10 lb Penalty Read online

  I sat on my stool and simply listened, and learned many surprising (to me) facts of electoral life, chief among which was the tiny amount of money allowed to be spent. No one could buy themselves into Parliament: every candidate had to rely on an army of unpaid helpers for door-to-door persuasions and the nailing of “vote for me” posters to suitable trees.

  There were Representation of the People Acts, Crystal told me crisply, her fingers busy on the keyboard, her eyes unwaveringly turned to the screen. The acts severely limited what one could spend.

  “There are about seventy thousand voters in this constituency,” she said. “You couldn’t buy seventy thousand half-pints of beer with what we’re allowed to spend. It’s impossible to bribe the British voters. You have to persuade them. That’s your father’s job.”

  “Don’t buy a stamp, dear, for a local letter,” Faith said, smiling. “Get on a bicycle and deliver it by hand.”

  “Do you mean you can’t buy stamps?”

  “You have to write down every cent you spend,” Crystal nodded. “You have to make an itemized return after the election to show where the money went, and you can bet your sweet life Paul Bethune’s people will be hoping like hell they’ll find we’ve gone over the limit, just like we’ll be scrutinizing his return with a magnifying glass, looking for any twopenny wickedness.”

  “Then last night’s dinner ... ,” I began.

  “Last night’s dinner was paid for by the people who ate it, and cost the Local Constituency Association nothing,” Crystal said. She paused, then went on with my education. “Mervyn and I are employed by the Local Constituency Association of this party, not directly by Westminster. The local association pays for these offices here, and the whole caboodle relies on gifts and fund-raising.”

  She approved of the way things were set up, and I wondered vaguely why, with everything carefully regulated to ensure the election of the fittest, there were still so many nutcases in the House.

  The relative peace of just seven bodies in the offices lasted only until an influx of the previous night’s social mix trooped in through both doors and asked endless questions to which there seemed no answers.

  Mervyn Teck loved it. The police, the media people, the party enthusiasts and the merely curious, he expansively welcomed them all. His candidate was not only alive but being perfectly charming to every inquirer. The TV cameraman shone his bright spotlight on my father’s face and taped the sincerity of his smile. Local newspapermen had been augmented by several from the major dailies. Cameras flashed. Microphones were offered to catch anything worth saying, and I, doing my bit, simply smiled and smiled and was terribly nice to everyone and referred every question to my parent.

  Crystal, trying to continue working but having to cling physically to her desk to avoid being swept around the place like flotsam, remarked to me tartly that there would hardly have been more fuss if George Juliard had been killed.

  “Lucky he wasn’t,” I said, wedging my stool next to her to keep us both anchored.

  “Did the noise of the gunshot make him trip?” she asked.

  “No. He tripped first.”

  “Why are you so sure?”

  “Because the bang of a high-velocity bullet reaches you after the bullet itself.”

  She looked disbelieving.

  “I learned it in physics lessons,” I said.

  She glanced at my beardless face. “How old are you?” she asked.

  “Seventeen.”

  “You can’t even vote!”

  “I don’t actually want to.”

  She looked across to where my father was winning media allies with modesty and grace.

  “I’ve met a fair number of politicians,” she said. “Your father’s different.”

  “In what way?”

  “Can’t you feel his power? Perhaps you can’t, as you’re his son. You’re too close to him.”

  “I do sometimes feel it.” It stunned me, I should have said.

  “Look at last night,” Crystal went on without pausing. “I was there in the hall, sitting at the back. He set that place alight. He’s a natural speaker. I mean, I work here, and he had my pulse racing. Poor old Dennis Nagle, he was a nice worthy man, pretty capable in a quiet way, but he could never have got a crowd cheering and stamping their feet, like last night.”

  “Could Orinda?” I asked.

  Crystal was startled. “No, she can’t make people laugh. But don’t judge her by last night. She’s done devoted work in the constituency. She was always at Dennis’s side. She’s feeling very hurt that she wasn’t selected to follow Dennis, because until your father galvanized the selection panel she was unopposed.”

