My father and the Prime Minister sat in the two fattest 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, has 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 non-committal. 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 slug-like mollusc 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 only believe 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.
ELEVENTH.
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 in around 3000 B 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 draughts, 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 bird-like 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 fertilised 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 round 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-pound colt stumbling on its way out of the sale ring and breaking a leg. Fall-of-the-hammer insurance comes into effect before 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.' 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 grinning.
Schoolchildren recognised 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 office and printed it big in a centre-page spread extolling virility and presence of mind and the 'hands-on' policy out on the deep blue sea.
Even the Prime Minister didn't much like that 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 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 antagonise 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 grovelling 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 cliches 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. 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) had either temporarily ceased or he had gone into hiding.
Usher Rudd, sacked by the Hoopwestern Gazette Hoopwestern Gazette as a sleaze generator and definitely now as a sleaze generator and definitely now non grata non grata under many flags, had all the same as a freelance found a market in weekly sex magazines on the edge of perversion. under many flags, had all the same as a freelance found a market in weekly sex magazines on the edge of perversion.
The motto he everlastingly lived by: SLEAZE SELLS 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 round 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. Pin-ups, 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 bird-like head inspected his non-personalised 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 very good, but that's not the point.' 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 round the world with stopovers in capital cities to learn about famine and fertilisers 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.
Beneath this surface, although none of us knew it, little upheavals were growing and coalescing like cumulonimbus. My father had once said that they always killed Caesar, and when Parliament reconvened the knives were ready to drive into the toga.
My father, worried, told Polly and me that Hudson Hurst intended to challenge the Prime Minister for the leadership of the party. Hudson Hurst was cosying up to each Cabinet member in turn to ask for support. With his now polished manner he was smoothly saying that the party needed a tougher, younger leader who would galvanise the nation to prepare for the big build-up towards the next General Election, three years ahead.
'Alderney Wyvern,' I said, 'is writing the script.'
Polly said, horrified, 'He couldn't.'
My father said, 'It's been Wyvern's aim all along to rule by stealth.'
'Then stop him!' Polly exclaimed.
But Hudson Hurst resigned from the Cabinet and announced to the world that a majority of the party in power was dissatisfied with the decisions being made in its name and that he could do better.
'Stop him,' Polly said again. 'Oppose him.'
The three of us, sitting round the kitchen table in Polly's house, were silenced by the suddenness and size of the task. Sure, my father had aimed if possible one day to be Prime Minister, but had thought of acceding peacefully after a resignation, not of being a contender for the Ides of March.
My father, considering loyalty to be a paramount virtue, went to Downing Street and declared himself the Prime Minister's man. The Prime Minister, however, seeing that the party wanted a change, decided it was time to go just as soon as a new leader was elected. The way was now clear for my father to declare himself as a candidate for the ultimate job. The battle was now joined.
On a harmless-looking Tuesday morning in October I went into Weatherbys as usual and found that no one would look at me. Puzzled but unalarmed I made my way into my office and found that someone had kindly or unkindly left on my desk a copy of SHOUT! SHOUT! Open at the centre pages. Open at the centre pages.
SHOUT! was the weekly magazine that regularly printed Usher Rudd's most virulent outbursts. was the weekly magazine that regularly printed Usher Rudd's most virulent outbursts.
There was a photograph, not of my father, but of myself, dressed as a jockey.
The headline in huge letters read, 'DOPE!'
Underneath it said: 'Jockey son of George Juliard, self-aggrandising Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, was fired for snorting cocaine, says trainer.'
In disbelief I read the trailing paragraphs.
'I had to get rid of him,' says Sir Vivian Durridge. 'I could not have a glue-sniffing, drug-taking bad apple, infecting my good stable's reputation. The boy is no good. I am sorry for his father.'
His father, the magazine pointed out, had entered the ring in the power struggle currently rending apart the Party. How could George Juliard proclaim himself a paragon of all the virtues (including family values) when he had failed as a parent himself, as his only child was a drug addict?
I felt as I had in Vivian Durridge's study on that morning five years earlier; numb from the ankles down. It hadn't been true that I had ever sniffed glue or cocaine or anything else, and it still wasn't true, but I wasn't fool enough now to think that everyone would believe me.
I picked up the magazine and, with eyes speculatively following every step I took, went to see the chairman, the working boss of Weatherbys, in his office. He sat at his desk. I stood before him.
I needn't have taken the magazine with me. He had a copy of it already on his desk.
'It's not true,' I said flatly.
'If it's not true,' the chairman asked, 'why on earth would Vivian Durridge say it is? Vivian Durridge is one of the most highly respected men in racing.'
'If you'll give me the day off, I'll go and ask him.'
He stared up at me, considering.
'I think,' I said, 'that this is an attack on my father more than on myself. This article was written by a journalist called Usher Rudd who tried to discredit my father once before, in fact five years ago, when he first stood for Parliament in a by-election. My father complained to the editor of the newspaper and Usher Rudd was sacked. This looks like revenge. You'll see that this article says my father is involved in a power struggle in the party and, well, he is. Whoever wins the struggle will be the next Prime Minister. Usher Rudd is determined it won't be George Juliard.'
The chairman still said nothing.
'When I applied here for a job,' I said, 'Sir Vivian sent you a reference about me, and, oh' I remembered in a blinding flash of joy 'he sent me a letter, which I'll show you...' I turned towards the door. 'It is actually here in this building, in the insurance office.'