by Dick Francis
The Bethune cavalcade had several times crossed our path, their megaphone louder, their traveling circus larger, their campaign vehicle not a painted Range Rover but a roofless double-decker bus lent from his party headquarters. Bethune’s message followed him everywhere: “Dennis Nagle was out of touch, old-fashioned. Elect Bethune, a local man, who knows the score.”
A recent opinion poll in the constituency had put Bethune a few points ahead. Titmuss and Whistle were nowhere.
The Gazette had trumpeted merely, “An End to Sleaze,” and waffled on about “the new morality” without defining it. Though by instinct a Bethune man, the editor had let Usher Rudd loose and thereby both increased his sales and scored an own-goal. The editor, I thought in amusement, had dug his own dilemma.
My father thanked his faithful workers.
“Whatever happens tomorrow,” he said, “I want you to know how much I appreciate all you’ve done ... all the time you’ve given ... your tireless energy ... your friendly good nature. I thank our agent, Mervyn, for his excellent planning. We’ve all done our best to get the party’s message across. Now it’s up to the voters to decide.”
He thanked Orinda for rallying to his side. “... all the difference in the world to have her support ... immensely generous ... reassuring to the faithful ...”
Orinda, splendid in gold chains and emerald green, looked modest and loved it.
Polly, beside me, made a noise near to a retch.
I stifled a quivering giggle.
“Don’t think I’ve forgotten,” she said to me severely, “that it was you who changed Orinda from foe to angel. I bear it only because the central party wants to use your father’s talents. Get him in, they said. Just like you, they more or less told me to put his feet on the escalator, and he would rise all the way.”
But someone, I thought, had tried to prevent that first step onto the escalator. Had perhaps tried. A bullet, a wax plug, an unexplained fire. If someone had tried to halt him by those means and hadn’t left it to the ballot box ... then who? No one had seriously tried to find out.
The speeches done, my father came over to Polly and me, his eyes gleaming with excitement, his whole body alive with purpose. His strong facial bones shouted intelligence. His dark hair curled with healthy animal vigor.
“I’m going to win this by-election,” he said, broadly smiling. “I’m going to win. I can feel it.”
His euphoria fired everyone in the place to believe him, and lasted in himself through breakfast the next morning. The glooms crowded in with his second cup of coffee and he wasted an hour in doubt and tension, worrying that he hadn’t worked hard enough, that there was more he could have done.
“You’ll win,” I said.
“But the opinion polls ...”
“The people who compile the opinion polls don’t go ’round the village pubs at lunchtime.”
“The tide is flowing the wrong way....”
“Then go back to the City and make another fortune.”
He stared and then laughed, and we set out on a tour of the polling stations, where the volunteers taking exit polls told him they were pretty even, but not to lose hope.
Here and there we came across Paul Bethune on a similar mission with similar doubts. He and my father were unfailingly polite to each other.
The anxiety went on all day and all evening. After weeks of fine weather it rained hard that afternoon. Both sides thought it might be a disaster. Both sides thought it might be to their advantage. The rain stopped when the lightbulb workers poured out of the day shift and detoured to the polling booths on their way home.
The polls closed at ten o’clock and the counting began.
My father stood in our bedroom window staring out across the cobbled square to the burned-out shell of the bow-fronted shops.
“Stop worrying,” I said. As if he could.
“I was head-hunted, you know,” he said. “The party leaders came to me and said they wanted to harness my economic skills for the good of the country. What if I’ve let them down?”
“You won’t have,” I assured him.
He smiled twistedly. “They offered me a marginal seat to see what I was made of. I was flattered. Serves me right.”
“Father ...”
“Dad.”
“Okay, Dad. Good men do lose.”
“Thanks a lot.”
We went in time along the square to the Town Hall where, far from offering peace, the atmosphere was electric with hope and despair. Paul Bethune, surrounded by hugely rosetted supporters, was trying hard to smile. Isobel Bethune, in dark brown, tried to merge into the woodwork.
