Dick Francis: 10 lb Penalty

I learned about Orinda by sitting on an inconspicuous stool in a comer and listening to the three helpers describe to my father a visit the dispossessed lady had paid that day to the office.

The thinnest, least motherly help, who was also the most malicious, said with lip-curling glee, “You’d think she’d be grieving for Dennis, but she just seems furious with him for dying. She talks about ‘ our constituents,’ like she always did. She says she wrote his speeches and formed his opinions. She said it was understood from when Dennis was first ill that she would take his place. She says we three are traitors to be working for you, George. She was absolutely stuttering with rage. She says if you think she’ll meekly go away, you have another think coming. And she says she is going to tonight’s dinner!”

My father grimaced.

I thought that the selection committee had probably acted with good sense.

From my stool I also learned that the main opposition party was fielding “a fat slob with zero sex appeal” against my father. His — Paul Bethune’s — party had recently picked up a couple of marginal seats in by-elections and were confident of taking Hoopwestern since “the need for change” was in the air.

In the days that followed I saw his picture everywhere: a grin above the slogan Bethune is better. Give him your X.

It made me laugh. Was he collecting divorcées?

On that first evening, though, all I learned of him was that he was a local councillor and losing his hair. Incipient baldness might in fact lose him the election, it seemed (never mind his mental suitability). America hadn’t elected a bald president since the soldier-hero Eisenhower, and few people nowadays named their babies Dwight.

I learned that votes were won by laughter and lost by dogma. I learned that the virility of George Juliard acted like a friction rub on the pink faces of his helpers.

“My son will come with me to the dinner tonight,” he said. “He can have Mervyn’s place.” Mervyn Teck, he explained, was the agent, his chief of staff, who was unavoidably detained in the midlands.

The three aroused ladies looked me over again, nodding.

“The dinner,” he explained to me briefly, “is being held at The Sleeping Dragon, the hotel straight across the square from here.” He pointed through the bow-fronted windows, showing me a multi-gabled facade, adorned with endless geraniums in hanging baskets, barely a hundred yards away. “We’ll walk over there at seven-thirty. Short reception. Dinner. Public meeting in the hall to the rear of the hotel. If we get some good hecklers, it may last until midnight.”

“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 as if she would explode if she kept them in.

“Dennis was a cuddly precious, you know. Can’t think why he married that harpy. ”

Dearest Polly, herself on the angular side of cuddly, had one of those long-jawed faces from which condensed kindness and goodwill flowed forth unmistakably. She wore dark red lipstick as if she didn’t usually: it was the wrong color for her yellowish skin.

“Dennis told us he wanted us to select Orinda. She made him say it. He knew he was dying.”

Orinda flashed her white teeth at a second cameraman.

“That man’s from the Hoopwestern Gazette,” Dearest Polly said disgustedly. “She’ll make the front page.”

“But she won’t get to Parliament,” I said.

Polly’s eyes focused on me with awakening amusement. “Your father’s son, aren’t you, then! It was George’s ability to identify the essential points that swayed us in his favor. There were seventeen of us on the selection panel, and to begin with most people thought Orinda the obvious choice. I know she took it for granted...”

And she’d reckoned without Dearest Polly, I thought. Polly and others of like mind.

Polly said, “I don’t know how she has the nerve to bring her lover!”