10 lb Penalty - Dick Francis [9]
“You want hecklers?” I said, surprised.
“Of course. They set fire to things. Very dull otherwise.”
I asked weakly, “What do I wear?”
“Just look tidy. There’s a Front Bench bigwig coming. They wheel out the big guns to support a by-election as marginal as this. I’ll wear a dinner jacket to start with, but I’ll strip off my black tie later. Maybe unbutton my shirt a bit. See how it goes.” He smiled almost calmly, but I could sense excitement running in him deeply. He’s a fighter, I thought. He’s my father, this extraordinary man. He’s kicked my dreams away and shown me a different world that I don’t like very much, but I’ll go with him, as he wants, for a month, and I’ll do my best for him, and then we’ll see. See how it goes ... as he’d said.
We walked across the square at seven-thirty, I in gray trousers and navy blazer (new from the Brighton shops), he in black tailoring that was in itself a step forward in my education.
He was received with acclaim and clapping. I smiled and smiled at his shoulder and was terribly nice to everyone, and shook hand after hand as required. No babies in sight.
“My son,” he gestured. “This is my son.”
Some of the perhaps eighty people at the reception and dinner were dressed formally like my father, others made political-equality statements like open-necked shirts and gingham with studs.
The Front Bench bigwig came with black bow sharply tied, his wife discreetly diamonded. I watched her being unpretentiously and endlessly charming to strangers, and when I in my turn was introduced to her she clasped my hand warmly and grinned into my eyes as if meeting me were a highlight of her evening. I had a long way to go, I thought, before I could put that amount of genuine and spontaneous friendliness into every greeting. I saw also that Mrs. Bigwig’s smile was worth a ballot box full of Xs.
I realized slowly, as the room filled up, that the dinner was a ticket affair; that except for the Bigwigs and my father, everyone had paid for their presence. My father, it appeared, had paid for me. One of the evening’s organizing committee was telling him he didn’t have to.
“Never accept gifts,” he had warned me on the drive from Brighton. “Gifts may look harmless, but they can come back to haunt you. Say no. Pay for yourself, understand?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“Never put yourself into the position of having to return a heavy favor when you know what you’re being asked to do is wrong.”
“Don’t take sweets from strangers?”
“Exactly so.”
The organizing lady informed my father that if he had had a wife, her ticket would have been free.
He said with gentle, smiling finality, “I will pay for my son. Dearest Polly, don’t argue.”
Dearest Polly turned to me with mock exasperation. “Your father. What a man!” Her gaze slid past me and her face and voice changed from blue skies to storm. “Bugger,” she said.
I looked, of course, to see the cause of the almost comic disapproval and found it was an earnest-eyed thin woman of forty or so sun-baked summers, whose tan glowed spectacularly against a sleeveless white dress. Blonde streaked hair. Vitality plus.
Dearest Polly said “Orinda!” under her breath.
Orinda, the passed-over candidate, was doing her best to eclipse the chosen rival by wafting around the room, embracing everyone extravagantly while saying loudly, “Daaarling, we must all do our best for the party even if the selectors have made this ghastly mistake....”
“Damn her,” said Dearest Polly, who had been, she told me, a selector herself.
Everyone knew Orinda, of course. She managed to get the cameraman from the local television company to follow her around, so that her white slenderness would hog whatever footage reached the screen.
Dearest Polly quietly fumed, throwing out sizzling news snippets my way