10 lb Penalty - Dick Francis [41]
“Cheer up,” he commanded to my silent reluctance. “No one wins all the time. Say something. You haven’t said anything for hours.”
“All right ... Orinda said Usher Rudd wants to know if I’m your catamite.”
My father spluttered into the gin that Polly had poured him.
Polly said, “What’s a catamite?” but my father knew.
I said, “Usher Rudd’s trying to prove I’m not your son. If you have a marriage certificate, put it in a bank vault.”
“And your birth certificate, where’s that?”
“With my stuff at Mrs. Wells’s.”
He frowned. My things hadn’t followed me so far. He borrowed Polly’s phone and called my ex-landlady forthwith. “She’s packed everything,” he reported, “but the carriers I ordered haven’t turned up. I’ll see to it again on Monday.”
“My bicycle is at the stables.”
He caught some sense of the wreck he’d made of my aspirations, but I also saw quite clearly that he still expected me to face reality thoroughly and grow up.
“Tough it out,” he said.
“Yes.”
Polly looked from one of us to the other and said, “The boy’s doing his best for you, George.”
Leaving her in her house, I drove the Range Rover back to Hoopwestern, familiar at last with the four-wheel drive and the weight and size. I disembarked my parent at a church hall (directions from Mervyn) where he was due to meet and thank the small army of volunteers working for him and the party’s sake throughout the whole scattered area of the constituency. The volunteers had brought their families and their neighbors, and also tea, beer, wine and cake to sustain them and my father’s inexhaustible enthusiasm to energize them for the next three weeks.
“My son ... this is my son.” He presented me over and over again, and I shook hands and smiled and smiled and chatted up old ladies and talked football with shaky knowledge and racing with piercing regret.
Mervyn moved from group to group with plans and lists. This ward would be canvassed tomorrow, that ward on Monday: leaflets ... posters... visits... leave not one of seventy thousand voters unaware of JULIARD.
Three more weeks of it... Even with the spice of looking out for stray attacks, the campaign at that point seemed more like purgatory than appealing.
But I’d said I would do it ... and I would.
I ate chocolate cake. Still no pizza.
At good-bye time I collected the Range Rover from where I’d parked it in a nearby road and was as sure as possible that no one had tampered with it that evening.
Foster Fordham had given me simple instructions on the telephone. “Always take with you a carton of dishwasher powder in a box with a spout. When you park the vehicle, sprinkle a thin line of powder on the ground from behind each front wheel back to the rear wheel on the same side. If anyone has moved the vehicle or wriggled under it in your absence, the powder will tell you. Understand?”
“Yes. Thank you.”
“Always set the alarms carefully, and disable them and start the vehicle from a distance, however short a time you’ve been away.”
I’d followed his instructions faithfully, but our sump-plug merchant had tried no other tricks. I ferried my father safely from the church hall back to the bow-fronted headquarters and left him there with Mervyn, the two of them endlessly discussing tactics, while I housed the Range Rover in its lockup and finally ran a pizza to earth in the local take-away.
Mervyn and my father absentmindedly ate half of it. Mervyn laid out dozens of stickers and leaflets in piles, ready for distribution. Yes, he said when I asked him, of course by-elections were wildly exciting, they were the peaks in his busy life. And there were the final touches to be arranged for the fund-raising fete organized for next week—such a pity Orinda wasn’t in charge of it this time....
I yawned and climbed the narrow stairs, leaving my two elders to lock up: and I woke in the night to a strong smell of smoke.
Smoke.
I sat bolt upright in bed.
Without much more than instinct I disentangled my legs from the sheets and violently shook the unconscious lump on the neighboring