10 lb Penalty - Dick Francis [77]
“Your father and I,” the prime minister said, “have been discussing Alderney Wyvern. I’ve met him once or twice, but I’ve seen no harm in him. I know that Jill Vinicheck and other women in the Cabinet say they owe him a great deal, and Hudson Hurst, above all, had benefited from a change of presentation. I’ve seen nothing sinister or unacceptable in any of this. The man is quiet, tactful, and as far as I can see, he hasn’t put a foot wrong politically. Jill Vinicheck, in particular, has once or twice found his considered advice helpful, and certainly the press have stopped making frivolous comments on her clothes, and take her as the serious politician that she is.”
“Er ... ,” I said. “Yes, sir.”
“Your father says that he and you have seen a different side of Alderney Wyvern. A violent side. He says you believe this capacity for violence still exists. I have to tell you that I find this hard to believe, and until I see something of it myself I have to give Wyvern the benefit of the doubt. I am sure you have both acted with the best of intentions in drawing my attention to the influence Wyvern may have with my ministers but, George, if you’ll excuse my saying so, your son is a very young man without much experience of the world, and he may be exaggerating trouble where little exists.”
My father looked noncommittal. I wondered what the prime minister would have thought if he himself had seen Wyvern hit Orinda. Nothing less, it seemed, was going to convince him that the outer shell of the man he’d met hid a totally different creature inside, rather like a beautiful spiky and shiny conch shell hiding the slippery sluglike mollusk inside: a gastropod inching along on its stomach.
The prime minister said, “I will take note and remember what you have both said, but at the moment I don’t see any real grounds for action.”
He stood up, indicating that the meeting was over, and shook hands with my father with unabated good nature, and I remembered my father’s teaching on the very first day when I’d driven with him from Brighton to Hoopwestern, that people believe only what they want to believe. It applied, it seemed, even to prime ministers.
After we’d left No. 10 I said glumly to my father, “I did you no good.”
“He had to be told. He had to be warned. Even if it does my career no good, it was the right thing to do.”
My father’s strict sense of right and wrong might destroy him yet, I thought.
Eleven
After Christmas that year several things happened that changed a lot of lives.
First of all, on New Year’s Eve, a wide tongue of freezing air licked down from the Arctic Circle and froze solid all of Canada, all of northern Europe, and all of the British Isles. Weathermen stopped agitating about global warming and with equally long faces discussed permafrost. No one seemed to mention that when Stonehenge was built around 3000 B.C. the prevailing climate was warm, and no one remembered that in the nineteenth century Britain was so cold in the winters that on the Thames in London, they skated, held fairs and roasted oxen.
In the houses of that time people huddled in wing chairs with their feet on footstools to avoid drafts, and women wore a dozen layers of petticoats.
In the winter when I was twenty-two it rained ice on top of snow. People skated on their lawns and built igloos for their children. Diesel oil congealed to jelly. All racing came to a halt, except on a few specially built all-weather tracks, but even they had to be swept clear of snow. Owners cursed as their training bills kept rolling in, professional jockeys bit their fingernails and-amateurs were grounded.
Claims for frost damage avalanched into Weatherbys, and in the middle of all this Evan, my boss, announced that he was leaving the firm to join a growing insurance company as managing director. I expected Weatherbys to replace him, over my head, but instead they told him to spend his three months’ notice teaching me his job. I thought I was too young,