Dick Francis - 10 lb Penalty

“Tell her,” Jill Vinicheck said, enjoying herself, “never to buy clothes in shops.”

Social Security nodded. “She must have them made.”

Jill Vinicheck: “Always wool or silk or cotton. Never polyester, or tight.”

“There’s a marvelous man who could make your mother really elegant, with her long, thin figure. He totally changed the way the papers write about us now. They discuss our policies, not our clothes. And he can’t do it only for women. Look at the change in Hudson Hurst! Hud frankly looked a bit of a gangster, but now he’s a statesman.”

“No time like the present,” Jill Vinicheck said with the briskness that had no doubt propelled her up the ladder. “Our wand-waving friend is here somewhere.

Why don’t we introduce him to your mother straightaway?”

“Er...” I said, “I don’t think she...”

“Oh, there he is,” said Social Security, stepping sideways and pouncing. “Let me introduce you...”

She had her hand on his arm and he turned towards her, and I came face-to-face with A. L. Wyvern.

Alderney “Anonymous Lover” Wyvern.

No wonder Education and Social Security had reminded me of Orinda. All those years ago his ideas had dressed her, too.

I knew him instantly, but it took him several seconds to add four years to my earlier appearance. Then his face hardened to ill will and he looked disconcerted, even though with my father in the Cabinet he might have considered that both he and I might be asked to the families’ Christmas reception. Maybe he hadn’t given it a thought. In any case, my presence there was to him an unwelcome surprise.

So was his, to me.

Education and Social Security were looking puzzled.

“Do you two know each other?” one of them asked.

“We’ve met,” Wyvern said shortly.

His own appearance, too, had changed. At Hoopwestern he had made a point of looking inconspicuous, of being easily forgettable. Four years later he wasn’t finding it so simple to fade into the wallpaper.

I had thought him then to be less than forty, but I now saw that to have been probably an underestimate.

His skin had begun to show a few wrinkles and his hair to recede, and he was now wearing glasses with narrow dark frames. There was still about him, though, the strong secretive aura of introverted clout.

At the Downing Street Christmas party there was no overt sign of the sleeping anger that had blazed across Orinda’s face and nearly killed her. He was not this time saying to me aloud in fury, “One day I’ll get you,” but I could see the intent rise again in his narrowed eyes as if no interval for second thoughts had existed.

The extraordinary response I felt was not fear but excitement. The adrenaline rush in my blood was to fight, not flight. And whether or not he saw my reaction to him as vividly as I felt it, he pulled down the shutters on the malice visible behind the dark framed lenses and excused himself with the briefest of courtesies to Education and Social Security: when he moved slowly away it was as if every step were consciously controlled.

“Well!” exclaimed Jill Vinicheck. “I know he’s never talkative, but I’m afraid he was... impolite.”

Not impolite, I thought.

Murderous.

After the reception Polly, my father and I all ate in one of the few good restaurants in London that had taken the din out of dinner. One could mostly hear oneself speak.

My father had enjoyed a buddy-buddy session with the prime minister and Polly said she thought the circular eyes of the home secretary were not after all an indication of mania.

Didn’t the home secretary, I asked, keep prisoners in and chuck illegal immigrants out?

More or less, my father agreed.

I said, “Did you know there was a list on a sort of easel there detailing all the jobs in government?”

My father, ministerially busy with broccoli that he didn’t actually like, nodded, but Polly said she hadn’t seen it.

“There are weird jobs,” I said, “like minister for former countries and undersecretary for buses.” Polly looked mystified but my father nodded. “Every prime minister invents titles to describe what he wants done.”

“So,” I said, “theoretically you could have a minister in charge of banning yellow plastic ducks.”

“You do talk nonsense, Benedict dear,” Polly said.

“What he means,” my father said, “is that the quickest way to make people want something is to ban it. People always fight to get what they are told they cannot have.”

“All the same,” I said mildly, “I think the prime minister should introduce a law banning Alderney Wyvern from drinking champagne at No. 10 Downing Street.”

Polly and my father sat with their mouths open.

“He was there,” I said. “Didn’t you see him?”

They shook their heads.

“He kept over to the far side of the room, out of your way. He looks a bit different. He’s older, balder. He wears spectacles. But he is revered by the minister of education, the secretary of state for social security and the secretary of state for defense, to name those I am sure of. Orinda and Dennis Nagle were kindergarten stuff. Alderney Wyvern now has his hands on levers he can pull to affect whole sections of the nation.”

“I don’t believe it,” my father said.

“The dear ladies of education and social security told me they had a friend who would do wonders for my... er... mother’s wardrobe. He had already, they said, turned Hudson Hurst from a quasi-mobster into a polished gent. What do you think they give Alderney in return?”

“No,” my father said. “Not classified information. They couldn’t!”

He was scandalized. I shook my head.

“What, then?” Polly asked. “What do they give him?”

“I’d guess,” I said, “that they give him attention. I’d guess they listen to him and act on his advice. Orinda said years ago that he had a terrific understanding of what would happen in politics. He would predict things and tell Dennis Nagle what to do about them and Orinda said he was nearly always right. Dennis Nagle had his feet on the upward path, and if he hadn’t died I’d think he’d be in the Cabinet by now with Wyvern at his shoulder.”

My father pushed his broccoli aside. A good thing his broccoli farmers weren’t watching. They were agitating for a broccoli awareness week to make the British eat their greens. A law to ban excess broccoli would have had healthier results.

“If he’s so clever,” Polly asked, “why isn’t he in the Cabinet himself?”

“Orinda told me the sort of power Alderney really wants is to be able to pull the levers behind the scenes. I thought it a crazy idea. I’ve grown up since then.”

“Power without responsibility,” my father murmured.

“Allied,” I said ruefully, “to a frighteningly violent temper which explodes when he’s crossed.”

My father hadn’t actually seen Wyvern hit Orinda. He hadn’t seen the speed and the force and the heartlessness; but he had seen the blood and tears and they alone had driven him to try to retaliate. Wyvern had wanted to damage my father’s reputation by provoking my father to hit him. I dimly understood, but still hadn’t properly worked it out, that attacking Wyvern would, in the end, destroy the attacker.

My boss Evan agreeing, I’d tied in the No. 10 Thursday evening reception with a Friday-morning trip to meet a claims inspector to see if a hay barn had burned by accident or design (accident) and was due to stay again on Friday night in London with Polly and my father before going to ride at Stratford-upon-Avon on Saturday, but en route I got a message to return to meet my father in Downing Street by two that Friday afternoon.