Mervyn talked to Paul Bethune’s agent absentmindedly and I would have bet neither of them heard what the other was saying.
Usher Rudd took merciless photographs.
There was a smattering of applause at my father’s entrance, and both Polly (in pinkish gray) and Orinda (in dramatic glittering white) sailed across the floor to greet him personally.
“George, daaahling,” Orinda crowed, offering her smooth cheek for a kiss. “Dennis is with us, you know.”
George daaahling looked embarrassed.
“It’s going quite well, George,” Polly said, giving succor. “First reports say the town votes are fairly even.”
The counting was going on under all sorts of rigorous supervision. Even those counting the Xs weren’t sure who had won.
My father and Paul Bethune looked as calm as neither was feeling.
The hall gradually filled with supporters of both sides. After midnight, getting on for one o’clock, the four candidates and their close supporters appeared on the platform, shuffling around with false smiles. Paul Bethune looked around irritably for his wife, but she’d hidden herself successfully in the crowd. Orinda stood on the platform close beside my father as of right and no one questioned it, though Polly, beside me on the floor, fumed that it should be me up there, not that ... that ...
Words failed her.
My father told me afterwards that the result had been whispered to the candidates before they faced the world, presumably so that neither would burst into tears, but one couldn’t have guessed it from their faces.
Finally the returning officer (whose function was to announce the result) fussed his way onto the center stage, tapped the microphone to make sure it was working (it was), grinned at the television cameras and rather unnecessarily asked for silence.
He strung out his moment of importance by looking around as if to make sure everyone was there on the platform who should be and finally, slowly, in a silence broken only by a throng of heartbeats, read the result.
Alphabetically.
Bethune ... thousands.
Juliard ... thousands.
Titmuss ... hundreds.
Whistle ... sixty-nine.
It took a moment to sink in. Staring down a preliminary cheer from the floor, the returning officer completed his task.
George Juliard is therefore elected ...
The rest was drowned in cheers.
Polly worked it out. “He won by just under two thousand. Bloody well done.”
Polly kissed me.
Up on the stage Orinda was loudly kissing the new MP.
It was too much for Dearest Polly, who left my side to go to his.
I found poor, sad Isobel Bethune at my elbow instead.
“Look at that harridan with your father, pretending it was she who won the votes.”
“She did help, to be fair.”
“She would never have won on her own. It was your father who won the election. And my Paul lost. He positively lost. Your father never mentioned that bimbo of his, not once, though he could have done, but the public never forget those things. Sleaze sticks, you know.”
“Mrs. Bethune ...”
“This is the third time Paul’s contested the seat,” she told me hopelessly. “We knew he would lose to Dennis Nagle the last two times, but this time the party said he was bound to win,
with the way the recent by-elections have been swinging in our favor, and with the other party ignoring Orinda and bringing in a stranger and they’ll never let Paul stand again. He’s lost worse than ever this time with everything on his side, and it’s that horrid Usher Rudd’s fault and I could kill him....” She smothered her face in a handkerchief as if to shut out the world and, stroking my arm, mumbled, “I’ll never forget your kindness.”
Up on the stage her stupid husband still looked self-satisfied.
A month ago, I thought, I hadn’t known the Bethunes existed.
Dearest Polly had bloomed unseen.
I hadn’t heard of Orinda, or of Alderney Wyvern.
I hadn’t met Mrs. Kitchens or her fanatical, unlovable Leonard, and I hadn’t known plump, efficient Mervyn or worried Crystal. I never did know the last names of Faith or Marge or Lavender, but I was certain even then that I would never forget the mean-spirited red-haired terror whose delight in life was to find out people’s hidden pleasures in order to destroy them. Bobby Usher bleeding Rudd.
Nine
So my father went to Westminster and I to Exeter, and the intense month we had spent in getting to know each other receded from a vivid present experience into a calmer, picture-filled memory.
