‘Apparently the poor animal had been pressing her head against the wall, just pressing... Well, I’ve never seen a horse do that and nor has her lad, but the vet says that head-pressing is a symptom of poison, and now everyone’s in a tizzy. Panic.’
‘What poison?’ I asked, faintly teasing. ‘Not belladonna?’
‘No. Thanks very much. Very funny. I’ve had to put up all my life with being named after deadly nightshade. The vet kindly says belladonna would very likely have killed her.’
Two days later Bell was back on the line with an update. It was Wednesday by then.
‘Dad and Oliver Quigley are trying to keep this out of the papers, heaven knows why, there isn’t a chance. News goes round Newmarket like the black death. The filly is up at the equine hospital and they’re taking blood samples and her temperature, and poking around in manure, you name it, they’ve thought of it. I saw Kris doing the forecast at lunch time. He looks so level headed you’d never guess what he’s like. Don’t tell him I watch him.’
Bell was right in that nothing was secret or sacred at Headquarters: on back pages from tabloids to broadsheets, the filly kicked football into second place for two whole days.
I’d taken my film of Sunday’s happenings to be developed the day after the lunch party, and I’d sent a set of prints as a gift to Caspar Harvey. Bell reported her father as being horrified by the filly pics but on the whole grateful, and Oliver Quigley was moaning that the filly’s state wasn’t his fault. ‘But Dad’s so angry we’re heading for court, I shouldn’t wonder,’ Bell said. ‘They spend hours arguing against each other.’
My own days as usual were spent at the weather section of the BBC Wood Lane Television Centre. There each afternoon at two o’clock I and all other Met Office forecasters working the same shift were connected together in a telephone conference to learn what was happening in the weather world, and what interpretation we should put on sometimes wildly divergent facts.
The skill that had unexpectedly transformed my life at about twenty-two had been an awakening gift for presentation. I’d been dumped ‘cold’ in front of the cameras one evening at nine-thirty to give the longest solo appearance of the day, standing in at the ultimate last minute for a colleague with literally running diarrhoea. Because it was unexpected I hadn’t had time for nerves, and most luckily I’d read the weather signs right, so that it rained the next day where I’d said it would.
The resulting trickle of letters of approval had been enough to give me another chance. I’d enjoyed it. More letters followed. By the end of six months I was a regular on the screen and after seven years reached second place in the hierarchy. The top guy, the oldest of us all, held guru status and was treated by everyone with the deference due his post-card collection of Edwardian porn.
Both he and I could have shunted ourselves out of active forecasting and wafted our careers upstairs into organisation. Neither of us wanted to go. The actor in both of us enjoyed the live performance.
My grandmother loved it.
My grandmother was in a way my Cherokee at White Waltham, or, in other words, the bottomless pit into which I chose to pour the shekels I should have been laying up in bonds.
My grandmother and I had no other relations left beside ourselves and both she and I knew that probably fairly soon I’d be alone. The energetic woman who’d picked an infant from the wreckage that had just killed her daughter, the able journalist who had persuaded a court to grant her custody of her grandson, the understanding adult who’d seen a boy safely through childhood, adolescence and university, she now, at eighty, used wheels for legs and needed a nursing attendant all the time for simple living.
I called to see her on the Thursday afternoon, kissing her lightly on the forehead and checking on her general state of. health.
‘How’re you doing, Gran?’
‘Absolutely fine.’
A lie, as we both knew.
She still lived in the flat where I’d spent my youth, on the first floor of a house overlooking the River Thames near the top of the tidal flow. At low tide there were acres of mud with screeching gulls scavenging; and at high tide steamerfuls of tourists charging past — with or without thumping music — for a quick trip up through the half-tide lock at Richmond into deeper waters above.
The ever-increasing rent stretched our joint resources painfully, but the living parade outside was worth it.
When I’d graduated from college and left the nest, as one does, she’d still been an agile employee of a travel company for whom she’d worked all my life. The travel company, enlightened beyond the normal, had relied on her changing age to give advice in their brochures to her peers. At fifty she’d written, ‘Those gorgeous boys teaching you tennis are playing for money not keeps’, and at sixty she’d said of Australia ‘Climb Ayer’s Rock if you’re either a five-year-old kid or next best thing to a mountain goat’, and at seventy gave her view that ‘It’s now or never for Great Walls and pilgrimage. Do it now, or settle for never’.
Fate had settled it for never. At seventy-four, disregarding warning periods of little feeling in her legs, she went out to assess the strength needed for white-water rafting in southern stretches of the Colorado river. She hadn’t actually bucketed down the fiercest stretches; she’d asked the guides. She wasn’t mad, my grandmother. She was paid to write about possible adventures for her age group, and if necessary to say ‘don’t go’. At seventy-four she’d been unenthusiastic about white water down her spine and, wanting to get home, had ignored subsequent fever and chills as just a nuisance. Then, delayed at the airport, she’d had to wait half a day for a replacement aircraft to be found for the return to England. She’d written me a postcard from the airport, which of course I didn’t receive until three weeks later.
It said:
‘Dearest Perry, I have the screaming heebie-jeebies about this flight, but there isn’t another for five days. Look after yourself. I’ve caught a cold. Eternally, Gran.’
On the long overnight heebie-jeebie flight from Phoenix, Arizona, to London she had progressively lost muscular strength in her legs, and by the time the substitute aircraft landed safely at Heathrow the next morning the whole of her lower body felt numb. She had walked very slowly to immigration, and hardly ever again.
After hours of anxious investigations, we were told that the trouble lay in a meningioma, a non-cancerous but hard tumour that had invaded and grown slowly inside the spinal column and was now compressing the spinal nerves. Friendly and clearly concerned doctors tried truckloads of steroids, but they did no good. Surgery, though discussed lengthily and carefully carried out, interfered with the vascular supply of blood to the spinal cord and made things worse.
My grandmother’s heebie-jeebies were never to be lightly ignored.
She had had the heebie-jeebies the day she’d travelled eighteen hours to try by her presence to persuade my reluctant parents to leave their much-loved house, only to see it blow up with them inside as she approached. She’d had much milder heebie-jeebies the day I’d broken my ankle being run over by a golf cart, but because of some deeply foreboding heebie-jeebies, we had not gone skiing in a valley that could have killed us in an avalanche had we been there.
When the medical dust had settled on the unhelpful meninges, my no longer active grandmother was making jokes about relative inability, and was afraid she would be forcibly retired by her employers. Instead, they had asked for columns on day-treats and holidays for the disabled, and I had shaken hands on a deal with an agency that supplied nurses; they agreed that a succession of angels would each live for a week in the flat, caring for my gran. They would nurse, shop, cook, dress and drive their patient to column-worthy destinations. They would sleep in the small rear-facing room where my physics books still took up shelf space. They would wear uniform if they wanted to. And, my grandmother insisted, they would watch the weather forecasts.