10 lb Penalty - Dick Francis [60]
Usher Rudd was wandering about with his intrusive malice trying to catch people photographically at a disadvantage, but interestingly when he caught my eye he pretended he hadn’t, and veered away. I had no illusions that he wished me well.
Mervyn Teck and a retinue of dedicated volunteers, stoutly declaring the afternoon a success, drove my father and me back to The Sleeping Dragon. Four days to polling day, I thought: eternity.
Over dinner in the hotel dining room I told my father about the two Stallworthy horses. A phlegmatic chestnut stayer and a sprinting excitable bay with a black mane.
“Well ...,” he said, frowning, “you love speed. You’ll take the bay. What makes you hesitate?”
“The horse I want has a name that might disturb you. I can’t change his name: one isn’t allowed to after a Thoroughbred has raced. I won’t have that horse unless it’s OK with you.”
He stared. “What name could possibly disturb me so much?”
After a pause I said flatly, “Sarah’s Future.”
“Ben!”
“His dam was Sarah Jones; his sire Bright Future. It’s good breeding for a jumper.”
“The bay ...?”
“No,” I said. “The chestnut. He’s the one I want. He’s never won yet, though he’s been second. A novice has a wider—a better—choice of a race. Apart from that, he felt right. He’d look after me.”
My father absentmindedly crumbled a bread roll to pieces.
“You,” he said eventually, “you are literally Sarah’s future. Let’s say she would be pleased. I’ll phone Stallworthy in the morning.”
Far from slackening off during the run-up to polling day, the Juliard camp spent the last three days in a nonstop whirl.
I drove the Range Rover from breakfast to bedtime. I drove to Quindle three times, and all around the villages. I screwed together and unclipped the soapbox until I could do it in my sleep. I loaded and unloaded boxes of leaflets. I made cooing noises at babies and played ball games with kids and shook uncountable hands and smiled and smiled and smiled.
I thought of Sarah’s Future, and was content.
On the last evening, Wednesday, my father invited all his helpers and volunteers to The Sleeping Dragon for a thank-you supper. Along in a room off the Town Hall, Paul Bethune was doing the same.
The Bethune cavalcade had several times crossed our path, their megaphone louder, their traveling circus larger, their campaign vehicle not a painted Range Rover but a roofless double-decker bus lent from his party headquarters. Bethune’s message followed him everywhere: “Dennis Nagle was out of touch, old-fashioned. Elect Bethune, a local man, who knows the score.”
A recent opinion poll in the constituency had put Bethune a few points ahead. Titmuss and Whistle were nowhere.
The Gazette had trumpeted merely, “An End to Sleaze,” and waffled on about “the new morality” without defining it. Though by instinct a Bethune man, the editor had let Usher Rudd loose and thereby both increased his sales and scored an own-goal. The editor, I thought in amusement, had dug his own dilemma.
My father thanked his faithful workers.
“Whatever happens tomorrow,” he said, “I want you to know how much I appreciate all you’ve done ... all the time you’ve given ... your tireless energy ... your friendly good nature. I thank our agent, Mervyn, for his excellent planning. We’ve all done our best to get the party’s message across. Now it’s up to the voters to decide.”
He thanked Orinda for rallying to his side. “... all the difference in the world to have her support ... immensely generous ... reassuring to the faithful ...”
Orinda, splendid in gold chains and emerald green, looked modest and loved it.
Polly, beside me, made a noise near to a retch.
I stifled a quivering giggle.
“Don’t think I’ve forgotten,” she said to me severely, “that it was you who changed Orinda from foe to angel. I bear it only because the central party wants to use your father’s talents. Get him in, they said. Just like you, they more or less told me to put his feet on the escalator, and he would rise all the way.”
But someone, I thought, had tried to prevent