10 lb Penalty

by Dick Francis

  Along in his stable yard there were no horses, but the head groom, who lived in an adjoining cottage, was pottering aimlessly about.

  He recognized me without hesitation, though it was over five years since I’d left.

  “Well, Ben,” he said, scratching his head, “I never knew you took drugs.”

  He was old and small and bandy-legged and had loved and been loved by the great beasts in his care. The life he’d lived in their service had pathetically gone, leaving him without anchor, without purpose, with only a fading mental scrapbook of victories past.

  “I never did take drugs,” I said.

  “No, I wouldn’t have thought so, but if Sir Vivian says...”

  “Where is he?” I asked. “Do you know?”

  “He’s ill, of course.”

  “Ill?”

  “He’s gone in the wits, poor old man. He was walking around the yard with me one day at evening stables, same as usual, when all of a sudden he clapped a hand to his head and fell down, and I got the vet to him.”

  “The vet?”

  “There’s a telephone in the tack room and I knew the vet’s number.” The head groom shook his own old head. “So, anyway, the vet came and he brought with him the doctor and they thought Sir Vivian had had a stroke or some such. So an ambulance came for him, and his family, they didn’t want to say he was gaga, but he couldn’t go on training, poor old man, so they just told everybody he’d retired.”

  I wandered around the yard with the once-supreme head groom, stopping at each empty stall for him to tell me what splendid winners had once stood in each.

  All the owners, he said, had been asked to take their horses away and send them somewhere else temporarily, but the weeks had passed and the old man wasn’t coming back; one could see that now, and nothing was ever going to be the same again.

  “But where,” I asked gently, “is Sir Vivian at this moment?”

  “In the nursing home,” he simply said.

  I found the nursing home. A board outside announced Haven House. Sir Vivian sat in a wheelchair, smooth of skin, empty of eye, warmed by a rug over his knees.

  “He’s confused. He doesn’t know anyone,” the nurses warned me; but even if he didn’t recognize me, he garrulously talked.

  “Oh dear, yes,” he said in a high voice, not like his own gruff tones. “Of course I remember Benedict Juliard. He wanted to be a jockey, but I couldn’t have him you know. I couldn’t have anyone who sniffed glue.”

  Sir Vivian’s eyes were wide and guileless. I saw that he now did believe in the fiction he had invented for my father’s sake. I understood that from now on he would repeat that version of my leaving him because he truly believed it.

  I asked him, “Did you yourself ever actually see Benedict Juliard sniffing glue, or cocaine, or anything else?”

  “Had it on good authority,” he said.

  Five years too late I asked him, “Whose authority?”

  “Eh? What? Whose authority? Mine, of course.”

  I tried again. “Did anyone tell you that Benedict Juliard was addicted to drugs? If anyone told you, who was it?”

  The intelligence that had once inhabited the Durridge brain, the worldly experience that had illuminated for so long the racing scene, the grandeur of thought and judgment, all had been wiped out by a devastating hemorrhage in some tiny recess of that splendid personality. Sir Vivian Durridge no longer existed. I spoke to the shell, the chaos. There was no hope that he would ever again remember anything in detail, but he would be forever open to suggestion.

  I sat with him for a while, as it seemed he liked company and, even if he didn’t know who I was, he didn’t want me to go.

  The nurses said, “It settles him to have people near him. He was a great man once, you know. And you’re the second person, outside his family, who has been to see him recently. He is so pleased to have visitors.”

  “Who else came?” I asked.

  “Such a nice young man. Red hair. Freckles. So friendly, just like you. A journalist, he said. He was asking Sir Vivian about someone called Benedict Juliard, who had ridden his horses for him once. Oh, my goodness,” the nurses said, clapping hands to surprised mouths. “Benedict Juliard ... isn’t that who you said you were?”

  “That’s right. What would Sir Vivian like that he hasn’t got?”

  The nurses giggled and said, “Chocolate biscuits and gin, but he isn’t supposed to have either.”

  “Give him both.”

  I handed them money. Vivian Durridge sat in his wheelchair and understood nothing.

