10-lb PENALTY.

by DICK FRANCIS.

FIRST.

Glue-sniffing jockeys don't win the Derby.

I'd never sniffed glue in my life.

All the same, I stood before the man whose horses I rode and listened to him telling me he had no further use for my services. He sat behind his large antique paper-covered desk fidgeting with his clean fingernails. His hands were a yellowish white, very smooth.

'I have it on good authority,' he said.

'But I don't!' I protested in bewilderment. 'I've never sniffed glue or anything else. Certainly not cocaine. I've never even smoked pot. It's not true.'

He looked at me coldly with the knowing eyes of a rich, powerful, assured and physically bulky man who had inherited a good brain and a chunk of merchant bank, and trained racehorses prestigiously out of obsession.

I was not yet eighteen at that point and, I now know, immature for my age, though of course I wasn't aware of it at the time. I felt helpless, though, in the face of his inaccurate certainty, and had no idea how to deal with it.

'Sir Vivian...' I began with desperation, but he effortlessly cut me off with his heavier authoritative voice.

'You can clear off at once, Benedict,' he said. 'I'll not have my stable contaminated by rumours of a drug-taking jockey, even if he is an amateur and not much good.' He saw me flinch but went on relentlessly. 'You'll never be a top race rider. You're too big, for one thing, or at least you will be in a year or two and, frankly, you look clumsy on a horse. All arms and legs. In your hands, the most collected jumper turns in a sprawling performance. With that and an unsatisfactory reputation... well, I no longer want you associated with my stable.'

I stared at him numbly, hurt more deeply by his fairly brutal assessment of my lack of riding ability, which could perhaps be substantiated, rather than by the accusations of drug-taking, which couldn't.

Around me the familiar walls of his stable office seemed to recede, leaving me isolated with a thumping heart and no feeling below the ankles. All the framed photographs of past winners, all the bookshelves and the olive-green wallpaper faded away. I saw only the stony face spelling out the effective end of my long-held dream of winning all races from the Grand National down.

I expect seventeen is a better age than most to be chopped off at the ambitious knees. It just didn't feel like it at that moment of the slice of the axe.

'Outside that window,' said Sir Vivian Durridge, pointing, 'a car is waiting for you. The driver says he has a message for you. He's been waiting a good hour or more, while you've been out riding exercise.'

I followed the direction of his finger, and saw, some way across the raked gravel of the imposing entrance driveway to his porticoed domain, a large black car inhabited solely by a chauffeur in a peaked cap.

'Who is it?' I asked blankly.

Vivian Durridge either didn't know or wasn't telling. He said merely, 'On your way out, you can ask him.'

'But, sir...' I began again, and dried to fresh silence in the continuing negation of his distrust.

'I advise you to clean up your act,' he said, making a gesture that directed me to leave. 'And now, I have work to do.'

He looked steadfastly down at his desk and ignored me, and after a few seconds I walked unsteadily over to the high polished door with its gilded knob and let myself out.

It was unfair. I had not cried much in my life but I felt weak then and near to weeping. No one before had pitilessly accused me of something I hadn't done. No one had so ruthlessly despised my riding. I still had a thin skin.

No other good trainer would let me into his stable if Vivian Durridge had kicked me out of his.

In a mist of bewildered misery I crossed the wide Durridge entrance hall, made my way through the heavy front door and crunched across the gravel to where the car and chauffeur waited.

I knew neither of them. The August morning sun gleamed on black spotless bodywork, and the chauffeur with the shiny black peak to his cap let down the window beside him and stretched out a black uniformed arm, silently offering me a white unaddressed envelope.

I took it. The flap was only lightly glued. I peeled it open, drew out a single white card from inside, and read the brief message.

'Get in the car.'

Underneath an afterthought had been added.

'Please.'

I looked back towards the big house from which I'd been so roughly banned and saw Vivian Durridge standing by his window, watching me. He made no movement: no reconsidering action, no farewell.

I understood none of it.

The handwriting on the card was my father's.

I sat on the back seat of the car for almost an hour while the chauffeur drove at a slow pace through Sussex, south of London, approaching finally the seaside spread of Brighton.

