthday he’d given me an airline ticket to America so that I could spend the summer holidays on a horse farm in Virginia owned by the family of a school friend. Many fathers had done less.
I followed him into four-twelve and found without surprise that I was in the sitting room of a suite directly facing the sea, the English Channel stretching blue-gray to the horizon. When George Juliard had set out with the goal of making money, he had spectacularly hit his target.
“Have you had breakfast?” he asked.
“I’m not hungry.”
He ignored the untruth. “What did Vivian Durridge say to you?”
“He sacked me.”
“Yes, but what did he say?”
“He said I couldn’t ride and that I sniffed glue and also cocaine.”
My father stared. “He said what?”
“He said what you asked him to, didn’t he? He said he had it on good authority that I took drugs.”
“Did you ask him who his ‘good authority’ was?”
“No.” I hadn’t thought of it until too late, in the car.
“You’ve a lot to learn,” my father said.
‘ ‘It was no coincidence that you sent a car to wait for me.”
He smiled marginally, light gleaming in his eyes. He was taller than I, with wider shoulders, and in many ways inhabited an intenser, more powerful version of the body I had been growing into during the past five years. His hair was darker then mine, and curlier, a close rug on his Grecian-like head. The firmness in his face, now that he was approaching his late thirties, had been already apparent in his wedding photograph, when the gap in age had showed not at all, where the bridegroom had looked the dominant partner and the bride, smiling in her blue silk dress outside the registry office, had shone with youthful beauty.
“Why did you do it?” I asked, trying to sound more adult than bitter, and not managing it.
“Do what?”
“Get me kicked out.”
“Ah.”
He walked over to a pair of glass doors leading to a balcony and opened them, letting in the vivid coastal air and the high voices from the beach. He stood there silently for a while, breathing deeply, and then, as if making up his mind, he closed the windows purposefully and turned toward me.
“I have a proposition for you,” he said.
“What proposition?”
“It will take a good while to explain.” He lifted a telephone receiver and told the room service that whether or not breakfast had been officially over an hour ago, they were to send up immediately a tray of cereal, milk, hot toast, grilled bacon with tomatoes and mushrooms, an apple, a banana and a pot of tea. “And don’t argue,” he said to me, disconnecting, “you look as if you haven’t eaten for a week.”
I said, “Did you tell Sir Vivian that I take drugs?”
“No, I didn’t. Do you?”
“No.”
We looked at each other, virtual strangers, though as closely tied as genetically possible. I had lived according to his edicts, had been to his choice of schools, had learned to ride, to ski and to shoot because he had