  “In fact,” I said, “if anyone had a motive for bumping off my father, it would be her.”

  “Oh, but she wouldn’t!” Crystal was honestly dismayed. “She can sometimes be a darling, you know. Mervyn loves her. He’s quite put out that he’s not working to get her elected. He was looking forward to it.”

  My first impression of Crystal’s sharp spikiness had been right only as regarded her outward appearance. She was kinder and more patient than she looked. I wondered if at one time she had been anorexic: I had known anorexic girls at school. The teeth of one of them had fallen out.

  Crystal’s teeth were straight and white, though seldom visible, owing to an overall serious view of life. I thought she was probably twenty-five or -six and hadn’t had enough in life to smile about.

  Mervyn Teck zigzagged to my elbow through the busy crowd and said it was time to think about driving my father to his day’s engagements in the outlying town of Quindle. The constituency was large in area with separate pockets of concentrated inhabitation: Mervyn gave me a map with roads and destination marked, but looked at me doubtfully.

  “Are you sure you’re competent enough?”

  I said “Yes” with more confidence than I felt.

  “One incident like last night’s is a godsend,” he said. “A car crash on top would be too much. We don’t want any whiff of accident-prone.”

  “No,” I said.

  Across the room my father was dangling the Range Rover’s keys in my direction. I went over to him and took them and he, with the help of a walking stick, detached himself from the chattering well-wishers (the police and media had long gone) and limped through the office and out to the parking lot.

  Crowds beget crowds. There was a bunch of people outside the rear door who clapped and smiled at my father and gave him thumbs-up signs. I looked across the parking lot to where we had left the Range Rover on our arrival from Brighton the previous afternoon, and my father asked me to fetch it over so that he wouldn’t need to hobble that far.

  I walked across to the conspicuous vehicle and stopped beside it, the keys in my hand. The sun shone again that day, gleaming on the gold and silver painted garlands; and after a moment I turned away and went back to my father.

  “What’s the matter?” he said, half-annoyed. “Can’t you drive it!”

  “Is it insured for someone my age?”

  “Yes, of course. I wouldn’t suggest it otherwise. Go and fetch it, Ben.”

  I frowned and went back into the offices, ignoring his displeasure.

  “It’s time you went,” Mervyn said, equally impatient. “You said you could drive George’s car.”

  I nodded. “But I’d be better in a smaller car. Like you said, we don’t want an accident. Do you have a smaller one? Could I borrow yours?”

  Mervyn said with obvious aggravation, “My car isn’t insured for drivers under twenty-one.”

  “Mine is, though,” Crystal said. “My nineteen-year-old brother drives it. But it’s not very glamorous. Not like the Range Rover.”

  She dug the keys out of her handbag and said that Mervyn (to his impatience) would give her a ride home if we were not back by five-thirty, and would pick her up again in the morning. I thanked her with an awkward kiss on the cheek, and with Mervyn Teck repeating his disapproval, went out t
o rejoin my father.

  “I’m disappointed in you, Ben,” he said when Mervyn Teck explained. “You’d better practice in the Range Rover tomorrow.”

  “OK. But today, now, before we go, would you arrange for some mechanics to come here and make sure there’s nothing wrong with it.”

  “Of course there’s nothing wrong with it. I drove it to Brighton and back yesterday and it was running perfectly.”

  “Yes ... but it’s been standing out in the car park all night. Last night it’s possible someone tried to shoot you. Suppose someone’s hammered a nail or two into the Range Rover’s tires? Or anything.” I finished self-deprecatingly, as if I thought sabotage a childish fantasy, but after a brief, thoughtful silence my father said to Mervyn, “I’ll go in Crystal’s car. Ben can practice on the Range Rover tomorrow. Meanwhile, Mervyn, get the Range Rover overhauled, would you?”

  Mervyn gave me a sour look, but it was he, after all, who had most wanted to avoid the accident-prone label: or so he’d said.

