Even the prime minister didn’t much like that. George Juliard as a relative newcomer with a normally quiet department in his charge was fine. George Juliard on the fast track upwards in public acclaim was a threat.
“One mustn’t make a minister a cult, ” the prime minister said in a television interview: but others talked of “leadership qualities” and “getting things done,” and Polly advised Dearest George to damp it down a bit and not let his success antagonize his colleagues.
My father therefore paid lavish tribute to the army of civil servants behind his fish-war solutions. “Without their help...” and so on and so on. He did a lot of modest groveling in Cabinet.
Towards the end of the long winter freeze the racing papers — frantic for something to fill their pages after weeks of near stagnation — gave a lot of space to the news that Sir Vivian Durridge, at seventy-four, had decided to retire from training.
The article, full of sonorous clichés like “long and distinguished career,” detailed his winners of the Derby (four) and other great races (“too numerous to mention”) and listed both the chief owners he’d trained for (“royalty downwards”) and the chief jockeys he’d employed (“champions all”).
Tucked away near the end came the riveting information that according to the form book, “Benedict Juliard had for two years ridden the Durridge horses as an amateur.”
Benedict Juliard, as everyone in racing knows, is the son of George Juliard, charismatic minister of agriculture, fisheries and food. Ben Juliard won three races on horses trained by Sir Vivian, and then left.
End of Vivian Durridge. A happy retirement, Sir Vivian.
It seemed the freezing temperatures had put a brake even on adultery. Usher Rudd, still active with his telephoto lens and his mean spirit, had hit a dry patch in his relentless pursuit of the unfortunate opposition front-bencher, whose progress from bimbo to spanked bimbo (with the odd choirboy for variety) either had temporarily ceased or he had gone into hiding.
Usher Rudd, sacked by the Hoopwestern Gazette as a sleaze generator and definitely now non grata under many flags, had all the same as a freelancer found a market in weekly sex magazines on the edge of perversion.
The motto he everlastingly lived by: Sleaze Sells.
And where it doesn’t exist, invent it.
The opposition front-bencher killed himself.
Shock reverberated through Parliament and shivered in many a conscience.
He had been the “shadow” chancellor, the one who would have written the country’s budget if his party had been in power. Rudd, for all his digging, had found no cent out of place.
Leader writers, hands raised in semi-mock horror, pointed out that though adultery (like suicide) might be a sin, it was not, under British law, a crime. Hounding a man to despair — was that a sin? Was that a crime?
Usher Rudd, smirking and unrepentant, repeated his credo again and again: if people in the public eye chose to behave disgustingly in private, the public had a right to know.
Did they? What was disgusting? Who should judge? Chat shows discussed it endlessly.
Usher Rudd was either “the watchdog of the people” or a dangerous voyeur.
My father, walking with me in the woods around Polly’s house, believed Usher Rudd would now be looking for another target.
“Until he’s safely locked on to some other poor bastard,” he said. “Just you remember how he listened to us in The Sleeping Dragon, so be very careful. He had a go at us then, and we got him sacked.”
“Yes, but,” I said, “I’m certain you’ve stuck to what you wrote that day in those pacts, that you would do nothing shameful or unlawful and would cause no scandal. Usher Rudd can’t therefore touch you.”
He smiled. “Those pacts! Yes, I’ve kept my bargain. But a small thing like innocence wouldn’t stop that red-haired shit. Have you found your side of the promise difficult to keep?”
I shook my head. “I’ve kept it.”
It was undoubtedly true, though, that the pact I’d written myself had shaped and inhibited what one might call my sex life. More accurately, my lack of sex life. I’d had two brief but pretty satisfactory interludes, one at university, one in racing, but both times I’d drawn back from any deep involvement. As for promiscuity, Usher Rudd had proved a bigger threat than AIDS.
When the sun at last shone warmingly on the house in outer Wellingborough where I lived in a “granny flat” built for a dear-departed granny, the ceilings first drizzled rain from burst pipes in the attic and then fell down completely. As major replastering was obviously required, I packed my stuff again in nomadic boxes and drove them to the office, storing them in the leg room under my desk.
Evan was stripping the office of the clutter of his five-year tenure. Pinups, long lusted over, disappeared. He arranged a thousand files in easy order and gave me an index. He bequeathed me three straggly green plants suffering from sunlight deficiency.
“I can’t manage without you,” I said.
“You can always phone me.” His birdlike head inspected his non-personalized end of the room. “You won‘t, though. You’ll make your own decisions. If anyone thought you couldn’t, you wouldn’t be taking my place.”
He left in a flurry of farewell beers, and I spent the whole summer at first tiptoeing and then striding into new responsibilities, and in six swift months shed the last remnants of boy and grew in confidence and perhaps in ability until I had settled into the person I would be for the rest of my life.
When I mentioned how I felt to Polly, she said the change was obvious and that I was lucky: some people weren’t sure who they were till the far side of thirty.
My father, who’d known who he was at nineteen, had during the early summer consolidated himself in the Cabinet, and by conscientious work had converted his colleagues’ jealousy into acceptance, if not admiration. George Juliard had arrived as a political fact.
I asked him about Alderney Wyvern.
My father frowned. “I haven’t seen Wyvern anywhere since Christmas, but he’s somewhere about — though the prime minister still won’t hear a word against him. I’d say both Hudson Hurst and Jill Vinicheck are voting to his tune. They’re both apt to say on one day that they haven’t made up their minds on a point of discussion, but a couple of days later their minds and opinions are firm, and they always agree with each other... and I think those opinions are Wyvern’s, though I’ve no way of proving it.”
“And are they good opinions?”
“Sometimes very good, but that’s not the point.”
Parliament went into summer recess. Polly and the member for Hoopwestern spent the first part of the break in the constituency, living in Polly’s house and working with Mervyn and Orinda. The four of them had settled into an energetic and harmonious team to the great benefit of all the voters, floating or not.
My father then took Polly around the world with stopovers in capital cities to learn about famine and fertilizers and freaks of climate, and came back with a fair understanding of how a billion people fed themselves on the blue planet.
I in my little world at Wellingborough computed numbers and risks and moved back into my granny flat when the new ceilings were dry.
Usher Rudd began stalking a bishop. Everyone except His Reverence sighed with relief.
I rode a winner in August and another in September.