Dick Francis - Second Wind

 

 

My sincere thanks to JOHN KETTLEY Meteorologist FELIX FRANCIS Physicist MERRICK FRANCIS Horseman and NORMA JEAN BENNET ETHEL SMITH FRANK ROULSTONE CAROLINE GREEN ALAN GRIFFIN ANDY HIBBERT PILAR BUSH GORDON STEVE PICKERING and THE CAYMAN ISLANDS NATIONAL ARCHIVE

 

 

l

 

 

PROLOGUE.

 

 

DELIRIUM BRINGS COMFORT to the dying.

 

 

I had lived in an ordered world. Salary had mattered, and timetables. My grandmother belonged there with her fears.

 

 

"But isn't there a risk? " she asked.

 

 

You bet your life there's a risk.

 

 

"No, " I said. "No risk. " "Surely flying into a hurricane must be risky? " "I'll come back safe, " I said.

 

 

But now, near dead as dammit, I tumbled like a rag-doll piece of flotsam in towering gale-driven seas that sucked unimaginable tons of water from the deeps and hurled them along in liquid mountains faster than a Derby gallop. Sometimes the colossal waves swept me inexorably with them.

 

 

Sometimes they buried me until my agonized lungs begged the ultimate relief of inhaling anything, even water, when only air would keep the engine turning.

 

 

I'd swallowed gagging amounts of Caribbean salt.

 

 

It had been night for hours, with no gleam anywhere. I was losing all perception of which way was up. Which way was air.

 

 

My arms and legs had bit by bit stopped working. An increasingly out-of-order brain had begun seeing visions that shimmered and played in colors inside my head.

 

 

I could see my dry-land grandmother clearly. Her wheelchair. Her silver shoes. Her round anxious eyes and her miserable foreboding.

 

 

"Don't go, Perry. It gives me the heebiejeebies. " Whoever listens to grandmothers.

 

 

When she spoke in my head, her mouth was out of sync with her voice.

 

 

I'm drowning, I thought. The waves are bigger. The storm is worse. I'll go to sleep soon.

 

 

Delirium brings comfort at the end.

 

 

AT THE BEGINNING it was a bit of fun.

 

 

Kris Ironside and I, both single, both thirty-one, both meteorologists employed to interpret the invisible swings and buffets of global air for television and radio audience consumption, both of us found without excitement that some of the vacation weeks allotted to us overlapped.

 

 

We both worked in the Weather Center of the British Broadcasting Corporation, taking it in turns with several other forecasters to deliver the good or bad weather news to the nation.

 

 

From breakfast to midnight our voices sounded familiar and our faces smiled or frowned into millions of homes until we could go nowhere at all without recognition.

 

 

Kris rather enjoyed it, and so had I once, but I had long gone beyond any depth of gratification and sometimes found the instant identification a positive drawback.

 

 

"Aren't you... ? " "Yes, I guess so. " I used to go for vacations to lands that didn't know me.

 

 

A

 

 

week in Greece. Elephants in the Serengeti. By dugout canoe up the Orinoco. Small adventures. No grand or gasp-worthy dangers. I lived an ordered life.

 

 

Kris stabbed with his thumb the roster pinned to the department notice board. Disgust shook his hand.

 

 

"October and November! " he grumbled. "And I asked for August. " It was January at the time, August tended to be given to those with school-age children. Kris's chances of August had always realistically been zero, but with Kris hope often outweighed common sense.

 

 

It was his streak of wild unpredictability--the manic side of his character--that made him a good evening pub companion, but a week in his company once in the foothills of the Himalayas had left me glad to return to home soil.

 

 

My own name, Perry Stuart, appeared alphabetically near the bottom of the list, ahead only of Williams and Yates. In late October, I saw, I could take the ten working days still owing to me by then and return to the screen on the eve of Fireworks Night, November 5th. I shrugged and sighed. Year after year I got especially chosen and, I supposed, honored to deal with the rain-or-no-rain million-dollar gamble on fine weather for the night the skies blazed with the multicolored firework star bursts sent up in memory of Guy Fawkes and his blow-up Parliament gunpowder plot. Year after year if I got downpours right I winced over sack loads of letters from reproachful children who reckoned their disappointment to be my fault.

 

 

Kris followed my gaze down the list and tapped my name with his finger.

 

 

"October and November, " he pronounced without surprise. "Don't tell me! You'll waste half of that leave on your grandmother again. " "I expect so. " He protested, "But you see her every week. " "Mm. " Where Kris had parents, brothers and a coven of cousins,

 

 

I

 

 

had a grandmother. She had literally plucked me as an infant out of the ruins of a gas-exploded house, and had dried her grief for my dead parents in order to bring me up.

 

 

Where batches of my meteorological colleagues had wives, husbands, live-ins and one-nighters, I had sometimes--my grandmother's nurses. I wasn't unmarried by design, more by lack of urgency or the advent of Cinderella.

 

 

As AUTUMN APPROACHED the Ironside manic-depressive gloom intensified downwards. Kris's latest girlfriend left him, and the Norwegian pessimism he'd inherited from his mother, along with his pale skin, lengthy jaw and ectomorph physique, was leading him to predict cyclones more often than usual at the drop of a single millibar.

 

 

Small groups of the great wide public with special needs tended to gravitate to particular forecasters. One associate, Beryl Yates, had cornered weddings, for instance, and Sonny Rae spent his spare time advising builders and house painters, and pompous old George told local councils when they might dryly dig up their water mains.

 

 

Landowners, great and small, felt comfortable with Kris, and would cut their hay to the half hour on his say-so.

 

 

As Kris's main compulsive personal hobby was flying his own light aircraft, he spent many of his free days lunching with far-flung but welcoming farmers. They cleared their sheep out of fields to give him landing room and had been known to pollard a row of willows to provide a safe low trajectory takeoff.

 

 

I had flown with him three times on these farming jaunts, though my own bunch of followers, apart from children with garden birthday parties, had proved to be involved with horses.

 

 

I seemed particularly to be consulted by racehorse trainers seeking perfect underfoot conditions for their speedy hopefuls, even though we did run forecasts dedicated to particular events.

 

 

By voice transfer on a message machine a trainer might say, "I've a fancied runner at Windsor on Wednesday evening, what are the chances of firm ground? " or

 

 

"I'm not declaring my three-mile chaser to run tomorrow unless you swear it'll rain overnight. " They might be pony club camp organizers or horse show promoters, or even polo entrepreneurs, begging for the promise of sunshine. They might be shippers of brood mares to Ireland anxious for a calm sea crossing, and they might above all be racecourse managers wanting advice on whether or not to water their turf for good going in the days ahead. The prospect of good going encouraged trainers to send their horses. The prospect of many runners encouraged spectators to arrive in crowds. "Good going" was gold dust to the racing industry, and woe betide the forecaster who misread the clouds.

 

 

l r But no weatherman, however profound his knowledge or intuition, could guess the skies right all the time, and, as over the British Isles especially the fickle winds could change direction without giving notice, to be accurate eighty-five percent of the time was miraculous.

 

 

Kris's early autumnal depression intensified day by day and it was from some vague impulse to cheer him up that I agreed to his suggestion of a Sunday lunch flight to Newmarket. Our host, Kris assured me, would be catering for at least twenty guests, so my presence would hardly overload the arrangements.

 

 

"And besides, " Kris added with mild routine sarcasm, "your face is your fortune, you can't get away from it. Caspar will slobber all over you. " "Caspar? " "Caspar Harvey, it's his lunch. " "Oh. " Caspar Harvey might be one of Kris's wealthiest farming cronies, but he also owned three or four racehorses whose trainer twittered in nervous sound bites in my ears from Monday to Sunday. Oliver Quigley, the trainer, temperamentally unsuited to any stressful way of life, let alone the nerve breaking day-to-day of the thoroughbred circuit, was, on his messages system, audibly in awe of Caspar Harvey, which was hardly the best basis for an owner-trainer relationship.

 

 

I had met neither man face to face and didn't much want to, but as the day of the lunch approached I kept coming across references to "that gift to racing, Caspar Harvey" or "Caspar Harvey in final dash to honors on the winning owners' list" or

 

 

"Caspar Harvey pays millions at the Yearling Sales for Derby hopes", and as my knowledge and curiosity grew, so did my understanding of the Quigley jitters.

 

 

The week before the Caspar Harvey lunch was one of those times when I gave the top two forecasts, at six-thirty and nine-thirty each evening, daily working out the probable path of air masses and going in front of the cameras at peak times to put my assessments on the line. Many people used to think that all Kris and I and other forecasters did was to read out from someone else's script, there was often surprise when we explained that we were in actual fact forecasters, that it was we who predicted the weather ourselves, using the information gathered from distant weather stations and having discussed it with colleagues. We then went "live" and un scripted--and usually alone into a very small studio where we ourselves placed the computerized weather symbols on the background screen map of Britain.

 

 

There were well over two hundred weather stations covering the British Isles, each reporting local wind speeds and direction and barometric pressure into a large central computer housed in the main Meteorological Office in Bracknell, near Ascot, west of London. Into that computer too came data from all over the world, and one could draw from it everything the world's weather was likely to do in the next forty-eight hours. But nothing was ever certain, and a lurch of high atmosphere pressure could let in a polar gust that would refrigerate our cheerful expectations into unconvincing explanations.

 

 

The late September Sunday of Caspar Harvey's lunch, though, dawned fine and clear with a chilly wind from the east, conditions that would remain that way all day while the farmers of East Anglia harvested their late-ripening barley.

 

 

"Perfect for flying, " Kris said.

 

 

Kris's airplane, a low-winged single-engined Piper Cherokee, was approximately thirty years old. He, he frankly acknowledged, was its fourth owner, the third being a flying club that had sometimes put six hours a day on the propeller log (Kris's only gripe) and rubbed old-age patches into the cracked leather seats.

 

 

My first reaction to the antique rig a couple of years earlier had been

 

 

"No thanks, I'll stay on the ground, " but Kris had introduced me in his home airfield's echoing hangar to a machinist who understood the relationship between loose screws and sudden death. I'd put my life in Kris's hands on the machinist's assurance that old though the Piper might be, it was airworthy to the last rivet.

 

 

Kris, in fact, had turned out to be a surprisingly competent pilot. I'd expected him to be as volatile in the air as in his general behavior but instead he was soberly responsible at the controls and only as high as a radiosonde balloon afterwards.

 

 

Many of our colleagues found Kris a difficult companion and asked me in mild exasperation how I dealt with his obvious leaning towards my company. I usually answered truthfully that I enjoyed his slightly weird views on life, and I didn't mention that in his depressive periods he talked familiarly about suicide as if discussing an unimportant life choice like what tie to wear for early breakfast broadcasts.

 

 

It was regard for his parents, and for his father in particular, that deterred him from the final jump into the path of a train (his preferred method of exit), and I reckoned that he had less self-hatred and more courageous staying power than many who'd given in to a death wish.

 

 

At the time of Caspar Harvey's lunch party, Kris Ironside at thirty-one had outlasted the macabre instincts of a succession of young women who had temporarily found the idea of suicide fascinating, and was beginning to face the possibility that he might yet make it to middle age.

 

 

In appearance, apart from the overall tall and willowy build, he was noticeably good-looking, with pale blue intelligent eyes, wiry blond stick-out hair that refused help from barbers, a strong blond mustache, and, on screen particularly, a sort of half-grin that dared you not to believe his every word.

 

 

He kept his flying pride and joy on White Waltham airfield and to its upkeep devoted the bulk of his income, gleefully informing anyone who would listen that it left aerobic exercises out of sight as a keep-fit heart-stresser. He greeted me at White Waltham with what I knew from experience to be supercharged happiness. His Cherokee, parked by the petrol pumps, was taking aboard fuel that was no more stable than himself, each wing tank being filled to overflowing to expel any water formed there by hot saturated air condensing as the aircraft cooled after last time out.