I might not see him for weeks at a time but we talked now often on the telephone. Parliament was still in its summer recess. He would go back as a new boy, as I would, when my first term began.
Meantime I rode Sarah’s Future every morning under Stallworthy’s critical eye and can’t have done as badly as for Vivian Durridge because when I asked if he would enter the chestnut in a race for me—any race would do—he chose a novice ’chase at Wincanton on an inconspicuous Thursday and told me he hoped I’d be worth it as it was costing my father extras in the way of horse transport and shoeing with racing plates, not to mention the entry fee.
Laden thus half with glee and half with guilt, I went with Jim in his car to Wincanton, where Jim declared and saddled the horse and then watched him win with as much disbelief as I felt when I sailed past the post first.
“He flew!” I said, thrilled and astonished, as I unbuckled the saddle in the winner’s enclosure. “He was brilliant.”
“So I saw.”
Jim’s lack of much enthusiasm, I discovered, was rooted in his not having had the faith for a bet. Neither was Stallworthy overjoyed. All he said the next morning was, “You wasted the horse’s best win. You haven’t any sense. If I’d thought for a moment you would go to the front when the favorite fell, I’d have told you to keep the chestnut on a tight rein so we could have put the stable money on him next time out. What your father will say, I can’t imagine.”
What my father said was, “Very well done.”
“But nobody backed it ...”
“Don’t you listen to Stallworthy. You listen to me. That horse is for you to do your best on. To win whenever you can. And don’t think I didn’t back it. I have an arrangement with a bookmaker that wherever—whenever—you ride in a race, I am betting on you at starting price. I won on you at twenties yesterday ... I’m even learning racing jargon! Always try to win. Understand?”
I said “Yes” weakly.
“And I don’t care if you lose because some other horse is faster. Just keep to the rules and don’t break your neck.”
“OK.”
“Is there anything else you want?”
“Er ...”
“You’ll get nowhere if you’re afraid to tell me.”
“I’m not exactly afraid,” I said.
“Well, then?”
“Well ... will you telephone Stallworthy? Will you ask him to run your horse in the novice ’chase at Newton Abbot a week tomorrow? He’s entered him but now he won’t want to run him. He’ll say it’s too soon. He’ll say the horse will have to carry a 5-lb. penalty because I won on him yesterday.”
“And will he?”
“Yes, but there aren’t many more races—suitable races, that is—that I can ride him in before term starts. Stallworthy wants to win but I just want to race.”
“Yes, I know.” He paused. “I’ll fix it for Newton Abbot. Anything else?”
“Only ... thanks.”
His laugh came down the wire. “Give my regards to Sarah’s Future.”
Feeling a bit foolish, I passed on the message to the chestnut, though in fact I had fallen into a habit of talking to him, sometimes aloud if we were alone, and sometimes in my mind. Although I had ridden a good many horses, he was the first I had known consistently from day to day. He fitted my body size and my level of skill. He undoubtedly recognized me and seemed almost to breathe a sigh of relief when I appeared every morning for exercise. We had won the race at Wincanton because we knew and trusted each other, and when I’d asked him for maximum speed at the end he’d understood from past experience what was needed, and had seemed positively to exult in having at last finished first.
Jim forgave the success and grew interested. Jim was by nature in tune with horses and, as I gradually realized, did most of the actual training. Stallworthy, although he watched the gallops most mornings, won his races with pen and entry forms, totting up times and weights and statistical probabilities.
Up the center of the long exercise field there were two rows of schooling fences, one of three flights of hurdles, and one of birch fences. Jim patiently spent some mornings teaching both me and the chestnut to go up over the birch with increasing precision, measuring our stride for takeoff from farther and farther back before the actual jump.
The riding I’d learned to that date had been from watching other people. Jim taught me, as it were, from inside, so that in that first month with Sarah’s Future I began to develop from an uncoordinated windmill with a head full of unrealistic dreams into a reasonably competent amateur rider.
