10 lb Penalty (20 page)

“Mrs. Bethune ...”

“This is the third time Paul’s contested the seat,” she told me hopelessly. “We knew he would lose to Dennis Nagle the last two times, but this time the party said he was bound to win, with the way the recent by-elections have been swinging in our favor, and with the other party ignoring Orinda and bringing in a stranger and they’ll never let Paul stand again. He’s lost worse than ever this time with everything on his side, and it’s that
horrid
Usher Rudd’s fault and I could
kill
him....” She smothered her face in a handkerchief as if to shut out the world and, stroking my arm, mumbled, “I’ll never forget your kindness.”

Up on the stage her stupid husband still looked self-satisfied.

A month ago, I thought, I hadn’t known the Bethunes existed.

Dearest Polly had bloomed unseen.

I hadn’t heard of Orinda, or of Alderney Wyvern.

I hadn’t met Mrs. Kitchens or her fanatical, unlovable Leonard, and I hadn’t known plump, efficient Mervyn or worried Crystal. I never did know the last names of Faith or Marge or Lavender, but I was certain even then that I would never forget the mean-spirited red-haired terror whose delight in life was to find out people’s hidden pleasures in order to destroy them. Bobby Usher bleeding Rudd.

So my father went to Westminster and I to Exeter, and the intense month we had spent in getting to know each other receded from a vivid present experience into a calmer, picture-filled memory.

I might not see him for weeks at a time but we talked now often on the telephone. Parliament was still in its summer recess. He would go back as a new boy, as I would, when my first term began.

Meantime I rode Sarah’s Future every morning under Stallworthy’s critical eye and can’t have done as badly as for Vivian Durridge because when I asked if he would enter the chestnut in a race for me—any race would do—he chose a novice ’chase at Wincanton on an inconspicuous Thursday and told me he hoped I’d be worth it as it was costing my father extras in the way of horse transport and shoeing with racing plates, not to mention the entry fee.

Laden thus half with glee and half with guilt, I went with Jim in his car to Wincanton, where Jim declared and saddled the horse and then watched him win with as much disbelief as I felt when I sailed past the post first.

“He
flew!”
I said, thrilled and astonished, as I unbuckled the saddle in the winner’s enclosure. “He was brilliant.”

“So I saw.”

Jim’s lack of much enthusiasm, I discovered, was rooted in his not having had the faith for a bet. Neither was Stallworthy overjoyed. All he said the next morning was, “You wasted the horse’s best win. You haven’t any sense. If I’d thought for a moment you would go to the front when the favorite fell, I’d have told you to keep the chestnut on a tight rein so we could have put the stable money on him next time out. What your father will say, I can’t imagine.”

What my father said was, “Very well done.”

“But nobody backed it ...”

“Don’t you listen to Stallworthy. You listen to
me.
That horse is for you to do your best on. To win whenever you can. And don’t think I didn’t back it. I have an arrangement with a bookmaker that wherever—
whenever
—you ride in a race, I am betting on you at starting price. I won on you at twenties yesterday ... I’m even learning racing jargon!
Always
try to win. Understand?”

I said “Yes” weakly.

“And I don’t care if you lose because some other horse is faster. Just keep to the rules and don’t break your neck.”

“OK.”

“Is there anything else you want?”

“Er ...”

“You’ll get nowhere if you’re afraid to tell me.”

“I’m not exactly afraid,” I said.

“Well, then?”

“Well ... will you telephone Stallworthy? Will you ask him to run your horse in the novice ’chase at Newton Abbot a week tomorrow? He’s entered him but now he won’t want to run him. He’ll say it’s too soon. He’ll say the horse will have to carry a 5-lb. penalty because I won on him yesterday.”

“And will he?”

“Yes, but there aren’t many more races—suitable races, that is—that I can ride him in before term starts. Stallworthy wants to win but I just want to
race.”

“Yes, I know.” He paused. “I’ll fix it for Newton Abbot. Anything else?”

“Only ... thanks.”

His laugh came down the wire. “Give my regards to Sarah’s Future.”