He would answer none of my questions except to say that he was following instructions, and after a while I stopped asking. Short of jumping out and running free at any of the few traffic-light stops, it seemed I was going to go wherever my father had ordained, and as I had no fear of him I would, from long conditioned habit, do what he asked.

I thought chiefly and in a mixture of rage and unhappiness of the scene in Durridge's study, his words circling endlessly in memory and not getting more bearable as time went by.

The black car drifted past Regency town houses and open-fronted souvenir shops, past old grandeur and new-world commercialism, and sighed to a stop on the sea front outside the main door of a large hotel of ancient French architectural pedigree with bright beach towels drying on its decorative wrought-iron balconies.

Porters appeared solicitously. The chauffeur climbed out of his seat and ceremoniously opened the door beside me and, thus prompted, I stood up into the sea air, hearing gulls crying and voices in the distance calling on the wet ebb-tide strand, smelling the salt on the wind and unexpectedly feeling the lift of spirits of the sandcastle holidays of childhood.

The chauffeur made me a small sketch of a bow and pointed at the hotel's main door, and then, still without explaining, he returned to his driving seat and at a convenient moment inserted himself into the flow of traffic and smoothly slid away.

'Luggage, sir?' one of the porters suggested. He was barely older than myself.

I shook my head. For luggage I wore the clothes suitable for first-lot August morning exercise with the Durridge string: jodhpurs, jodhpur boots, short-sleeved sports shirt and harlequin-printed lightweight zipped jacket (unzipped). I carried by its chin-strap my shiny blue helmet. With a conscious effort I walked these inappropriate garments into the grand hotel, but I needn't have worried: the once-formal lobby buzzed like a beehive with people looking normal in cut-off shorts, flip-flop sandals and message-laden T-shirts. The composed woman at the reception desk gave my riding clothes an incurious but definite assessment like a click on an identification parade and answered my slightly hoarse enquiry.

'Mr George Juliard?' she repeated. 'Who shall I say is asking for him?'

'His son.'

She picked up a telephone receiver, pressed buttons, spoke, listened, gave me the news.

'Please go up. Room four-twelve. The lift is to your left.'

My father was standing in an open doorway as I walked down a passage to locate four-twelve. I stopped as I approached him and watched him inspect me, as he customarily did, from my dark curly hair (impervious to straightening by water), to my brown eyes, thin face, lean frame, five foot eleven (or thereabouts) of long legs to unpolished boots: not in any way an impressive experience for an ambitious parent.

'Ben,' he said. He breathed down his nose as if accepting a burden. 'Come in.'

He tried hard always to be a good father, but gave no weight to my infrequent assurances that he succeeded. I was a child he hadn't wanted, the accidental consequence of his teenage infatuation with a woman biologically just old enough to be his own mother. On the day I went to Brighton I was almost as old as he had been when he fathered me.

Over the years I'd gleaned the details. There had been a hullabaloo in both extended families when they were told of the pregnancy, an even worse fuss (product of the times) when my mother refused an abortion, and a frosty turning of backs at the hasty (and happy) wedding.

The marriage-day photograph was the only record I had of my mother, who ironically died of pre-eclampsia at my birth, leaving her very young husband literally holding the baby with his envisaged bright future in ruins, so it was said.

George Juliard, however, who wasn't considered bright for nothing, promptly rearranged his whole life, jettisoning the intended Oxford degree and career in law, persuading his dead wife's sister to add me to her already large family of four sons, and setting forth into the City to learn how to make money. He had paid from the beginning for my keep and later for my education and had further fulfilled his duties by turning up at parentteacher meetings and punctiliously sending me cards and gifts at Christmas and birthdays. A year ago for my birthday he'd given me an air ticket to America so that I could spend the summer holidays on a horse farm in Virginia owned by the family of a school friend. Many fathers had done less.

I followed him into four-twelve and found without surprise that I was in the sitting-room of a suite directly facing the sea, the English Channel stretching blue-grey to the horizon. When George Juliard had set out with the goal of making money, he had spectacularly hit his target.