 

 

Kris, never one of the old goggles-and-white-silk-scarf variety of pilots, was wearing a plaid heavy wool shirt with a Norwegian-knit sweater on top. He eyed my dark pants, white shirt and navy jacket and nodded approval, in some way he considered my all-too-conventional appearance to be a license for his own eccentricity to flourish.

 

 

He finished the refueling, checked that the two wing tank caps were screwed on tight and then, having with my help pushed the little white airplane a short distance from the pumps (a small courtesy to other refuelers), he methodically walked round the whole machine, intoning his checklist to himself as he touched each vital part. As usual, he finished by un clipping and opening backwards each half of the engine cowling, checking that the mechanic hadn't left a rag in the works (as if he would! ) and also wiping the dipstick clean before re-inserting it down into the sump, to make sure there was a satisfactorily deep lake of oil there to lubricate the engine.

 

 

Kris had never been one to take foolish chances when it came to flying.

 

 

Once aboard and sitting in the left-hand (captain's) seat he equally seriously completed his pre-starting checks--all switches in good order, and things like that--and finally started the engine, gazing concentratedly at its gauges.

 

 

Used to his meticulous ways, I sat placidly waiting for satisfaction to relax the tension in his backbone and hands, until at last he grunted, switched on his radio, and informed the Sunday controller up in his glass tower that Ironside in his Cherokee required takeoff clearance for a simple flight to Newmarket, return expected at about seventeen hundred hours local time. Kris and the controller knew each other well, the exchange of information was a courtesy, more than an obligation. Cleared to taxi, allowed the tower.

 

 

"Thanks, kiddo, " the pilot said.

 

 

Kris was right, it was a lovely day for flying. The Cherokee lifted off lightheartedly with its easy load and swung round towards the north as it climbed away from base. The noise of the engine in a cross between a growl and clatter made casual conversation difficult, but talking anyway was ever superfluous up there higher than eagles. Pleasure as always sat like a balloon in my mind, and I checked our progress against the map on my knees with unalloyed contentment. Maybe one of these days... why didn't I... learn to fly?

 

 

Kris had drawn two straight lines on the wipe-clean surface of the air map, a dog-leg route to lunch. It was he who steered by the direction indicator, allowing for magnetic variation and a crosswind, and I with small triumphs who checked our passage over the roads and rivers two thousand feet below and pointed them out to him, earning grins and nods.

 

 

From White Waltham we flew north to avoid crossing straight over London, turning northeast where the north heading multi-lane M1 highway reached the outskirts of the sprawling town of Luton, with its busy airport to the east.

 

 

Kris yearned for some of the expensive avionic packages that would give him access to all the latest equipment that made air navigation easier. It cost him every spare cent, however, just to keep flying, so he navigated by dead reckoning and sharp-eyed passengers, and only once, he said, had he been disastrously lost.

 

 

Dead reckoning delivered us safely alive into the Newmarket area, where he sought out a large house some way south of the town and, descending to a thousand feet or so, circled round it twice, causing figures below to appear waving in the garden.

 

 

"Caspar Harvey's house, " Kris shouted unnecessarily.

 

 

I nodded O. K. , and as he was circling clockwise, with the wing on my side low to give me a good view, I brought out the handy little camera I carried with me always and took enough shots, I reckoned, to thank and please our host.

 

 

Kris, breaking off from the circling, ascended again a few hundred more feet and gave me a Cherokee-eye view of the purpose-built town that the racing world called

 

 

"Headquarters. " I'd talked a hundred or more times on the telephone or voice mail to the trainers who worked there. I'd corresponded with e-mail by the electronic ton. I knew voices and I knew characters, and it wasn't only Oliver Quigley whose sharp anxieties begged assurances from me that I couldn't give.

 

 

Neither Kris nor I, as I'd checked with him before the flight, knew which of the many stable yards in Newmarket were identifiable from the air, and once over the place and thundering along at a hundred and twenty knots, I found I was sure only of one or two of the biggest.

 

 

Oliver Quigley had told me often that his string could trot straight from his yard onto Warren Hill, but with the speed and the sunshine and my ground-to-air ignorance of the town's geography, I wasn't at all sure in which quadrangle stable yard stood Caspar Harvey's equine investments, not to mention a filly due to run on Friday. To be on the safe side of pleasing the trainer, therefore, I snapped as many stable yards as I could.

 

 

There wasn't a horse to be seen, neither on the well-marked gallops nor in the stable yards nor on the horse walks (special paths for horses) which laced the town. There were upwards of twelve hundred aristocratic thoroughbreds down there somewhere, but at lunchtime on a Sunday they weren't doing much but dreaming.

 

 

Kris looked at his watch and headed south of the town, where he put the wheels down sweetly on the official grass strip that ran beside the part of the racecourse used in high summer--the July course. The Jockey Club not only allowed this but, to Kris's indignation, charged a fee.

 

 

He taxied back fast to where a Land Rover waited with a young woman in an ultra short skirt leaning against it.

 

 

"Shit, " Kris said forcefully.

 

 

"Why shit? " "He's sent his daughter. He promised she wouldn't be here. " "She looks O. K. to me. " Kris said

 

 

"Huh" with pity for my ignorance and slowed the Cherokee, and, swinging it round neatly into a tidy configuration for parking, cut the engine.

 

 

"Her name's Belladonna, " Kris said. "Poison. " I unclipped my seat belt, unlatched the door, climbed out and jumped down from the wing. Kris, having checked his switches, scrambled after. I wasn't sure he meant it about her name but he casually introduced us. "Bell, this is Perry.

 

 

Perry... Belladonna. Call her Bell. " I shook her hand. She said, eyebrows lifting, "Aren't you... ? " "I expect so, " I said.

 

 

She looked sugar-sweet, not deadly. Fair hair, more wispy than regulated. Blue eyes with innocuously blinking lids.

 

 

Pinkoutlined lips with a smile that never quite left them. Even without Kris's comment, I'd have been aware of witchcraft.

 

 

"Climb in, " she invited, gesturing to the Land Rover.

 

 

"Dad heard you circling overhead and sent me along. He's mulling wine. He'd never leave with cinnamon floating. " Kris, apparently deaf to the instruction, was walking round his aircraft and patting it with approval, listening to the small cracking noises of the metal cooling. Its white painted fuselage gleamed in the sun along with the dark blue personalized insignia of a lightning flash and the registration letters that identified Kris worldwide, and in fact he had flown in enough countries to be known (not without respect) as the "the fussy English. " After his final landing on wet days he sponged and dried the undersides of the wings, not just the tops, to get rid of any mud thrown up by the wheels.

 

 

"Get in, do, " Bell told him, opening the Land Rover's front passenger door for him. "This party's today, not tomorrow. " The antagonism between them was faint but positive. I sat in the rear seat for the five-mile drive to Caspar Harvey's house listening to the semi-polite exchanges and wondering how far their mutual dislike would go, such as, would they save each other if it risked themselves.

 

 

Caspar Harvey's home proved to be more than halfway to grand but just definitely on the under side of ostentatious.

 

 

The front, with small-scale Palladian pillars, seemed imposing, but the inside was only one room deep, and no one had tried to pretend otherwise. Entrance hall and sitting room, combined by a wall of arches, made a single space ample enough for the gathering of upwards of thirty people who stood around drinking hot red wine, eating handfuls of peanuts and talking about Newmarket's main profitable crop--racehorses.

 

 

Caspar Harvey, noticing Kris's arrival, eeled his way, drink held high, until he could greet his guest within shouting distance in the throng.

 

 

"I heard your overhead pass. " He nodded to Kris. "And welcome to you, too, " he added in my direction. "My trainer swears by your nose for rain. He's here somewhere. Do I run my filly on Friday? My wife puts her faith in the stars. Have some wine. " I accepted the wine, which tasted melodiously of cinnamon and sugar, and followed his identifying finger to his trainer across the crowd, Oliver Quigley, a-quiver and visibly ill at ease.

 

 

"Tell him it will be dry until Friday, " Harvey said.

 

 

"Tell him to run my horse. " He was enjoying, I thought, his role of lavish host.

 

 

Reprehensible of me to think also that the role itself meant more to him than his guests. His expansive gestures were like his setting, a conscious indication of wealth and achievement, but one that carefully fell short of a flourish of trumpets.

 

 

I told him I'd taken aerial photos of his house and would send them to him, and, pleased, he invited me to take as many shots of his guests as they would allow.

 

 

In body he was as substantial as in means, a heavy-shouldered presence with a thick neck and a trim gray grizzled beard.

 

 

Shorter by only three inches than Kris's willowy extent--as I was myself--Caspar Harvey would nevertheless have been noticeable at any height, or lack of it, he had, strongly developed, the indefinable aura that comes with success. I took his picture.

 

 

He posed again, and nodded benignly at the flash.

 

 

Kris drank Coca-Cola as a good little pilot should and kept his manic extravagance within bounds. It was definitely an "up" day in his psyche, good for wit and laughter and with no question of despairing walks along railway tracks.

 

 

The non-poisonous Belladonna, appearing at my side and pouring from a steaming jug of replenishment, asked me baldly why a sensible-looking person like myself should bother with Ironside's mental switchback.

 

 

"He's clever, " I said neutrally.

 

 

"Is that enough? " "Why don't you like him? " I asked.

 

 

"Like him? I loved the bastard once. " She gave me a twitch of a deeper smile and a shrug of shoulders and poured reinforcements for others and I, as one does at such events, in time fetched up in a chatting bunch that contained the ever worried trainer, Oliver Quigley. What about this wind, he wanted to know. "It's cold, " he said.

 

 

My harmless actual tangible presence--especially with camera seemed to upset him. I was used to aggression and disbelief from the sort of horse-oriented people who seemed to think (like children) that bad weather was somehow my fault. I was accustomed to being the unpopular messenger who brought the bad news of battles lost, and I'd been often enough cursed for smiling while I forecast blizzards, but on the whole I'd not caused what looked unexpectedly like jear.

 

 

I must be misreading him, I thought. But then, I knew him only as an agitated weather-obsessed horse trainer, and he could have--who knew--all sorts of other problems.

 

 

"It depends on the Urals, " I said soothingly.

 

 

He was mystified. "What does? " "The wind from the east. It's early in the year for a polar continental blast like this, but there may be a clear dry day for Caspar Harvey's filly, if it goes on blowing until Friday. " "And will it? " The question was put slightly pugnaciously by a gray-haired fiftyish imposing American-sounding woman who'd joined the group with three rows of pearls and an apologetic husband.

 

 

"Evelyn dear... " he murmured patiently.

 

 

She persevered with questions. "And what do you mean by Urals? " Her husband, a small round man in heavy dark eyeglass frames, answered her smoothly.

 

 

"Evelyn, dear, the Urals are mountains in Russia. On a straight line from the Urals to London, there is no high ground to get in the way. Nothing to divert or deflect an east wind from Siberia. " He assessed me with shrewd but amiable brown eyes behind the heavy-duty lenses. He said, "Aren't you the young man who flew here with the meteorologist? " Before I could agree that yes, I was, Oliver Quigley told him with rapid emphasis and energetic hands that I too forecast the weather and was probably even better known to the television public than Kris himself. "Robin and Evelyn, " he assured me, anxious to be understood, "are American of course, and, as they live mostly in Florida, they don't see much British TV. " "Darcy, " said the small man, completing the introduction by shifting his wine glass carefully to his left hand and offering me the right, "Robin Darcy. " He made lunch-party small talk in !

