‘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.
Chapter 3
Robin, as 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 organisation 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 6 miles an hour, if that. There are 35 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 national weather channel for us all to see how Odin was coming along.
Dramatically well, was the answer.
The pressure in the circling centre 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 65 mph, lay more than 200 miles south of Jamaica and was travelling due north at 7 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 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 if 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.