Second Wind

Chapter 2

Deeply upset on many levels, Caspar Harvey took charge, and it was he who sent for the vet, brushing Quigley out of the way and offering the vet, 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 vet. 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 trousers pocket.

He nodded. ‘Take the filly, for the insurance. Pictures. Stronger than words.’

I did his bidding, the flash bright inside the darkening box.

‘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 vet, 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 phone 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 vet earned his double fee with screeching tyres 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-lad 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.

The cold wind blew until Friday, its Sunday sunshine fading to a depressing iron-grey. Caspar Harvey’s filly clung onto life, her symptoms and progress delivered to me literally at first hand by Bell who had at the last minute, she said, remembered to write my phone 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 lad, but the vet 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 vet 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 lunch time. He looks so level headed 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 broadsheets, 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 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 Met 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 literally running diarrhoea. 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 post-card collection of Edwardian porn.

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

‘How’re you doing, Gran?’

‘Absolutely fine.’

A lie, as we both knew.

She still lived in the flat where I’d spent my youth, on the first 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 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.

It said:

On the long overnight heebie-jeebie 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 non-cancerous but hard tumour 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 heebie-jeebies were never to be lightly ignored.

She had had the heebie-jeebies the day she’d travelled 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 heebie-jeebies the day I’d broken my ankle being run over by a golf cart, but because of some deeply foreboding heebie-jeebies, 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, cook, dress and drive their patient 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 uniform 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 grand-daughter 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 for assistance. Only when she laid the papers down unmoving on her lap 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 heebie-jeebies 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 favourite place, so that we could both watch the raucous seagulls chase each other 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, ‘OK,’ 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 series of magazine articles 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, could 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 home-grown 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 south-west 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 sea-water 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 inflowing 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 travelling quite fast at 2.0 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 organised,’ I commented, nodding. ‘The surface winds are circling at about 80 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 high-surfing contests in north Cornwall? 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 had 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 backward-looking search came up tentatively with the Darcys; Robin the brains and Evelyn the pearls.

Confirmation quickly followed. Kris despatched: ‘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 1000 millibars, an ominously low reading considering that the average was nearer 1013. A wind sheer aloft that had been preventing an organised 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 meagre 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, ceps, chanterelles, shitake, 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 spectacle 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 realise 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 a hundred grams at a time.’

‘So... er... Evelyn?’ I murmured again.

‘She and my mother get on fine. They both adore jewellery. 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’t go, Perry. It gives me the heebie-jeebies...’

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.

Robin and Evelyn’s South Florida home, although 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 colour. I was used to the blue-grey 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 trousers 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 recognise 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 colada 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 the lower-level 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 naiveté.

‘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 weather-man, 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 swivelled 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.