‘That’s fine, thank you.’
I gave him the rest of my dollar bills, thanked Unwin and the Master, and gratefully accepted their offer of a ride to the airport.
Deciding, before I caught the night flight to London, that helping the conspirators to get rid of me neatly involved a polite goodbye to Robin Darcy (who’d lost his aeroplane to our foolhardiness, after all) I phoned his number but heard only Evelyn’s voice saying, ‘Please leave a message.’
‘I’ll write,’ I said, grateful for the let-off, and travelled home, knees-under-chin, trying to sleep, but with the reality of sore feet and the memory of guns and hurricanes keeping me awake.
Chapter 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 flat and to buy a runabout for me and a customised 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 ail-too English November day I phoned 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 up 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 enquired 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 text-book publishing house in Kensington. I rode a lift as directed by an entrance-hall name-taker, and was met when the door slid open by a young female general assistant with long untidy brownish hair and a long creased brownish skirt.