10 lb Penalty - Dick Francis [8]
The political headquarters bustled with earnest endeavor, brightly colored telephones, a click-clacking floor-standing photocopier, constant cups of tea, desks, computers, maps on the walls with colored pins in, directories in heaps, envelopes by the carton-load and three middle-aged women enjoying the fuss.
We had parked in the parking lot and walked to the unmistakable glass-fronted premises where it not only said VOTE JULIARD in huge letters but displayed three large pictures of my father, all of them projecting a good-natured, intelligent, forward-looking person who would do an excellent job at Westminster.
The three women greeted him with merry cries of pleasure and a stack of problems.
“This is my son,” he said.
The merry smiles were bent my way. They looked me up and down. Three witches, I thought.
“Come in, dear,” one of them said. “Cup of tea?”
Two
The double shop, I found, was the regular constituency office of the party to which my father belonged. It was where Dennis Nagle, the previous member, had lately held his Saturday “surgeries,” being present himself to listen to local problems and to do his best to sort them out. Still in his fifties, he had died, poor fellow, of pancreatic cancer. His ambitious wife, Orinda, was reportedly steaming with vitriolic anger since the selection committee had passed her over in favor of my parent to fight to retain the vacated seat at the behest of the central party.
I learned about Orinda by sitting on an inconspicuous stool in a comer and listening to the three helpers describe to my father a visit the dispossessed lady had paid that day to the office.
The thinnest, least motherly help, who was also the most malicious, said with lip-curling glee, “You’d think she’d be grieving for Dennis, but she just seems furious with him for dying. She talks about ‘our constituents,’ like she always did. She says she wrote his speeches and formed his opinions. She said it was understood from when Dennis was first ill that she would take his place. She says we three are traitors to be working for you, George. She was absolutely stuttering with rage. She says if you think she’ll meekly go away, you have another think coming. And she says she is going to tonight’s dinner!”
My father grimaced.
I thought that the selection committee had probably acted with good sense.
From my stool I also learned that the main opposition party was fielding “a fat slob with zero sex appeal” against my father. His—Paul Bethune’s—party had recently picked up a couple of marginal seats in by-elections and were confident of taking Hoopwestern since “the need for change” was in the air.
In the days that followed I saw his picture everywhere: a grin above the slogan Bethune is better. Give him your X.
It made me laugh. Was he collecting divorcées?
On that first evening, though, all I learned of him was that he was a local councillor and losing his hair. Incipient baldness might in fact lose him the election, it seemed (never mind his mental suitability). America hadn’t elected a bald president since the soldier-hero Eisenhower, and few people nowadays named their babies Dwight.
I learned that votes were won by laughter and lost by dogma. I learned that the virility of George Juliard acted like a friction rub on the pink faces of his helpers.
“My son will come with me to the dinner tonight,” he said. “He can have Mervyn’s place.” Mervyn Teck, he explained, was the agent, his chief of staff, who was unavoidably detained in the midlands.
The three aroused ladies looked me over again, nodding.
“The dinner,” he explained to me briefly, “is being held at The Sleeping Dragon, the hotel straight across the square from here.” He pointed through the bow-fronted