Feeling a bit foolish, I passed on the message to the chestnut, though in fact I had fallen into a habit of talking to him, sometimes aloud if we were alone, and sometimes in my mind. Although I had ridden a good many horses, he was the first I had known consistently from day to day. He fitted my body size and my level of skill. He undoubtedly recognized me and seemed almost to breathe a sigh of relief when I appeared every morning for exercise. We had won the race at Wincanton because we knew and trusted each other, and when I’d asked him for maximum speed at the end he’d understood from past experience what was needed, and had seemed positively to exult in having at last finished first.

Jim forgave the success and grew interested. Jim was by nature in tune with horses and, as I gradually realized, did most of the actual training. Stallworthy, although he watched the gallops most mornings, won his races with pen and entry forms, totting up times and weights and statistical probabilities.

Up the center of the long exercise field there were two rows of schooling fences, one of three flights of hurdles, and one of birch fences. Jim patiently spent some mornings teaching both me and the chestnut to go up over the birch with increasing precision, measuring our stride for takeoff from farther and farther back before the actual jump.

The riding I’d learned to that date had been from watching other people. Jim taught me, as it were, from inside, so that in that first month with Sarah’s Future I began to develop from an uncoordinated windmill with a head full of unrealistic dreams into a reasonably competent amateur rider.

Grumbling at great length about owners who knew nothing at all about racing and should leave all decisions to their trainer, Stallworthy complainingly sent the chestnut to carry his 5-1b. penalty at Newton Abbot.

I’d never before ridden on the course and at first sight of it felt foolish not to have listened to Stallworthy’s judgment. The steeplechase track was an almost one-and-a-half-mile flat circuit with sharpish turns, and the short grass gave little purchase on rock-hard ground, baked by the sun of August.

Stallworthy, with several other runners from his yard, had brought his critical eye to the course. Jim, saddling Sarah’s Future, told me the chestnut knew the course better than I did (I’d walked around it a couple of hours earlier to see the jumps, and the approaches to them, at close quarters) and to remember what I’d learned from him at home, and not to expect too much because of the weight disadvantage and because the other jockeys were all professionals, and that this was not an amateur race.

As usual, it was the speed that seduced me and fulfilled, and the fact that we finished third was enough to make my day worthwhile, though Stallworthy, who had incidentally also trained the winner, announced to me several times, “I told you so. I told your father it was too much to expect. Perhaps you’ll listen to me next time.”

“Never mind,” Jim consoled. “If you’d won today you’d have to have carried a 10-lb. penalty at Exeter races next Saturday, always supposing you can persuade the old man to let him run there, after this. He’ll say it’s too soon, which it probably
is.”

The old man (Stallworthy) conducted a running battle over the telephone with my father.

My father won.

So, blisteringly, by six lengths, did Sarah’s Future, because the much longer galloping track, up on Halden Moor above Exeter, suited him better. He carried a 5-lb. penalty, not 10, and made light of it. The starting price, my father assured me later, would pay the training fees until Christmas.

Two days after that, in cooler blood, I went to learn mathematics.

 

My father learned back-bench tactics, but that wasn’t what the party had sent him to Hoopwestern for. He tried to explain it to me that the path upward led through the whip’s office, which sounded nastily about flagellation to me, though he laughed.

“The whip’s office is what gives you the thumbs-up for advancement towards the ministerial level.”

“And their thumbs are up for you?”

“Well ... so far ... yes.”

“Minister of what?” I asked, disbelievingly. “Surely you’re too young?”

“The really forward boys are on their way by twenty-two. At thirty-eight, I’m old.”

“I don’t like politics.”

“I can’t ride races,” he said.

To have the whip withdrawn, he explained, meant the virtual end to a political career. If getting elected was the first giant step, then winning the whip’s approval was the second. When the newly elected member for Hoopwestern was shortly appointed as undersecretary of state in the Department of Trade and Industry, it was apparently a signal to the whole fabric of government that a bright, fast-moving comet had risen over the horizon.