 

 

a subdued Boston-type accent. "And will you be along with Kris Ironside on his vacation? " Not that I knew of. "I don't think so, " I replied. Robin,

 

 

I

 

 

thought, had just inquired very delicately about my sexual preference. And what, I wondered, was his own? Evelyn, matronly in black and seemingly older than her husband, was nobody's idea of a trophy bimbo.

 

 

"Be sure to look us up, " she said automatically, but insincerely.

 

 

"Love to. " I sounded falsely eager, as one does.

 

 

Her husband rocked a little on heels and toes, his wrists folded over each other low on his stomach. His interest in me, slight in the first place, was fading rapidly, and presently he drifted off, Evelyn in tow, in search of more responsive brains.

 

 

Belladonna reappeared with her jug, her gaze ahead on the Darcys. "If you like cleverness, he's your man. " "He's clever at what? " Bell's pale eyelids fluttered. "It's like beauty. Born in him. He just is. " Darcy wandered around, however, looking insignificant and unimpressive. Evelyn's socializing voice was the one that prevailed.

 

 

"Don't be fooled, " Bell said.

 

 

"No. " "Kris said you saved his life a couple of times. " After a pause, I said,

 

 

"He liked to play with trains. " "No longer? " "Less and less. " "I wouldn't fly with him, " she said. "So we quarreled.

 

 

"After a silence she added, "It finished us. Doesn't he scare you? " There had been a time only a year ago when the trains had all but won, when I'd sat with him all night while he curled like a fetus and moaned with pain, when the only word he'd said, in a sort of anguish, had been

 

 

"Poison. " A couple of paces away Kris was at the top of his upswing, telling a {lying joke and raising eye-crinkling laughter. "So the air hostess said, Yes, Miss Steinem, of course you can go up to the cockpit during this flight and talk to our lady captain and our lady first officer, but there's just one thing, with our all female flight crew we don't call it a cockpit any more...

 

 

" "God, " Bell groaned. "I told him that bit of feminism yon ks ago. " "Good jokes never die. " "Did you know that sometimes he writes verses? " "Mm. " I paused. "Scientific, mostly. " "I've seen him tear them up, " Bell said.

 

 

So had I. A form of suicide, I'd thought, but better to kill a poem than himself.

 

 

Bell turned her back on Kris and said there was food in the dining room. There were also white-clothe tables and caterers' gold chairs and an autumnal buffet suitable for millionaires and hungry weathermen. I collected a disgracefully full plate and was welcomed by an insistent Evelyn Darcy into a space on a round table where her husband and four other guests were munching roast grouse with concentration.

 

 

The four unknowns and I went through the usual recognition routine and a promise that it wouldn't rain before bedtime, and I smiled and answered them placidly because in fact I liked my job very much, and good public relations never hurt.

 

 

Two of the unknowns slowly identified themselves as George Loricroft, distinguished, forty-five, top-dog racehorse trainer, and his blonde and over-shapely young wife, Glenda.

 

 

Every time Glenda spoke, her dominating husband either contradicted or interrupted her. Glenda's nervous titter hid some razor-sharp resentment, I'd have said.

 

 

Evelyn Darcy, who besides the three rows of pearls, the black dress and the gray-silver over-lacquered hair was decidedly nosy, had no inhibitions about question time. She wanted to know--and used her loud voice to get attention--whether Kris and I earned a fortune for our many on screen appearances. How else could Kris afford the upkeep of an airplane?

 

 

Every one heard her. Kris across the room gave me a comical look, half choked with laughter and yelled her an answer.

 

 

"We're both civil servants. We get civil service pay. You all pay us... and it's not enough to fund a month of condoms. " Reactions to this intimate and inaccurate revelation varied from laughter among the guests to distaste and embarrassment. I peacefully ate my grouse. Being a friend of Kris's meant being willing to accept the whole package. He could have said far worse. He had done, in the past.

 

 

Evelyn Darcy enjoyed the ripples. Robin looked longsuffering at her side. George Loricroft, the constant wife repressor, checked with me that we did indeed get civil service pay and I un excitedly agreed that yes we did, and why not, we gave a public service.

 

 

Oliver Quigley at that point inserted a chair where there was hardly enough space for it between Evelyn and myself and behaved in general as if the military police were hot on his trail for unspeakable offenses. Did the man never relax?

 

 

"I wanted to say to you, " he more or less stuttered into my lunch, "that I had a sort of pamphlet in the post yesterday from a new sort of organization that offers... er, well, I mean, it's worth a try, you know... " "Offers what? " I asked without pressing interest as he rambled to a halt.

 

 

"Weller... a personalized reading of the weather. " "A private firm? " I asked. "Is that it? " "Well... yes. You give the... er, by e-mail of course...

 

 

the time and place where you want to know what weather to expect and you get the answer back at once. " "Fascinating, " I said dryly.

 

 

"Haven't you heard of it? Bit of competition for you, isn't If he'd had more courage, what he'd said would have neared sarcasm. As it was, I finished the excellent grouse and fried breadcrumbs and smiled without annoyance.

 

 

"You go ahead and sign on with them, Mr. Quigley, " I said.

 

 

"Fine. " "I didn't expect you to say that! " he exclaimed. "I mean..

 

 

don't you mind? " "Not in the least. " Robin Darcy leaned forward and asked me from across his wife and the shaky trainer.

 

 

"How much do you charge Mr. Quigley for saying to run Caspar's filly on Friday? " Oliver Quigley might be nervous, but not stupid. He listened, and understood. He opened and closed his mouth and would, I knew, continue to tap me for accurate info that he didn't have to pay for.

 

 

Robin Darcy, with seemingly genuine interest, then asked me politely when I'd first become interested in the weather, and I told him, as I'd explained a hundred times before, that I'd watched the clouds since I was six, and had never wanted a different life.

 

 

His amiability, I thought, was built on his certainty of his own mental superiority. I had long ago learned to leave that sort of belief unchallenged, and had received a couple of advancements in consequence. Only to myself could I admit my reprehensible cynicism. And to myself, often enough, I could also, with humility, admit that I'd more than met my match. I smiled weakly at Robin Darcy and couldn't decide where his cleverness ended--or began.

 

 

Evelyn asked, "Where did you go to learn meteorology? Is there a special school for it? " I said, "It's called standing out in the rain. " Kris, on the move back to the buffet, overheard both question and answer and replied to her over his shoulder,

 

 

"Don't listen to him. He's a physicist. Dr. Perry Stuart, no less. " Robin yawned and closed his myopic eyes, but somewhere in that sharp brain there had been a quickening. I had seen it and could feel it, and didn't know why he wanted to hide it.

 

 

Oliver Quigley hastened to assure me with many a quiver that he hadn't meant to insult me by considering an outside firm better, when we both knew he had come darned near to -

 

it. The difference was that although he appeared vastly disturbed by it, I didn't care at all. If Oliver Quigley would only take his shivery nerves and dump them on someone else's doorstep, I would be delighted.

 

 

Caspar Harvey played the genial host faultlessly to give his guests good memories, collecting me from table, taking me in tow and introducing me to everyone in turn, persuading them to let me take their photo. Those who disliked the idea were overridden, Caspar offered refilled glasses, and got his way.

 

 

I snapped Quigley and Loricroft together, the pair of racehorse trainers topping up on crisp roast potatoes and pausing briefly in passing to discuss their trade. I heard snatches of Quigley--"He never pays on time"--and then Loricroft-"My runner at Baden-Baden got bumped at the start. " Loricroft's bosomy wife confided proudly to others at the table, "George goes to Germany often and wins races there, don't you, George? " But Loricroft, coldly undermining her enthusiasm, cut the "often" to "only once" during the past season. "I win far more races in France, but I can't expect my dear wife to get things right. " He looked around to gather sympathe ic responses and smiled with superiority down his nose. I thought Glenda a pain but her dear George an agony.

 

 

The splendid lunch narrowed down to coffee and worthwhile port and eventually, with regret, the guests began to leave. Kris and I needed transport back to the Cherokee, though, and Bell was nowhere to be seen.

 

 

Caspar Harvey himself put an end to my hovering on one foot by halting in front of me and saying decisively, "While you're here in Newmarket you may as well take a peek at my filly. Take her photo too. Then you'll know what's at stake when you're looking at Friday. " He put a tugging hand on my arm and made it downright rude for me to pull away, but I had no reason not to see the filly, if that was what he wanted, and felt it a small enough courtesy after such a lunch, if Kris were not pressed for time for flying home before dark.

 

 

It wasn't time that upset Kris, but the realization that he was expected to travel in the Land Rover again with Bell. There seemed no logical reason for four of us to travel in two cars to see the filly, but that was clearly what Caspar Harvey wanted, and when he'd cordially waved a temporary adieu to Oliver Quigley, his last departing guest, that was what Caspar Harvey got.

 

 

He drove out through the front gates, following Quigley's pale blue Volvo, and leaving Kris behind for his daughter to bring in the Land Rover.

 

 

With only a six or so miles' journey to go, Caspar Harvey lost no time in saying what he'd maneuvered me into hearing.

 

 

"How unstable is your friend Kris? " I said vaguely, "Um... " Harvey announced, "I don't want him as a son-in-law. " "At the moment, " I said, "it doesn't look probable. " "Rubbish! The girl's besotted. A year ago they fought like cats, and I'll tell you, I was glad of it. Not that he's not a brilliant forecaster, he is. So I went on acting on his weather advice and he's saved me thousands, literally thousands. " He paused, finding the question difficult, I guessed, but asking it just the same.

 

 

"Can you tell him to leave my daughter alone? " The short answer was of course no, I couldn't. It didn't seem to me, though, to be the right question.

 

 

When I didn't answer at once Harvey said, "A year ago she was spitting mad. She went off and got a job in Spain. Then six weeks ago she came back wanting me to arrange today's lunch and not to tell Kris she'd be here, and I did it for her, God knows why, thinking she'd thoroughly got over him, and I was wrong. She hasn't. " He paused gloomily, his big car purring, eating up the miles.

 

 

"He asked if he could bring a friend to navigate today and when I saw you... and you're obviously sensible not like him--I thought of getting you to tell him not to upset Bell all over again... but I suppose you'll think it was a bad idea..

 

 

" I said a shade helplessly, "They'll work it out for themselves. " It wasn't what he wanted to hear, and we finished the six miles in mutually unsatisfied silence.

 

 

Oliver Quigley's stable yard it transpired, was on the far side of the town, where shops and hotels gave way to the essential business of the place, to stalls for polished horses, and to the Heath galloping grounds, where they could practice winning and turn their gloss into procreation.

 

 

Quigley the trainer drove his pale blue Volvo into his own domain, and even there he looked ill at ease. The big quadrangle stable yard was alive with grooms fetching hay and water to each horse, and putting the straw floor covering clean and comfortable for the night. The groom in authority--clearly the foreman, the head groom--was doling out scoops of food for each horse. Some of the stalls had open doors, some had interior lights on, some were altogether closed and dark. There was an air of wanting to finish the Sunday afternoon program and get off as soon as possible for more enjoyable pursuits.

 

 

Caspar Harvey had stopped his car beside Quigley's and made no more reference to his daughter's feelings for Kris.

 

 

There was a notable smartening of body language among the grooms at the sight of the two most powerful men in their lives, Oliver Quigley the trainer (and never mind his selfconscious fluttering, it was he who paid the wages) and Caspar Harvey, owner of four superstars that gave kudos not only to Quigley's stable, but to the whole sport of racing.

 

 

The filly who might run on Friday was to be found, it seemed, behind one of the closed doors, not yet put right for the night.

 

 

Caspar Harvey with pleased anticipation strode over to a row of six stalls separated from the others on one side by the path leading out from the yard and down towards the Warren Hill gallops, and on the other side by a path giving on to the large house where it seemed Quigley lived.

 

 

"This is the filly's stall, " he said, beckoning to me to come as he unlatched the bolts of the top half of the split stable door.

