10 lb Penalty Read Online Free PDF

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