And she’d reckoned without Dearest Polly, I thought. Polly and others of like mind.
Polly said, “I don’t know how she has the nerve to bring her lover!”
“Er...” I said. “What?”
“That man just behind her. He was Dennis’s best friend.”
I didn’t see how being Dennis’s best friend made anyone automatically Orinda’s lover, but before I could ask, Polly was claimed away. Dennis’s best friend, a person who managed to look unremarkable even in a dinner jacket, seemed abstracted more than attentive, but he did stick faithfully to Orinda’s back: rather like a bodyguard, I thought.
I realized in consequence that Mr. Bigwig himself had a genuinely serious bodyguard, a young muscular-looking shadow whose attention was directed to the crowd, not his master.
I wondered if my father accepted that bodyguards would be the price of success as he went up his chosen ladder.
He began circling the room and gestured for me to join him, and I practiced being Mrs. Bigwig but fell far short of her standard. I could act, but she was real.
There was a general movement into the dining room next door, where too many tables laid for ten people each were crowded into too small a space. Places were allocated to everyone by name and, my father and I entering almost last, I found that not only were we not expected at the same table — he was put naturally with the Bigwigs and the Constituency Association’s chairman — but I was squeezed against a distant wall between a Mrs. Leonard Kitchens and Orinda herself.
When she discovered her ignominious location, Orinda flamed with fury like a white-hot torch. She stood and quivered and tried to get general attention by tapping a glass with a knife, but the noise was lost in the general bustle of eighty people chattering and clattering into their places. Orinda’s angry outburst barely reached farther than her knives and forks.
“This is an insult! I always sit at the top table! I demand...”
No one listened.
Through the throng I saw Dearest Polly busily settling my father into a place of honor and guessed with irony that Orinda’s quandary was Polly’s mischief.
Orinda glared at me as I hovered politely, waiting for her to sit. She had green eyes, black lashed. Stage greasepaint skin.
“And who are you?” she demanded; then bent down and snatched up the name card in front of my place. My identity left her speechless with her red mouth open.
“I’m his son,” I said lamely. “Can I help you with your chair?”
She turned her back on me and spoke to her bodyguard (lover?) best friend of her dead husband, a characterless-seeming entity with a passive face.
“Do something!” Orinda instructed him.
He glanced past her in my direction and with flat expressionless eyes dismissed me as of no consequence. He silently held Orinda’s chair for her to sit down and to my surprise she folded away most of her aggression and sat stonily and with a stiff back, enduring what she couldn’t get changed.
At school one learned a good deal about power: who had it and who didn’t. (I didn’t.) Orinda’s understated companion had power that easily eclipsed her own, all the more effective for being quiet.
Mrs. Leonard Kitchens, on my right, patted my chair with invitation and told me to occupy it. Mrs. Leonard Kitchens, large, comfortable in a loose floral dress and with the lilt of a Dorset accent on her tongue, told me that my father looked too young to have a son my size.
“Yes, doesn’t he,” I said.
Leonard himself, on her other side, bristled with a bad-tempered mustache and tried unsuccessfully to talk to Orinda across his wife and me. I offered to change places with him. His wife said sharply, “No.”
Mrs. Leonard Kitchens’s gift for small talk took us cozily through dinner (egg salad, chicken, strawberries), and I learned that “my Leonard,” her husband, was a nurseryman by trade with fanatical political beliefs and a loathing for Manchester United.
With the chicken, Mrs. Kitchens, to my surprise, mentioned that Dennis Nagle had been an undersecretary of state in the Department of Trade and Industry, not a simple back-bencher, as I had somehow surmised. If my father won the seat, he would be a long way behind Dennis in career terms.
Mrs. Leonard Kitchens spoke conspiratorily into my right ear. “Perhaps I shouldn’t tell you, dear, but Polly very naughtily changed the name cards over, so as to put Orinda next to you. I saw her. She just laughed. She’s never liked Orinda.” The semi-whispering voice grew even quieter, so as not to reach the ears on my left. “Orinda made a great constituency wife, very good at opening fetes and that sort of thing, but one has to admit she did tend to boss Dennis sometimes. My Leonard was on the selection panel and he voted for her, of course. Men always fall for her, you know.” She drew back and looked at me with her big head on one side. “You’re too young, of course.”
To my dismay I could feel myself going red. Mrs. Kitchens laughed her worldly laugh and shoveled her strawberries. Orinda Nagle ignored me throughout, while pouring out nonstop complaints to her companion, who mostly replied with grunts. I thought I would rather be almost anywhere else.
Dinner finally over, the talkative throng rose to its collective feet and transferred down a passage into the large room lit by chandeliers that made The Sleeping Dragon the area’s popular magnet for dances, weddings and — as now — political free-for-alls.
Orinda’s companion left his name card on the table, and out of not-very-strong curiosity I picked it up.
Mr. A. L. Wyvern, it said.
I let “Mr. A. L. Wyvern” fall back among the debris of napkins and coffee cups and without enthusiasm drifted along with everyone else to the rows of folding chairs set up for the meeting. I’d read somewhere that affairs like this could draw tiny crowds unworthy of the name, but perhaps because my father was new to the district, almost double the number of the diners had turned up, and the whole place buzzed with the expectation of enjoyment.
It was the first political meeting I’d attended and at that point I would have been happy if it had been my last.
There were speeches from the small row of people up on a platform. The chairman of the Constituency Association rambled on a bit. Mr. Bigwig was on his feet for twenty minutes. Mrs. Bigwig smiled approvingly throughout.
My father stood up and lightened the proceedings by making everyone laugh. I could feel my face arranging itself into Mrs. Bigwig-type soppiness and knew that in my case anyway it had a lot to do with relief. I had been anxious that he wouldn’t grab his audience, that he would embarrass me into squirming agony by being boring.
I suppose I should have known better. He told them what was right with the country, and why. He told them what was wrong with the country, and how to fix it. He gave them a palatable recipe. He told them what they wanted to believe, and he had them stamping their feet and roaring their applause.
The local TV station cameraman filmed the cheers.
Predictably, Orinda hated it. She sat rigidly, her neck as stiff as if she had an unbending rod there instead of vertebrae. I could see the sharp line of her jaw and the grim, tight muscles around her mouth. She shouldn’t have come, I thought: but perhaps she truly had believed that the selectors had made a ghastly mistake.
Dearest Polly, chief de-selector of Dennis’s widow, regarded my father euphorically, as if she had invented him herself; and indeed without her he might not have been there to seize the first rung of his destiny.
Eyes alight with the triumph of his reception, he asked for questions and, true to his intention, he stripped off his tie. He flung it on the table in front of him, and then he rounded the table so that there was nothing between him on the platform and the crowd below. He opened his arms wide, embracing them. He invited them to join him in a political adventure, to build for a better world and in particular for a better world for the constituents of Hoopwestern.