10 lb Penalty - Dick Francis [48]
I said, “I thought you wanted her on my father’s side.”
“Well, yes, I do. But I don’t want her going around saying all the time that she was the one we should have picked.”
“Get him into Parliament, Polly,” I said. “Put him on the escalator, then he’ll deal with Orinda and everything else.”
“How old did you say you are?”
“Eighteen at the end of next week. And it was you, dearest Polly, who said I look into people’s minds.”
She asked in some alarm, “Do you see into mine?”
“Sort of.”
She laughed uneasily, but I saw nothing but good.
One could say the opposite about Leonard Kitchens. I had come to notice that the tilt of his prominent mustache acted like a weather vane, signaling the direction of his feelings. The upward thrust that evening was combative and self-important, a combination looking for a fight. Bulky Mrs. Kitchens (in large pink flowers printed on dark blue) followed her Leonard’s progress around the meeting with anxiety for a while and then made a straight line to my side.
“Do something,” she hissed into my ear. “Tell Orinda to leave my Leonard alone.”
It seemed to me that it was the other way around, as Leonard’s mustache vibrated by Orinda’s neck, but on Mrs. Kitchens’s urgent and continuous prompting I went over to hear Leonard’s agitated and whining drift.
“I would do anything for you, Orinda, you know I would, but you’re joining the enemy and I can’t bear to see him slobbering all over you, it’s disgusting....”
“Wake up, Leonard,” Orinda said lightly, not seeing the seething lava below the faintly ridiculous exterior, “it’s a new world.”
The undercurrents might tug and eddy, but Orinda had definitely unified the party behind JULIARD; yet in our room that night my father would literally not hear a word said about her. In fact he put a finger decisively against his lips and drew me out into the passage, closing our door behind us.
“What’s up?” I asked, mystified.
“Tonight the editor of the Gazette asked me if I thought people who voted for me were silly.”
“But that’s nonsense. That’s ...” I stopped.
“Yes. Think back. When we joked about silly voters we were alone in this bedroom here. Did you repeat what we said?”
“Of course not.”
“Then how did the Gazette know?”
I stared at him, and said slowly, “Usher Rudd.”
He nodded. “Didn’t you tell me that that mechanic—Terry, isn’t that what his name is?—got sacked because Usher Rudd had listened to his pillow talk using one of those gadgets that pick up voice waves from the faint vibrations in the windows?”
“Usher Rudd,” I said furiously, “is trying to prove I’m not your son.”
“Never mind, he’s on a loser.”
“He’s following Orinda, too, not to mention the Bethunes.”
“He thinks if he flings enough mud, some will stick. Don’t give him any target.”
As the days went by one could see that Orinda’s flip-flop had most impact in Hoopwestern itself, less in Quindle, and not very much in the villages dotting the maps with a church spire, a couple of pubs and a telephone box. Cheers and clapping greeted her near home but news of her arrival to canvass in, say, Middle Lampfield (pop. 637) was more likely to be greeted with a polite “Oo? Aah” and a swift return to “Zoomerzet” cider.
More local draft cider flowed down the constituency throats than babies’ formula, and my father’s head for the frothy fruit of the apple earned him approval. We rolled every day at lunchtime from pub to pub to pub (I drove) and I got used to hearing the verdict. “A good chap, your father, he understands what we need in the countryside. Reckon I’ll vote for him. That Bethune, that they say is a certainty, he’s a town councillor, and you know what we think of them lot, thumbs down.”
My father made them laugh. He knew the price of hay. They would have followed him to the South Pole.
Orinda thought the villages a waste of time, and so did Mervyn.
“The bulk of the votes is in the towns,