“Well, Ben,” he said, scratching his head, “I never knew you took drugs.”
He was old and small and bandy-legged and had loved and been loved by the great beasts in his care. The life he’d lived in their service had pathetically gone, leaving him without anchor, without purpose, with only a fading mental scrapbook of victories past.
“I never did take drugs,” I said.
“No, I wouldn’t have thought so, but if Sir Vivian says...”
“Where is he?” I asked. “Do you know?”
“He’s ill, of course.”
“Ill?”
“He’s gone in the wits, poor old man. He was walking around the yard with me one day at evening stables, same as usual, when all of a sudden he clapped a hand to his head and fell down, and I got the vet to him.”
“The vet?”
“There’s a telephone in the tack room and I knew the vet’s number.” The head groom shook his own old head. “So, anyway, the vet came and he brought with him the doctor and they thought Sir Vivian had had a stroke or some such. So an ambulance came for him, and his family, they didn’t want to say he was gaga, but he couldn’t go on training, poor old man, so they just told everybody he’d retired.”
I wandered around the yard with the once-supreme head groom, stopping at each empty stall for him to tell me what splendid winners had once stood in each.
All the owners, he said, had been asked to take their horses away and send them somewhere else temporarily, but the weeks had passed and the old man wasn’t coming back; one could see that now, and nothing was ever going to be the same again.
“But where,” I asked gently, “is Sir Vivian at this moment?”
“In the nursing home,” he simply said.
I found the nursing home. A board outside announced Haven House. Sir Vivian sat in a wheelchair, smooth of skin, empty of eye, warmed by a rug over his knees.
“He’s confused. He doesn’t know anyone,” the nurses warned me; but even if he didn’t recognize me, he garrulously talked.
“Oh dear, yes,” he said in a high voice, not like his own gruff tones. “Of course I remember Benedict Juliard. He wanted to be a jockey, but I couldn’t have him you know. I couldn’t have anyone who sniffed glue.”
Sir Vivian’s eyes were wide and guileless. I saw that he now did believe in the fiction he had invented for my father’s sake. I understood that from now on he would repeat that version of my leaving him because he truly believed it.
I asked him, “Did you yourself ever actually see Benedict Juliard sniffing glue, or cocaine, or anything else?”
“Had it on good authority,” he said.
Five years too late I asked him, “Whose authority?”
“Eh? What? Whose authority? Mine, of course.”
I tried again. “Did anyone tell you that Benedict Juliard was addicted to drugs? If anyone told you, who was it?”
The intelligence that had once inhabited the Durridge brain, the worldly experience that had illuminated for so long the racing scene, the grandeur of thought and judgment, all had been wiped out by a devastating hemorrhage in some tiny recess of that splendid personality. Sir Vivian Durridge no longer existed. I spoke to the shell, the chaos. There was no hope that he would ever again remember anything in detail, but he would be forever open to suggestion.
I sat with him for a while, as it seemed he liked company and, even if he didn’t know who I was, he didn’t want me to go.
The nurses said, “It settles him to have people near him. He was a great man once, you know. And you’re the second person, outside his family, who has been to see him recently. He is so pleased to have visitors.”
“Who else came?” I asked.
“Such a nice young man. Red hair. Freckles. So friendly, just like you. A journalist, he said. He was asking Sir Vivian about someone called Benedict Juliard, who had ridden his horses for him once. Oh, my goodness,” the nurses said, clapping hands to surprised mouths. “Benedict Juliard... isn’t that who you said you were?”
“That’s right. What would Sir Vivian like that he hasn’t got?”
The nurses giggled and said, “Chocolate biscuits and gin, but he isn’t supposed to have either.”
“Give him both.”
I handed them money. Vivian Durridge sat in his wheelchair and understood nothing.
I telephoned my father.
“People believe what they want to believe,” I said. “Hudson Hurst will want to believe your son is a drug addict and he’ll go around asserting to your colleagues that that makes you unfit to be prime minister. Well, you remember what I wrote that day when we made the pacts... that I would do my best to keep you safe from attack?”
“Of course, I remember.”
“It’s time to do it.”
“But, Ben... how?”
‘I’m going to sue him for libel.”
“Who? Hurst? Usher Rudd? Vivian Durridge?”
“No. The editor of SHOUT!”
After a pause my father said, “You need a lawyer.”
“Lawyers are expensive. I’ll see what I can do myself.”
“Ben... I don’t like it.”
“Nor do I. But if I can make a charge of libel stick to SHOUT! Hudson Hurst will have to shut up. And there’s no time to lose, is there, as didn’t you say the first internal vote in the party for a new leader is next week?”
“It is, yes. Monday.”
“Then you go back to your fish and chips, and I’ll take a sword to Usher bleeding Rudd.”
From Durridge’s place in Kent I drove across much of southern England, down the M4 to Exeter and around to the training stables that to me seemed like home, the domain of Spencer Stallworthy.
I arrived at about six-thirty, when he was just finishing his round of evening stables.
“Hello,” he said, surprised. “I didn’t know you were coming.”
“No...” I watched him feed carrots to the last couple of horses and wandered over to look into the stall that had held Sarah’s Future for three splendid years. It was inhabited now by a long-necked gray, and I grieved for the simple happiness of days gone.
Jim was there still, closing the stalls for the night, checking that the grooms had filled the hay nets and positioned the water buckets: all so familiar, so much missed.
The evening routine finished, I asked if I could talk to them both for a while, which meant a short drive to Stallworthy’s house and an issue of well-remembered sherry.
They knew my father was in the Cabinet and I explained about the power struggle. I showed them the center pages of SHOUT! which shocked them back to the bottle.
Jim blinked his white eyelashes rapidly, always a sign of disturbance, and Stallworthy said, “But it’s not true, is it? You never took drugs. I’d have known it.”
“That’s right,” I said gratefully, “and that’s what I’d like you to write for me. A statement that I rode from your stables for three years and won races and showed no sign of ever being interested in drugs. I want as many affidavits as I can get to say that I am not a drug addict and never was as far as you can possibly tell. I’m going to sue this magazine for libel.”
Both Stallworthy and Jim were outraged on my behalf and wrote more fiercely in my defense than I could have asked for.
Stallworthy gave me a bed for the night and a horse to ride in the early morning, and I left after breakfast and drove along the familiar country roads back to the university.
The two years since I’d graduated seemed to vanish. I parked the car in the road outside the Streatham Campus and walked up the steep path to the Laver Building, home of the mathematics department. There, after a good deal of casting about, I found my tutor — the one who had written for me the reference sought by Weatherbys — and explained to him, as to Stallworthy and Jim, what I was asking of him.