10 lb Penalty Read Free Page B

or any policy statements. I just want you to be with me, to be part of my scene.”
    “I don’t ... I mean,” I more or less stuttered, “I don’t understand what I could do.”
    “Eat your apple,” he said calmly, “and I’ll explain.”
    He sat in one of the armchairs and crossed his legs with deliberation, as if he had rehearsed the next bit, and I thought that probably he had indeed gone over it repeatedly in his mind.
    “The selection committee who chose me as their candidate,” he said, “would frankly have preferred me to be married. They said so. They saw my bachelor state as a drawback. I told them therefore that I had been married, that my wife had died, and that I had a son. That cheered them up no end. What I’m asking you to do is to be a sort of substitute wife. To come with me in public. To be terribly nice to people.”
    I said absentmindedly, “To kiss babies?” “I’ll kiss the babies.” He was amused. “You can chat up the old ladies ... and talk football, cricket and racing to the men.”
    I thought of the wild thrill of riding in races. I thought of the intoxication of risking my neck, of pitting such skill as I had against fate and disaster, of completing the bucketing journeys without disgrace. A far cry from chatting up babies.
    I yearned for the simple life of carefree, reckless speed; the gift given by horses, the gift of skis; and I was beginning to learn, as everyone has to in the end, that all of life’s pleasures have strings attached.
    I said, “How could anyone think I would bother with drugs when race riding itself gives you the biggest high on earth?”
    My father said, “If Vivian said he would take you back, would you go?”
    “No.” My answer came instinctively, without thought. Things couldn’t be the same. I had gone a long way down reality’s road in those few hours of an August Wednesday. I could acknowledge grimly that I would never be my dream jockey. I would never win my Grand National. But patting babies instead? Good grief!
    “The polling day,” he said, “is more than three weeks before term starts at Exeter. You will be eighteen by then ...”
    “And,” I said, without either joy or regret, “I wrote to Exeter to say I wouldn’t be taking up the place they’d offered me. Even if you instruct me to go, I can’t.”
    “I overruled your decision,” he told me flatly. “I thought you might do that. I’ve observed you, you know, throughout your young life, even if we’ve never been particularly close. I got in touch with Exeter and reversed your cancellation. They are now expecting your registration. They have arranged lodging for you on campus. Unless you totally rebel and run away, you’ll go ahead with your degree.”
    I felt a lurching and familiar recognition of this man’s power as a force that far outweighed any ordinary family relationship. Even Exeter University had done his bidding.
    “But, Father ...,” I said feebly.
    “Dad.”
    “Dad ...” The word was wholly inappropriate both for the image of him as the conventionally supportive parent of a schoolboy and for my perception of him as something far different from an average man in a business suit.
    The Grand National, for him, I saw, was the road to Downing Street. Winning the race was the prime ministership in Number Ten. He was asking me to abandon my own unobtainable dream to help him have a chance of achieving his own.
    I looked at the untouched apple and banana and had no more appetite.
    I said, “You don’t need me.”
    “I need to win votes. You can help with that. If I weren’t totally convinced of your value as a constituent-pleaser you wouldn’t be sitting here now.”
    “Well ...,” I hesitated, “to be honest, I wish I wasn’t.”
    I would have been pottering about happily in Vivian Durridge’s stable yard, untroubled in my illusions. And I would have been drifting towards a less abrupt, less brutal awakening. I would also, I supposed, have been going to