  I telephoned my father.

  “People believe what they want to believe,” I said. “Hudson Hurst will want to believe your son is a drug addict and he’ll go around asserting to your colleagues that that makes you unfit to be prime minister. Well, you remember what I wrote that day when we made the pacts ... that I would do my best to keep you safe from attack?”

  “Of course, I remember.”

  “It’s time to do it.”

  “But, Ben ... how?”

  ‘I’m going to sue him for libel.”

  “Who? Hurst? Usher Rudd? Vivian Durridge?”

  “No. The editor of SHOUT!”

  After a pause my father said, “You need a lawyer.”

  “Lawyers are expensive. I’ll see what I can do myself.”

  “Ben ... I don’t like it.”

  “Nor do I. But if I can make a charge of libel stick to SHOUT!, Hudson Hurst will have to shut up. And there’s no time to lose, is there, as didn’t you say the first internal vote in the party for a new leader is next week?”

  “It is, yes. Monday.”

  “Then you go back to your fish and chips, and I’ll take a sword to Usher bleeding Rudd.”

  From Durridge’s place in Kent I drove across much of southern England, down the M4 to Exeter and around to the training stables that to me seemed like home, the domain of Spencer Stallworthy.

  I arrived at about six-thirty, when he was just finishing his round of evening stables.

  “Hello,” he said, surprised. “I didn’t know you were coming.”

  “No ...” I watched him feed carrots to the last couple of horses and wandered over to look into the stall that had held Sarah’s Future for three splendid years. It was inhabited now by a long-necked gray, and I grieved for the simple happiness of days gone.

  Jim was there still, closing the stalls for the night, checking that the grooms had filled the hay nets and positioned the water buckets: all so familiar, so much missed.

  The evening routine finished, I asked if I could talk to them both for a while, which meant a short drive to Stallworthy’s house and an issue of well-remembered sherry.

  They knew my father was in the Cabinet and I explained about the power struggle. I showed them the center pages of SHOUT!, which shocked them back to the bottle.

  Jim blinked his white eyelashes rapidly, always a sign of disturbance, and Stallworthy said, “But it’s not true, is it? You never took drugs. I’d have known it.”

  “That’s right,” I said gratefully, “and that’s what I’d like you to write for me. A statement that I rode from your stables for three years and won races and showed no sign of ever being interested in drugs. I want as many affidavits as I can get to say that I am not a drug addict and never was as far as you can possibly tell. I’m going to sue this magazine for libel.”

  Both Stallworthy and Jim were outraged on my behalf and wrote more fiercely in my defense than I could have asked for.

  Stallworthy gave me a bed for the night and a horse to ride in the early morning, and I left after breakfast and drove along the familiar country roads back to the university.

  The two years since I’d graduated seemed to vanish. I parked the car in the road outside the Streatham Campus and walked up the steep path to the Laver Building, home of the mathematics department. There, after a good deal of casting about, I found my tutor—the one who had written for me the reference sought
by Weatherbys—and explained to him, as to Stallworthy and Jim, what I was asking of him.

  “Drugs? Of course, a lot of the students experiment, and as you know we try to get rid of the hard core, but you were about the last student I would have suspected of getting hooked. For a start, drugs and mathematics don’t mix, and your work was particularly clear-headed. This magazine article is all rubbish.”

  I beseeched him to put those views in writing, which he did with emphasis.

  “Good luck,” he said when I left. “These journalists get away with murder.”

  I hiked back to my car and drove across country to my old school at Malvern.

  There on its hillside campus, steep like Exeter University, though not so big, I sought out the man who had taught me mathematics. He passed the buck to my onetime housemaster, who listened and sent me to the head.

  The headmaster walked with me down the broad familiar stone-floored passage in the main building and up the stone stairs to his study, where I showed him a copy of SHOUT! and also a copy of Vivian Durridge’s letter.

  “Of course I’ll support you,” he said without hesitation, and wrote, and handed me the handwritten page to read.