I went to listen to his maiden speech, sitting inconspicuously in the gallery. He spoke about lightbulbs and had the whole House laughing, and Hoopwestern’s share of the illumination market soared.

I met him for dinner after his speech, when he was again in the high exaltation of post-performance spirits.

“I suppose you haven’t been back to Hoopwestern?” he said.

“Well, no.”

“I have, of course. Leonard Kitchens is in trouble.”

“Who?”

“Leonard ...”

“Oh, yes. Yes, the unbalanced mustache. What sort of trouble?”

“The police now have a rifle which may be the one fired at us that evening.”

“By the police,” I asked as he paused, “do you mean Joe the policeman whose mother drives a school bus?”

“Joe whose mother drives a school bus is actually Detective Sergeant Joe Duke, and yes, he’s now received from The Sleeping Dragon a very badly rusted .22 rifle. It seems that after the trees shed their leaves the guttering ’round the roof of the hotel got choked with them, as happens most years, and rainwater overflowed instead of draining down the pipes as it should, so they sent a man up a ladder to clear out the leaves, and they found it wasn’t just leaves clogging the guttering, it was the .22 rifle.”

“But what’s that got to do with Leonard Kitchens?”

My father ate peppered steak, rare, with spinach.

“Leonard Kitchens is the nurseryman who festoons The Sleeping Dragon with all those baskets of geraniums.”

“But ...,” I objected.

“Apparently in a broom cupboard on that bedroom level he keeps a sort of cart with things for looking after the baskets. Shears, a long-spouted watering can, fertilizer. They think he could have hidden the gun in the cart. If you stand on a chair by the window you can reach up far enough outside to put a rifle up in the gutter. And someone
did
put a gun up there.”

I frowned over my food.

“You know what people are like,” my father said. “Someone says, ‘I
suppose
Leonard Kitchens could have put the rifle in the gutter, he’s always in and out of the hotel,’ and the next person drops the ‘I suppose’ and repeats the rest as a fact.”

“What does Leonard Kitchens himself say?”

“Of course, he says it wasn’t his gun and he didn’t put it in the gutter, and he says no one can prove he did.”

“That’s what guilty people always say,” I observed.

“Yes, but it’s true, no one can prove he ever had the gun. No one has come forward to connect him to rifles in any way.”

“What does Mrs. Kitchens say?”

“Leonard’s wife is doing him no good at all. She goes around saying her husband was so besotted with Orinda Nagle that he would do anything, including shooting me in the back, to get me out of Orinda’s way. Joe Duke asked her if she had ever seen a rifle in her husband’s possession, and instead of saying no, as any sensible woman would, she said he had a garden shed full of junk, and it was possible he had
anything
lying around in there.”

“Did Joe by any chance search the shed? I mean, did he have a look around to see if Leonard had any bullets?”

“Joe couldn’t get a warrant to search, as there were no real grounds for suspicion. Also, as I suppose you know, it’s quite easy to buy high-velocity bullets, and even easier to throw them away. There’s no chance of telling that it was indeed that rifle that was used because, even if you could remove all the rust, there is no bullet to match it to, as the one from the whatnot finally got lost altogether in the fire. No one ever found any cartridge cases in the hotel, either.”

My father continued with his steak. Putting down his knife and fork, he said, “I took the Range Rover to Basil Rudd’s garage and had him dismantle the engine for a thorough check of the oil system. There was nothing in the sump except oil. It was actually extremely unprofessional for that mechanic—Terry, I think he is—to push the substitute plug up into the sump, but Basil Rudd won’t hear a word against him, and I suppose there was no harm done.”

“There might have been,” I said. I thought for a moment and asked, “I suppose Leonard Kitchens isn’t accused of being in possession of candles?”

“You may laugh,” my father said, “but in the shop at his garden center, where they sell plastic gnomes and things, they do have table centerpieces with candles and ribboned bows and stuff.”

“You can buy candles anywhere,” I said. “And what about the fire? Was that Leonard Kitchens, too?”

“He was there,” my father reminded me, and I remembered Mrs. Kitchens saying her Leonard liked a good fire.

“Did the firemen ever find out how that fire started?”