Kris drank Coca-Cola as a good little pilot should and kept his manic extravagance within bounds. It was definitely an ‘up’ day in his psyche; good for wit and laughter and with no question of despairing walks along railway tracks.
The non-poisonous Belladonna, appearing at my side and pouring from a steaming jug of replenishment, asked me baldly why a sensible-looking person like myself should bother with Ironside’s mental switch-back.
‘He’s clever,’ I said neutrally.
‘Is that enough?’
‘Why don’t you like him?’ I asked.
‘Like him? I loved the bastard once.’ She gave me a twitch of a deeper smile and a shrug of shoulders and poured reinforcements for others, and I, as one does at such events, in time fetched up in a chatting bunch that contained the ever-worried trainer, Oliver Quigley. What about this wind, he wanted to know. ‘It’s cold,’ he said.
My harmless actual tangible presence — especially with camera — seemed to upset him. I was used to aggression and disbelief from the sort of horse-oriented people who seemed to think (like children) that bad weather was somehow my fault. I was accustomed to being the unpopular messenger who brought the bad news of battles lost, and I’d been often enough cursed for smiling while I forecast blizzards; but on the whole I’d not caused what looked unexpectedly like fear.
I must be misreading him, I thought. But then, I knew him only as an agitated weather-obsessed horse trainer, and he could have — who knew — all sorts of other problems.
‘It depends on the Urals,’ I said soothingly.
He was mystified. ‘What does?’
‘The wind from the east. It’s early in the year for a polar continental blast like this, but there may be a clear dry day for Caspar Harvey’s filly, if it goes on blowing until Friday.’
‘And will it?’ The question was put slightly pugnaciously by a grey-haired fiftyish imposing American-sounding woman who’d joined the group with three rows of pearls and an apologetic husband.
‘Evelyn dear...’ he murmured patiently.
She persevered with questions. ‘And what do you mean by Urals?’
Her husband, a small round man in heavy dark spectacle frames, answered her smoothly. ‘Evelyn, dear, the Urals are mountains in Russia. On a straight line from the Urals to London, there is no high ground to get in the way. Nothing to divert or deflect an east wind from Siberia.’ He assessed me with shrewd but amiable brown eyes behind the heavy duty lenses. He said, ‘Aren’t you the young man who flew here with the meteorologist?’
Before I could agree that yes, I was, Oliver Quigley told him with rapid emphasis and energetic hands that I too forecast the weather and was probably even better known to the television public than Kris himself. ‘Robin and Evelyn,’ he assured me, anxious to be understood, ‘are American, of course, and as they live mostly in Florida, they don’t see much British TV.’
‘Darcy,’ said the small man, completing the introduction by shifting his wine glass carefully to his left hand and offering me the right, ‘Robin Darcy.’ He made lunch-party small talk in a subdued Boston-type accent. ‘And will you be along with Kris Ironside on his vacation?’
Not that I knew of. ‘I don’t think so,’ I replied. Robin, I thought, had just enquired very delicately about my sexual preference. And what, I wondered, was his own? Evelyn, matronly in black and seemingly older than her husband, was nobody’s idea of a trophy bimbo.
‘Be sure to look us up,’ she said automatically, but insincerely.
‘Love to.’ I sounded falsely eager, as one does.
Her husband rocked a little on heels and toes, his wrists folded over each other low on his stomach. His interest in me, slight in the first place, was fading rapidly, and presently he drifted off, Evelyn in tow, in search of more responsive brains.
Belladonna reappeared with her jug, her gaze ahead on the Darcys. ‘If you like cleverness, he’s your man.’
‘He’s clever at what?’
Bell’s pale eyelids fluttered. ‘It’s like beauty. Born in him. He just is.’
Darcy wandered around, however, looking insignificant and unimpressive. Evelyn’s socialising voice was the one that prevailed.
‘Don’t be fooled,’ Bell said.
‘No.’
‘Kris said you saved his life a couple of times.’
After a pause, I said, ‘He liked to play with trains.’
‘No longer?’
‘Less and less.’
‘I wouldn’t fly with him,’ she said. ‘So we quarrelled.’ After a silence she added, ‘It finished us. Doesn’t he scare you?’
There had been a time only a year ago when the trains had all but won; when I’d sat with him all night while he curled like a foetus and moaned with pain; when the only word he’d said, in a sort of anguish, had been ‘Poison’.
A couple of paces away Kris was at the top of his upswing, telling a flying joke and raising eye-crinkling laughter. ‘So the air hostess said, “Yes, Miss Greer, of course you can go up to the cockpit during this flight and talk to our lady captain and our lady first officer, but there’s just one thing, with our all-female flight crew we don’t call it a cockpit any more”...’
‘God,’ Bell groaned. ‘I told him that bit of feminism yonks ago.’
‘Good jokes never die.’
‘Did you know that sometimes he writes verses?’
‘Mm.’ I paused. ‘Scientific, mostly.’
‘I’ve seen him tear them up,’ Bell said.
So had I. A form of suicide, I’d thought: but better to kill a poem than himself.
Bell turned her back on Kris and said there was food in the dining-room. There were also white-clothed tables and caterers’ gold chairs and an autumnal buffet suitable for millionaires and hungry weather-men. I collected a disgracefully full plate and was welcomed by an insistent Evelyn Darcy into a space on a round table where her husband and four other guests were munching roast grouse with concentration.
The four unknowns and I went through the usual recognition routine and a promise that it wouldn’t rain before bedtime; and I smiled and answered them placidly because in fact I liked my job very much, and good public relations never hurt.
Two of the unknowns slowly identified themselves as George Loricroft, distinguished, forty-five, top-dog racehorse trainer, and his blonde and over-shapely young wife, Glenda. Every time Glenda spoke, her dominating husband either contradicted or interrupted her. Glenda’s nervous titter hid some razor-sharp resentment, I’d have said.
Evelyn Darcy who, beside the three rows of pearls, the black dress and the grey-silver over-lacquered hair, was decidedly nosy, had no inhibitions about question time. She wanted to know — and used her loud voice to get attention — whether Kris and I earned a fortune for our many on-screen appearances. How else could Kris afford the upkeep of an airplane?
Everyone heard her. Kris across the room gave me a comical look, half choked with laughter and yelled her an answer.
‘We’re both civil servants. We get civil service pay. You all pay us... and it’s not enough to fund a month of condoms.’
Reactions to this intimate and inaccurate revelation varied from laughter among the guests to distaste and embarrassment. I peacefully ate my grouse. Being a friend of Kris meant being willing to accept the whole package. He could have said far worse. He had done, in the past.
Evelyn Darcy enjoyed the ripples. Robin looked long-suffering at her side. George Loricroft, the constant wife represser, checked with me that we did indeed get civil service pay and I unexcitedly agreed that yes we did, and why not, we gave a public service.