10 lb Penalty - Dick Francis [67]
There wasn’t much in racing, in fact, that Weatherbys didn’t do.
It was because of mad, tearful, silly Mrs. Courtney Young that I began to think that one distant day I might apply to Weatherbys for a job.
In the spring of my third year of study my father came to Exeter to see me (he had been a couple of times before) and to my surprise brought with him Dearest Polly.
I had spent a week of each Christmas holiday skiing (practicing my French!) and I’d been riding and racing in every spare minute, but I also played fair and passed all my exams and assessments with reasonable grades if not with distinction, so when I saw him arrive a quick canter around the guilt reflexes raised no wincing specters, and I shook his hand (we had at least advanced that far) with uncomplicated pleasure.
“I don’t know if you realize,” my father said, “that we are fast approaching a general election.”
My immediate reaction was Oh, God. No. I managed not to say it aloud, but it must have been plain on my face.
Dearest Polly laughed and my father said, “This time I’m not asking you to canvass door to door.”
“But you need a bodyguard....”
“I’ve engaged a professional.”
I felt instantly jealous: ridiculous. It took me a good ten seconds to say sincerely, “I hope he’ll mind your back.”
“He’s a she. All sorts of belts in martial arts.”
“Oh.” I glanced at Polly, who looked merely benign.
“Polly and I,” my father said, “propose to marry. We came to hear if you had any objections.”
“Polly!”
“Dear Benedict. Your father is so abrupt. I would have asked you more gently.”
“I’ve no objections,” I said. “Very much the opposite.”
I kissed her cheek.
“Goodness!” she exclaimed. “You’ve grown.”
“Have you?” my father inquired with interest. “I hadn’t noticed.”
“I’ve stopped at last,” I sighed. “I’m over an inch taller and fifteen pounds heavier than I was at Hoopwestern.” Too big, I might have added, for much scope as a professional jockey, but an excellent size for an amateur.
Polly herself hadn’t changed, except that I saw with interest that the hard crimson lipstick had been jettisoned for an equally inappropriate scarlet. Her clothes still looked unfashionable even by charity shop standards, and no one had taken recent scissors to her hair. With her long face and thin, stringy body, she looked a total physical mismatch for my increasingly powerful father, but positive goodness shone out of her as always, and her sincerity, it seemed to me, was now tinged with amusement. There had never been anything gauche or self-conscious in her manner, but only the strength to be her own intelligent, uncompromising self.
More than a marriage of true minds, I thought. A marriage of true morality.
I said sincerely to my father, “Congratulations,” and he looked pleased.
“What are you doing next Saturday?” he asked.
“Racing at Chepstow.”
He was shaking his head. “I want you to stand beside me.”
“Do you mean ...,” I hesitated, “that you are marrying ... next Saturday?”
“That’s right,” he agreed. “Now that we’ve decided, and since you seem quite pleased, there’s no point in delaying. I’m going to live with Polly in her house in the woods, and I’ll also find a larger apartment in London.”
Polly, I learned by installments through that afternoon, had inherited the house in the woods from her parents, along with a fortune that set her financially free to work unpaid wherever she saw the need.
She was two years older than my father. She had never been married: a mischievous glint in her eye both forbade and answered the more intimate question.
She didn’t intend, she said, to make a wasteland of Orinda Nagle’s life. Orinda and Mervyn Teck had been running the constituency day to day and making a success of it. Polly didn’t hunger to open fetes or flirt with cameras. She would organize, as always, from behind the scenes. And she would be listened to, I thought, where influence mattered.
Six days later she and my father married in the ultimate of quiet weddings. I stood by my father and Polly was supported by the