He stood the picture on the table and without fuss gave me back my birth certificate and passport.
“Keep them safe.”
“Yes.”
“Right. Then let’s get on with this election.”
Stopping only briefly to leave my identity in an envelope in the manager’s safe, we went to the new basic headquarters to collect Mervyn, pamphlets, Faith and Lavender, and start a door-to-door morning around three Hoopwestern housing estates. Lightbulb workers, they said.
Mervyn, proud of himself, had found a replacement megaphone. His friendly printer continued to furnish a torrent of JULIARDs. Mervyn for once seemed content in his world, but his day shone even brighter when Orinda arrived, declaring her readiness for the fray.
With Faith and Lavender cool and Mervyn hot, therefore six of us squeezed into the Range Rover, leaving behind Crystal (chronically anxious) and Marge (dusting and sweeping).
Only eight days after this one, I thought, and it will be over. And what will I do, I wondered, after that? There would be three or four weeks to fill before the Exeter term started. I mentally shrugged. I would be eighteen. I had a bicycle... might get to France...
I drove mechanically, stopping wherever Mervyn dictated.
Orinda had come in neat slacks and jacket, light orange-scarlet in color. As usual, gold chains. Smooth perfect makeup.
Babies got kissed. My father came across a clutch of child-minding house-husbands, factory shift workers, and learned about tungsten filaments. I chatted up a coffee-morning of old ladies who weren’t satisfied until my parent shook their hands. (Pink smiles. A blossoming of votes.) Orinda met old friends. Mervyn alerted the streets to our presence like a musically tinkling fish-and-chip van, and Faith and Lavender left no doorbell unrung.
When we drove out of the last of the estates we’d seen one or two TITMUSSes, no WHISTLE, not a BETHUNE to speak of, but many a window now proclaimed JULIARD. One could not but hope.
Mervyn and my father decided on one more long street, this time of varied and slightly more prosperous-looking houses. I, by this time, had had enough of door-to-dooring to last me several lifetimes, but as always the others seemed to have an indefatigable appetite. My father’s eyes still shone with enthusiasm and people who disagreed with his political theories left him not downcast but stimulated. He never tired, it seemed to me, of trying to convert the heathen.
Without much hope I asked Faith and Lavender if they wouldn’t prefer to say they’d done enough; how about lunch? “No, no,” they insisted with fervor, “every vote counts.”
Orinda alone seemed uneasy and withdrawn and not her usual positive and extravagant self, and in the end, while she and I waited together on the sidewalk beside the Range Rover for the others to finish galvanizing a retirement home, I asked her what was the matter.
“Nothing,” she said, and I didn’t press it, but after a moment or two she said, “Do you see that white BMW there, along the road?”
“Yes.” I frowned. “I saw it earlier, in one of the housing estates.”
“He’s following us.”
“Who’s following us? Is it Usher Rudd?”
“Oh, no.” She found the idea a surprise, which in itself surprised me. “No, not Usher Rudd. It’s Alderney Wyvern.”
It was I, then, who was surprised, and I asked, sounding astonished, “Why on earth should he follow us?”
Orinda frowned. “He’s still furious with me for supporting your father.”
“Well... I’d noticed. But why, exactly?”
“You’re too young to understand.”
“I could try.”
“Dennis used to do everything Alderney said. I mean, Alderney actually was how Dennis got advancement. Alderney would tell him what to say. Alderney is very clever, politically.”
“Why doesn’t he find a parliamentary seat for himself?”
“He says he doesn’t want to.” She paused. “To be frank, he isn’t easy to understand. But I know he expected me to be selected and to retain the seat as Dennis’s widow, and he worked on people like that creepy Leonard Kitchens, with that shudder-making mustache, to make sure I was selected. And then out of the blue the central party in Westminster decided they wanted George Juliard in Parliament, so he came and dazzled the selectors, who always listen to Polly, as a matter of course, and she fell for him like a ton of bricks... Anyway, Alderney got nowhere with your father. I sometimes think that that’s the sort of power Alderney really wants, to be able to pull the levers behind the scenes.”
It seemed to me at that moment a wacky notion. (I still had a lot to learn.)
“So now that I’ve joined your father,” Orinda said, “I’m not listening to Alderney as much. I used to do everything he suggested. We always did, Dennis and I, because Alderney would tell us such and such a thing would happen on the political scene and mostly he was right, and now I’m out with you and your father so much of the time... You’ll laugh, but I almost think he’s jealous!”
I didn’t laugh. I’d seen my father’s powerful effect on every female in Hoopwestern, from acid-tongued Lavender onwards. It wouldn’t have surprised me if he’d left a comet tail of jealousy through the constituency, except that he needed the men to vote for him as well as the women, and I’d watched him keep a tactical distance from their wives.
Alderney Wyvern, along the road, got out of his car and stood aggressively on the sidewalk, hands on hips, staring at Orinda.
“I’d better go and talk to him,” Orinda said.
I said instinctively, “No, don’t.”
She caught the alarm in my voice and smiled. “I’ve known him for years.”
I hadn’t yet come across the adult, grossly matured variety of jealousy, only the impotent rage of adolescence, but I felt intuitively that a great — and disturbing — change had taken place in A. L. Wyvern.
He had been by his own choice self-effacing on every occasion I’d seen him: quiet in manner, self-contained, behaving as if he didn’t want to be noticed. All that had now gone. The stocky figure seemed now heavier, the shoulders hunched, the face, even from a distance, visibly tense with menace. He had the out-of-control anger of a rioter, or of a militant striker.
I said to Orinda, “Stay here.”
“Don’t be silly.”
She walked confidently towards him in her brave orange-red clothes.
I could hear his voice, low and growling, but not what he said. Her reply was light and teasing. She put out a hand as if to stroke his arm affectionately, and he hit her very hard in the face.
She cried out with shock as much as pain. I ran towards her, and although Wyvern saw me coming, he hit her again, backhanded, across her nose and mouth.
She squealed, raising her hands to shield her face, trying at the same time to escape from him, but he clutched the shoulder of her jacket to prevent her running, and drew back his fist for a third blow.
She wrenched herself free. She half overbalanced. She stumbled off the sidewalk into the roadway.
The prosperous residential street that had been so peaceful and empty suddenly seemed filled with a heavy truck that bore down towards Orinda, brakes shrieking, horn blowing in banshee bursts.
Orinda tottered blindly as if disoriented, and I sprinted towards her without calculating speed or distance but simply impelled by the need of the moment.
The truck driver was swerving about, trying to miss her and actually making things worse because his direction was unpredictable. I might easily have shoved her into his path rather than out of it, but I threw myself at Orinda in a sort of twisting football tackle so that she fell half under me onto the hard surface and rolled, and the screaming black tires made skid marks an inch from our feet.