Second Wind

by Dick Francis

  “I’ll write:” I said. grateful for the let-off, and traveled home, knees-under-chin. trying to steep, but with the reality of sore feet and the memory of guns and hurricanes keeping me awake.

  7

  When I reached her in the morning my grandmother sat with her mouth open, disapproving of my appearance.

  “Hi, Gran,” I said mildly. “How’s things?”

  She shed her shock briefly. “You do know you’re due on the screen today? You look awful, Perry.”

  “Thanks so much.”

  “And you’ve got all those extra Fireworks Night shows:”

  “It will rain,” I said. “Can I sleep tonight on your sofa?”

  She agreed at once without question.

  “And I want to talk to you about what I should do.”

  She looked with seriousness into my face. The few times I’d asked her for help in that way had meant an adult-to-adult evaluation of the known facts with no gender or generation gap involved. The one rule we’d kept so far had been to give any life-altering decisions a chance to mature, which meant never acting on impulse.

  Her decision to go on travel-writing through her later seventies had had input from a whole parade of specialists, and for my abandonment of a career in physics for the presentation of the vagaries of wind and temperature over the British Isles she had called in a casting agency expert in assessing personality.

  She had taken days to agree to the ongoing expense of having a private nurse, but, once it was decided, she had sold her precious diamonds, gifts from her husband (my grandfather), to refurbish the whole shabby apartment and to buy a runabout for me and a customized car for herself, to take her and her motor wheelchair on expeditions for her travel firm. We would live, she persuaded me, in style.

  The nurse came out of the kitchen and offered me coffee. Coffee, I thought, was nowhere near enough.

  “Go for an hour’s walk, my dear.” my grandmother said sweetly to her, and smiled with age-old wiles.

  Jett van Els, working beyond her week-on. week-off schedule, asked if I would still be there if she returned in an hour. I could have said I would be there whenever ... but after she’d gone out into the chilly damp all-too-English November day I called a different young woman first.

  Tentatively, I spoke to Belladonna, who replied in an ear-drum shattering shriek.

  “Perry! Dad told me yesterday you were alive. I can’t believe it! We all thought you’d drowned.”

  “Well ... no,” I assured her calmingly, and asked where I could find Kris.

  “I’m supposed to be marrying him, did you know?”

  “Congratulations.”

  “He asked me when I’d thought him dead all day. It’s not fair.”

  “Your true feelings came out.” I smiled. “Where is he?”

  “Here. He drove to see Oliver Quigley, heaven knows why, that poor man’s a frightful wreck even though Dad’s not going to sue him over the filly after all, and then Kris is going to work, he’s on his way now, actually, he spent the night here ... with me. Not the first time ... why am I telling you.”

  I sorted out her meanings and inquired about the filly. Alive or dead?

  “Alive,” Bell said. “Sick to death but not dying, except that her mane and tail are thinning out; and now the equine research place are talking about what’s wrong with her isn’t ragwort in her hay, which they thought had been fed to her to nobble her, but, and you’ll never believe it, they think it may be due to radiation sickness, I ask you!”

  I sat on my grandmother’s sofa as if punched breathless.

  I said “Uh?” uselessly.

  “Radiation sickness,” Bell repeated disgustedly. “They say, in the filly it’s very mild, if it can ever be said to have a mild, but probably terminal, complaint. They say she’s probably been exposed to radium or something similar. And where did she get it? Dad’s absolutely furious. Kris said you would have known where to get radium. He said you’d have known about uranium and plutonium too because you were a physicist as well as a weather forecaster.”

  “Mm,” I said. “Well, it’s very difficult to get hold of radium but not impossible. Marie Curie isolated it from pitchblende a hundred years or more ago in Paris. But the others ...” I stopped abruptly, and then said, “Did Kris talk about me as if I were dead?”

  “I’m so sorry, Perry, we all did.”

  I said not to worry, learned where Kris would be when and sent good wishes to her father. Then I sat in the armchair beside my grandmother’s wheels, and told her everything significant I had seen and felt and thought since Caspar Harvey’s invitation to lunch at Newmarket.

