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Xs.
    I realized slowly, as the room filled up, that the dinner was a ticket affair; that except for the Bigwigs and my father, everyone had paid for their presence. My father, it appeared, had paid for me. One of the evening’s organizing committee was telling him he didn’t have to.
    “Never accept gifts,” he had warned me on the drive from Brighton. “Gifts may look harmless, but they can come back to haunt you. Say no. Pay for yourself, understand?”
    “Yes, I think so.”
    “Never put yourself into the position of having to return a heavy favor when you know what you’re being asked to do is wrong.”
    “Don’t take sweets from strangers?”
    “Exactly so.”
    The organizing lady informed my father that if he had had a wife, her ticket would have been free.
    He said with gentle, smiling finality, “I will pay for my son. Dearest Polly, don’t argue.”
    Dearest Polly turned to me with mock exasperation. “Your father. What a man!” Her gaze slid past me and her face and voice changed from blue skies to storm. “Bugger,” she said.
    I looked, of course, to see the cause of the almost comic disapproval and found it was an earnest-eyed thin woman of forty or so sun-baked summers, whose tan glowed spectacularly against a sleeveless white dress. Blonde streaked hair. Vitality plus.
    Dearest Polly said “Orinda!” under her breath.
    Orinda, the passed-over candidate, was doing her best to eclipse the chosen rival by wafting around the room, embracing everyone extravagantly while saying loudly, “Daaarling, we must all do our best for the party even if the selectors have made this ghastly mistake....”
    “Damn her,” said Dearest Polly, who had been, she told me, a selector herself.
    Everyone knew Orinda, of course. She managed to get the cameraman from the local television company to follow her around, so that her white slenderness would hog whatever footage reached the screen.
    Dearest Polly quietly fumed, throwing out sizzling news snippets my way as if she would explode if she kept them in.
    “Dennis was a cuddly precious, you know. Can’t think why he married that harpy. ”
    Dearest Polly, herself on the angular side of cuddly, had one of those long-jawed faces from which condensed kindness and goodwill flowed forth unmistakably. She wore dark red lipstick as if she didn’t usually: it was the wrong color for her yellowish skin.
    “Dennis told us he wanted us to select Orinda. She made him say it. He knew he was dying.”
    Orinda flashed her white teeth at a second cameraman.
    “That man’s from the Hoopwestern Gazette,” Dearest Polly said disgustedly. “She’ll make the front page.”
    “But she won’t get to Parliament,” I said.
    Polly’s eyes focused on me with awakening amusement. “Your father’s son, aren’t you, then! It was George’s ability to identify the essential points that swayed us in his favor. There were seventeen of us on the selection panel, and to begin with most people thought Orinda the obvious choice. I know she took it for granted....”
    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