  It said:Benedict Juliard attended Malvern College for five years. During the last two, while he was successfully working towards his A levels and university entrance in mathematics, he spent all breaks either riding racehorses—he won three steeplechases—or skiing, in which sport he won a European under-eighteen downhill race.

  In addition to those skills he was a considerable marksman with a rifle: he shot in the school team that won the prestigious Ashburton Shield.

  In all these activities he showed clearheadedness, natural courage and a high degree of concentration. It is ludicrous to suggest that he was ever under the influence of hallucinatory drugs.

  I looked up, not knowing quite what to say. “I admire your father,” the headmaster said. “I’m not saying I agree with him all the time politically, but the country could certainly do worse.”

  I said “Thank you” rather feebly, and he shook hands with me on a smile.

  Onwards I went to Wellingborough, where I briefly called in to see the chairman to tell him what I’d been doing and what I proposed to do. Then, taking a couple of the photocopies of Vivian Durridge’s letter and his reference from their folder, and making copies of all the letters I’d collected, I drove to Wellingborough station and, tired of the roads, I caught the train to London.

  SHOUT! emanated, it transpired, from a small and grubby-looking building south of the Thames. The editor wouldn’t in the least want to see me but, late in the afternoon, I marched straight into his office shedding secretaries like bow waves. He was sitting in a sweatshirt behind a cluttered desk, typing on a keyboard of a computer.

  He didn’t recognize me, of course. When I told him who I was, he invited me to leave.

  “I am going to sue you for libel,” I said, opening the copy of SHOUT! at the center pages. “I see from the small print at the beginning of this magazine that the name of the editor is Rufus Crossmead. If that’s who you are, I’ll be suing Rufus Crossmead personally.”

  He was a small, pugnacious man, sticking his chest out and tucking his chin in like a pugilist. I supposed briefly that dealing with wronged and furious victims of his destructive ethos was a regular part of his life.

  I remembered how, five years earlier, my father had pulverized the editor of the Hoopwestern Gazette, but I couldn’t reproduce exactly that quiet degree of menace. I didn’t have the commanding strength of his vibrant physical presence. I left Rufus Crossmead, however, in no doubt as to my intentions.

  I laid down in front of him copies of the strong letters from Spencer Stallworthy, Jim, my Exeter tutor and the headmaster of Malvern College, and I gave him finally a copy of the letter Vivian Durridge had sent.

  “The only good defense in a libel suit,” I said, “is to prove that the allegations are true. You can’t use that defense, because you’ve printed lies. It will be easy for me to establish that Sir Vivian Durridge is now hopelessly confused after a stroke and doesn’t know what he’s saying. Usher Rudd must have been aware of it. He was trying to revenge himself for my father having got him sacked from the Hoopwestern Gazette. No reputable paper has employed him since. He suits your style, but he’s dropped even you in the shit.”

  Rufus Crossmead gloomily read the various papers.

  “We’ll settle out of court,” he said.

  It sounded to me as if he’d said it often before, and it wasn’t at all what I’d expected. I wasn’t sure it was even what I wanted.

  I said slowly, “I’ll tell you what I’ll settle for ...”

  “It’s up to the proprietors,” Crossmead interrupted. “They’ll make you an offer.”

  “They always do?” I asked.

  He didn’t exactly nod, but it was in the air.

  “Then you tell the proprietors,” I said, “that I’ll settle for a retraction and a statement of sincere regret from you that your magazine’s accusations were based on incorrect information. Tell your proprietors that I’ll settle for a statement appearing very visibly in next Tuesday’s issue of SHOUT! In addition, you will send immediately—by registered mail—a personally signed copy of that retraction and statement of regret to each of six hundred fifty or so members of Parliament.”

  Twelve

  It wasn’t enough, I thought, to defend.

  I should have written in that pact, “I will attack my father’s attackers.”

  I should have written that I’d go to war for him if I saw the need.

  At almost eighteen, I’d written from easy sentiment. At twenty-three, I saw that, if the pact meant anything at all, it pledged an allegiance that could lead to death. And if that were so, I thought, it would be feeble just to sit around waiting for the ax.