  She listened as if she’d been everywhere with me, as if her eyes and ears had duplicated my own.

  At the end, she said in great alarm, “You need to ask someone for information, Perry, and for help.”

  “Yes,” I agreed, “but who?”

  That corny old phrase “going to the authorities” raised its banal head. Who, exactly, was an authority? Could I walk into the local nick and expect to be believed? No, I couldn’t.

  “Maybe,” I said after thought, “I’ll try the Health and Safety Executive.”

  “Who are they?”

  “They inspect factories.”

  My grandmother shook her head. but I looked them up under civil service departments in the phone book and got them to agree to a meeting in an hour. Being Perry Stuart, weatherman and widely known TV face, had its uses.

  Jett van Els returned to the minute with the warmth of Eve in her brown eyes and the chill of November on her cheeks. There had been other nurses in my life with generous and willing impulses as temporary as their employment. but my all-seeing grandparent, while Jett made coffee in the kitchen, unexpectedly warned me this time not to awaken what I couldn’t later put back to sleep. In amusement I promised, but a promise wasn’t enough.

  “I mean it,” my grandmother said. “When you want to be. you’re too powerful for your own good.”

  Powerful wasn’t the word for my impact on the motherly fiftyish official I at length met as my first true “authority.” I was not, she pointed out, a factory.

  “I’m talking about a trading company,” I said.

  She pursed her mouth. “Has it anything to do with weather?”

  “No.”

  She looked aimlessly for a while into the distance, sighed, then wrote a few words on a slip of paper and handed it to me.

  “Try here,” she said. “You never know.”

  The “here” of the instruction was an office high in the premises of a textbook publishing house in Kensington. I rode an elevator as directed by an entrance-hall name-taker, and was met when the doors slid open by a young female general assistant with long untidy brownish hair and a long creased brownish skirt.

  “I’m Melanie,” she announced, and then exclaimed, “I say! Aren’t you Perry Stuart? Good heavens! Come this way.”

  The office she led me into was small and its occupant, large. Four bare walls and a skylight housed a desk, two chairs of so-so comfort and a gray metal filing cabinet. The tall man who rose to a sketchy handshake and an introduction of himself as John Rupert could easily have filled the part of textbook publisher downstairs.

  “My colleague at the Health and Safety Executive,” he said without preliminaries, “informs me you may have something to tell me about the Unified Trading Company—and while we are at this stage, do you find your appearance a hindrance on occasion?”

  I said, “I couldn’t come to your office, for instance, without someone remarking that I’d been here.”

  “Melanie, for instance?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Mm.” He thought briefly; so briefly that I was pretty certain he’d thought before my arrival. “If you were to publish a textbook. Dr. Stuart, what subject would you choose?”

  I gave him not the instinctive answer of “Wind and rain,” but the more oblique thought “Depression.”

  His eye
s narrowed. He nodded briefly. He said. “I was told you might be a player.” A contemplative silence lengthened. “There appears to exist,” he said finally, “a small packet of extremely sensitive information. I myself think it’s very unlikely you’ve seen it, but I’m told that if you have, you may have understood what you were looking at.” He left another extended pause. “Can you help us?”

  Who, I wondered, was us? Us, I concluded, were “the authorities” I’d come looking for. “Us” had to be trusted ... for now.

  I asked, “Where would you look for your sensitive package?”

  “It could be anywhere in the world.” John Rupert pinched the thin bridge of his nose. “We had a man in Mexico, near the northern border. He’d had a sight of a sensitive package, he’d reported its existence, he’d heard it was for sale and on its way to Miami. He asked us whether he should steal it if he could, or buy it:” John Rupert grimaced. ”He let the wrong people know that he had seen it, and he was found floating face down in the Florida Everglades with a bullet in his head and his legs half eaten away by alligators:’

  I’d got myself into a right pickle, I thought, and telling anyone anything at all was asking for more trouble, if not a bullet. I didn’t know if what I’d learned was worth dying for, and yet I found I couldn’t, from some obscure instinct towards justice and order, simply walk away and forget it.

