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“Could I get you a taxi?” I asked.

She leaned across the table and put her hand on mine. “You’re a nice boy,” she said, “whoever your father is.”

There was a familiar bright flash and the whine of a film winding on and there, a few feet away, stood the other Rudd, Bobby Usher himself, grinning triumphantly and radiating ill nature in megawatts.

Isobel Bethune lunged furiously to her feet but Usher Rudd, quick at getaways, was out of the door before she could draw breath to shout. “I hate him,” she said, again near to tears. “I’ll kill him.”

I asked the barman to phone for a taxi.

“Mrs. Bethune still owes for the drinks.”

“Oh.”

“I haven’t any money,” she said. “Pay for me, there’s a dear.”

I salvaged from my pockets the remains of the money my father had given me in Brighton and handed her all of it.

“You pay the man for the drinks. I’m not old enough yet to buy alcohol and I’m not getting into that sort of trouble.”

Both the barman and Isobel, openmouthed, completed the sale.

Five

Back at the Town Hall the debate had passed through lukewarm and was heating towards chopping motions with the hands of the two protagonists.

A local chess champion, brought in as referee, had come to the fray with a pinging time clock and, making his own set of rules, he had decreed that each candidate would in turn answer specific questions, the answers to last a maximum of five minutes before being silenced by the time clock’s arbitration.

The format seemed to be working quite well, chiefly because both candidates knew how to speak. I was no longer surprised by my father’s ability to rouse, amuse and convince, but somehow I’d expected Paul Bethune to be as bombastic and unkind as he’d seemed to his wife. Instead he delivered dryly witty and well-prepared responses to the questions and it was only afterwards that I wondered if he’d learned his best phrases by heart and had used them before.

The Town Hall was full. The seats given by Polly to me and Isobel Bethune now held the mayor and his missus. And, glad to be less exposed, I stood by the door and watched the waves of animation and agreement and fury roll in turn across the faces of the audience, and thought that at least they were listening, and obviously cared.

There could be no winner that night. They both won. Everyone applauded and went away talking.

Orinda had several times clapped for Bethune. Leonard Kitchens kept his hands forever in his pockets. Dearest Polly’s long face glowed with goodness and pleasure, and freckly Basil Rudd looked even more like his obnoxious cousin when he smiled.

No one produced a gun.

My father and Paul Bethune shook hands.

Like star actors they left the stage last, each surrounded at once by chattering satellites, all with something to say, questions to ask, points to make. My father genuinely enjoyed it, and again his spirits were helium-ballooning as we headed back to our base.

“It’s quicker if we walk straight across the square,” my parent objected as I tried to persuade him to take to the cloister. “Why do you want to walk two sides of a triangle, not one, and you a mathematician?”

“Bullets,” I said.

“My God.” He stopped dead. “But no one would try again!”

“You’d have said no one would try the first time, but they did.”

“We don’t know for sure.”

“And the sump plug?”

He shook his head as if in general disbelief, but he made no further objection to the cloister route, and seemed not to notice that I walked between him and the well-lit open square.

He wanted to talk about the debate. He also wanted to know why I’d missed half of it and where I’d been. I told him all of Isobel’s troubles but I could feel he was barely attending: his mind and his tongue were still busy with points made and lost against the lady’s unfaithful man.

“He’s dedicated, you know. I can’t stand his politics.”

I said, “I hate what you say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.”

“Bull’s-eye. Don’t tell me all those school fees weren’t wasted.”

“Come