The following week it was Orinda who nearly died.
Seven
On the Tuesday of the last full week of canvassing, my box of possessions, and my bicycle, finally arrived by carrier from Mrs. Wells.
Up in our room, my father picked with interest and curiosity through the meager debris of my life: two trophies for winning amateur ’chases the previous Easter, several photographs of me on horses and skis, and other photos from school with me sitting in one of those frozen team lineups (this one for target shooting) with the captain hugging a cup. There were also books on mathematics and racing biographies. Also clothes, but not many as, to my dismay, I was still growing.
My father extracted my passport, my birth certificate and the framed photograph of his wedding to my mother. He took the picture out of its frame and after looking at it for several long minutes he ran his finger over her face and sighed deeply, and it was the only time I’d known him to show any emotion at all about his loss.
I said incautiously, “Do you remember her? If she walked into the room now, would you know her?”
He gave me a look of such bleakness that I realized I’d asked a question of unforgivable intrusion, but after a pause all he said was, “You never forget your first.”
I swallowed.
He said, “Have you had your first?”
I felt numb, embarrassed almost beyond speech, but in the end I said truthfully, “No.”
He nodded. It was a moment of almost unbearable intimacy, the first ever between us, but he remained totally calm and matter-of-fact, and let me recover.
He sorted through some papers he had brought in a briefcase from a recent trip to London, put my own identifications in the case, snapped shut the locks and announced that we were going to call on the Hoopwestern Gazette.
We called, in fact, on the editor, who was also the publisher and proprietor of the only local daily. He was a man in shirtsleeves, harassed, middle aged, and from the tone of his front pages, censorious. He stood up from his desk as we approached.
“Mr. Samson Frazer,” my father said, calling him by name. “When we met the other evening, you asked if I thought people who vote for me are silly.”
Samson Frazer, for all his importance in Hoopwestem, was no match in power for my parent. Interesting, I thought.
“Er...” he said.
“We’ll return to that in a minute,” my father told him. “First, I have some things for you to see.”
He unlatched the briefcase and opened it.
“I have brought the following items,” he said, taking out each paper and putting it down in front of the editor. “My marriage certificate. My son’s birth certificate. Both of our passports. This photograph of my wife and myself taken outside the registry office after our wedding. On the back” — he turned the picture over — “you will see the professional photographer’s name and copyright, and the date. Here also is my wife’s death certificate. She died of complications after the birth of our son. This son, Benedict, my only child, who has been at my side during this by-election.”
The editor gave me a swift glance as if he hadn’t until that point taken note of my existence.
“You employ a person called Usher Rudd,” my father said. “I think you should be careful. He seems to be trying to cast doubt on my son’s identity and legitimacy. I’m told he has made scurrilous insinuations.”
He asked the editor just how he’d come to hear of “silly” votes when he, my father, had only used the word — and in a joke — in the privacy of his own room.
Samson Frazer froze like a dazzled rabbit.
“If I have to,” my father said, “I will send hair samples for DNA testing. My own hair, my son’s hair, and some hair from my wife, which she gave me in a locket. I hope you will carefully consider what I’ve said and what I’ve shown you.” He began methodically replacing the certificates in the briefcase. “Because I assure you,” he went on pleasantly, “if the Hoopwestern Gazette should be so unwise as to cast doubt on my son’s origins, I will sue the paper and you personally for defamation and libel, and you might quite likely wish you hadn’t done it.” He snapped the locks shut so vigorously that they sounded in themselves like a threat.
“You understand?” he asked.
The editor plainly did.
“Good,” my father said. “If you catch me in sleaze, that will be fair enough. If you try to manufacture it, I’ll hang you out by the toes.”
Samson Frazer found nothing to say.
“Good day to you, sir,” my father said.
He was in high good humor all the way back to the hotel and went upstairs humming.
“What would you say,” he suggested, “to a pact between us?”
“What sort of pact?”
He put the briefcase down on the table and drew out two sheets of plain paper.
“I’ve been thinking,” he said, “of making you a promise, and I want you to make the same promise in return. We both know how vulnerable one is to people like Usher Rudd.”
“And it’s not impossible,” I interrupted, “that he’s listening to us at this moment, particularly if he knows where we’ve just been.”
My father looked briefly startled, but then grinned.
“The red-haired dung beetle can listen all he likes. The promise I’ll make to you is not to give him, or anyone like him, any grounds ever for messy publicity. I’ll be dead boring. There will be no kiss-and-tell bimbos and no illicit payment for favors and no cheating on tax and no nasty pastimes like drugs or kinky sex...”
I smiled easily, amused.
“Yes,” he said, “but I want you to make the same promise to me. I want you to promise me that if I get elected you’ll do nothing throughout my political career that can get me discredited or sacked or disgraced in any way.”
“But I wouldn’t,” I protested.
“It’s easy for you to say that now while you’re young, but you’ll find life’s full of terrible temptations.”
“I promise,” I said.
He shook his head. “That’s not enough. I want us both to write it down. I want you to be able to see and remember what you promised. Of course, it’s in no way a legal document or anything pretentious like that, it’s just an affirmation of intent.” He paused, clicking a ballpoint pen while he thought, then he wrote very quickly and simply on one sheet of paper, and signed his name, and pushed the paper over for me to read.
It said: “I will cause no scandal, nor will I perform any shameful or illegal act.”
Wow, I thought. I said, not wanting this to get too serious, “It’s a bit comprehensive, isn’t it?”
“It’s not worth doing otherwise. But you can write your own version. Write what you’re comfortable with.”
I had no sense of binding myself irrevocably to sainthood.
I wrote: “I’ll do nothing that could embarrass my father’s political career or drag his name in the dust. I’ll do my best to keep him safe from any sort of attack.”
I signed my name lightheartedly and gave him the page. “Will that do?”
He read it, smiling. “It’ll do.”
He folded both pages together, then picked up the wedding photograph and positioned it facedown on the glass in its frame. He then put both of the signed pacts on the photo and replaced the back part of the frame, fastening it with its clips.
“There you are,” he said, turning the frame face up. “Every time you look at your mother and me, you’ll remember the promises behind the photo, inside the frame. Couldn’t be simpler.”