He drove me back against the shoulder-height rough stone wall that divided a garden from the sidewalk, but I squirmed out of his grasp and simply ran, intent on escape and containment, not on winning any battles.
I could hear Wyvern coming after me, and saw my father with renewed fury turning back to my aid.
I yelled at him in frenzy, “Get in the Range Rover. Get in the vehicle,” and he wavered and turned again and marvelously did as I said.
Three steps from the Range Rover I stopped running and swung around fast to face Wyvern, in whom calculation had never been wholly overwhelmed by emotion: he sized up the gallery he was playing to — Orinda, my father, Mervyn, Faith and Lavender — and under the glare of all those sets of eyes he abruptly conceded that further attack would have legal consequences he wouldn’t relish and stopped a bare six paces from where I stood.
The venom in his expression shriveled the saliva in my mouth.
“One day,” he said, “I’ll get you one day.”
But not today, I thought, and today was all that mattered.
He took a few steps backwards, his face smoothing out to its customary flatness, then he turned and walked towards his car as if nothing had happened. Easing into the driver’s seat he started the engine and drove collectedly away with no burning of tires or other histrionics.
He left a lot of speechlessness in and around the Range Rover.
In the end Mervyn, clearing his throat, said, “Orinda needs a doctor.”
Orinda disagreed. “I need a tissue.”
Faith and Lavender between them produced some crumpled white squares. Orinda wiped her face, looked in a small mirror and moaned at the wreck it revealed. “I’m not going anywhere like this.”
“The police...?” suggested Faith.
“No,” Orinda said, and no one argued.
With everyone subdued, I drove the Range Rover back to the headquarters, where my father transferred himself and Orinda into her nearby parked car and set off to her home, with me following to bring him back.
He was silent for the whole of the return journey, but as I braked to a halt at the end of it he said finally, “Orinda thinks you saved her from being run over by the truck.”
“Oh.”
“Did you?”
“The truck driver missed us.”
He insisted I tell him what had happened.
“Her eyes were watering,” I explained. “She couldn’t see where she was going.”
I made as if to get out of the vehicle, but he stopped me.
“Wait.” He seemed to be searching for words and not finding them.
I waited.
He said in the end, “I’m afraid I’ve let you in for more than I expected.”
I half laughed. “It hasn’t been boring.”
He went to Quindle with Mervyn early on the following Saturday to undertake an all-embracing round of the town’s surburbs and, because of a dinner that evening and yet more commitments on the Sunday morning, he stayed in Quindle overnight.
That Sunday was my eighteenth birthday. My father had told me he would leave me a birthday card with Crystal, and I was to go along at nine in the morning to collect it. He would return that afternoon, he said, and we would dine together that evening to celebrate. No more political meetings, he said. Just the two of us, with champagne.
When I arrived at the party office at nine the door was locked and fifteen minutes passed before Crystal arrived and chattered her way inside. Yes, she agreed, my father had left me a card: and many happy returns and all that.
She took an envelope out of the desk and gave it to me, and inside I found a card with a joke on it about growing old, and nothing else. “Yours, Dad,” he’d written.
“George said,” Crystal told me, “that you are to go out into the street and find a black car with a chauffeur in it. And don’t ask me what it’s about, George wouldn’t tell me, but he was smiling fit to crack his cheeks. So off you go, then, and find the car.”
“Thanks, Crystal.”
She nodded and waved me off, and I went outside and found the black car and the chauffeur a hundred yards away, patiently parked.
The chauffeur without speaking handed me a white envelope, unaddressed.
The card inside read, Get in the car.
And underneath, Please.
With a gleam and a breath of good spirits I obeyed the instructions.
It wasn’t much of a surprise when the chauffeur (not the same man as before, or the same car) refused to tell me where we were going. It was, however, clear shortly that the direction was westward and that many signposts distantly promised Exeter.
The chauffeur aimed at the heart of that city and pulled up outside the main doors of its grandest hotel. As before, the car’s rear door was ceremoniously opened for me to step out and again, smiling broadly (not in the script), he pointed silently towards the interior and left me to the uniformed porters inquiring sniffily about my luggage.
My luggage this time again consisted of what I wore: a white long-sleeved sweatshirt, new blue jeans and well-tried running shoes. With undoubtedly more self-confidence than at Brighton I walked into the grand lobby and asked at the reception desk for George Juliard.
The receptionist pressed buttons on a computer.
“Sorry, no one called Juliard staying at the hotel.”
“Please check again.”
She checked. Gave me a professional smile. Still no one called Juliard, past, present or future.
I was definitely not this time in cutoff shorts and message-laden T-shirt land. Even on the last summer Sunday of August, business suits here prevailed. Ladies were fifty. In a cathedral city, people had been to church. The chauffeur, I gloomily concluded, had taken me to the wrong place.
The hotel’s entrance lobby bulged at one side into a glass-roofed conservatory section with armchairs and green plants, and I sat there for a while considering what I should do next. Had my father intended me to get to know Exeter before I went to its university?
Or what?
After about half an hour a man dressed much as I was myself, though a good ten years older, appeared in the lobby. He looked around and drifted unhurriedly in my direction.
“Juliard?” he said. “Benedict?”
“Yes.” I stood up, taller than he by an inch or two, which seemed to surprise him. He had yellow-blond hair, white eyelashes and outdoor skin. A man of strong muscles, self-confident, at home in his world.
“I’m Jim,” he said. “I’ve come to collect you.”
“Who are you?” I asked. “Where are we going?”
He smiled and said merely, “Come on.”
He led the way out of the hotel and around a few comers, fetching up beside a dusty dented red car that contained torn magazines, screwed-up sandwich papers, coffee-stained polystyrene cups and a mixed-parentage dog introduced as Bert.
“Disregard the mess,” Jim said cheerfully, sweeping crumpled newspapers off the front passenger seat onto the floor. “Happy birthday, by the way.”
“Uh... thanks.”
He drove the way I’d been taught not to; jerking acceleration and sudden brakes. Start and stop. Impulse and caution. I would have gone a long way with Jim.
It turned out to be only eight miles westward, as far as I could judge. Out of the city, past a signpost to Exeter University’s Streatham Campus (home among much else of the department of mathematics), deep into rural Devon, with heavy thatched roofs frowning over tiny-windowed cottages.
Jim jerked to a halt in front of a larger example of the basic pattern and pointed to a heavy wooden front door.
“Go in there,” he instructed. “Down the passage, last room on the left.” He grinned. “And good luck.”