 

 

....

 

 

"me's in There.

 

 

And so she was. But she wouldn't race on Friday.

 

 

I watched Harvey's face change from pride to horror. I saw his throat constrict as he groped for air. His treasure, the Friday filly, the two-year-old preparing to take the females' crown, the possible over-winter favorite for the following year's I, 000 Guineas and Oaks, the future dam of champions, the golden chestnut with a single small white star on her forehead, this fast and famous athlete was down on her knees and groaning, sweat darkening her flanks.

 

 

While Harvey, Quigley and I watched in long stunned seconds she toppled over onto her side, labored breath wheezing, her pain obvious.

 

 

She looked on the point of death, but she didn't die.

 

 

ON many levels, Caspar Harvey took charge, and it was he who sent for the veterinarian, brushing Quigley out of the way and offering the veterinarian, whom he knew well, twice his normal fee if he abandoned his Sunday afternoon rest and appeared in Quigley's yard immediately.

 

 

There was nothing he could physically do for his filly because he didn't know what was wrong with her, he understood the power of money, though, and he would spend it lavishly if it would get useful results.

 

 

"Colic? " He speculated. "Oliver, shouldn't you be walking her round? Surely walking is what you do for colic? " Oliver Quigley squatted down beside his horse's head and stroked her nose. He said he thought walking might do more harm than good, even if he could get the filly to stand up again, and that he would wait for the veterinarian. And it was noticeable, I thought, that, faced with a real and disastrous looking crisis with his horses, his constant anxiety shivers abated and almost died away.

 

 

Caspar Harvey stifled his emotions and thought of the future.

 

 

"You... " he said to me. "I mean you, Stuart, do you still have that camera? " I produced it from my pants pocket.

 

 

He nodded. "Take the filly, for the insurance. Pictures.

 

 

Stronger than words. " I did his bidding, the flash bright inside the darkening stall.

 

 

"Send them to me, " he said, and I assured him I would.

 

 

Belladonna, driving Kris into the yard in the Land Rover, reacted to the filly's plight with loving distress and absolute priority, and Kris infuriated her by saying his and my departure time was more important than waiting around for the veterinarian, because we couldn't navigate or land safely at White Waltham in fading light. Filly or no filly we needed to be off the ground by half past four, he said. Bell argued sharply that half past five would do. Kris said if she wouldn't take us to the plane when he wanted to go, he would call for a taxi. It seemed to me, listening to the vinegary exchange, that Caspar Harvey had no immediate worry about a son-in-law.

 

 

The veterinarian earned his double fee with screeching tires and, while listening through his stethoscope, metaphorically scratched his head over the filly.

 

 

"I don't think she has colic, " he said. "What has she been eating? " The head groom and all the others were immediately insulted at the slur on their care.

 

 

The filly had eaten nothing that day, they swore, except oats and bran and hay.

 

 

Kris argued insistently with Bell, who finally in a rage told her father she would be away for a while delivering the infuriating Kris to his transport. Her father nodded absentmindedly, his attention all now on his suffering animal, and he looked vague also when, on the point of leaving, I thanked him for the lunch and repeated that I would send the snaps.

 

 

Bell, braking with a jerk beside the Cherokee after a bad tempered ride through the town, listened with a frown while Kris tried to explain yet again that as we were both on duty that evening it was essential to return in time. It was true that we were on duty, but it wasn't strictly necessary for us to leave Newmarket by half past four. A long-established loyalty, however, tied my tongue.

 

 

She watched Kris walk round the Cherokee doing the ever-necessary checks.

 

 

"He makes me lose my temper, " she said.

 

 

I nodded. "I'll look after him. You go back to your father. " She stared at me concentratedly with the blue eyes.

 

 

She said, "I don't mean to be a bitch. " I thought that as she was dealing with two strong-willed men and was hardly pliant herself, she was not, even with the winsomely blinking eyelids, going to activate any sort of three way equilibrium without a maybe volcanic show of strength first.

 

 

Kris finished his checks, and Bell and I both stood up out of the Land Rover. Bell and Kris stood looking at each other in a silence that crackled as if electric.

 

 

Bell said finally, "I've got a job as assistant trainer to George Loricroft. I'll be staying in Newmarket from now on. " Loricroft had been at the lunch table where I sat with Evelyn (pearls) and Robin (glasses) Darcy.

 

 

Kris considered it, scowling.

 

 

"I've a month's leave coming up, " he said. "I'm going to Florida for part of it. " "Nice for you. " "You could come. " "No. " Kris turned his back abruptly and climbed into his flying machine, anything but, I thought wryly, a magnificent man as in the song.

 

 

I said goodbye awkwardly to Bell and said I hoped for the best with the filly.

 

 

"Give me your phone number, and I'll tell you. " I had a pen but no paper. She took the pen and wrote the number on her left-hand palm.

 

 

"Get in, get in, Perry, " Kris shouted, "or I'll go without you. " "He's a shit, " Bell said.

 

 

"He loves you, " I commented.

 

 

"Like a tornado tears you apart. " Kris started the engine and, not wanting to risk being actually abandoned, I climbed into the Cherokee, closed the door, fastened its hatch and buckled on my seat belt. Bell gave a vestige of a wave in return for my more vigorous farewell through the window, but Kris stared unforgivingly ahead until it was too late even for courtesy. When we were airborne, though, and while Bell still stood by the Land Rover watching us depart, Kris made a ceremonial pass in front of her and waggled his wings as we flew away.

 

 

Newmarket to White Waltham wasn't really very far. We had plenty of time and plenty of light when we landed, and the good spirits of the morning had returned to the pilot.

 

 

T HE CO I D WIN D blew until Friday, its Sunday sunshine fading to a depressing iron gray. Caspar Harvey's filly clung onto life, her symptoms and progress delivered to me at first hand by Bell, who had at the last minute, she said, remembered to write my telephone number onto something more lasting than skin only when she'd already squeezed liquid soap onto her hands.

 

 

"Apparently the poor animal had been pressing her head against the wall, just pressing.... Well, I've never seen a horse do that and nor has her groom, but the veterinarian says that head-pressing is a symptom of poison, and now everyone's in a tizzy. Panic. " "What poison? " I asked, faintly teasing. "Not belladonna? " "No. Thanks very much. Very funny. I've had to put up all my life with being named after deadly nightshade. The veterinarian kindly says belladonna would very likely have killed her. " Two days later Bell was back on the line with an update.

 

 

It was Wednesday by then.

 

 

"Dad and Oliver Quigley are trying to keep this out of the papers, heaven knows why, there isn't a chance. News goes round Newmarket like the black death. The filly is up at the equine hospital and they're taking blood samples and her temperature, and poking around in manure, you name it, they've thought of it. I saw Kris doing the forecast at lunchtime. He looks so levelheaded you'd never guess what he's like. Don't tell him I watch him. " Bell was right in that nothing was secret or sacred at Headquarters, on back pages from tabloids to broad sheets the filly kicked football into second place for two whole days.

 

 

I'd taken my film of Sunday's happenings to be developed the day after the lunch party, and I'd sent off a set of prints as a gift to Caspar Harvey. Bell reported her father as being horrified by the filly pics but on the whole grateful, and Oliver Quigley was moaning that the filly's state wasn't his fault.

 

 

"But Dad's so angry we're heading for court, I shouldn't wonder, " Bell said. "They spend hours arguing against each other. " My own days as usual were spent at the weather section of the BBC Wood Lane Television Centre. There each afternoon at two o'clock I and all other Meteorological Office forecasters working the same shift were connected together in a telephone conference to learn what was happening in the weather world, and what interpretation we should put on sometimes wildly divergent facts.

 

 

The skill that had unexpectedly transformed my life at about twenty-two had been an awakening gift for presentation. I'd been dumped "cold" in front of the cameras one evening at nine-thirty to give the longest solo appearance of the day, standing in at the ultimate last minute for a colleague with running diarrhea. Because it was unexpected I hadn't had time for nerves, and most luckily I'd read the weather signs right, so that it rained the next day where I'd said it would.

 

 

The resulting trickle of letters of approval had been enough to give me another chance. I'd enjoyed it. More letters followed.

 

 

By the end of six months I was a regular on the screen and after seven years reached second place in the hierarchy.

 

 

The top guy, the oldest of us all, held guru status and was treated by everyone with the deference due his postcard collection of Edwardian porn.

 

 

Both he and I could have shunted ourselves out of active forecasting and wafted our careers upstairs into organization.

 

 

Neither of us wanted to go. The actor in both of us enjoyed the live performance.

 

 

My grandmother loved it.

 

 

My grandmother was in a way my Cherokee at White Waltham, or, in other words, the bottomless pit into which I chose to pour the shekels I should have been laying up in bonds.

 

 

My grandmother and I had no other relations left besides ourselves and both she and I knew that probably fairly soon I'd be alone. The energetic woman who'd picked an infant from the wreckage that had just killed her daughter, the able journalist who had persuaded a court to grant her custody of her grandson, the understanding adult who'd seen a boy safely through childhood, adolescence and university, she now, at eighty, used wheels for legs and needed a nursing attendant all the time for simple living.

 

 

I called to see her on the Thursday afternoon, kissing her lightly on the forehead and checking on her general state of health.

 

 

L

 

 

"How're you doing, Gran? " "Absolutely fine. " A lie, as we both knew.

 

 

She still lived in the apartment where I'd spent my youth, on the second floor of a house overlooking the River Thames near the top of the tidal flow. At low tide there were acres of mud with screeching gulls scavenging, and at high tide steamerfuls of tourists charging past--with or without thumping music--for a quick trip up through the half-tide lock at Richmond into deeper waters above.

 

 

The ever-increasing rent stretched our joint resources painfully, but the living parade outside was worth it.

 

 

When I'd graduated from college and left the nest, as one does, she'd still been an agile employee of a travel company for whom she'd worked all my life. The travel company, enlightened beyond the normal, had relied on her changing age to give advice in their brochures to her peers. At fifty she'd written, "Those gorgeous boys teaching you tennis are playing for money, not keeps, " and at sixty she'd said of Australia, "Climb Ayer's Rock if you're either a five-year-old kid or next best thing to a mountain goat, " and at seventy gave her view that "It's now or never for Great Walls and pilgrimage. Do it now, or settle for never. " Fate had settled it for never. At seventy-four, disregarding warning periods of little feeling in her legs, she went out to assess the strength needed for white-water rafting in southern stretches of the Colorado River. She hadn't actually bucketed down the fiercest stretches, she'd asked the guides. She wasn't mad, my grandmother. She was paid to write about possible

 

 

- L.

 

 

adventures for her age group, and if necessary to say, "Don't go. " At seventy-four she'd been unenthusiastic about white water down her spine, and, wanting to get home, had ignored subsequent fever and chills as just a nuisance. Then, delayed at the airport, she'd had to wait half a day for a replacement aircraft to be found for the return to England. She'd written me a postcard from the airport, which of course I didn't receive until three weeks later.

 

 

Dearest Perry, I have the screaming heebiejeebies about this flight but there isn't anotherforfve days. Look after yourself I've caught a cold. Eternally, Gran.

 

 

On the long overnight heebiejeebie flight from Phoenix, Arizona, to London she had progressively lost muscular strength in her legs, and by the time the substitute aircraft landed safely at Heathrow the next morning the whole of her lower body felt numb. She had walked very slowly to immigration, and hardly ever again.

 

 

After hours of anxious investigations we were told that the trouble lay in a meningioma, a noncancerous but hard tumor that had invaded and grown slowly inside the spinal column and was now compressing the spinal nerves. Friendly and clearly concerned doctors tried truckloads of steroids, but they did no good. Surgery, though discussed lengthily and carefully carried out, interfered with the vascular supply of blood to the spinal cord and made things worse.

