Crystal, trying to continue working but having to cling physically to her desk to avoid being swept around the place like flotsam, remarked to me tartly that there would hardly have been more fuss if George Juliard had been killed.
“Lucky he wasn’t,” I said, wedging my stool next to her to keep us both anchored.
“Did the noise of the gunshot make him trip?” she asked.
“No. He tripped first.”
“Why are you so sure?”
“Because the bang of a high-velocity bullet reaches you after the bullet itself.”
She looked disbelieving.
“I learned it in physics lessons,” I said.
She glanced at my beardless face. “How old are you?” she asked.
“Seventeen.”
“You can’t even vote!”
“I don’t actually want to.”
She looked across to where my father was winning media allies with modesty and grace.
“I’ve met a fair number of politicians,” she said. “Your father’s different.”
“In what way?”
“Can’t you feel his power? Perhaps you can’t, as you’re his son. You’re too close to him.”
“I do sometimes feel it.” It stunned me, I should have said.
“Look at last night,” Crystal went on without pausing. “I was there in the hall, sitting at the back. He set that place alight. He’s a natural speaker. I mean, I work here, and he had my pulse racing. Poor old Dennis Nagle, he was a nice worthy man, pretty capable in a quiet way, but he could never have got a crowd cheering and stamping their feet, like last night.”
“Could Orinda?” I asked.
Crystal was startled. “No, she can’t make people laugh. But don’t judge her by last night. She’s done devoted work in the constituency. She was always at Dennis’s side. She’s feeling very hurt that she wasn’t selected to follow Dennis, because until your father galvanized the selection panel she was unopposed.”
“In fact,” I said, “if anyone had a motive for bumping off my father, it would be her.”
“Oh, but she wouldn’t!” Crystal was honestly dismayed. “She can sometimes be a darling, you know. Mervyn loves her. He’s quite put out that he’s not working to get her elected. He was looking forward to it.”
My first impression of Crystal’s sharp spikiness had been right only as regarded her outward appearance. She was kinder and more patient than she looked. I wondered if at one time she had been anorexic: I had known anorexic girls at school. The teeth of one of them had fallen out.
Crystal’s teeth were straight and white, though seldom visible, owing to an overall serious view of life. I thought she was probably twenty-five or — six and hadn’t had enough in life to smile about.
Mervyn Teck zigzagged to my elbow through the busy crowd and said it was time to think about driving my father to his day’s engagements in the outlying town of Quindle. The constituency was large in area with separate pockets of concentrated inhabitation: Mervyn gave me a map with roads and destination marked, but looked at me doubtfully.
“Are you sure you’re competent enough?”
I said “Yes” with more confidence than I felt.
“One incident like last night’s is a godsend,” he said. “A car crash on top would be too much. We don’t want any whiff of accident-prone.”
“No,” I said.
Across the room my father was dangling the Range Rover’s keys in my direction. I went over to him and took them and he, with the help of a walking stick, detached himself from the chattering well-wishers (the police and media had long gone) and limped through the office and out to the parking lot.
Crowds beget crowds. There was a bunch of people outside the rear door who clapped and smiled at my father and gave him thumbs-up signs. I looked across the parking lot to where we had left the Range Rover on our arrival from Brighton the previous afternoon, and my father asked me to fetch it over so that he wouldn’t need to hobble that far.
I walked across to the conspicuous vehicle and stopped beside it, the keys in my hand. The sun shone again that day, gleaming on the gold and silver painted garlands; and after a moment I turned away and went back to my father.
“What’s the matter?” he said, half-annoyed. “Can’t you drive it!”
“Is it insured for someone my age?”
“Yes, of course. I wouldn’t suggest it otherwise. Go and fetch it, Ben.”
I frowned and went back into the offices, ignoring his displeasure.
“It’s time you went,” Mervyn said, equally impatient. “You said you could drive George’s car.”
I nodded. “But I’d be better in a smaller car. Like you said, we don’t want an accident. Do you have a smaller one? Could I borrow yours?”
Mervyn said with obvious aggravation, “My car isn’t insured for drivers under twenty-one.”
“Mine is, though,” Crystal said. “My nineteen-year-old brother drives it. But it’s not very glamorous. Not like the Range Rover.”
She dug the keys out of her handbag and said that Mervyn (to his impatience) would give her a ride home if we were not back by five-thirty, and would pick her up again in the morning. I thanked her with an awkward kiss on the cheek, and with Mervyn Teck repeating his disapproval, went out to rejoin my father.
“I’m disappointed in you, Ben,” he said when Mervyn Teck explained. “You’d better practice in the Range Rover tomorrow.”
“OK. But today, now, before we go, would you arrange for some mechanics to come here and make sure there’s nothing wrong with it.”
“Of course there’s nothing wrong with it. I drove it to Brighton and back yesterday and it was running perfectly.”
“Yes... but it’s been standing out in the car park all night. Last night it’s possible someone tried to shoot you. Suppose someone’s hammered a nail or two into the Range Rover’s tires? Or anything.” I finished self-deprecatingly, as if I thought sabotage a childish fantasy, but after a brief, thoughtful silence my father said to Mervyn, “I’ll go in Crystal’s car. Ben can practice on the Range Rover tomorrow. Meanwhile, Mervyn, get the Range Rover overhauled, would you?”
Mervyn gave me a sour look, but it was he, after all, who had most wanted to avoid the accident-prone labeclass="underline" or so he’d said.
In Crystal’s small workaday box on wheels I therefore drove the candidate safely to his far-flung appointments, and again I saw and heard him shake awake the apathetic voting public, progressively attracting more and more people as his voice raised laughter and applause. His audience approved with their eyes and shouted questions, some friendly, some hostile, all of them getting thoughtful answers, lightly phrased.
I didn’t know how much of the day’s flashing enthusiasm would actually carry the feet to the polling booths, but it was enough, my father assured me, if they didn’t walk into the opposition camp and write their X for Bethune.
We had squeezed into Crystal’s car an invention of my father’s that was basically two wooden boxes, each a foot high, one larger than the other, that would bolt together, one on top of the other, to form an impromptu stepped platform to raise a speaker above his listeners: just enough for him to be comfortably heard, not high enough to be psychologically threatening. “My soapbox” my father called it, though it was many years since such crowd-pulling structures had contained soap.