10 lb Penalty - Dick Francis [31]
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.”