  In Crystal’s small workaday box on wheels I therefore drove the candidate safely to his far-flung appointments, and again I saw and heard him shake awake the apathetic voting public, progressively attracting more and more people as his voice raised laughter and applause. His audience approved with their eyes and shouted questions, some friendly, some hostile, all of them getting thoughtful answers, lightly phrased.

  I didn’t know how much of the day’s flashing enthusiasm would actually carry the feet to the polling booths, but it was enough, my father assured me, if they didn’t walk into the opposition camp and write their X for Bethune.

  We had squeezed into Crystal’s car an invention of my father’s that was basically two wooden boxes, each a foot high, one larger than the other, that would bolt together, one on top of the other, to form an impromptu stepped platform to raise a speaker above his listeners: just enough for him to be comfortably heard, not high enough to be psychologically threatening. “My soapbox” my father called it, though it was many years since such crowd-pulling structures had contained soap.

  I assembled the “soapbox” in three places in the town’s scattered focal points, and at each place a crowd gathered, curious, or anti, or uncommitted, and at each place, as I unbolted, or assembled or packed away the stepped platform, people would crowd around me with (mostly) friendly inquiries.

  “Are you his chauffeur?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is he as knowledgeable as he seems?”

  “More so.”

  “What does he think about education?”

  I smiled. “He’s in favor of it.”

  “Yes, but...”

  “I can’t answer for him. Please ask him yourself.”

  They turned away and asked him, and got politically correct and truthful answers that would never be implemented without a huge increase in taxes: I was learning the economic facts as rapidly as I’d ever assimilated quadratic equations.

  My father’s appearances in Quindle had been well publicized in advance by posters all over the town. Volunteers had distributed them and volunteers met and escorted us everywhere, their faces shining with commitment. My own commitment, I had already found, was to my father himself, not to his party or his beliefs. My private views, if I had any, were that good ideas were scattered around, not solely the property of any shade of rosette: and of course what were to me good ideas were hateful errors to others. I didn’t embrace any single whole agenda package, and it was always those who didn’t care passionately, those who changed their minds and swung with the wind, those who felt vaguely dissatisfied, they it was who swayed one side in or another side out. The “floating voters,” who washed back and fore with the tide, those were my father’s target.

  Quindle, like Hoopwestern, had grown in response to industries planted in the surrounding fields; not lightbulbs this time, but furniture and paint. There had then been a long policy of “infilling,” the building of large numbers of small houses on every patch of vacant grass. The resulting town strained against its green belt and suffered from interior traffic snarl-ups on a standstill scale. It worked well for soapbox orators: in the summer heat cars crept past with their windows down, getting the message.

  Among the blizzard of VOTE JULIARD posters there were some for TITMUSS and WHISTLE and, of course, many for BETHUNE IS BETTER. GIVE HIM YOUR X. Bethune’s notices on the whole looked tattered, and I found it wasn’t merely because it was three days since he’d stomped inner Quindle on his own soapbox tour, but because the local weekly paper, the Quindle Diary, had hit the newsstands with “Bethune for Sleaze” as its headline.

  One of the volunteers having tucked the Quindle Diary under my elbow, I read the front page, as who wouldn’t.

  “As our representative in Westminster, do we want an adulterer who says he upholds the family values to which this newspaper in this young town is dedicated? Do we believe the promises of one who can’t keep a solemn vow?”

  I read to the end and thought the whole tone insufferably pompous, but I didn’t suppose it would do the Bethune camp much good.

  At each of his three ascents of the soapbox my father was bombarded with demands that he should at least deplore the Bethune hypocrisy, and at each place, carefully sidestepping the loaded come-ons, he attacked Bethune and his party only for their political aims and methods.

  His restraint didn’t altogether please his own army of volunteers.

  “George could demolish Bethune if he would only take a hatchet to his character,” one of them complained. “Why won’t he do it?”

  “He doesn’t believe in it,” I said.