Grumbling at great length about owners who knew nothing at all about racing and should leave all decisions to their trainer, Stallworthy complainingly sent the chestnut to carry his 5-1b. penalty at Newton Abbot.
I’d never before ridden on the course and at first sight of it felt foolish not to have listened to Stallworthy’s judgment. The steeplechase track was an almost one-and-a-half-mile flat circuit with sharpish turns, and the short grass gave little purchase on rock-hard ground, baked by the sun of August.
Stallworthy, with several other runners from his yard, had brought his critical eye to the course. Jim, saddling Sarah’s Future, told me the chestnut knew the course better than I did (I’d walked around it a couple of hours earlier to see the jumps, and the approaches to them, at close quarters) and to remember what I’d learned from him at home, and not to expect too much because of the weight disadvantage and because the other jockeys were all professionals, and that this was not an amateur race.
As usual, it was the speed that seduced me and fulfilled, and the fact that we finished third was enough to make my day worthwhile, though Stallworthy, who had incidentally also trained the winner, announced to me several times, “I told you so. I told your father it was too much to expect. Perhaps you’ll listen to me next time.”
“Never mind,” Jim consoled. “If you’d won today you’d have to have carried a 10-lb. penalty at Exeter races next Saturday, always supposing you can persuade the old man to let him run there, after this. He’ll say it’s too soon, which it probably is.”
The old man (Stallworthy) conducted a running battle over the telephone with my father.
My father won.
So, blisteringly, by six lengths, did Sarah’s Future, because the much longer galloping track, up on Halden Moor above Exeter, suited him better. He carried a 5-lb. penalty, not 10, and made light of it. The starting price, my father assured me later, would pay the training fees until Christmas.
Two days after that, in cooler blood, I went to learn mathematics.
My father learned back-bench tactics, but that wasn’t what the party had sent him to Hoopwestern for. He tried to explain it to me that the path upward led th
rough the whip’s office, which sounded nastily about flagellation to me, though he laughed.
“The whip’s office is what gives you the thumbs-up for advancement towards the ministerial level.”
“And their thumbs are up for you?”
“Well ... so far ... yes.”
“Minister of what?” I asked, disbelievingly. “Surely you’re too young?”
“The really forward boys are on their way by twenty-two. At thirty-eight, I’m old.”
“I don’t like politics.”
“I can’t ride races,” he said.
To have the whip withdrawn, he explained, meant the virtual end to a political career. If getting elected was the first giant step, then winning the whip’s approval was the second. When the newly elected member for Hoopwestern was shortly appointed as undersecretary of state in the Department of Trade and Industry, it was apparently a signal to the whole fabric of government that a bright, fast-moving comet had risen over the horizon.
I went to listen to his maiden speech, sitting inconspicuously in the gallery. He spoke about lightbulbs and had the whole House laughing, and Hoopwestern’s share of the illumination market soared.
I met him for dinner after his speech, when he was again in the high exaltation of post-performance spirits.
“I suppose you haven’t been back to Hoopwestern?” he said.
“Well, no.”
“I have, of course. Leonard Kitchens is in trouble.”
“Who?”
“Leonard ...”
“Oh, yes. Yes, the unbalanced mustache. What sort of trouble?”
“The police now have a rifle which may be the one fired at us that evening.”
“By the police,” I asked as he paused, “do you mean Joe the policeman whose mother drives a school bus?”
“Joe whose mother drives a school bus is actually Detective Sergeant Joe Duke, and yes, he’s now received from The Sleeping Dragon a very badly rusted .22 rifle. It seems that after the trees shed their leaves the guttering ’round the roof of the hotel got choked with them, as happens most years, and rainwater overflowed instead of draining down the pipes as it should, so they sent a man up a ladder to clear out the leaves, and they found it wasn’t just leaves clogging the guttering, it was the .22 rifle.”
