Polly and I listened to snatches. “They don’t have the manpower for surveillance... they won’t do it... you can’t guard against a determined assassin... yes...” — my father’s gaze slid my way — “... but he’s too young... all right, then... we’re agreed.” He put down the receiver carefully and with deliberation and a sigh said, “Foster Fordham will write a report for the police. Ben will nanny me to the best of his ability and Mervyn will have to put up with it. And now, dearest Polly, I’m going to abandon tomorrow’s canvassing and go where I’m not expected.”
Hanging from a hook on one wall was a large appointments calendar with an extensive square allocated to each day. Crystal had entered the basics of my father’s advance plans in the squares so that one could see at a glance what he would be doing on each day.
The program had started the previous Tuesday with “Candidate arrives. Office familiarization.” Wednesday’s schedule of “Drive around constituency” had been crossed off, and “Fetch son from Brighton” inserted instead and underneath that, “Dinner at Sleeping Dragon?” Nothing about being shot at on the way home.
The Quindle engagements and the infant school evening were listed for Thursday, and door-to-door canvassing and the Town Hall debate for Friday.
More of the same stretched ahead. If I hadn’t had the interest of attempting to foil seriously dangerous attacks on said candidate I would have suffered severe strain of the smiling muscles long before polling day.
How could he face it, I wondered. How could he enjoy it, as he clearly did?
“Tomorrow,” he said, pleased with his inspiration, “tomorrow we’ll go to Dorset County racecourse. Tomorrow will be for Ben. We’ll go to the races.”
My first reaction was joy, which he noted. Fast on joy’s heels came a sort of devastation that I couldn’t hope to be riding there, that I would spend the afternoon as an exile, envying my neighbor his ox and his ass and his saddle in the amateurs’ steeplechase; but I let only the joy show, I think.
“We’ll go in the Range Rover,” my father said decisively, pleased with his plan. “And Polly will come with us, won’t you, Poll?”
Polly said she would love to.
Did Polly ever lie?
We drank the coffee without stress, my father finally as calm as he’d achieved during this whole strange week. Polly went out through the back office to retrieve her car and drive home, which I understood was a house in a wood outside the town, and my father and I, bolting everything securely, climbed the steep little staircase and slept undisturbed until Saturday morning.
Mervyn leaned in heavy annoyance on the bell at breakfast time and of course frowned heavily over the change of destination. How did George ever hope to be successful in a marginal seat if he neglected the door-to-door persuasion routine, which was of paramount importance? The Dorset County racecourse, sin of sins, was outside the Hoopwestern catchment area.
Never mind, my father soothed him, the many Hoopwestern voters who went to the races might approve.
Mervyn, unconvinced, shut his mouth grimly for half an hour, but as the day expanded decided to salvage at least crumbs from what he considered the ruins of canvassing’s best weekend opportunity and got busy on the telephone, with the result that we were invited to lunch with the racecourse stewards and were otherwise showered with useful tickets. Mervyn, from long experience, knew everyone of influence in the county.
He blamed me, of course, for the switch, and perhaps with reason. If he’d had his way he would have been dancing happy attendance on Orinda, walking backwards in her presence. What he would have done with A. L. Wyvern I couldn’t guess, but presumably he was used to the enigmatic shadow, as the Anonymous Lover had been deceased Dennis Nagle’s best friend also. They played golf.
Mervyn’s disappointments, I thought, shrugging off his ill will, were just too bad. In his life’s terms, success lay in getting his candidate elected or, if not elected, a close runner-up. Mervyn was not about to ruin his own reputation as agent out of tetchiness with Juliards, father or son.
The chilly atmosphere in the offices was lightened by an unexpected visit from the woman who ran the charity shop next door. She and Mervyn knew each other well, but she was fascinated to meet the new candidate, she said; she had seen us come and go, she wanted to shake hands with George, she’d heard his son was a doll, she wondered if we would like a homemade apple pie.
She put her offering on my father’s desk.
“Kind of you, Amy,” Mervyn said, and in his manner I read that not only had he known his neighbor a long time but he’d undervalued her for probably the whole period.
Amy was one of those people easy to undervalue; an apologetic, unassuming middle-aged widow (Polly said) who received gifts of unwanted junk, spruced them up a bit to sell, and would never have dipped into the till before passing on the proceeds to the charity that maintained her. Amy was fluffy, honest and halfway to stupid: also kind and talkative. One day of unadulterated Amy, I thought, would last a lifetime.
It was easy not to listen to every word in the flow, but she did grab our attention at one point.
“Someone broke a pane of glass in our window on Wednesday night and I’ve had a terrible job getting it mended.” She told us at far too much length how she’d managed it. “A policeman called, you know, and asked if the window had been broken by a rifle bullet but I said of course not, I clean the floor first thing when I arrive every morning because, of course, I don’t live upstairs like you can here. There’s only a bathroom and one small room I use for storage, though sometimes I do let a homeless person sleep there in an emergency. Anyway, of course I didn’t find a bullet. I told the policeman, Joe it was, whose mother drives a school bus, and he came in for a look ’round and made a note or two. I saw it in the paper about the gun going off and maybe someone was shooting at Mr. Juliard, you never feel safe these days, do you? And then, just now when I was dusting an old whatnot that I can’t seem to sell to anybody, I came to this bump, and I pulled it out, and I wonder if this was what Joe was looking for, so do you think I should tell him?”
She plunged a hand into a pocket in her drab, droopy cardigan and put down on the desk, beside the apple pie, a squashed-looking piece of metal that had certainly flown at high speed from a .22 rifle.
“I do think,” my father said carefully, “that you should tell your friend Joe, whose mother drives a school bus, that you’ve found the little lump of metal stuck in a whatnot.”
“Do you really?”
“Yes, I do.”
Amy picked up the bullet, squinted at it, and polished it a bit on her cardigan. So much for residual fingerprints, I thought.
“All right, then,” Amy said cheerfully, putting the prize back in her pocket. “I was sure you would know what I should do.”
She invited him to look around her shop, but he cravenly sent me instead, and so I found myself staring at an ugly six-foot-high cane-and-wicker whatnot that had stood near the window and had stopped the slug.
“I call it an étagère these days,” Amy said sadly. “But still nobody wants it. I don’t suppose you...?”
“No,” I said. And nor did I want any of the silver spoons or children’s toys or secondhand clothes neatly and cleanly arranged to do good.
I retrieved the Range Rover from its safe haven, picked up my father and (following Mervyn’s ungracious directions) found Polly’s unexpectedly grand house in the woods. She sat on the rear seat for our journey to the races, and with a touch of glee, detailed a few telephone calls she had made; a touch of persuasion here, a dangle of carrot there.