She sounded fiercely bitter. Whatever Polly thought of my ability to understand unhappiness and release it, I felt lost in the maze of Orinda’s implacable grievances against my father.
“Someone took a shot at him,” I said.
Orinda shook her head. “Another lie.”
“I was there,” I protested.
“So was Alderney,” she said. “He saw what happened. George Juliard tripped on the cobbles and someone loosed a single shot out of high spirits and Juliard claimed it had been aimed at him! Utter rubbish. He’ll do anything for publicity.”
I thought: Orinda herself would never get under a car and unscrew a sump plug. However careful one might be, oil would run out before one could thrust a candle into the drain. Even if she knew how and where to unscrew the plug, engine oil and Orinda’s clothes couldn’t be thought of together in a month of canvassing.
Orinda needed glasses to read a race card: I couldn’t envisage her aiming and firing a target rifle.
Orinda might wish my father dead, but couldn’t kill him herself, and didn’t believe that anyone else had tried.
Orinda, I thought, hadn’t asked or paid anyone to get rid of her rival physically. There were limits to her hate.
I took her across the course to watch the second race from near one of the fences, to give her at least some sensation of the speed involved. Her narrow high heels tended to dig into the turf and stick, making walking difficult, which didn’t please her. I was not, I acknowledged to myself in depression, making a great success of the afternoon.
She was, though, impressed by the noise and energy of the half-ton horses soaring or crashing through the tops of the big black birch fence, and she could hear the jockeys shouting to each other and to their mounts; could see the straining legs in white breeches and the brilliant colors of the silks in the August sun. And whether she wanted me to know it or not, she did quite suddenly understand why this sort of racing fascinated the duke and everyone else who had made the effort and the journey to the racecourse.
When the horses had surged past us again and were striving their way to the winning post, while the very air still vibrated with their passage, I said, “I do understand what you feel about having been passed over by the selectors.”
Orinda said unkindly, “You can’t possibly. You’re far too young.”
Almost in desperation I said, “You’ve lost what you most wanted, and it’s near to unbearable. You were looking forward to a sort of life that would be a joy every day, that would fulfill you and give you inner power to achieve your best dreams, and it’s been snatched away. You’ve been told you can’t have it. The pain of it’s brutal. Believe me, I do know.”
She stared, the green eyes wide.
“You don’t have to be old,” I said. “You can feel it if you’re only six and you passionately want a pony and you’ve nowhere to keep it and it’s not sensible to start with. And I...” I swallowed. I wanted to stop again, but this time found the grit for the words. “I wanted this.” I swept an arm to the black fence, to the whole wide racecourse. “I wanted all of this. I’ve wanted to be a jockey for as long as I can remember. I’ve grown up in the belief that this would be my life. I’ve grown up feeling warm and certain of my future, and... well... this week it’s been snatched away from me. This week I’ve been told I can’t live this life, I’m not a good enough rider, I haven’t the spark to be the jockey I want to be. The trainer I was riding for told me to leave. My father says he’ll pay for me to go to university, but not for me to waste my time riding in races when I’m not going to be brilliant. It didn’t really sink in... I didn’t know how absolutely awful it would be until I came here today... but I’d like to scream, actually, and roll on the ground, and if you think you have to be old enough to be my mother to feel as you do, well, you’re wrong.”
Six
At the end of the afternoon I glumly drove the Range Rover back to Polly’s house in the woods, feeling that I’d wasted all her planning and not only failed to profit from an unrepeatable opportunity but had positively made things worse.
By the time Orinda and I had recrossed the course (her heels were sticking worse than ever) and regained the stewards’ room, the duke had disappeared again towards his duties. Orinda watched the third race from the viewing balcony leading out of the luncheon room, her back relentlessly turned towards me, her manner forbidding conversation.
A horse carrying a 7-lb. penalty won the race. Orinda hadn’t backed it.
When the duke returned, all smiles at the sight of her, she thanked him charmingly for his hospitality and left. She said nothing to my father or to Polly or to myself, ignoring our existence, and I survived the last three races wishing I were smaller, richer, and at the very least a genius. Settling for the obvious privileges I had seemed dreary compared with the fairy tale lost.
When Polly invited us into her house my father accepted at once.
“Cheer up,” he commanded to my silent reluctance. “No one wins all the time. Say something. You haven’t said anything for hours.”
“All right... Orinda said Usher Rudd wants to know if I’m your catamite.”
My father spluttered into the gin that Polly had poured him.
Polly said, “What’s a catamite?” but my father knew.
I said, “Usher Rudd’s trying to prove I’m not your son. If you have a marriage certificate, put it in a bank vault.”
“And your birth certificate, where’s that?”
“With my stuff at Mrs. Wells’s.”
He frowned. My things hadn’t followed me so far. He borrowed Polly’s phone and called my ex-landlady forthwith. “She’s packed everything,” he reported, “but the carriers I ordered haven’t turned up. I’ll see to it again on Monday.”
“My bicycle is at the stables.”
He caught some sense of the wreck he’d made of my aspirations, but I also saw quite clearly that he still expected me to face reality thoroughly and grow up.
“Tough it out,” he said.
“Yes.”
Polly looked from one of us to the other and said, “The boy’s doing his best for you, George.”
Leaving her in her house, I drove the Range Rover back to Hoopwestern, familiar at last with the four-wheel drive and the weight and size. I disembarked my parent at a church hall (directions from Mervyn) where he was due to meet and thank the small army of volunteers working for him and the party’s sake throughout the whole scattered area of the constituency. The volunteers had brought their families and their neighbors, and also tea, beer, wine and cake to sustain them and my father’s inexhaustible enthusiasm to energize them for the next three weeks.
“My son... this is my son.” He presented me over and over again, and I shook hands and smiled and smiled and chatted up old ladies and talked football with shaky knowledge and racing with piercing regret.
Mervyn moved from group to group with plans and lists. This ward would be canvassed tomorrow, that ward on Monday: leaflets... posters... visits... leave not one of seventy thousand voters unaware of JULIARD.
Three more weeks of it... Even with the spice of looking out for stray attacks, the campaign at that point seemed more like purgatory than appealing.
But I’d said I would do it... and I would.
I ate chocolate cake. Still no pizza.
At good-bye time I collected the Range Rover from where I’d parked it in a nearby road and was as sure as possible that no one had tampered with it that evening.
Foster Fordham had given me simple instructions on the telephone. “Always take with you a carton of dishwasher powder in a box with a spout. When you park the vehicle, sprinkle a thin line of powder on the ground from behind each front wheel back to the rear wheel on the same side. If anyone has moved the vehicle or wriggled under it in your absence, the powder will tell you. Understand?”