10 lb Penalty (2 page)

The black car drifted past Regency town houses and open-fronted souvenir shops, past old grandeur and new world commercialism, and sighed to a stop on the seafront outside the main door of a large hotel of ancient French architectural pedigree with bright beach towels drying on its decorative wrought-iron balconies.

Porters appeared solicitously. The chauffeur climbed out of his seat and ceremoniously opened the door beside me and, thus prompted, I stood up into the sea air, hearing gulls crying and voices in the distance calling on the wet ebb-tide strand, smelling the salt on the wind and unexpectedly feeling the lift of spirits of the sand-castle holidays of childhood.

The chauffeur made me a small sketch of a bow and pointed at the hotel’s main door, and then, still without explaining, he returned to his driving seat and at a convenient moment inserted himself into the flow of traffic and smoothly slid away.

“Luggage, sir?” one of the porters suggested. He was barely older than I.

I shook my head. For luggage I wore the clothes suitable for first-lot August-morning exercise with the Durridge string: jodhpurs, jodhpur boots, short-sleeved sports shirt and harlequin-printed lightweight zipped jacket (unzipped). I carried by its chin-strap my shiny blue helmet. With a conscious effort I walked these inappropriate garments into the grand hotel, but I needn’t have worried: the once-formal lobby buzzed like a beehive with people looking normal in cutoff shorts, flip-flop sandals and message-laden T-shirts. The composed woman at the reception desk gave my riding clothes an incurious but definite assessment like a click on an identification parade and answered my slightly hoarse enquiry.

“Mr. George Juliard?” she repeated. “Who shall I say is asking for him?”

“His son.”

She picked up a telephone receiver, pressed buttons, spoke, listened, gave me the news.

“Please go up. Room four-twelve. The lift is to your left.”

My father was standing in an open doorway as I walked down a passage to locate four-twelve. I stopped as I approached him and watched him inspect me, as he customarily did, from my dark curly hair (impervious to straightening by water), to my brown eyes, thin face, lean frame, five foot eleven (or thereabouts) of long legs to unpolished boots: not in any way an impressive experience for an ambitious parent.

“Ben,” he said. He breathed down his nose as if accepting a burden. “Come in.”

He tried hard always to be a good father, but gave no weight to my infrequent assurances that he succeeded. I was a child he hadn’t wanted, the accidental consequence of his teenage infatuation with a woman biologically just old enough to be his own mother. On the day I went to Brighton I was almost as old as he had been when he fathered me.

Over the years I’d gleaned the details. There had been a hullabaloo in both extended families when they were told of the pregnancy, an even worse fuss (product of the times) when my mother refused an abortion, and a frosty turning of backs at the hasty (and happy) wedding.

The marriage-day photograph was the only record I had of my mother, who ironically died of preeclampsia at my birth, leaving her very young husband literally holding the baby with his envisaged bright future in ruins, so it was said.

George Juliard, however, who wasn’t considered bright for nothing, promptly rearranged his whole life, jettisoning the intended Oxford degree and career in law, persuading his dead wife’s sister to add me to her already large family of four sons, and setting forth into the City to learn how to make money. He had paid from the beginning for my keep and later for my education and had further fulfilled his duties by turning up at parent-teacher meetings and punctiliously sending me cards and gifts at Christmas and birthdays. A year ago for my birthday he’d given me an airline ticket to America so that I could spend the summer holidays on a horse farm in Virginia owned by the family of a school friend. Many fathers had done less.

I followed him into four-twelve and found without surprise that I was in the sitting room of a suite directly facing the sea, the English Channel stretching blue-gray to the horizon. When George Juliard had set out with the goal of making money, he had spectacularly hit his target.

“Have you had breakfast?” he asked.

“I’m not hungry.”

He ignored the untruth. “What did Vivian Durridge say to you?”

“He sacked me.”

“Yes, but what did he
say?
”

“He said I couldn’t ride and that I sniffed glue and also cocaine.”

My father stared. “He said
what?”

“He said what you asked him to, didn’t he? He said he had it on good authority that I took drugs.”

“Did you ask him who his ‘good authority’ was?”

“No.” I hadn’t thought of it until too late, in the car.

“You’ve a lot to learn,” my father said.

