10 lb Penalty - Dick Francis [52]
“So now that I’ve joined your father,” Orinda said, “I’m not listening to Alderney as much. I used to do everything he suggested. We always did, Dennis and I, because Alderney would tell us such and such a thing would happen on the political scene and mostly he was right, and now I’m out with you and your father so much of the time.... You’ll laugh, but I almost think he’s jealous!”
I didn’t laugh. I’d seen my father’s powerful effect on every female in Hoopwestern, from acid-tongued Lavender onwards. It wouldn’t have surprised me if he’d left a comet tail of jealousy through the constituency, except that he needed the men to vote for him as well as the women, and I’d watched him keep a tactical distance from their wives.
Alderney Wyvern, along the road, got out of his car and stood aggressively on the sidewalk, hands on hips, staring at Orinda.
“I’d better go and talk to him,” Orinda said.
I said instinctively, “No, don’t.”
She caught the alarm in my voice and smiled. “I’ve known him for years.”
I hadn’t yet come across the adult, grossly matured variety of jealousy, only the impotent rage of adolescence, but I felt intuitively that a great—and disturbing—change had taken place in A. L. Wyvern.
He had been by his own choice self-effacing on every occasion I’d seen him: quiet in manner, self-contained, behaving as if he didn’t want to be noticed. All that had now gone. The stocky figure seemed now heavier, the shoulders hunched, the face, even from a distance, visibly tense with menace. He had the out-of-control anger of a rioter, or of a militant striker.
I said to Orinda, “Stay here.”
“Don’t be silly.”
She walked confidently towards him in her brave orange-red clothes.
I could hear his voice, low and growling, but not what he said. Her reply was light and teasing. She put out a hand as if to stroke his arm affectionately, and he hit her very hard in the face.
She cried out with shock as much as pain. I ran towards her, and although Wyvern saw me coming, he hit her again, backhanded, across her nose and mouth.
She squealed, raising her hands to shield her face, trying at the same time to escape from him, but he clutched the shoulder of her jacket to prevent her running, and drew back his fist for a third blow.
She wrenched herself free. She half overbalanced. She stumbled off the sidewalk into the roadway.
The prosperous residential street that had been so peaceful and empty suddenly seemed filled with a heavy truck that bore down towards Orinda, brakes shrieking, horn blowing in banshee bursts.
Orinda tottered blindly as if disoriented, and I sprinted towards her without calculating speed or distance but simply impelled by the need of the moment.
The truck driver was swerving about, trying to miss her and actually making things worse because his direction was unpredictable. I might easily have shoved her into his path rather than out of it, but I threw myself at Orinda in a sort of twisting football tackle so that she fell half under me onto the hard surface and rolled, and the screaming black tires made skid marks an inch from our feet.
Orinda’s nose was bleeding and her eyes were overflowing with pain-induced tears, and beyond that she was dazed and bewildered. I knelt beside her, winded myself and fearful that I’d hurt her unnecessarily when the truck driver might have avoided her anyway.
The truck had stopped not far beyond us and the driver, jumping down from his cab and running towards us, was already rehearsing aggrieved innocence.
“She ran out straight in front of me, I didn’t have a chance. It isn’t my fault. ... I couldn’t help it ... it isn’t my fault she’s bleeding all down her front.”
Neither Orinda nor I made any reply. It was irrelevant. It hadn’t been his fault, and no one would say it had been. The person at fault stood in shocked rage on the sidewalk directly across the road from us, glaring and rigid and not coming to our aid.
With breath returning I asked Orinda if she was all right. Silly question, really, when her nose was bleeding