 

 

My grandmother's heebiejeebies were never to be lightly ignored.

 

 

She had had the heebiejeebies the day she'd traveled eighteen hours to try by her presence to persuade my reluctant parents to leave their much-loved house, only to see it blow up with them inside as she approached. She'd had much milder heebiejeebies the day I'd broken my ankle being run over by a golf cart, but because of some deeply foreboding heebiejeebies, we had not gone skiing in a valley that could have killed us in an avalanche had we been there.

 

 

When the medical dust had settled on the unhelpful meninges, my no longer active grandmother was making jokes about relative inability, and was afraid she would be forcibly retired by her employers. Instead, they had asked for columns on day-treats and holidays for the disabled, and I had shaken hands on a deal with an agency that supplied nurses, they agreed that a succession of angels would each live for a week in the flat, caring for my gran. They would nurse, shop and cook and dress their patient and drive her to column-worthy destinations.

 

 

They would sleep in the small rear-facing room where my physics books still took up shelf space. They would wear uniforms if they wanted to. And, my grandmother insisted, they would watch the weather forecasts.

 

 

Only one of the nurses the agency sent had been a failure, she'd been heavily unattractive and of gloomy mind, and she'd brought her dog. My grandmother preferred her angels to be of granddaughter age, unencumbered and pretty, and to their surprise, the agency found their nurses asking to spend repeat live-in weeks with an old woman.

 

 

On the Thursday after Caspar Harvey's lunch I mentioned the sick filly to my grandmother and found her one step ahead of the facts, no real surprise, she read newspapers at vacuum pump speed and from her own long experience at writing them, understood all the inferences they left out.

 

 

"Caspar Harvey will dump Oliver Quigley, don't you think, Perry? " she observed. "He'll send his horses to Loricroft, to be where his daughter's going. " As her hands and arms could deal fairly well with newsprint she habitually spread the papers open on her knees. I watched her wrestle, knowing she wouldn't thank me for assistance.

 

 

Only when she laid the papers down on her lap unmoving with a cross little sigh could one expect to be allowed to help.

 

 

As always, though it took her and the current nurse an hour or more to achieve it, she looked fresh, neat and striking, this time in a dark blue lace-edged gown with a silver and white artificial gardenia pinned to her left shoulder, and silver leather shoes on her non-functioning feet.

 

 

I asked, mystified,

 

 

"What makes you think Harvey will move his horses? " "He's in the game for glory. And you've always told me, haven't you, that Oliver Quigley has the permanent heebiejeebies all the time? " "I suppose so, yes. " I sat in a large armchair near the window, next to her, with her wheels locked in her favorite place, so that we could both watch the raucous seagulls chase one another over the mud, their display of basic aggressive instinct obvious and so informative that inter-human wars, my grandmother observed, were natural and inevitable.

 

 

On that Thursday afternoon it seemed to me that the life force was as low as the ebb tide in my grandmother, however hard she might try to disguise it, and it alarmed me very much because I didn't want to imagine life without her.

 

 

She had been always not only stand-in parent with bandages for scraped knees, but also an intellectual teacher, partner and prompter of thought. The occasional rebellions of my teens were distant memories. I'd come to visit her by habit for years since then, listening to her down-to-earth wisdom and adopting most of it for myself. It was too soon for her to ebb. I wasn't ready to lose her. I supposed that perhaps it would always be too soon.

 

 

"If Quigley loses the Harvey horses... " I began vaguely.

 

 

My grandmother had her own questions. "Who poisoned the filly? Who's trying to find out? What is that mad friend of yours doing about it? " I smiled. "He's off to Florida on leave. He has a love-hate thing going with Caspar Harvey's daughter. You might say he's running away. " She tired abruptly of the Harvey saga at that point and, closing her eyes, let the newspaper slide to the floor.

 

 

There was a new nurse on duty that week, one I hadn't met before, and as if called she came quietly into the sitting room and gathered the papers into a tidy pile. She had been introduced to me by my grandmother as, "This dear young woman is Jett van Els. She'll write it down for you. Her father was Belgian. " Jett van Els of the Belgian father easily filled my grandmother's requirements of youth and looks and was moreover tall and trim in a blue-and-white uniform with an upside down watch pinned where I would get into harassment trouble looking at the time.

 

 

My grandmother's sleepinesses never lasted more than a few minutes, but that day it took her longer to wake up. Still, she suddenly opened her round blue eyes and as always came back to full awareness immediately.

 

 

"Stay away from Newmarket, Perry, that place is full of villains. " She spoke as if without prior thought and looked almost surprised at what she'd said.

 

 

"Newmarket's quite a big town, " I commented mildly. "Stay away from whom, exactly? " "Stay away from that filly. " I said, "O. K. , " casually and didn't mean what I said.

 

 

As far as I could remember she had only once herself been to Newmarket, and that years ago on a visit prompted by her writing a magazine article series on how to squander one's time and spending money on cheerful days out. After that, Newmarket had been consigned to her mental file of' been there, done that" and life was too short, she often said, for taking the same road twice.

 

 

"What's wrong with seeing the filly, anyway? " I asked.

 

 

"That's exactly the point. Whatever's wrong with the filly, stay away from it. " She frowned, however, and I reckoned she didn't clearly know what she meant. Worse than physical weakness, I always feared, would be the atrophy of her sharp mind, so what she'd said about the filly was either acutely perceptive or nonsense, and I didn't want to guess which.

 

 

To Jett van Els the exchange meant nothing as horses weren't her interest. She arranged cushions comfortably at her patient's back and showed in every fluid movement the expertise of a good nurse. Regardless of her un-English name, she spoke and looked like a homegrown rose, very much the type for whom I'd once ditched a tycoon's daughter, only to be dumped in my turn when the novelty of being escorted by a well-known face had worn off. Real life began when the screen went dark.

 

 

Jett van Els with composure said that Mrs. Mevagissey would be having fish pie with parsley sauce for supper, did I want to stay?

 

 

Mrs. Mevagissey was my grandmother.

 

 

"No, he won't stay, " she placidly said. "But on past form you may find him asking you to share a pub sandwich in a week or two. " "Gran, " I protested.

 

 

"I'm glad of it, " she said truthfully. "So off you go, and I'll watch you tomorrow on the box. " I always left at her bidding so as not to exhaust her, and this time I collected on the way out a friendly and amused reaction from the brown van Els eyes, a visible message that if I asked I might get my sandwich.

 

 

Mrs. Mevagissey knew me a shade too well, I thought.

 

 

I SPENT FRIDAY in the Weather Centre watching reports come in from all over the world. The steady continental wind from the east was breaking up, but the Newmarket turf would still have been dry and fast for Harvey's filly that afternoon if she'd been capable of benefiting.

 

 

Messages from Bell sounded as if frustration largely prevailed. The industry's busy news-diggers had broken off their filly chase for the weekend in order to report the races themselves, and by Monday the sick horse would be of back-burner stature, if she got a mention at all. The transfer of all Harvey's other horses along the road from Quigley to Loricroft earned one strong paragraph, the engagement of Bell as Loricroft's assistant trainer merited a picture-of Bell, not of Loricroft, not of Harvey, and not of the horses. It was Bell who was pretty.

 

 

Poor Oliver Quigley no longer troubled my telephone twice at least every day, I received one pathetic call from him, a matter of a choking throat and barely swallowed emotion, the quivers back at full force.

 

 

Racing, though, even including the top two-year-old colts' races, the Dewhurst and the Middle Park Stakes, and the fillies' championship, the Cheveley Park Stakes, was not near my highest priority.

 

 

Winds around the globe were increasingly in turmoil as usual in that autumnal time of year, with a full-blown hurricane in the Pacific threatening the southwest California coast, and a destructively raging typhoon coming ashore and drowning people in the Philippines. Japan was suffering appalling waves, called tsunamis, caused by offshore ocean-bed earthquakes.

 

 

In the Atlantic the count of hurricanes and lesser tropical depressions had reached thirteen for the year, with possibly the most active cyclonic weeks of autumn still ahead, and although roaring and massive disturbances of hurricane strength seldom reached the British Isles except as decaying systems of heavy rain, to us as to meteorologists round the world they were of ultimate interest.

 

 

Two weeks after Caspar Harvey's lunch the year's fourteenth cyclonic swirl of clouds formed off the west coast of Africa and crossed the Atlantic slightly north of the equator. The three essentials for its transformation into a full hurricane were all in place, being, first, a seawater temperature above 80 degrees Fahrenheit, second, hot air from the tropics converging with equatorial air full of moisture taken up from the sea, and third, winds caused by the warm moist air rising and letting cold air flood in underneath. The rotation of the earth kept the in flowing winds spinning, and the heat of the ocean went on intensifying the whole circling air mass.

 

 

Its identifying name, chosen years before to be given to the fourteenth storm of that season, was Nicky.

 

 

Kris watched its development moodily.

 

 

"It's heading westwards, straight to Florida, " he complained, "and it's traveling quite fast at twenty miles an hour. " "I thought you'd be interested, " I said.

 

 

"Of course I'd be interested, but it will get there ahead of me, won't it? I don't go for another eight days. " "It's getting more organized, " I commented, nodding. "The surface winds are circling at about eighty miles an hour already.

 

 

" Kris said,

 

 

"I've always wanted to fly through a hurricane. " He paused.

 

 

"I mean... as a pilot... fly through one. " I listened to the fanatical relish in his voice, he wasn't making idle chat.

 

 

"People do, you know, " he said seriously.

 

 

"It's crazy, " I said, but I wanted to as well, badly.

 

 

"Just think of it! " His pale eyes glazed with growing excitement.

 

 

"And don't tell me the idea of it doesn't get your own blood racing, because who was it who competed in the North Cornwall high-surfing contests? Who can stand upright on a surfboard? Riding the tunnel, isn't it called? " "The tube. That was different. It was totally safe. " "Oh really? " "Well, almost. " "I'll fly you safely through Hurricane Nicky. " To his enormous disappointment, however, he didn't get the chance. Hurricane Nicky, although intensifying to a Category 3 storm on the Saffir-Simpson scale, with circulating wind speeds between 111 and 130 miles an hour, not only didn't wait around for Kris to arrive in the States, but turned northwards before it reached the American eastern seaboard at all, and blew itself out harmlessly over the cold waters of the North Atlantic.

 

 

Kris nevertheless set off to Florida, with the rocketry at Cape Canaveral as his priority, followed by contacts with the National Hurricane Tracking Center in Miami, but no storms at all, to his great disappointment, were shaping up in their chief spawning ground, west of Africa.

 

 

During an otherwise uneventful week there he sent me a fax to say he was now staying for a few days with the people we met at Caspar Harvey's lunch, as arranged.

 

 

I couldn't remember at first whom he meant. The lunch itself had receded in my mind, semi-eclipsed by the poisoning of the filly, but a backwards-looking search came up tentatively with the Darcys, Robin the brains and Evelyn the pearls.

 

 

L

 

 

Confirmation quickly followed. Kris dispatched, "This is a casual place. Robin and Evelyn are adamant they want you to join us on Monday, to stay for a few days, so send a yes-thank you pronto. Just to remind you, the minor disturbance now forming in the Caribbean will be called Odin if it develops. I intend to fly through it. Won't you come? " The minor disturbance in the Caribbean, I judged from a swift trawl of the chaotic conditions there, would probably collapse into a fizzle, saving the name Odin for another day.

 

 

Next morning, though, the winds south of Jamaica gained speed, and the barometric pressure dropped to well below a thousand millibars, an ominously low reading considering that the average was nearer 1013. A wind sheer aloft that had been preventing an organized circling movement had disintegrated and stopped tearing the upper atmosphere apart, and the minor disturbance, as if taking stock of the possibilities, had begun a slow invitation to a dance.

