10 lb Penalty Read Free

send up immediately a tray of cereal, milk, hot toast, grilled bacon with tomatoes and mushrooms, an apple, a banana and a pot of tea. “And don’t argue,” he said to me, disconnecting, “you look as if you haven’t eaten for a week.”
    I said, “Did you tell Sir Vivian that I take drugs?”
    “No, I didn’t. Do you?”
    “No.”
    We looked at each other, virtual strangers, though as closely tied as genetically possible. I had lived according to his edicts, had been to his choice of schools, had learned to ride, to ski and to shoot because he had distantly funded my preference for those pursuits, and I had not received tickets for Bayreuth, Covent Garden or La Scala because he didn’t enthuse over time spent that way.
    I was his product, as most teenage sons were of their fathers. I was also aware of his strict sense of honor, his clear vision of right and wrong and his insistence that shameful acts be acknowledged and paid for, not lied about and covered up. He was, as my four older cousins/brothers told me pityingly, a hard act to follow.
    “Sit down,” he said.
    The room was warm. I took off my jazzy zipped jacket and laid it on the floor with my helmet and sat in a light armchair, where he pointed.
    “I have been selected,” he said, “as a candidate in the Hoopwestern by-election, in place of the sitting MP, who has died.”
    “Er ...” I blinked, not quickly taking it in.
    “Did you hear what I said?”
    “Do you mean ... you are running for office?”
    “Your American friend Chuck would say I’m running for office, but as this is England, I am standing for Parliament.”
    I didn’t know what I should say. Great? How awful? Why? I said blunderingly, “Will you get in?”
    “It’s a marginal seat. A toss-up.”
    I looked vaguely around the impersonal room. He waited with a shade of impatience.
    “What is the proposition?” I asked.
    “Well, now...” Somewhere within him he relaxed. “Vivian Durridge treated you harshly.”
    “Yes, he did.”
    “Accusing you of taking drugs ... That was his own invention.”
    “But what for? ” I asked, bewildered. “If he didn’t want me around, why didn’t he just say so?”
    “He told me you would never be more than an average-standard amateur. Never a top professional jockey. What you were doing was a waste of time.”
    I didn’t want to believe it. I couldn’t face believing it. I protested vehemently, “But I enjoy it.”
    “Yes, and if you look honestly inside yourself, you’ll admit that a pleasant waste of time isn’t enough for you at this stage.”
    “I’m not you,” I said. “I don’t have your.:. your...”
    “Drive?” he suggested.
    I thought it over weakly, and nodded.
    “I am satisfied, though,” he said, “that you have sufficient intelligence ... and ... well ... courage ... for what I have in mind.”
    If he intended to flatter me, of course he succeeded. Few young boys could throw overboard such an assessment.
    “Father ...,” I began.
    “I thought we agreed you should call me Dad.” He had insisted at parent-teacher-schoolboy meetings that I should refer to him as “Dad,” and I had done so, but in my mind he was always Father, my formal and controlling authority.
    “What do you want me to do?” I said.
    He still wouldn’t answer straightaway. He looked absentmindedly out of the window and at my jacket on the floor. He fiddled with his fingers in a way that reminded me of Sir Vivian, and finally he said, “I want you to take up the place you’ve been offered at Exeter University.”
    “Oh.” I tried not to appear either astonished or annoyed, though I felt both. He went on, however, as if I’d launched into a long, audible harangue.
    “You’ve promised yourself a gap year, is that it?”
    A gap year, so called, was the currently fashionable pause between school and university, much praised and prized in terms of growing up in worldly experience before graduating academically. A lot to be said for