‘ ‘It was no coincidence that you sent a car to wait for me.”

He smiled marginally, light gleaming in his eyes. He was taller than I, with wider shoulders, and in many ways inhabited an intenser, more powerful version of the body I had been growing into during the past five years. His hair was darker then mine, and curlier, a close rug on his Grecian-like head. The firmness in his face, now that he was approaching his late thirties, had been already apparent in his wedding photograph, when the gap in age had showed not at all, where the bridegroom had looked the dominant partner and the bride, smiling in her blue silk dress outside the registry office, had shone with youthful beauty.

“Why did you do it?” I asked, trying to sound more adult than bitter, and not managing it.

“Do what?”

“Get me kicked out.”

“Ah.”

He walked over to a pair of glass doors leading to a balcony and opened them, letting in the vivid coastal air and the high voices from the beach. He stood there silently for a while, breathing deeply, and then, as if making up his mind, he closed the windows purposefully and turned toward me.

“I have a proposition for you,” he said.

“What proposition?”

“It will take a good while to explain.” He lifted a telephone receiver and told the room service that whether or not breakfast had been officially over an hour ago, they were to 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 it ... little against.

“You agreed I should have a gap year,” I protested.

“I didn’t prohibit it. That’s different.”

“But ...
can
you prohibit it? And why do you want to?”

“Until you are eighteen I can legally do almost anything that’s for your own good or, rather, that I consider is for your own good. You’re no fool, Ben. You know that’s a fact. For the next three weeks, until your birthday on August thirty-first, I am still in charge of your life.”

I did know it. I also knew that though by right I would receive basic university tuition fees from the state, I would not qualify for living expenses or other grants because of my father’s wealth. Working one’s way through college, although just possible in some countries, was hardly an option in Britain. Realistically, if my father wouldn’t pay for my keep, I wouldn’t be going to university, whether Exeter or anywhere else.

I said neutrally, “When I asked you, ages ago, you said you thought a gap year was a good idea.”

“I didn’t know that you intended your gap year to be spent on a racecourse.”

“It’s a growing-up experience!”

“It’s a minefield of moral traps.”

“You don’t trust me!” Even I could hear the outraged self-regard in my voice. Too near a whine. I said more frostily, “Because of your example, I would keep out of trouble.”

“No bribes, do you mean?” He was unimpressed by my own shot at flattery. “You’d throw no races? Everyone would believe in your incorruptibility? Is that it? What about a rumor that you take drugs? Rumors destroy reputations quicker than truth.”

I was silenced. An unproven accusation had that morning rent apart my comfortable illusion that innocence could shield one from defamation. My father would no doubt categorize the revelation as “growing up.”

A knock on the door punctuated my bitter thoughts with the arrival of a breakfast designed to give me a practically guilt-free release from chronic hunger. The necessity of keeping down to a low racing weight had occasionally made me giddy from deprivation. Even as I fell on the food ravenously I marveled at my father’s understanding of what I would actually eat and what I would reject.

“While you eat, you can listen,” he said. “If you were going to be the world’s greatest steeplechase jockey, I wouldn’t ask ... what I’m going to ask of you. If you were going to be, say, Isaac Newton, or Mozart, or some other genius, it would be pointless to ask that you should give it up. And I’m not asking you to give up riding altogether, just to give up trying to make it your life.”

Cornflakes and milk were wonderful.

“I have a suspicion,” he said, “that you intended your gap year to go on forever.”

I paused in mid-munch. Couldn’t deny he was right. “So go to Exeter, Ben. Do your growing up there. I don’t expect you to get a First. A Second would be fine; a Third is OK, though I guess you’ll manage good results, as you always have done, in spite of the disadvantage of your birth date.”

I zoomed through the bacon, tomatoes and mushrooms and accompanied them with toast. Because of the rigid education system that graded schoolchildren by age and not ability, and because I’ d been born on the last day of the age-grading year (September 1 would have given me an extra twelve months), I had always been the youngest in the class, always faced with the task of keeping up. A gap year would have leveled things nicely. And he was telling me, of course, that he understood all that, and was forgiving a poor outcome in the degree stakes before I’d even started.

“Before Exeter,” he said, “I’d like you to work for me. I’d like you to come with me to Hoopwestern and help me get elected.”