10 lb Penalty - Dick Francis [76]
My father thanked him sincerely for his trouble, and I reflected, slightly overwhelmed, that I’d never before given much of a thought to the living legacy of history my father hoped to inhabit.
The anteroom was any anteroom: just a gathering place, but with brilliant red walls.
The Cabinet Room, at the rear of the old mansion section, was long, with tall windows down one side and across one end, facing out into a peaceful-looking walled garden.
Irish terrorists had lobbed a bomb into that garden while all the cabinet ministers were in the building.
The bomb had done little damage. The grass now looked undisturbed. Peace was relative. Guy Fawkes could rise again.
Extraordinarily, Sir Thomas Knyvet, the magistrate who arrested Guy Fawkes red-handed with his barrels of gunpowder, lived in a house on the exact spot where the developer George Downing later built No. 10.
“This is where I usually sit,” my father said, walking down the room and coming to rest behind one of the two dozen chairs. “That chair with arms, halfway along the table, that is the prime minister’s chair. It’s the only one with arms.”
The long table down the center of the room wasn’t rectangular but a much elongated oval, in order, my father explained, for the prime minister to be able to see the various members more easily.
“Go on, then,” I teased him. “Take the arms.”
He was half-embarrassed, half-shy, but he couldn’t resist it. There was only his son to see. He crabbed sideways around the table and sat in the chair with arms; he nestled into it, resting his wrists, living the dream.
Above and behind him on the wall hung the only picture in that room, a portrait of Sir Robert Walpole, the first to be given the title prime minister.
“It all suits you,” I said.
He stood up self-consciously and said, as if to take the emotion out of the moment, “The chair opposite the prime minister is normally where the chancellor of the exchequer sits.”
“And how many of you put your feet up on the table?”
He gave me a disgusted look. “You’re not fit to be taken anywhere.”
We returned to the front hall, my father looking at his watch. The messenger appeared as if on cue to see us off the premises, and I wondered vaguely if there were interior monitoring video cameras—which would be merely normally prudent—to trace the comings and goings of visitors.
While we said lengthy farewells the front door opened and in walked the prime minister, followed by two alert young men: bodyguards.
The prime minister said “Hello, George” without surprise and glanced at his own watch revealingly. “Come this way. And you ... er ...”
My father said, “Ben.”
“Ben, yes. The race rider. You come, too.”
He led the way through the front hall and past the staircase into a crowded and busy office crammed with desks, office paraphernalia and people, who all stood up at his approach.
“Now, Ben, you stay here with these good people while I talk to your father.”
He went through the office, opened a door and gestured to my father to follow. The office staff gave me a chair and a friendly welcome and told me that I was in the room where all the real work got done; the running of the prime minister’s life as opposed to his politics.
They told me that quiet though the house might seem on a Friday afternoon, almost two hundred people worked there in the buildings in connected offices and that someone had once counted how many times the front door of No. 10 had been opened and closed in twenty-four hours, and it was more than nine hundred.
At length, in response to one of constant telephone calls, I was invited through the office and into the next room in the wake of my father, and found myself in a large, quiet, tidy place that was part office, part sitting room.
My father and