  “You have to play the aces you’re given.”

  “Not five aces,” I said.

  “What?”

  “He would think it cheating.”

  The volunteer raised his eyes to heaven but changed his approach. “You see that thin man standing near your father, writing in a notebook?”

  “Do you mean the one in a pink jogging suit and a baseball hat on backwards?”

  “I do indeed. He’s called Usher Rudd. He writes for the Hoopwestern Gazette and his column is also syndicated to the Quindle Diary. It’s he who wrote the personal attacks on Paul Bethune. He’s been following Bethune around ever since his party chose him as their candidate. Rudd’s a highly professional slinger of mud. Never, never trust him.”

  I said in apprehension, “Does my father know who he is?”

  “I told George that Usher Rudd would be bound to turn up again, but he doesn’t always look the same. The pink overalls and baseball cap are new.”

  “Usher Rudd’s an unusual name.”

  The volunteer laughed. “He’s really young Bobby Rudd, always a menace. His mother was Gracie Usher before she married a Rudd. The Rudd family have a string of body shops, for anything from bicycles to combine harvesters, but fixing cars isn’t to young Bobby’s taste. He calls himself an investigative journalist. More like a muckraker, I’d say.”

  I said tentatively, “Was he at the dinner last night?”

  “That big do at The Sleeping Dragon? He would have been for a certainty. He’ll be furious that the gunshot and all that happened was too late for today’s Gazette. The Gazette is only twenty-four pages long, mostly advertisements, sports results, local news and rehashed world events. Everyone buys it for the dirt Rudd digs up. He was a rotten Peeping Tom as a little boy, always had his snotty nose glued to people’s windows, and he hasn’t got better with time. If you want to have sex with the vicar, don’t do it in Quindle.”

  I said dryly, “Thanks for the advice.”

  He laughed. “Beware of Bobby Rudd, that’s all.” With the present crowd listening to my galvanic father with devouring eyes as much as persuadable ears, I slowly strolled around to guard his back; I was some poor sort of guardian to my parent, I thought with self-condemnation, if I left him wide open to repeat bullets or other jokers.

  I did my best to look purposeless, but clearly failed with that mess
age as Usher Rudd, also as if guileless, came to stand casually beside me. His baseball cap advertised vigorous sports goods, as did his footwear, and he wore between, from neck to ankle, a soft rose-pink loose exercise suit of nylonlike fabric which, instead of hiding the thinness of his body inside, gave an impression that the arms and legs functioned on a system of articulated rods. I, in my jeans and T-shirt, looked almost invisibly ordinary.

  “Hello,” he said. “Where is the Juliard battle-wagon?”

  Puzzled, I answered, “We came in a different car.”

  “I’m Usher Rudd.”

  His accent was unreconstructed Dorset, his manner confident to arrogant. He had unexcited blue eyes, sandy lashes and dry freckled skin: the small-boy menace who had peeped through windows still lived close to the surface and made me for once feel older than my years.

  “What’s your name?” he demanded, as I made no response.

  “Benedict,” I said.

  “Ben,” he asserted, nodding his recognition, “Ben Juliard.”

  “That’s right.”

  “How old are you?” He was abrupt, as if he had a right to the information.

  “Seventeen,” I said without offense. “How old are you?”

  “That’s none of your business.”

  I gazed at him with a perplexity that was at least half-genuine. Why should he think he could ask questions that he himself would not answer? I had a lot to learn, as my father had said, but I instinctively didn’t like him.

  Close behind my back my father was answering the sort of questions it was proper he should be asked: Where did he stand on education, foreign policy, taxes, the disunited kingdom and the inability of bishops to uphold the Ten Commandments? “Shouldn’t sins be modernized?” someone shouted. Moses was out of date.

  My father, who certainly lived by “thou shalt not” rather than by “what can I get away with?” replied with humor, “By all means pension off Moses if you would like your neighbor to covet your ox and your ass and carry off your wife and your lawn mower....”