“He was there,” my father reminded me, and I remembered Mrs. Kitchens saying her Leonard liked a good fire.
“Did the firemen ever find out how that fire started?”
My father shook his head. “They didn’t at the time. Some of them are now saying unofficially that it could have been started with candles. Leonard Kitchens fiercely denies he had anything to do with it.”
“What do you think yourself?”
My father drank some wine. He was trying to indoctrinate me into liking burgundy, but to his disgust, I still liked Diet Coke better.
He said, “I think Leonard Kitchens is fanatical enough to do almost anything. It’s easy enough to think of him as a bit of a silly ass, with that out-of-proportion mustache, but it’s people with obsessions who do the real harm in the world, and if he still has a grudge against me, I want him where I can see him.”
I did my best with the wine, but I didn’t really like it.
“There’s no point in his arranging accidents for you anymore, now that you’re elected.”
My father sighed. “With people like Kitchens you can’t be sure that good sense will be in control.”
I stayed with him that night in his Canary Wharf apartment by the Thames. His big windows looked down the wide river, where once a flourish of cranes had been busy with shipping, though he himself couldn’t remember “the Docks” except as a long-ago political lever. His old office (he ran his investment-consultant business from home) gave him a two-mile walk along the Embankment to his new office in Whitehall, a leg-stretching that was clearly keeping him muscularly fit. He blazed with vigor and excitement. Even though he was my father, I felt both energized and overwhelmed by his vitality.
In a way, I deeply loved him.
In a way I felt wholly incapable of ever equaling his mental force or his determination. It took me years to realize that I didn’t have to.
On the morning after his maiden speech I caught the early train from Paddington to Exeter, clicketing along the rails from reflected fame to anonymity.
In Exeter, one of eight thousand residential students, I coasted through university life without attracting much attention, and absorbed reams of calculus, linear algebra, actuarial science and distribution theory towards a bachelor of science degree in mathematics with accounting: and as a short language course came with the package I also learned French, increasing my vocabulary from piste and écurie (“track” and “stable”) to law and order.
As often as possible I cycled to Stallworthy’s stable to ride Sarah’s Future, and on several Saturdays set off from starting gates. After the first flourish as a novice, finding winning races for a steady but unspectacular jumper proved difficult, but also-ran was fine by me: fourth, fifth, sixth, one easy fall and no tailed-offs.
On one very cold December Saturday towards the end of my first term I was standing on the stands at Taunton watching one of Stallworthy’s string scud first towards the last flight of hurdles when it crashed and fell in a cascading cartwheel of legs, and snapped its neck.
They put screens round the disaster and winched the body away, and within ten minutes I came across Stallworthy trying to comfort the female owner. Crying ladies were not Stallworthy’s specialty. He first asked me to find Jim and then canceled that instruction and simply passed the weeping woman into my arms, and told me to take her for a drink.
Many trainers went white and shook with emotion when their horses died. Stallworthy shrugged and drew a line across a page.
Mrs. Courtney Young, the bereaved owner, wiped away her tears and tried to apologize while a large bracer of gin took its effect.
“It’s all right,” I assured her. “If my horse died, I’d be devastated.”
“But you’re so young. You’d get over it.”
“I’m sure you will, too, in time.”
“You don’t understand.” Fresh tears rolled. “I let the horse’s insurance lapse because I couldn’t afford the premium, and I owe Mr. Stallworthy a lot of training fees, and I was sure my horse would win today so I could pay off my debts, and I backed it with a bookie I have an account with, and I haven’t any money to pay him. I was going to have to sell my horse anyway if he didn’t win, but now I can’t do even that...”
Poor Mrs. Courtney Young.
“She’s mad,” Jim told me later, saddling Sarah’s Future. “She bets too much.”
“What will she do?”
“Do?” he exclaimed. “She’ll sell a few more heirlooms. She’ll buy another horse. One day she’ll lose the lot.”
I grieved very briefly for Courtney Young, but that evening I telephoned my father and suggested he insure Sarah’s Future.
“How did you get on today?” he asked. “I heard the results and you weren’t in the first three.”
“Fourth. What about insurance?”
“Who arranges horse insurance?”
“Weatherbys.”
“Do you want to?”
“For your sake,” I said.
“Then send me the paperwork.”
Weatherbys, the firm that arranged insurance for horses, were the administrators for the whole of racing. It was Weatherbys who kept the records, who registered horses’ names and ownership details, including colors; Weatherbys to whom trainers sent entries for races; Weatherbys who confirmed a horse was running and sent details of racing programs to the press; Weatherbys who printed race cards in color by night and dispatched them to racecourses by morning.
Weatherbys published the fixture list, kept the Thoroughbred Stud Book and acted as a bank for the transfer of fees to jockeys, prize money to owners, anything to anyone. Weatherbys ran a safe computer database.
There wasn’t much in racing, in fact, that Weatherbys didn’t do.
It was because of mad, tearful, silly Mrs. Courtney Young that I began to think that one distant day I might apply to Weatherbys for a job.
In the spring of my third year of study my father came to Exeter to see me (he had been a couple of times before) and to my surprise brought with him Dearest Polly.
I had spent a week of each Christmas holiday skiing (practicing my French!) and I’d been riding and racing in every spare minute, but I also played fair and passed all my exams and assessments with reasonable grades if not with distinction, so when I saw him arrive a quick canter around the guilt reflexes raised no wincing specters, and I shook his hand (we had at least advanced that far) with uncomplicated pleasure.
“I don’t know if you realize,” my father said, “that we are fast approaching a general election.”
My immediate reaction was Oh, God. No. I managed not to say it aloud, but it must have been plain on my face.
Dearest Polly laughed and my father said, “This time I’m not asking you to canvass door to door.”
“But you need a bodyguard...”
“I’ve engaged a professional.”
I felt instantly jealous: ridiculous. It took me a good ten seconds to say sincerely, “I hope he’ll mind your back.”
“He’s a she. All sorts of belts in martial arts.”
“Oh.” I glanced at Polly, who looked merely benign.
“Polly and I,” my father said, “propose to marry. We came to hear if you had any objections.”
“Polly!”
“Dear Benedict. Your father is so abrupt. I would have asked you more gently.”
“I’ve no objections,” I said. “Very much the opposite.”
I kissed her cheek.
“Goodness!” she exclaimed. “You’ve grown.”
“Have you?” my father inquired with interest. “I hadn’t noticed.”
“I’ve stopped at last,” I sighed. “I’m over an inch taller and fifteen pounds heavier than I was at Hoopwestern.” Too big, I might have added, for much scope as a professional jockey, but an excellent size for an amateur.