 

 

Kris transmitted,

 

 

"Odin is now designated a tropical storm.

 

 

Pity it's not yet a hurricane, but come on Monday anyway. " He included directions to reach the Darcys, and welcoming messages from both.

 

 

The Monday ahead was the beginning of my official leave.

 

 

I pondered over the meager savings I'd intended to devote to walking in Sicily, and then telephoned Belladonna Harvey.

 

 

I learned about the state of the filly (feeble but on her feet, test results still not available), the state of Oliver Quigley (lachrymose), the state of her relations with her new employer Loricroft (he was chasing her), and the state of her father (fuming).

 

 

And how was Kris doing, she finally wanted to know, as he'd been missing from the screen for a week.

 

 

"He went to Florida. " "So he did. " "He wanted you to go. " "Mm. " "He's staying with Robin and Evelyn Darcy. They've asked me to join them. Is that odd? " There was a pause before she said,

 

 

"What do you want to know? " With a smile that I knew reached my voice, I asked, "For a start, what does he do? " "Evelyn tells everyone he sells mushrooms. He never denies it. " "He can't sell mushrooms, " I protested.

 

 

"Why not? Evelyn says he sells all the sorts of mushrooms the food world's gone mad about. Portobello, cepes, chanterelles, shiitake, things like that. He has them freeze-dried and sealed in vacuum packs and they're making him a fortune. " She paused.

 

 

"Also he sells grass. " "He what? " "He sells grass. I don't mean that sort of grass. You may laugh, but in Florida they don't grow garden grass from seed.

 

 

The climate's wrong, or something. They plant sods instead.

 

 

They lay lawns like laying carpets. Robin Darcy has a sod farm. Don't laugh. That's what it's called, and it's a million dollar business. " I said slowly, "You also said he was born clever. " "Yes. He was. And I told you not to be fooled. He goes around in those thick black eyeglass frames looking like a rather inadequate and cuddly little ninny, but everything he touches turns to gold. " "And do you like him? " I asked.

 

 

"Not really. " She answered without hesitation. "He's Dad's buddy, not mine. He's too calculating. Everything he does has a purpose, but you only realize that later. " "And Evelyn? " I asked.

 

 

"She's his front man, like I told you. Well, woman. I've known them for ages, on and off. Robin and Dad have always talked farming, though you wouldn't think mushrooms and sod have much in common with birdseed, which is Dad's major industry. " I said vaguely, "I thought your father grew barley. " "Yes, he does. It makes great whisky. He doesn't grow the birdseed. He buys every variety of seed by the hundred tons and has a factory which mixes them and sells them in small packets to people who keep budgerigars and things. You might say that both Robin Darcy and my father make millions four ounces at a time. " "So... er... Evelyn? " I murmured again.

 

 

"She and my mother get on fine. They both adore jewelry.

 

 

If you talk diamonds to Evelyn you'll be her friend for life. " Bell hadn't persuaded me pro or con, but the thought of Florida, so far unvisited, easily won, and it was at that point that I thoughtlessly told my grandmother that Kris wanted to fly with me through a hurricane.

 

 

"Don'tgo, Perry. Itgives me the heebiejeebies.... " But I'd kissed her and given her anxiety no weight. It was years, by then, since the slow paralysis of the Phoenix-to London flight, and no heebies or indeed jeebies had since that dreadful journey raised a threatening head.

 

 

"I'll come back safely, " I assured her, and flew to Florida on the cheapest ticket I could find.

 

 

Ro B I N A N D E v E LY N S South Florida home, though apparently nothing extravagant for the area, was to eyes disciplined to a one-room third-floor attic bed sit (tiny bathroom and alcove-kitchen), a dazzling revelation.

 

 

To start with, there was the brilliance of color. I was used to the blue-gray northern light already afflicting the afternoons of London W. 12, latitude between 51 and 52 degrees north.

 

 

In Sand Dollar Beach, at latitude 25 degrees, just north of the Tropic of Cancer but well north of the equator, pink was vibrant, turquoise blazed to the horizon on the sea and green palm trees swayed over white crumbling lacy waves.

 

 

I very seldom regretted the constraints I accepted in order to pay for my grandmother's comfort, but I felt, on that beautiful sparkling evening, that the English screaming seagulls fighting on the ebb tide came expensive.

 

 

I had thanked the Darcys for their invitation and they'd warmly greeted my arrival but, even allowing for the legendary generosity that Americans displayed by habit, I still wasn't sure why I was there in Sand Dollar Beach watching the golden sunset, drinking an exotic intoxicater and eating canapes the size of Frisbees.

 

 

Evelyn talked about diamonds, as Bell had foretold.

 

 

Evelyn, silver hair immaculate, wore shimmering ice-blue silk pants with a loose blouse of the same silk, embroidered all over with pearls and little silver tubes that my worldly grandmother had educated me to recognize as bugles.

 

 

Robin, full glass of icy concoction in hand, lazed back in a vast thickly cushioned garden chaise longue that horizontally supported his bare ankles and feet. Robin had called me

 

 

"Dr.

 

 

Stuart" while meeting my flight in Miami airport and "dear boy" when pressing a pina co lada into my hand, murmuring also

 

 

"Pineapple juice, coconut milk and rum. Suit you, I hope? " He wasn't sure of me, I thought, nor I of him. One could often perceive goodwill instantly. In Robin I saw a chess game.

 

 

We sat on a south-facing large terrace that overlooked the calm Atlantic Ocean on one side and was dramatically lit on the other by streaky gold clouds in a late afternoon sky.

 

 

Kris, who seldom drank alcohol even when not flying, restlessly wandered from terrace to lower-level deck pool and back again, searching the golden heavens as if in annoyed disappointment.

 

 

Robin Darcy said to him tolerantly,

 

 

"Kris, go inside and watch the Weather Channel. If the great god Odin is stalking about in the Caribbean, you won't see him up here for days. " I asked Robin if he and Evelyn had ever sat tight through a hurricane and was smiled at with sad pity for my naivete.

 

 

"You can't sit tight, " Evelyn assured me. "You get thrown about. I thought you were a meteorologist. I thought you knew things like that. " "He knows in theory, " Kris told them, pardoning me. "He knows how hurricanes form but no one knows why. He knows why they're called hurricanes, but not where they're going. He's a doctor of philosophy, which is rare for a weatherman, and he ought to be doing research like into the why, that no one knows, and not sitting drinking in the sun, but I'll tell you he's here now because I said I'd fly him through a hurricane's eye, and not because he's researching coconut milk with pineapple juice and rum. " Robin swiveled his eyes my way, also the hand holding his drink. "Is that a fact? " he said.

 

 

"I wouldn't have missed this evening for anything, " I replied. I raised my own drink towards the sun, but it was opaque like many questions and let no light through.

 

 

ROBIN, GENEROUS WITH his telephone as with his rum, listened with barely confined enthusiasm to my report on the weather brewing in the circle of sea named after the frightening Caribs, North American Indians, who invaded the islands and coastal lands, and ruled by torture there before Columbus and other European colonists drove them out in their turn.

 

 

There were still pirates, modern-dress variety, Robin said, infesting the warm blue waters as murderous predators, stealing yachts and killing the owners, though maybe they weren't quite as bloodsucking as in the past. He smiled, mentioning that the word Carib had the same linguistic root as cannibal.

 

 

I talked to the Hurricane Center in Miami, where a longtime telephone pal gave me an as-of-five-minutes-ago state of the upper winds, "Odin is coming along nicely, " he said. "There were signs of organization during the night. I wouldn't now say you've crossed the pond for nothing. Call me tomorrow, we might have more. This storm's mighty slow, forward movement only six miles an hour, if that. There are thirty-five-miles-an-hour sustained winds on the surface, but no eye yet. " To Robin I said,

 

 

"It's a toss-up. " "Heads it's a hurricane? " "Do you want it to be a hurricane? " I asked curiously.

 

 

It seemed to me that in fact he did, but he shook his bespectacled head and said, "No, I definitely don't. I've lived here in Florida for forty years, and I've gone inland from the coast every time evacuation's been advised. We've been lucky with water surge too. There's a reef parallel with the coast here about half a mile out and in some way it lowers the storm surge and inhibits the formation of large waves. Where there's no reef, it's the water, not the wind, that kills most people. " One couldn't live so long in a hurricane alley, I supposed, without learning a few deadly statistics, and on my second (glorious) evening in his house, Robin switched on the Weather Channel for us all to see how Odin was coming along.

 

 

Dramatically well, was the answer.

 

 

The pressure in the circling center of the tropical depression Odin, a happy television voice announced, had dropped 20 millibars in the past two hours. Almost unheard of! Now officially designated a vigorous tropical storm, Odin, generating winds around sixty-five m. p. h. , lay more than two hundred miles south of Jamaica and was traveling due north at seven miles an hour.

 

 

Robin absorbed the information thoughtfully and announced that on the next day we would all take a flight to Grand Cayman Island for a few days in the sun.

 

 

As we had spent the whole of that day swimming in the Darcy pool, drinking Darcy revivers and lying in the Florida sun, Robin had only one possible intention, to move, if not directly into the eye of Odin, at least to where it could see us.

 

 

Kris stalked with huge elastic strides around the sunny pool deck and the half-shaded terrace above. Odin, tracked by radar and satellites, was too small for his taste, too slow, and too far from land. Robin said dryly that he was sorry not to have been able to fix a better display.

 

 

Evelyn thought hurricane-chasing a dangerous and juvenile sport and said she wasn't going to Grand Cayman, she was staying comfortably at home, and Robin reminded her that f Odin intensified, and if Odin changed course, as hurricanes were liable to do from one minute to the next, it might be she who found the monster roaring on her doorstep, not us.

 

 

"What is more, " she continued firmly, ignoring the threat, "tonight for dinner we're having stone crabs, Florida's pride, and after that Kris can repeat to us the poem he's been muttering to himself all day, and after that you can watch hours of Weather Channel if you like, but don't wake me in the morning, I'm not catching any flight to anywhere. " "What poem? " Robin asked.

 

 

"There's no poem. I'm going for a swim, " Kris said immediately, and was still in the pool at sunset.

 

 

"He did recite a poem, " Evelyn complained, "why does he pretend he didn't? " I said from experience,

 

 

"Give him time. " In time he would either repeat his verses or tear them up.

 

 

It would depend on how he felt.

 

 

The stone crabs for dinner, with mustard sauce and green salad, beat fish pie with parsley sauce out of sight, and over coffee out on the terrace in soft silhouetting light, Kris said, without preliminaries, "I went to Cape Canaveral, you know. " We nodded.

 

 

"I'll fly through a hurricane, but those first astronauts sat on countless tons of rocket fuel and lit a match. So... well.

 

 

I wrote for them. I wrote about Cape Canaveral, about the past... about the future. " He stood up abruptly and carried his coffee cup to the end of the terrace. His voice came matter-of-factly out of the dark.

 

 

"There are lonely concrete launch pads there, deep set in dusty grass, They are circles scarcelyfre-marked, barely twenty feet across, Rockets stood there, waiting, men inside with trusting courage, For the Ift-off to the stars. " No one spoke.

 

 

Kris said, "Now shuttles roar routinely to a station up in orbit, Soon they'll print a cosmic schedule, issue a boarding pass, And who will spare a memory or even a passing thank you To those circles in the grass? " More silence.

 

 

With a sigh, Kris said, "Many a windy year will blow across the Cape abandoned.

 

 

Ghosts of fear and bumpy hearts will thin and fade and pass.

 

 

Weeds green the concrete circles. It'sfrom a launch pad out in orbit That men have gone to Mars. " Kris walked over and put his coffee cup on the table.

 

 

"So you see, " he said, a near-laugh lightening his concept, "I'm no John Keats. " Robin said judiciously, "An interesting apercu all the same. " Kris left Robin explaining an apercu to Evelyn and walked me to the edge of the terrace to look at the moon reflected in the pool.

