10 lb Penalty - Dick Francis [7]
My cousins/brothers had both envied and sneered, so that effectively I had become the “only” child that I actually was, not the petted last addition to a big family.
The father who had planned my life to the point of my unsought arrival in Brighton took it for granted that in the last three weeks of his legal guardianship I would still act as he directed.
I suppose, looking back, that many boys of seventeen would have complained and rebelled. All I can say is that they weren’t dealing with a trusted and proven benevolent tyranny: and since I knew he meant me the opposite of harm, I took the envelope of money and spent it in the Brighton shops on clothes I thought his constituents would have voted for if they’d been judging a candidate by his teenage son’s appearance.
We left Brighton soon after three in the afternoon, and not in the morning’s overpowering black car with the unnervingly silent chauffeur (obeying my father’s “no explanation” instructions, it seemed) but in a cheerful metallic coffee-colored Range Rover with silver and gold garlands of daisylike flowers in metal paint shining along the sides.
“I’m new in the constituency,” my father said, grinning. “I need to get myself noticed and recognized.”
He could hardly be missed, I thought. Heads turned to watch us all along the south coast. Even so, I was unprepared for Hoopwestern (in Dorset), where it seemed that every suitable pole and tree bore a placard saying simply VOTE JULIARD. No one in the town could avoid the message.
He had driven the advertisement-on-wheels from Brighton, with me sitting beside him on the front seat, and on the way he gave me nonstop instruction on what I should say and not say, do and not do, in my new role.
“Politicians,” he said, “should seldom tell the whole truth.”
“But ...”
“And politicians,” he went on, “should never lie.”
“But you told me always to tell the truth.”
He smiled sideways at my simplicity. “You better damn well tell me the truth. But people as a rule believe only what they want to believe, and if you tell them anything else they’ll call you a troublemaker and get rid of you and never give you your job back, even if what you said is proved spot on right by time.”
I said slowly, “I suppose I do know that.”
“On the other hand, to be caught out in a lie is political death, so I don’t do it.”
“But what do you say if you’re asked a direct question and you can’t tell the truth and you can’t tell a lie?”
“You say ‘how very interesting’ and change the subject.”
He drove the Range Rover with both speed and caution, the way he lived his whole life.
“During the next weeks,” he said, “people will ask you what I think about this and that. Always say you don’t know, they’d better ask me themselves. Never repeat to anyone anything I’ve said, even if I’ve said it in public. OK?”
“If you say so.”
“Remember this election is a contest. I have political enemies. Not every smiling face is a friend.”
“Do you mean ... don’t trust anyone?”
“That’s exactly what I mean. People always kill Caesar. Don’t trust anyone.”
“But that’s cynical!”
“It’s the first law of self-preservation.”
I said, “I’d rather be a jockey.”
He shook his head in sorrow. “I’m afraid you’ll find that every world has its share of villains and cheats, jockeys not excepted.”
He drove into the center of Hoopwestern, which proved to be one of those old indigenous market towns whose ancient heart had been petrified into a quaint, cobbled pedestrian precinct, with the raw pulse of modern commerce springing up in huge office buildings and shopping malls on three sides around a ring road.
“This used to be a farming community,” my father said neutrally. “Farming is now an industry like the factory here that makes lightbulbs and employs more people. I need the lightbulb votes.”
His campaign headquarters, I found, were in a remarkable back-to-back hybrid house with an old bay-windowed