Instead I asked, but light-heartedly, 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 through 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-towards-the-switch would remain for ever 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, tomorrow, 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 travelling south and anticlockwise, 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 night-time comfort, the telephone rang clamorously and Jett briskly answered it, but instead of a reply to the usual type of magazine question like ‘How to paint one’s toenails if one can’t feel one’s toes’, we had Jett’s no-nonsense enquiry, ‘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?’
He had a ghost writer for me, he said straightforwardly, and I agreed to meet the ghost between broadcasts in the morning.
Later, with my grandmother as always only fitfully sleeping in her airy room, Jett and I took a couple of cushions and sat, well wrapped in Edwardian type fur-lined car rugs, on a stone seat for two in a small glass-windowed entrance porch built to keep nineteen-o-eight ladies dry from carriage to gentlemen’s beds.
The night air felt fresh and smelled of low-tide mud. We sat close to each other for warmth and didn’t talk much. If the whole of life were simple like this, I thought, there would be peace among seagulls and no wind to speak of. I kissed Jett van Els without heeding my grandmother’s fears, and got kissed cheerfully back, and many things became understood between us in an oasis of tranquillity.
But there’s a calm spell at the centre of every hurricane. The fury of the second wind was as always round the corner.
In the very early morning I shed my grandmother’s comfortable sofa in time to appear on her screen at breakfast, and did my best to soften the rainy news for the nation. The celebration night of the brave traitor and his low-grade explosive was going to pass as unsatisfactorily as the first, whatever I said.
During the morning, between rueful appearances steering short of apology, I made a quick trip by bus to Kensington and rode the lift to the seventh floor to discuss a book on Depression with a ghost.
I accepted a so-so chair and coffee with ginger snaps, listening to John Rupert’s rational plans for a book not about depressions, but about storms, which he said would sell better.
Was he serious about a book? I asked, and he said civilly why not? Books had been written about sharks’ teeth before now.
‘And incidentally,’ he murmured, eating the ginger biscuit set out for me, ‘it was “How they brought the good news from Ghent to Aix.” ’
‘Whatever,’ I said.
‘Robert Browning,’ he added.
The door quietly opened, admitting an unmistakable ghost, a feeble-looking grandfather with thin white hair and strong sinews for shaking hands.
They introduced him to me without melodrama by name as ‘Ghost’, no Mr... no first name, just Ghost, and John Rupert calmly asked me to repeat what I’d told him the day before.
‘Say it all again?’ I protested.
‘Say it again, but differently, so while Ghost understands it for the first time, I see things more clearly.’
I sighed. ‘Well then... Say that by mistake a folder of papers has been left on a Caribbean island, and the island has no radio, no telephone, no mail service and no people, but it does have a usable airstrip.’
I continued with breaks for thought, and for Ghost’s assimilation of what had happened.
‘Say it is essential to retrieve the folder.’
A break...
‘Say there is a suitable aircraft available, but no discreet pilot, as yours has been killed in a car crash.’
Another break...
‘Then at a lunch party in England a pilot appears who longs to fly through the eye of a hurricane. He’s a meteorologist, and there’s a hurricane in the offing in the Caribbean — Nicky — and it is hurricane season in general. A flight through a hurricane is offered in return for a simple side-trip to collect the folder of papers.’
‘Reasonable,’ Ghost said.
‘Mm. The pilot took along another meteorologist friend as a navigator and general helper...’
‘And the friend was you?’ John Rupert said.
I nodded. ‘Our flight through the hurricane ended in the sea. The pilot was saved by helicopter, and I was thrown back onto the island by the currents. I came across the folder of letters, but I didn’t know they were important, or at least not to begin with. They were written in many different scripts and languages.’
‘And you have them?’ The ghost showed great excitement, a matter of twitches and shivers very like Oliver Quigley.