 

 

"Robin's arranged a Piper in Cayman, " he said. "I've checked that I can fly it. Are you on? " "I can't afford much. " "Don't fuss about the money. Are you spiritually on? " "Yes. " "Great. " My unqualified agreement excited him. "I was sure that's why you came. " "Why is Robin so keen on us going to Odin? " Kris wrinkled his tall pale forehead. "Understanding why people do things, that's your sort of work, not mine. " "I liked your poem. " He grimaced. "You should go to the Cape. You'd never believe that the moon walks were spawned from those concrete slabs. " There were times, there were days, when the extremes of Kris's seesaw nature fell into balance, not just as always for his solo two-minute on screen weather forecasts, but also for a lasting peace. It was as if the careful pilot took over even after the wheels had landed. On the evening of the Cape Canaveral verses he sounded more levelheaded than I'd ever known him out of an airplane.

 

 

"Did you see Bell? " he asked.

 

 

"I talked to her on the telephone. " "Will she marry me, do you think? " I blew a breath of exasperation down my nose.

 

 

"First, " I said, "you'd better ask her. " "And next? " "Both of you practice keeping your temper. Count ten before you yell. " He thought it over and nodded. "You tell her, and I'll do it. " I nodded. I doubted that either would manage it, but an attempt was an advance.

 

 

In a typical non sequitur he conversationally asked,

 

 

"What do you know of Trox Island? " "Er. " I thought without result. "Does Bell like it, or something? " "Bell? It's nothing to do with Bell. It's to do with Robin and Evelyn. " I said

 

 

"Oh? " vaguely. "I've never heard of it. " "It seems that most people have never heard of it, " Kris said, "but suppose Robin wants you and me to fly to Trox Island, never mind through Odin's eye. " I said, puzzled, "Whyever should he? " "I think it's something to do with mushrooms. " "Oh no, Kris, " I protested. "I'm not risking my life for mushrooms. " "You won't be risking your life. In the past, dozens of planes have flown through hurricanes to gather essential and helpful information, and almost none has been lost. " Almost none, I thought, wasn't enormously reassuring.

 

 

"So why mushrooms? " I asked.

 

 

"Robin was talking on the phone soon after I came, " Kris explained, "and I accidentally overheard him, and it was something about me and possibly my friend, that's you, and Odin and mushrooms on Trox Island. " "And you haven't asked him about it? " "Well... not yet. I mean... I don't want to upset him...

 

 

he says he's paying for us to go to Cayman, and he's paying the cost of the aircraft... " "I'll ask him, " I said, and later, peacefully, nightcap glass of cognac to hand, I mentioned Bell's account of the Darcy mushroom and sod farm business and wondered where he found fungus and grass to grow best.

 

 

"Florida, " he promptly said. "I grow my grass in swampland up near Lake Okeechobee. Best wet agricultural conditions for sod in the States. " "And someone mentioned Trox Island too. Where's that? " I put no force into an ultra-calm inquiry, but even so I sensed a tightening, and then a deliberate loosening in my host.

 

 

"Trox? " He took his time answering. He opened a heavy gleaming wood thermidor and fiddled lengthily with cutting and lighting a cigar. Internal debate came out in punctuating puffs of smoke. I sat placidly, looking out from the terrace to the vast untroubled sea.

 

 

"Trox, " Robin said pleasantly at length, sure he had the whole tobacco tip redly glowing, "is one of the many little islands sticking up in the Caribbean Sea. I believe Trox is chiefly constructed of guano--that's bird droppings, of course. " "Fertilizer, " I agreed.

 

 

He nodded. "So I understand, but I've never been there myself. " He inhaled smoke and blew it out, and said how much Evelyn and he were enjoying having Kris and me as house guests and how interesting he had found Kris's view of the future of space travel, and how much he looked forward to Kris's reports on shaking hands with Odin. He had dropped Trox Island as if of no interest. I tried again to mention it and he cut me off immediately, saying flatly, "Think about Odin.

 

 

Forget Trox Island. Let me fill your glass. " Evelyn drew me away, wanting me to identify the stars, turning aside as boring our engrossment with shifting winds.

 

 

At the end of the evening Kris and I each returned to our colorful basic tropical bedrooms, brilliant fabrics, wicker furniture, white tiled floor, ceiling fan circling, bright bathroom adjacent, all an ultimate comfort. I fell asleep as easily as on the previous evening, but half-woke hours later in the dark wondering why the London streetlights weren't throwing familiar shadows on the ceiling.

 

 

Miami... I drifted to full consciousness... I was in Sand Dollar Beach, named for the flat round decorative shells sometimes found on the shoreline. They were a sort of sea urchins of the order Clypeasteroida... I'd looked them up.

 

 

I switched on the bedside light, felt restless, got up, padded in and out of the bathroom, and finally, with a towel and in swimming shorts made my way through the dark house, across the terrace and down into the soothing pool.

 

 

Robin Darcy, friendly but secretive, generous beyond normal, had given us too much and told us too little. So what the devil were Kris and I set on? And could it be a one-way trip?

 

 

Mrs. Mevagissey relied on my earnings, as I for twenty past years had lived on hers. I had no right to risk the money that paid the nurses. They alone made her existence bearable. My priority was to fly through a hurricane and to return home safely. Kris's plans came second, Robin's third.

 

 

Odin, my own knowledge and forward-looking perception told me, could grow quite quickly from Category 3 to Category 5 on the Saffir-Simpson scale, which meant that the speeds of its winds would destroy every instrument put out to measure them. Category 5 meant Odin would deliver catastrophic damage in storm surge wherever it touched on , - shore, it could sustain incredible winds of around 180 miles an hour in its eye wall... and little islands, with or without mushrooms, could be flooded and disappear.

 

 

I relaxed in the semi-cool water and swam lengths with economic strokes, covering distance without concentrating.

 

 

All my life swimming had been the one competitive sport my grandmother and I had been comfortably able to afford for me, though from sixteen onwards I'd deserted municipal pools and Olympic-type racing for longer endurance trials and surfing.

 

 

By the time Kris and I went to Florida I was growing out also of the urge to race at all, but I still had the shoulders and movements of long practice.

 

 

Thinking only of Hurricane Odin and Trox Island, I slid out of the pool in a while and stood, toweling, with my back to the house.

 

 

A voice behind me said with goose-bumpy menace, "Stand still and raise your hands. " I nearly swung round thoughtlessly and would doubtless have been shot, but after a moment of reconsideration I dropped the towel and did as I'd been told.

 

 

"Now turn round slowly. " I turned round, realizing that I, on the pool deck, was in unlit shadow to anyone up on the terrace.

 

 

Robin stood up there, lit from behind by a glow in the house. Round cozy Robin held a handgun pointing motionlessly where it could do me terminal damage.

 

 

"I'm Perry, " I said.

 

 

"I was swimming. " "Come forward where I can see you. And come slowly, or I'll shoot. " If he hadn't so obviously been speaking the simple truth,

 

 

I

 

 

might have joked, instead I slowly stepped forward until the house lights shone into my eyes.

 

 

"What are you doing out here? " Robin asked blankly, lowering the gun to point at my feet.

 

 

"I couldn't sleep. Can I put my hands down now? " He shook himself slightly as if waking up, opening his mouth and nodding, but in the second before life returned to normal the pool area was suddenly full of blinding lights, blue uniforms, shouting voices and horribly purposeful black guns.

 

 

The wish--the willingness--to kill reached me like shock waves. I felt battered by noise. I was told to kneel and did so, and was held down by a ruthless hand on my neck.

 

 

Robin was ineffectually speaking. The blue-uniformed police, not listening, continued with their rough mission, which was if not to put a bullet in him, at least to immobilize the intruder and shout garbled words into his befuddled ear, words Robin later identified as my "rights. " For what seemed ages I went on kneeling ignominiously on the pool deck, feeling stupid in my swimming shorts, gripped by unfriendly hands, with wrists clicked into handcuffs behind my back (always behind one's back in Florida, Robin said, and in most other states). My protests got nowhere against their loud-voiced and fulfilling abuse until Robin finally reached the chief uniform's attention. The intruder, he apologized, was a houseguest.

 

 

A houseguest swimming at three-thirty in the morning?

 

 

Very sorry, Robin said. Very sorry.

 

 

Unwillingly deprived of their prey, the blue uniforms with surliness holstered their guns and rested their lightbulbs. They reported back by radio to their home base, produced forms for Robin to sign, treated both of us with continuing suspicion, retrieved their handcuffs and finally disappeared as fast as they had come.

 

 

I stood up stifily, picked up the towel, crossed the terrace and followed Robin into the house.

 

 

He wasn't pleased with me, nor inclined to realize that he hadn't warned me about any alarms.

 

 

"I had no idea, " he said crossly, "that you would swim in the middle of the night. There are burglar alarms round the terrace which alert a security firm to the presence of an intruder.

 

 

There's a direct line to the police and a warning buzzer in my bedroom. I suppose you'd better have a drink. " "No... I'm sorry for the trouble. " I wound and tied the towel round my hips like a loincloth and Robin assessed me with thoughtfulness, crossing his wrists below his stomach to hold his gun.

 

 

"I must say, " he said judiciously, "that you behaved very coolly under fire. " I hadn't felt cool. My heart rate had been of Cape Canaveral speed.

 

 

I asked, "How far off were they from actually shooting? " "The distance of a trigger's travel, " Robin said. He put his handgun into a pocket in his robe. "Go back to bed. I hope you sleep. " Before I could move, however, the telephone rang, and without surprise at this early-morning summons, Robin answered.

 

 

"Yes, " he said into the receiver. "A false alarm. My houseguest... midnight swim... yes, everything's fine.. yes.

 

 

.

 

 

yes... it's Hereford... yes, that's right, Hereford.

 

 

No, the police weren't happy, but I assure you all is well. " He put down the receiver and briefly explained to me that the security firm had been checking. "They always do, after the police radio in that it's a false alarm. " Robin accompanied me to my bedroom door, recovering his milder manner on the way.

 

 

"I should have told you about the alarm, " he murmured.

 

 

"But never mind, no harm done. " "No. " I smiled goodnight, and he with a laugh said he hoped I would be as unruffled when I met Odin.

 

 

LEAVING EVELYN AT home, Robin, Kris and I flew on Cayman Airways from Miami to Grand Cayman in the morning, Robin with still good humor telling Kris about our adventures in the night. Kris, on the far side of the house, had slept soundly through the din.

 

 

It was after we'd cleared immigration that trickles of decent information slowly reached me, but without flowing together to make a stream.

 

 

Robin and Kris, collected by car outside the airport, were driven away, telling me transport was there for me as well but otherwise leaving me standing in unexpectedly hot air temperature wondering what to do next.

 

 

"Next" turned out to be a thin woman in bleached often washed cotton trousers and a white sleeveless top who walked straight up to me and said,

 

 

"Dr. Stuart, I presume. " ! l

 

 

L

 

 

Her voice was crisply grand-house-in-the-country English.

 

 

She'd seen a lot of British weather forecasts and she knew me by sight, she said. She told me to get into the front cab of her orange pickup truck, standing not far ahead. She sounded accustomed to being in charge.

 

 

"Robin Darcy... Kris... " I began.

 

 

She interrupted, "Kris Ironside has gone for familiarization flights in the aircraft he'll be flying. Get in the pickup, do.

 

 

" I sat in the cab and roasted in the heat, which allowed no respite, even with the windows open. It was the second half of October south of the Tropic of Cancer. I took off my too conventional tie and thought of a tepid shower.