  “Suppose,” I said at length, “as a result of too many cooks trying to keep a sensitive package safe, it gets too thoroughly hidden away on an island and has to be retrieved so that it can be used. It’s no good to anyone if it’s not in use.” I stopped.

  “Go on, go on.” John Rupert urged.

  “To collect the package there’s a suitable light airplane available, but no suitable pilot to fly it, until along comes a meteorologist, a private pilot with a hankering to fly through the eye of a hurricane. The pilot agrees to make a detour flight to pick up the package, in return for his hurricane adventure.”

  John Rupert, understanding, gave me a nod.

  “That simple errand fails,” I said. “The hurricane crashes the aircraft into the sea. Collecting the package, still essential, now involves more certain measures, such as a calmer sky, and a much larger aircraft with a bigger crew equipped and ready to do actual battle if necessary.”

  “Battle for the package?”

  “More like battle for the repossession of the whole island, whose ownership is in dispute. The crew, I think, are the Unified Trading Company, who ruled the place before they frightened the residents away by growing exotic mushrooms in containers that gave off radioactivity ...” I stopped talking. His face was smoothing to disbelief.

  “Goodbye,” I said briefly. standing up. “Children in school can make more or less anything appear to give off radioactive alpha particles. Just scatter a little powdered uranium ore around.” I gave him a small card with my grandmother’s phone number on it. “Phone if you’re interested in any more.”

  “Stop,” he said, his interest growing already.

  “People aren’t wrong to be frightened,” I said from the doorway. “If you swallow a pea-sized alpha particle source, it will kill you, but you can carry it safely for a long time in a paper bag. I expect I’m telling you what you already know.”

  “Don’t go yet.”

  “I have to take the bad news from Aix to Ghent.”

  John Rupert laughed.

  Kris in the end was easy to find as he was back at the BBC Weather Center at Wood Lane, preparing to share with me the bad-weather broadcast ahead for the run-up to Guy Fawkes Night.

  He greeted me with a yelp and a crushing hug, and I suffered similar warm squeezing all round the office. Comment on thinness and gauntness could last only minutes when, to the relief of the forecaster standing by to give the kids the damp news for squibs, reliable old Stuart had returned from the dead and popped up on time.

  Kris himself looked spectacularly tanned with sun-brightened hair and mustache. and he rose at the sight of me from gloom to stratosphere as fast as any of his rocket lift-off poems.

  “I can’t believe it!” His voice could probably he heard all down Wood Lane. “How come you’re here? We all thought your gran a bit touched yesterday, insisting you’d have got a message to her if you’d drowned!”

  We walked along a quiet passage towards the room we all shared between appearances—all except the guru. who had a retreat to himself—and Kris, with small skips and jumps like a young boy, told me that he in the life raft had scudded with the wind across the western edge of Odin for days until Robin’s hired helicopter operators had spotted him and winched him up. The description of his rescue poured out of him like an uncorked flood. as if to prevent any other subject surfacing, but in the end I put an anchoring hand on his arm and congratulated him on his engagement to Bell.

  “Don’t tell her father.” he said in alarm. “Old Caspar wouldn’t exactly have wept if he’d had to get someone else to tell him it was hay-cutting time.”

  There was too much truth in that to be funny. I let it go without contradiction and asked instead, “What did Robin Darcy say about losing his airplane?”

  “I haven’t talked to him since that morning we set off. If I call his home in Sand Dollar Beach I just get Evelyn’s voice on an answering machine. But poor old Robin, what can he say? It was he who urged us to go.”

  “Well...” I frowned. “What did he really want you to do on that island?”

  “Trox?”

  “Yes, of course, Trox.”

  “How should I know?” Kris shrugged absentmindedly, then suddenly looked wary.

  “Perhaps,” I mildly suggested, “because he himself told you.”

