I hated politics.
“Hud” had a damp, cold handclasp that I supposed he couldn’t help, and if he had lately had an oiled black ponytail and a black mustache-beard mouth-circling combination, they had very likely been dyed. His present hair color was the dark-lightly-flecked-with-gray that a passing girlfriend had told me couldn’t be faked, and he’d had a cut in a swept-back and duck-tailed style straight from the films of James Bond. Distinguished. Impressive, one had to admit. It inspired trust.
My father’s own mat of natural dark, close curls was cut to display to advantage the handsome outline of his skull. Expert stuff. Ah well.
Hudson Hurst was overpoweringly pleasant to Polly. Smile and smile, I thought, remembering Hoopwestern: smile and smile and shake the hands and win the votes. He flicked me a glance, but I wasn’t important.
Sweet Mrs. Prime Minister appeared at my elbow and asked if I was having a good time.
“Oh, yes. Splendid, thank you.”
“You look a bit lost. Come with me.” She led me across to the far side of the big room and stopped beside a sharply dressed woman who reminded me strongly of Orinda. “Jill, dear, this is George Juliard’s son. Do look after him.”
Jill gave me a comprehensive head-to-toe and stared at Mrs. Prime Minister’s retreating back without enthusiasm.
“I’m really sorry,” I said, “I don’t know your name.”
“Vinicheck. Education.”
“Minister of?”
Her grim lips twitched. “Certainly.”
She was joined by another woman in the simplest and best of current fashion: another Orinda-clone. Secretary of state for social security.
She said bluntly, “Where does your mother get her clothes?”
I followed her gaze across the room and saw Polly talking unselfconsciously to the man with flat white hair and circular eyes: the home secretary. Polly’s clothes, as always, had nothing to do with popular opinion but very clearly revealed her individual character.
Jill Vinicheck (education) kindly said, “Your father may have a bright career in front of him, but your mother will have to change the way she dresses or she’ll be clawed to bits by those bitches who write about fashion in the newspapers.”
The minister of social security agreed. “Every woman in politics gets the hate treatment. Haven’t you noticed?”
“Oh, not really, no.”
“Your mother’s skirt is the wrong length. You don’t mind me telling you? I’m only being helpful. Frankly, it would be the wrong length whatever length it was, according to the fashion bitches. But you can pass on some tips to her from us, if you like.”
“Er...”
“Tell her,” Jill Vinicheck said, enjoying herself, “never to buy clothes in shops.”
Social Security nodded. “She must have them made.”
Jill Vinicheck: “Always wool or silk or cotton. Never polyester, or tight.”
“There’s a marvelous man who could make your mother really elegant, with her long, thin figure. He totally changed the way the papers write about us now. They discuss our policies, not our clothes. And he can’t do it only for women. Look at the change in Hudson Hurst! Hud frankly looked a bit of a gangster, but now he’s a statesman.”
“No time like the present,” Jill Vinicheck said with the briskness that had no doubt propelled her up the ladder. “Our wand-waving friend is here somewhere.
Why don’t we introduce him to your mother straightaway?”
“Er...” I said, “I don’t think she...”
“Oh, there he is,” said Social Security, stepping sideways and pouncing. “Let me introduce you...”
She had her hand on his arm and he turned towards her, and I came face-to-face with A. L. Wyvern.
Alderney “Anonymous Lover” Wyvern.
No wonder Education and Social Security had reminded me of Orinda. All those years ago his ideas had dressed her, too.
I knew him instantly, but it took him several seconds to add four years to my earlier appearance. Then his face hardened to ill will and he looked disconcerted, even though with my father in the Cabinet he might have considered that both he and I might be asked to the families’ Christmas reception. Maybe he hadn’t given it a thought. In any case, my presence there was to him an unwelcome surprise.
So was his, to me.
Education and Social Security were looking puzzled.
“Do you two know each other?” one of them asked.
“We’ve met,” Wyvern said shortly.
His own appearance, too, had changed. At Hoopwestern he had made a point of looking inconspicuous, of being easily forgettable. Four years later he wasn’t finding it so simple to fade into the wallpaper.
I had thought him then to be less than forty, but I now saw that to have been probably an underestimate.
His skin had begun to show a few wrinkles and his hair to recede, and he was now wearing glasses with narrow dark frames. There was still about him, though, the strong secretive aura of introverted clout.
At the Downing Street Christmas party there was no overt sign of the sleeping anger that had blazed across Orinda’s face and nearly killed her. He was not this time saying to me aloud in fury, “One day I’ll get you,” but I could see the intent rise again in his narrowed eyes as if no interval for second thoughts had existed.
The extraordinary response I felt was not fear but excitement. The adrenaline rush in my blood was to fight, not flight. And whether or not he saw my reaction to him as vividly as I felt it, he pulled down the shutters on the malice visible behind the dark framed lenses and excused himself with the briefest of courtesies to Education and Social Security: when he moved slowly away it was as if every step were consciously controlled.
“Well!” exclaimed Jill Vinicheck. “I know he’s never talkative, but I’m afraid he was... impolite.”
Not impolite, I thought.
Murderous.
After the reception Polly, my father and I all ate in one of the few good restaurants in London that had taken the din out of dinner. One could mostly hear oneself speak.
My father had enjoyed a buddy-buddy session with the prime minister and Polly said she thought the circular eyes of the home secretary were not after all an indication of mania.
Didn’t the home secretary, I asked, keep prisoners in and chuck illegal immigrants out?
More or less, my father agreed.
I said, “Did you know there was a list on a sort of easel there detailing all the jobs in government?”
My father, ministerially busy with broccoli that he didn’t actually like, nodded, but Polly said she hadn’t seen it.
“There are weird jobs,” I said, “like minister for former countries and undersecretary for buses.” Polly looked mystified but my father nodded. “Every prime minister invents titles to describe what he wants done.”
“So,” I said, “theoretically you could have a minister in charge of banning yellow plastic ducks.”
“You do talk nonsense, Benedict dear,” Polly said.
“What he means,” my father said, “is that the quickest way to make people want something is to ban it. People always fight to get what they are told they cannot have.”
“All the same,” I said mildly, “I think the prime minister should introduce a law banning Alderney Wyvern from drinking champagne at No. 10 Downing Street.”
Polly and my father sat with their mouths open.
“He was there,” I said. “Didn’t you see him?”
They shook their heads.
“He kept over to the far side of the room, out of your way. He looks a bit different. He’s older, balder. He wears spectacles. But he is revered by the minister of education, the secretary of state for social security and the secretary of state for defense, to name those I am sure of. Orinda and Dennis Nagle were kindergarten stuff. Alderney Wyvern now has his hands on levers he can pull to affect whole sections of the nation.”