10 lb Penalty - Dick Francis [68]
The bride wore brown with a gold-and-amber necklet given by my father, and looked distinguished. A photographer, at my request, recorded the event. A discreet paragraph appeared in The Times. The Hoopwestern Gazette caught up with the story later. Mr. and Mrs. George Juliard, after a week in Paris, returned to Hoopwestern to keep the lightbulb workers faithful.
I still disliked politics and I was extremely grateful that the approach of my final exams made it impossible for me to repeat my by-election stint.
There were many politically active students at Exeter, but I kept my head down with them, too, and led a double life only on Stallworthy’s gallops and various racetracks. I won no races that spring, but the sensation of speed was all that mattered: and, in an oddity of brain activity, the oftener I raced, the more clearly I understood second-order differential equations.
The general election swelled and broke under me like a Pacific surf, and my father, along with his party, were returned to power. A small majority, but enough.
No one shot at him, no one plugged his sump drain with wax, no one set fire to Polly’s house, and no one let the martial arts expert earn her fee.
Suspicion of shooting and arson still lay heavily on Leonard Kitchens, but no one could accuse him of anything this time as his formidable and unforgiving wife insisted on his taking her on a double Mediterranean cruise. They were in Athens on polling day.
Poor Isobel Bethune had been right: Paul Bethune’s party dumped him as a candidate in favor of a worthy woman magistrate. Though it was no longer hotly scandalous news, Paul Bethune’s roving eye had settled again outside his home, and Isobel, at last fed up with it, had shed her marriage and her sullen sons and gone to live with her sister in Wales.
Polly kept me informed, her humor dry. My father couldn’t have married anyone better.
I told him to beware of bikini-clad bimbos falling artistically into his lap with Usher Rudd in attendance for accusations of sleaze. Hadn’t I heard, he asked, that Usher Rudd had been sacked by the Gazette for manufacturing sleaze where it didn’t exist? Usher Rudd, my father cheerfully said, was now telephoto-lens-stalking a promiscuous front-bencher of the opposition.
When the party in power reassembled after the whole country had voted, there was a major reshuffle of jobs. To no one’s surprise at Westminster, my father’s career skipped upward like helium and he became a minister of state in the Ministry of Transport, one step down from a seat in the Cabinet.
I had the best photograph of his wedding to Polly framed, and stood it beside the one of him and my mother. I took the pacts we’d signed out of my mother’s frame and read them thoughtfully, and put them back. They seemed to belong to a different life. I had indeed grown up at Exeter, and I’d had “the first” that I would never forget: but the basic promises of those pacts had so far been kept, and although now it might seem a melodramatic statement, I knew that if it ever became necessary, I would indeed defend my father against any form of attack.
I took my final exams and, sensing that I’d probably done enough to gain a bachelor of science degree of a reasonable standard, I wrote to Weatherbys and asked for a job.
They replied, what job?
Any, I wrote. I could add, subtract and work computers, and I had ridden in races.
Ah, that Juliard. Come for an interview, they said.
Weatherbys, a family business started in 1770 and currently servicing racing in increasingly inventive and efficient ways, stood quietly in red brick surrounded by fields, trees and peaceful countryside near the small ancient town of Wellingborough, sixty miles northwest of London in the county of Northamptonshire.
Inside, the atmosphere of the furiously busy secretariat was notably calm and quiet also. Knowing the vast scope and daily pressure of the work being done there, I suppose I’d expected something like the clattering frenzy of an old-fashioned