  Kris slowed and stopped in two paces as if he had just remembered he’d given me two different answers already to that question.

  “I’m so glad,” he said explosively. “I’m really so pleased you’re alive.”

  “So am I that you are.” We beamed at each other, and whatever else was said. that was the truth.

  We shouldered through a swinging door into a change-clothes and brush-hair environment, where shiny foreheads and noses were dusted to matte by a lady dragon of twenty-three who tended to follow one into camera range waving a powder puff. Kris fell into flirtatious chat with her, but kept glancing my way from under his eyelids as if half hoping that I would after all disappear.

  Instead I asked, but lightheartedly, as if it were a joke, “What did Robin say about our ‘wheels-up’ approach to Trox Island?”

  “Nothing. I haven’t talked to him. I told you.”

  The dragoness had been darkening his almost white eyebrows. Kris, irritated by my tactlessness in reminding him of his imperfection, pushed her hand away sharply and snappily told me no one was perfect all the time. It wasn’t exactly the moment, I decided, to tell him I knew the right-hand—starboard—engine had stopped only because the pilot had forgotten to flip the switch from the empty fuel tank to the full one.

  Flying though a hurricane had been stress enough. Kris had forgotten the switch until too late and dealing with the unbalancing weight of a dead engine as well had been beyond his limits.

  The Cayman Trench was one of the deepest valleys in the world’s ocean floor, and unless Robin went to the unlikely and expensive trouble of finding and raising the wreckage. Kris’s last-second panicked too late wild yell and stretch-out-toward-the-switch would remain forever his secret.

  I did, though, want him to tell me truthfully why we’d gone to Trox at all, and in the end, in exasperation, he moodily gave in.

  “It’s no big deal,” he said. “All Robin wanted me to do on Trox Island was to collect a folder of papers that had been left behind by mistake, and bring them back to him without you having a good look at them first. Don’t ask me why he didn’t want you to, I don’t know, but, like I said before, you and I both owed him a lot, so I agreed. He said his folder was in a desk in one of the thick-walled huts, and he wanted me to collect it safely before
it was blown away by Hurricane Odin. But when we got there I couldn’t even find the desk. All the furniture had gone already.”

  “And ... um ...” I pondered. “You didn’t tell Robin ...”

  “No, I didn’t. Apparently when we didn’t return according to our flight plan the control tower people in Grand Cayman got in touch with Evelyn on the Darcy answering machine, and it was Evelyn, that pearly old duck, who paid for the search helicopter to go out looking for me and you as soon as the weather was possible.”

  I asked wryly, “Will she send us a bill?”

  “Which would you rather be” Kris asked, “broke or dead?”

  I drifted round the Weather Centre all afternoon catching up on the past two weeks of wind and gossip and preparing and presenting at six-thirty and nine-thirty the shape of things to come.

  Friday, the next day, the Fifth of November, Gunpowder, Treason, and Plot, looked like being a groan again for dads and children alike. A band of rain would cross the whole British area between lunch and bedtime the next day, starting in the west of Scotland and traveling south and counterclockwise, with veering winds later in the day bringing clouds and drizzle across southern England to mess up the Catherine wheels of Essex. Light the sodden blue touch-paper and retire to bed.

  I spent a quiet late evening with my grandmother and Jett van Els, a muscle and mind respite, a doze-on, doze-off breathing spell split only twice; first by Kris on a high at ten-thirty, giving a long TV funny overview of November fog banks.

  Second, when Jett had begun the slow tough task of my grandmother’s Tarzan act from wheelchair to nighttime comfort, the telephone rang clamorously and Jett briskly answered it, but instead of a reply to the usual type of magazine question like, “How does one paint one’s toe-nails if one can’t feel one’s toes,” we had Jett’s no-nonsense inquiry, “I’ll ask when he’ll be available. Who shall I say called? John Rupert?” She lifted her eyebrows comically, and I stretched out a hand to the receiver and said, “Hello?”