 

 

"I'm Amy Ford, " the woman said, identifying herself as she drove out of the airport. "How do you do? " "Could I ask where are we going? " "I have an errand to run in George Town. Then to my , , no use

 

 

She drove a short distance into a compact and prosperous looking small town, its streets lined with shade trees and alive with camera-clicking tourists.

 

 

"This is the island's capital, George Town, " Amy said, and added,

 

 

"It's the only real town, actually. " "All these people... " "They come off the cruise ships, " Amy said, and pointed, as we rounded a corner, to the broad open sea where three huge passenger ships rode at anchor, and imitation pirate galleons popped off imitation cannonballs, and container ships edged into the quay side bringing food and bulldozers.

 

 

Amy parked within running distance of the public library to return a book, then, after passing important-looking bank buildings, she drove back along the harbor front where friendly drivers amazingly gave way with smiles.

 

 

"Nice place, " I said, meaning it.

 

 

Amy took the comment as natural. "My house next, " she said.

 

 

"Not far. " Her house, not far, as she'd said, must have covered eight thousand square feet of the ocean front paradise it was set in, a clone of Robin Darcy's easy opulence but magnified by two.

 

 

She led the way into a sitting room, small by the house's overall standard, but blessedly cool with air-conditioning and a rotating ceiling fan. There was a view through heavy sliding glass doors of intensely blue sea, there were chairs and china figures in tropically exuberant colors, and there was a man in white shorts who said

 

 

"Michael Ford" and shook my hand.

 

 

"You look bigger than on the screen. " His comment was without offense and said in roughly the same accent as his wife, though I would have placed him a shade lower in the social hierarchy, however bulging the coffers.

 

 

In between my basic weather work (and frankly to earn more in order to pay Jett van Els and her sisters), I lectured freelance and after-dinner talked, and, from a natural aptitude for mimicry, I'd learned to recognize the origins of many accents.

 

 

Not nearly in such incredible detail as Shaw's Professor Higgins, of course, but enough in the right places to amuse.

 

 

I would have put Michael Ford's vocal roots, like my own, as somewhere in western rural Berkshire, but in his case the basic material had been polished by studied layers of gloss.

 

 

Scarcely taller than Robin Darcy, Michael Ford, with his %s tanned bare broad-shouldered torso and his strong shoe-andsockless slightly bowed brown legs, looked like the useful muscle that the rounded Robin lacked.

 

 

Amy Ford said, "Cold drink? " to me and poured orange juice lavishly onto ice cubes, and it wasn't untii I tasted it that I realized there was a good deal of something like Bacardi in its kick.

 

 

I said, "Would you mind awfully telling me who you are and why I'm here? " And I heard Amy's tones in my own, slightly shocking.

 

 

Amy, however, appearing not to notice, did in part explain.

 

 

"I sold Robin my airplane. As I understand it, your friend is going to fly it through this hurricane Odin, and you are here to navigate. " I thought blankly, why ever would Robin buy a doubtless expensive airplane for Kris--someone he'd casually met at a lunch party--to fly through a violent storm?

 

 

"Robin bought my airplane for Nicky, actually, " Amy said, seeing nothing odd in it, "but of course Nicky went away. " "Hurricane Nicky? " I asked.

 

 

"Naturally. Of course. But this new storm was brewing more or less on Nicky's heels, one might say, and Robin said he'd met Kris, who was a good pilot, and Kris wanted to fly through a hurricane, so... well... here you are. " As an explanation it raised more questions than it answered.

 

 

I said over my strongly laced juice, "Where is Odin this morning, do you know? " As of two hours earlier, Odin, according to my helpful pal at the Miami Hurricane Center, had been intensifying south of Jamaica and causing the population of that island to contemplate safety in the hills.

 

 

"If you're going towards Odin, " my pal warned, "remember that on Grand Cayman Island there aren't any hills to go to. " "Is Odin likely to hit Cayman? " "Look, Perry, you know damned well that not even Odin knows where it's going. But the report just coming in puts Odin high in Category Three, that's a fierce hurricane, Perry, you get out of there. Disregard what I said before, and go. " "What about Trox Island? " I asked.

 

 

He said, "Where? " and after a pause added, "If that's one of that scatter of little islands in the western Caribbean, then don't go there, Perry, don't. If Odin goes on developing it could hit any of those islands head on and wipe them out. " "Wind or storm surge? " "Both. " He hesitated. "We can easily be wrong, so it's better not to guess. At the moment I'd put my money on Odin veering northwest to miss Jamaica, and as Grand Cayman, " he finally assured me, "would then be straight ahead of Odin...

 

 

it's a place to leave, not play around in, if you have any sense.

 

 

" I suppose I had no sense.

 

 

I asked, "Where exactly is Trox Island? " "Is it important? I'll look it up. " There was a rustling of paper. "Here we are. Islands in the West Caribbean...

 

 

Roncador Cay... Swan... Thunder Knoll. Here it is.

 

 

. Trox.

 

 

Number of inhabitants, anything from zero to twenty, mostly fishermen. Size, one mile long, half a mile wide. Highest point above sea level, two hundred feet. Volcanic? No. Constructed of bird droppings, guano, coral and limestone rock. Map coordinates, 17. 50 degrees north, 81. 44 west.

 

 

"Another rustle of paper. "There you are, then, it's just a peak of guano-covered rock sticking up from undersea mountains. " "Any farming? Any mushrooms? " "Why mushrooms? No, if anything, you might find coconuts. It says here there are palm trees. " "Who does Trox belong to? " "It doesn't say in this list. All it says is Ownership Disputed. " "And is that the absolute lot? " "Yes, except that it says there's a landing for boats and an old grass strip for aircraft, but no fuel and no maintenance.

 

 

Nothing. Forget it. " He was busy at work and could talk no longer. His final advice was

 

 

"Go home", and he meant by home, England.

 

 

Michael Ford looked at the heavy gold watch weighing down his left wrist and pushed buttons on a vast television set until he reached a noisy channel giving alarmist details of the development of Odin.

 

 

Odin had become organized into a full-grown hurricane with a central area where the winds were circling ever faster, leaving a calm small round quiet center like a hub. Odin, with this well-developed "eye, " was now circling with winds of a hundred and twenty miles an hour or more, but was still going forwards slowly at seven. The low-pressure center of winds aloft had weakened and allowed a stronger circling in the central dense overcast, resulting in the distinct formation of the eye.

 

 

Kris, at least, would be pleased to hear the development was official.

 

 

Odin was seven hundred and fifty miles south of where Evelyn peacefully sunned herself on the Sand Dollar pool deck, and even from where I stood on Grand Cayman Island, the view through the windows of sand and palm trees, two hundred miles from a major storm, was calm, sunny and without a breeze. It seemed impossible that any speed of wind could blow away a town as thoroughly as Hurricane Andrew had, or that any ocean surge could drown three hundred thousand people as in Bangladesh. I knew pretty thoroughly the paths of the winds of the world and had studied most of the devilments of nature, but like many a volcanologist I'd warmed my hands from afar without walking round an erupting rim.

 

 

As a committed fly-through prospect the satellite picture of Odin was soul-shrink daunting. Did I really intend to fly with Kris into the center of that?

 

 

I had brought with me by habit my small accurate camera, but even given the best lens in the world, I was not going to see any satellite's-eye view. The circling top of a great hurricane, where the winds were coldest, rose to maybe fifty or sixty thousand feet. Kris and I, without oxygen, couldn't go much higher than ten thousand, and we would fly into the quiet central hub, read and note the air pressure there, ditto the wind speeds in the eye wall, and fly out on the other side to make our way back to the home field. For most of the way, might we not be buffeted about in rain cloud? But we would be traveling faster than the wind.

 

 

How the hell, I thought privately, did one find the eye?

 

 

How was I supposed to navigate? I'd had no rehearsals. Who would give me a quick course in hurricane dead reckoning?

 

 

Who would distract me from the word "dead"?

 

 

Why did I, all the same, want to do that fLight more than anything else?

 

 

The Weather Channel went on chattering in civilized tones about the downward march of millibars, those useful measurements of low air pressure and forthcoming disaster.

 

 

The television screen in the Ford house looked out from a clearly expensive wall fitment, and Amy, Michael and I sat around in lush armchairs glancing occasionally at the image of the wide white swirling mass while they told me that historically Grand Cayman had suffered few major direct hits, but that of course there was always a first time. Their blithe voices, though, said they didn't believe it.

 

 

I'd heard jockeys describe the atmosphere in the changing room before they'd gone out to partner half a ton of horse in the Grand National Steeplechase over the biggest, most demanding jumps in the sport. They were going into breakneck paraplegic country, and they did it for love. I'd wondered why they felt compelled, and in the Fords' clean bright wealthy sitting room, I found I knew.

 

 

DURING THE SEVERAL idle hours before Robin and Kris reappeared, I learned among other things that in the United States Amy had owned, managed and sold a string of video rental stores, while Michael had equipped gymnasiums and collected membership money.

 

 

They were both proud of their achievements, also proud of each other, and in those areas talked freely.

 

 

I learned that neither Amy nor Michael were themselves licensed pilots, though Amy had been taking instruction before she sold her aircraft to Robin.

 

 

"Why did you sell it to Robin? " I asked Amy without pressure, more as time-filling chitchat than as a purposeful inquiry.

 

 

Michael made a damping movement of his hand as if urging caution, but Amy answered limpidly, "He wanted it. He made a good offer, so I agreed. " She finished her tall glass of orange mixture. "If you want to know why he bought it, you'll have to ask him. " Robin and Kris came back at that moment in good spirits, so I did ask him straight out, lightly, there and then, as if it were merely again a conversational opening without purpose.

 

 

Robin blinked, paused, smiled, and in the same misleading way answered, "Amy wouldn't want me to tell you that she could buy a diamond necklace if she sold me her airplane. " "And more besides, " Michael heartily said, relieved.

 

 

I smiled warmly. They were all capable liars. Amy gave Kris a tall glass tinkling with ice and I told him neutrally, "Mine has rum in it. " He was halfway up to a manic high, but nonalcoholic, as usual. He looked piercingly at the almost full glass standing beside me on a small table, then he tasted his own, set it down, and with sizzling enthusiasm told me the news.

 

 

"It's a terrific plane. Two engines. I had an instructor put me through its paces. Passed with O. K. O. K. , Robin's happy.

 

 

Every one's happy. Mind you, most people think amateurs should stay strictly away from storms, but they'll take account of what we'll measure, even if we don't have a fully equipped flying laboratory... " "When are we going? " I asked.

 

 

Every one looked at the Weather Channel's update. Odin by that moment had dropped another couple of frightening millibars and had moved one minute northwest. A bright mannered elderly studio visitor with--I guessed--a payoff from the tourist trade rejoiced that Odin was circling over water and doing no harm to holiday makers or people vacationing ashore. Kris looked at me cynically and shrugged, as in circling over a warm sea Odin was strengthening all the time.

 

 

"Tomorrow morning, " Kris said. "Oh-eight hundred. Eight o'clock. Before it gets too hot. " Michael and Amy insisted on having Robin, Kris and me all stay overnight in their house. They gave us unending drinks, more rather than less alcoholic, to Kris's embarrassment, and Michael grilled steaks on a brick-built barbecue with a flourish of proprietorial strength inside a shiny vinyl apron.

 

 

Kris and I were given small tasks to do, like folding napkins and filling a tub with ice cubes, small tasks that kept us close to Amy's side. It became somehow understood that neither of us should wander away, and with Robin's alarm system in mind, I stayed where my hosts wanted. It felt to me a shade like luxurious imprisonment, but I had little money and no good excuse for insisting on a hotel instead.

 

 

Michael, besides, though on the surface all friendly, a genial cook, had also, I slowly realized, an agility with all those muscles that spoke of combat rather than the exercise machines he had dealt in.

 

 

Odin on the television moved slowly, dangerously, northwest.