He went through the office, opened a door and gestured to my father to follow. The office staff gave me a chair and a friendly welcome and told me that I was in the room where all the real work got done; the running of the prime minister’s life as opposed to his politics.
They told me that quiet though the house might seem on a Friday afternoon, almost two hundred people worked there in the buildings in connected offices and that someone had once counted how many times the front door of No. 10 had been opened and closed in twenty-four hours, and it was more than nine hundred.
At length, in response to one of constant telephone calls, I was invited through the office and into the next room in the wake of my father, and found myself in a large, quiet, tidy place that was part office, part sitting room.
My father and the prime minister sat in the two fat-test armchairs, looking relaxed, and I was waved to join them.
“Your father and I,” the prime minister said, “have been discussing Alderney Wyvern. I’ve met him once or twice, but I’ve seen no harm in him. I know that Jill Vinicheck and other women in the Cabinet say they owe him a great deal, and Hudson Hurst, above all, had benefited from a change of presentation. I’ve seen nothing sinister or unacceptable in any of this. The man is quiet, tactful, and as far as I can see, he hasn’t put a foot wrong politically. Jill Vinicheck, in particular, has once or twice found his considered advice helpful, and certainly the press have stopped making frivolous comments on her clothes, and take her as the serious politician that she is.”
“Er...” I said. “Yes, sir.”
“Your father says that he and you have seen a different side of Alderney Wyvern. A violent side. He says you believe this capacity for violence still exists. I have to tell you that I find this hard to believe, and until I see something of it myself I have to give Wyvern the benefit of the doubt. I am sure you have both acted with the best of intentions in drawing my attention to the influence Wyvern may have with my ministers but, George, if you’ll excuse my saying so, your son is a very young man without much experience of the world, and he may be exaggerating trouble where little exists.”
My father looked noncommittal. I wondered what the prime minister would have thought if he himself had seen Wyvern hit Orinda. Nothing less, it seemed, was going to convince him that the outer shell of the man he’d met hid a totally different creature inside, rather like a beautiful spiky and shiny conch shell hiding the slippery sluglike mollusk inside: a gastropod inching along on its stomach.
The prime minister said, “I will take note and remember what you have both said, but at the moment I don’t see any real grounds for action.”
He stood up, indicating that the meeting was over, and shook hands with my father with unabated good nature, and I remembered my father’s teaching on the very first day when I’d driven with him from Brighton to Hoopwestern, that people believe only what they want to believe. It applied, it seemed, even to prime ministers.
After we’d left No. 10 I said glumly to my father, “I did you no good.”
“He had to be told. He had to be warned. Even if it does my career no good, it was the right thing to do.”
My father’s strict sense of right and wrong might destroy him yet, I thought.
Eleven
After Christmas that year several things happened that changed a lot of lives.
First of all, on New Year’s Eve, a wide tongue of freezing air licked down from the Arctic Circle and froze solid all of Canada, all of northern Europe, and all of the British Isles. Weathermen stopped agitating about global warming and with equally long faces discussed permafrost. No one seemed to mention that when Stonehenge was built around 3000 B.C. the prevailing climate was warm, and no one remembered that in the nineteenth century Britain was so cold in the winters that on the Thames in London, they skated, held fairs and roasted oxen.
In the houses of that time people huddled in wing chairs with their feet on footstools to avoid drafts, and women wore a dozen layers of petticoats.
In the winter when I was twenty-two it rained ice on top of snow. People skated on their lawns and built igloos for their children. Diesel oil congealed to jelly. All racing came to a halt, except on a few specially built all-weather tracks, but even they had to be swept clear of snow. Owners cursed as their training bills kept rolling in, professional jockeys bit their fingernails and-amateurs were grounded.
Claims for frost damage avalanched into Weatherbys, and in the middle of all this Evan, my boss, announced that he was leaving the firm to join a growing insurance company as managing director. I expected Weatherbys to replace him, over my head, but instead they told him to spend his three months’ notice teaching me his job. I thought I was too young, even by Weatherbys’ standards, but they seemed oblivious to my date of birth and merely told me that in following Evan I had a great deal to live up to.
Evan, tall, thin and with a birdlike head on a long neck, had taken over a department that had formerly acted mainly as a convenience for racing’s owners and trainers, and in five years had fertilized it with imagination and invention into an agency major by any standard.
In his last three months, in addition to our ordinary busy work, he took me to meet personally all the underwriters he fixed deals with on the telephone, so that in the end I could wander around the “boxes” at Lloyds, knowing and being known in the syndicates and speaking their language.
He taught me scams. “Beware the friendship scam,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“Two friends conspire,” he told me, amused. “One friend has a horse with something fatally wrong, a kidney ailment, say. OK? Instead of calling in a vet, Friend A sends his sick fellow to the sales. Friend B buys the sick animal at auction, insuring his purchase onwards from the fall of the hammer. Fall-of-the-hammer insurance was introduced to cover accidents like a million-dollar colt stumbling on its way out of the sale ring and breaking a leg. Fall-of-the-hammer insurance comes into effect before a vet’s inspection, see? So Friend B buys and insures a dud horse from the fall of the hammer. Friend A acts all innocent... ‘Would never have sold such a horse if I’d known...’ Friend B humanely kills his dud and collects the insurance. Friends A and B split the proceeds.” He laughed. “You’ve a nose for crooks, Ben. You’ll do all right.”
During that same three months my father became the front man in an ongoing fish war, discussing at international high level who could take how many fish of such and such a species of such and such a size out of any particular area of the world’s oceans. With wit and understanding, and by going to sea himself in freezing, salt-crusted, net-festooned seasickness factories, he learned the gripes and the legitimate arguments of men who lived close to Davy Jones and his ever-ready locker.
The press took notice. Headlines appeared: “Juliard Hooks Agreement,” and “Juliard in Japan.”
People in insurance began to say, “This Juliard person — no relation of yours, I suppose?”
“My father.”
“Seems to be doing a good job for my fish and chips.”
Fish and chips — the potatoes in agriculture — put my father on the map.
A television station sent a cameraman to sea with him: the cameraman, though sick the whole time, shot fearsomely memorable footage of my father hanging half-overboard in oilskins above the breaking waves and grinning.
Schoolchildren recognized pictures of “the Fish Minister” instantly: his Cabinet colleagues didn’t like it.
One of the top tabloids dug up the five-year-old stunning photograph of my father in mid-jump from the burning constituency offices and printed it big in a center-page spread extolling virility and presence of mind and the “hands-on” policy out on the deep blue sea.