“Exeter University required to know where you would spend your gap year before they offered you a deferred entry: that is to say, your going there not this October, but next year. They weren’t enthusiastic about racecourses.”
“There’s an Exeter racecourse.”
“You know damned well what they mean.”
“I don’t like politics.” Change the subject.
“Politics are the oil of the world.”
“You mean... the world doesn’t run without oil?” He nodded. “When politics jam solid, you get wars.”
“Father...” I said.
“Dad.”
“No. Father. Why do you want to be a politician?”
After a pause he said, “I am one. I can’t help it.”
“But you’ve never... I mean...”
“I’ve never made a move before? Don’t think I haven’t considered it. I’ve known since I was your age or younger that one day I would try for Parliament. But I needed a solid base. I needed to prove to myself that I could make money. I needed to understand economics. And then there came a time not long ago when I said to myself ‘now or never.’ So it’s now.”
It was the longest statement about himself that he’d ever made in my hearing; and he had simplified for my sake, I thought, an urge that had taken time to ripen and had burst out fully grown at The Sleeping Dragon. The Juliard dragon was awake now and roaring and prowling up broad Whitehall towards Number 10.
Thinking about him, I lost the way home. He made no sarcastic comment when I stopped, consulted the map, worked out where I’d gone wrong and finally arrived in the parking lot from an unexpected direction; and for that forebearance alone I would have served him as an esquire to a knight. How old-fashioned could one get?
It was well after six o’clock when we reached the parking lot, which, in consequence, was almost empty. All the bordering shops had closed for the day. The late-afternoon sunshine weakened to soft gold as I pulled up and applied Crystal’s brakes.
There were dim lights in the office, but no people. I unlocked the door and we found a large note laid out prominently on Mervyn Teck’s desk.
The Range Rover is in Rudd’s Repair Garage. They thoroughly overhauled it and found nothing wrong.
Four
I would have expected the nervous energy of the day-long performance in Quindle to have earned my father an evening’s rest, but I had barely begun to wake up to the stamina demanded of would-be public servants. It seemed that far from a quiet top-up of batteries, he was committed to another marathon shake-hands-and-smile, not this time in the chandeliered magnificence of The Sleeping Dragon’s all-purpose hall, but in much more basic space normally used as a schooling ground for five-year-olds in Hoopwestern’s outer regions.
There were kids’ attempts at pictures pinned to corkboards all around the walls, mostly thin figures with big heads and spiky hair sticking straight out like Medusa’s snakes. There were simple notices — do not run and raise your hand — all written in self-conscious lowercase letters.
Primary colors everywhere bombarded the eyesight to saturation point, and I couldn’t believe that this sort of thing had been my own educational springboard, but it had. Another world, long left behind.
There were several rows of the temporary folding chairs that grew more and more familiar to me as the days passed, and a makeshift speaker’s platform, this time with a microphone that squeaked whenever tested, and on several other occasions when switched on or off.
The lighting was of unflattering greenish-white fluorescent strips, and there weren’t enough of them to raise spirits above depression. Limbo must look like this, I thought: and the unenticing room had in fact drawn the sort of audience you could count on fingers and toes and still have enough left over for an abacus.
Mervyn Teck met us on the doorstep looking at his watch and checking, but by good luck and asking the way (less pride on my part than shame of arriving late) we had turned up on the exact minute advertised by a scatter of leaflets.
On the table on the platform, beside the temperamental microphone, there were a gavel for calling the meeting to order and two large plates of sandwiches secured by plastic wrap.
Two or three earnest lady volunteers crowded around the candidate with goodwill, but it was plain, ten minutes after start time, that apathy, and not enthusiasm, had won the evening.
I expected my father to be embarrassed by the small turnout and to hurry through the unsatisfactory proceedings, but he made a joke of it, abandoning the microphone, and sat on the edge of the platform, beckoning the sparse and scattered congregation to come forward into the first few rows, to make the meeting more coherent.
His magic worked. Everyone moved forward. He spoke to them familiarly, as if addressing a roomful of friends, and I watched him turn a disaster into a useful exercise in public relations. By the time the sandwiches had been liberated from the plastic even the few who had come to heckle had been tamed to silence.
Mervyn Teck looked both thoughtful and displeased.
“Something the matter?” I asked.
He said sourly, “Orinda would have drawn a much better house. She’d have packed the hall. They love her here: she presents prizes to the children here every term. She buys them herself.”
“I’m sure she’ll go on doing it.”
I meant it without irony, but Mervyn Teck gave me a glance of dislike and moved away. One of the lady volunteers sweetly told me that the time of the meeting had clashed with the current rave series on the television, and that even the pubs were suffering from it on Thursday nights. Tomorrow would be different, she said. Tomorrow the Town Hall will be packed.
“Er...” I said, “what’s happening in the Town Hall?”
“But you’re his son, aren’t you?”
“Yes, but...”
“But you don’t know that tomorrow night your father goes face-to-face in a debate with Paul Bethune?”
I shook my head.
“Fireworks,” she said happily. “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
My father, when I asked him about it on the short drive back to the center of Hoopwestern, seemed full of equal relish.
“I suppose,” I said, “there’ll be more point to it than the sort of fiasco tonight could have been.”
“Every vote counts,” he corrected me. “If I won only a few tonight, that’s fine. You have to win the floaters over to your side, and they have to be persuaded one by one.”
“I’m hungry,” I said as we passed a brightly lit take-away, so we backtracked and bought chicken wings with banana and bacon, and even there my father, recognized, fell into political chat with the man deep-frying chips.
In the early morning I went out and bought a copy of the Gazette. Sleaze and Paul Bethune filled pages four and five (with photographs) but the front-page topic of concern was headlined “Juliard Shot?”
Columns underneath said yes (eyewitnesses) and no (he wasn’t hurt). Statements from the police said nothing much (they couldn’t find a gun). Statements from onlookers, like the self-important gunshot expert, said Juliard had definitely been the object of an assassination attempt. He thought so and he was always right.
The consensus theory of the reporters (including Usher Rudd) was that resentment against Juliard was running high in the Orinda Nagle camp. The editor’s leader column didn’t believe that political assassination ever took place at so low a level. World leaders, perhaps. Unelected local candidates, never.
I walked through the town to the ring road looking for Rudd’s Repair Garage and found the staff unlocking their premises for the day. They had a large covered workshop and an even larger wire-fenced compound where jobs done or waiting stood in haphazard rows. The Range Rover was parked in that compound, sunlight already gleaming on its metallic paint.