“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 preeclampsia 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 parent-teacher meetings and punctiliously sending me cards and gifts at Christmas and birthdays. A year ago for my birthday he’d given me an airline 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-gray 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?”
“He said I couldn’t ride and that I sniffed glue and also cocaine.”
My father stared. “He said 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 then 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 toward 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 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 Bayreuth, 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 honor, 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? I said blunderingly, “Will you get in?”
“It’s a marginal seat. A toss-up.”
I looked vaguely around 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?” 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...”
“Drive?” he suggested.
I thought it over weakly, and nodded.
“I am satisfied, though,” he said, “that you have sufficient intelligence... and... well... courage... for what I have in mind.”
If he intended to flatter me, of course he succeeded. Few young boys could throw overboard such an assessment.
“Father...” I began.
“I thought we agreed you should call me Dad.” He had insisted at parent-teacher-schoolboy meetings that I should refer to him as “Dad,” and I had done so, but in my mind he was always Father, my formal and controlling authority.
“What do you want me to do?” I said.
He still wouldn’t answer straightaway. He looked absentmindedly out of the window and at my jacket on the floor. He fiddled with his fingers in a way that reminded me of Sir Vivian, and finally he said, “I want you to take up the place you’ve been offered at Exeter University.”