by Dick Francis
“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 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 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.
“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 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 heebie-jeebies about this flight, but there isn’t another for five days. Look after yourself. I’ve caught a cold. Eternally, Gran.
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 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 heebie-jeebies were never to be lightly ignored.
She had had the heebie-jeebies 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 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 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 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 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 :he 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 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 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?”