10 lb Penalty - Dick Francis [81]
SHOUT! was the weekly magazine that regularly printed Usher Rudd’s most virulent outbursts.
There was a photograph, not of my father, but of myself, dressed as a jockey.
The headline in huge letters read, DOPE!
Underneath it said, Jockey son of George Juliard, self-aggrandizing minister of agriculture, fisheries and food, was fired for snorting cocaine, says trainer.
In disbelief I read the trailing paragraphs:
I had to get rid of him, says Sir Vivian Durridge.
I could not have a glue-sniffing, drug-taking bad apple infecting my good stable’s reputation. The boy is no good. I am sorry for his father.
His father, the magazine pointed out, had entered the ring in the power struggle currently rending apart the Cabinet. How could George Juliard proclaim himself a paragon of all the virtues (including family values) when he had failed as a parent himself, as his only child was a drug addict?
I felt as I had in Vivian Durridge’s study on that morning five years earlier; numb from the ankles down. It hadn’t been true that I had ever sniffed glue or cocaine or anything else, and it still wasn’t true, but I wasn’t fool enough now to think that everyone would believe me.
I picked up the magazine and, with eyes speculatively following every step I took, went to see the chairman, the working boss of Weatherbys, in his office. He sat at his desk. I stood before him.
I needn’t have taken the magazine with me. He had a copy of it already on his desk.
“It’s not true,” I said flatly.
“If it’s not true,” the chairman asked, “why on earth would Vivian Durridge say it is? Vivian Durridge is one of the most highly respected men in racing.”
“If you’ll give me the day off, I’ll go and ask him.”
He stared up at me, considering.
“I think,” I said, “that this is an attack on my father, more than on myself. This article was written by a journalist called Usher Rudd who tried to discredit my father once before, in fact five years ago, when he first stood for Parliament in a by-election. My father complained to the editor of the newspaper and Usher Rudd was sacked. This looks like revenge. You’ll see that this article says my father is involved in a power struggle in the Party and, well, he is. Whoever wins the struggle will be the next prime minister. Usher Rudd is determined it won’t be George Juliard.”
The chairman still said nothing.
“When I applied here for a job,” I said, “Sir Vivian sent you a reference about me, and, oh”—I remembered in a blinding flash of joy—“he sent me a letter, which I’ll show you.” I turned towards the door. “It is actually here in this building, in the insurance office.”
I didn’t wait for him to comment but hurried back to the long insurance office and retrieved the cardboard box full of my stuff from under my desk. I simply hadn’t bothered to take it back to my reconstructed room and clutter the place up again with bits and pieces. Somewhere in that box were my father’s wedding photos with wives one and two.
In the frame behind the picture of himself and Polly the letter from Vivian Durridge was as clean and fresh as the day I received it.
As a precaution, I made several copies of the letter and put them in one file among hundreds, and took the original to the chairman.
He had already, fair man that he was, retrieved from his records the short “To whom it may concern” reference that Sir Vivian had spontaneously sent. It was lying on his desk on top of the magazine.
I handed him the letter, which he read twice.
“Sit down,” he said, pointing to the chair opposite his desk. “Tell me what happened.”
“Five years ago”—it seemed a lifetime—“like it says in the letter, my father wanted to make me face the reality that I would never be a top jockey.”
I told the chairman about the car and the chauffeur, and the hotel in Brighton facing the sea. I told him that my father had asked