  It had been Tuesday when SHOUT! had hit the newstands, and late afternoon on Wednesday when I’d crashed into Rufus Crossmead’s editorial office. On Friday I drove from Wellingborough to Hoopwestern, and spent the journey looking back to the end of that confrontation and the answers I’d been given.

  I’d asked SHOUT!’s editor why he had sent Usher Rudd to see Vivian-Durridge, and he’d said he hadn’t, it had been Usher Rudd’s own idea.

  “Usher—well, his name is Bobby—said he’d been asked to dig into everything you’d ever done, and come up with some dirt. He was getting ultra-frustrated because he couldn’t find any sludge. He went blasting on a bit that no one could be as careful to stay out of trouble as you had been, and then there was this announcement of Sir Vivian Durridge’s retirement, which said you had ridden for his stable, so Bobby went off on the off chance, and he came back laughing. Crowing. He said he’d got you at last. So he wrote the story and I printed it.”

  “And you didn’t check.”

  “If I had to check every word I print,” the editor had said with world-weariness, “our sales would plummet.”

  On Wednesday, early evening, I’d phoned Samson Frazer, the editor of the Hoopwestern Gazette.

  “If you’re thinking of reprinting a story about me from SHOUT!,” I’d said, “don’t do it. Usher Rudd wrote it. It’s not true and it’ll get you into court for libel.”

  Gloomy silence.

  Then, “I’ll reset the front page,” he’d said.

  On Thursday, with prudent speed, SHOUT!’s proprietors had acted to avoid the heavy expenses of a libel action and had written and mailed the retractions I’d asked for to the members of Parliament.

  My father, attending a meeting at the House on Friday morning, found that several certified letters had already reached their targets. In addition, he gave everyone—from the prime minister downwards—a copy of Vivian Durridge’s letter to me, along with a brief confirmation from himself that he’d asked Durridge to think of a way of persuading me to leave. Apparently the general reaction had been relief and relaxation, though Hudson Hurst had insisted there had to be some truth in
the dope story somewhere.

  “Why do you think so?” my father related that he’d asked, and the only reply had been stutter and dismay.

  My father said, “I asked Hudson Hurst if he himself had sent Usher Rudd to Vivian Durridge. He denied it. He looked bewildered. I don’t think he did it.”

  “No, I agree.”

  I now negotiated a roundabout. Fourteen more miles to Hoopwestern.

  I thought about Hudson Hurst, the ugly duckling converted to swan by scissors and razor. On television he was smooth, convincing and read his speeches from a teleprompter. No inner fire. A puppet.

  Alderney Wyvern pulled his strings.

  How to prove it? How to stop him?

  Attacking Alderney Wyvern could destroy the attacker. I sensed it strongly. History was littered with the laments of failed invasions.

  I arrived in Hoopwestern at noon and parked in the car park behind the old party headquarters. Polly had told me that the charity, which had owned the whole of the burned double bow-fronted building, had chosen to rebuild it much as before, with new bow windows fronting onto the cobbled square and new shops matching the row at the rear. When I walked in from the parking lot, all that seemed different were heavy fire doors and a rash of big scarlet extinguishers.

  Mervyn Teck was there, and greeted me with ambivalent open arms and wary eyes.

  “Benedict!” He was plumper than ever. Rotund, nowadays.

  “Hi, Mervyn.”

  He shook hands awkwardly, and glanced past me to where, on his desk, lay two newspapers, both SHOUT! and the Hoopwestern Gazette.

  “I didn’t expect you,” Mervyn said.

  “No, well, I’m sorry. I expect my father telephoned to say he couldn’t get down this weekend for the ‘surgery’?” Most Saturday mornings the public came to headquarters with their complaints. “I expect you’ll do fine without him.”

  My father, in fact, was busy in London with secretive little lunches and private dinners, with hurried hidden meetings and promises and bargains, all the undercover maneuvering of shifts of power. I hoped and trusted that A. L. Wyvern was fully occupied in doing the same.