'Have you had breakfast?' he asked.

'I'm not hungry.'

He ignored the untruth. 'What did Vivian Durridge say to you?'

'He sacked me.'

'Yes, but what did he say say?'

'He said I couldn't ride and that I sniffed glue and also cocaine.'

My father stared. 'He said what what?'

'He said what you asked him to, didn't he? He said he had it on good authority that I took drugs.'

'Did you ask him who his "good authority" was?'

'No.' I hadn't thought of it until too late, in the car.

'You've a lot to learn,' my father said.

'It was no coincidence that you sent a car to wait for me.'

He smiled marginally, light gleaming in his eyes. He was taller than I, with wider shoulders, and in many ways inhabited an intenser, more powerful version of the body I had been growing into during the past five years. His hair was darker than mine, and curlier, a close rug on his Grecian-like head. The firmness in his face, now that he was approaching his late thirties, had been already apparent in his wedding photograph, when the gap in age had showed not at all, where the bridegroom had looked the dominant partner and the bride, smiling in her blue silk dress outside the registry office, had shone with youthful beauty.

'Why did you do it?' I asked, trying to sound more adult than bitter, and not managing it.

'Do what?'

'Get me kicked out.'

'Ah.'

He walked over to a pair of glass doors leading to a balcony and opened them, letting in the vivid coastal air and the high voices from the beach. He stood there silently for a while, breathing deeply, and then, as if making up his mind, he closed the windows purposefully and turned towards me.

'I have a proposition for you,' he said.

'What proposition?'

'It will take a good while to explain.' He lifted a telephone receiver and told the room service that whether or not breakfast had been officially over an hour ago, they were to send up immediately a tray of cereal, milk, hot toast, grilled bacon with tomatoes and mushrooms, an apple, a banana and a pot of tea. 'And don't argue,' he said to me, disconnecting, 'you look as if you haven't eaten for a week.'

I said, 'Did you you tell Sir Vivian that I take drugs?' tell Sir Vivian that I take drugs?'

'No, I didn't. Do you?'

'No.'

We looked at each other, virtual strangers though as closely tied as genetically possible. I had lived according to his edicts, had been to his choice of schools, had learned to ride, to ski and to shoot because he had distantly funded my preference for those pursuits, and I had not received tickets for Beyreuth, Covent Garden or La Scala because he didn't enthuse over time spent that way.

I was his product, as most teenage sons were of their fathers. I was also aware of his strict sense of honour, his clear vision of right and wrong and his insistence that shameful acts be acknowledged and paid for, not lied about and covered up. He was, as my four older cousins/brothers told me pityingly, a hard act to follow.

'Sit down,' he said.

The room was warm. I took off my jazzy zipped jacket and laid it on the floor with my helmet and sat in a light armchair, where he pointed.

'I have been selected,' he said, 'as a candidate in the Hoopwestern by-election, in place of the sitting MP who has died.'

'Er...' I blinked, not quickly taking it in.

'Did you hear what I said?'

'Do you mean... you are running for office?'

'Your American friend Chuck would say I'm running for office, but as this is England, I am standing for Parliament.'

I didn't know what I should say. Great? How awful? Why? Great? How awful? Why? I said blunderingly, 'Will you get in?' I said blunderingly, 'Will you get in?'

'It's a marginal seat. A toss up.'

I looked vaguely round the impersonal room. He waited with a shade of impatience.

'What is the proposition?' I asked.

'Well, now...' Somewhere within him he relaxed. 'Vivian Durridge treated you harshly.'

'Yes, he did.'

'Accusing you of taking drugs... That was his own invention.'

'But what for for?' I asked, bewildered. 'If he didn't want me around, why didn't he just say so?'

'He told me you would never be more than an average-standard amateur. Never a top professional jockey. What you were doing was a waste of time.'

I didn't want to believe it. I couldn't face believing it. I protested vehemently, 'But I enjoy it.'

'Yes, and if you look honestly inside yourself, you'll admit that a pleasant waste of time isn't enough for you at this stage.'

'I'm not you,' I said. 'I don't have your... your...'