Second Wind

by Dick Francis

  There were well over two hundred weather stations covering the British Isles, each reporting local wind speeds and direction and barometric pressure into a large central computer housed in the main Meteorological Office in Bracknell, near Ascot, west of London. Into that computer too came data from all over the world: and one could draw from it everything the world’s weather was likely to do in the next forty-eight hours. But nothing was ever certain, and a lurch of high atmosphere pressure could let in a polar gust that would refrigerate our cheerful expectations into unconvincing explanations.

  The late September Sunday of Caspar Harvey’s lunch, though, dawned fine and clear with a chilly wind from the east, conditions that would remain that way all day while the farmers of East Anglia harvested their late-ripening barley. “Perfect for flying,” Kris said.

  Kris’s airplane, a low-winged single-engined Piper Cherokee, was approximately thirty years old. He, he frankly acknowledged, was its fourth owner, the third being a flying club that had sometimes put six hours a day on the propeller log (Kris’s only gripe) and rubbed old-age patches into the cracked leather seats.

  My first reaction to the antique rig a couple of years earlier had been “No thanks, I’ll stay on the ground,” but Kris had introduced me in his home airfield’s echoing hangar to a machinist who understood the relationship between loose screws and sudden death. I’d put my life in Kris’s hands on the machinist’s assurance that old though the Piper might be, it was airworthy to the last rivet.

  Kris, in fact, had turned out to be a surprisingly competent pilot. I’d expected him to be as volatile in the air as in his general behavior but instead he was soberly responsible at the controls and only as high as a radiosonde balloon afterwards.

  Many of our colleagues found Kris a difficult companion and asked me in mild exasperation how I dealt with his obvious leaning towards my company. I usually answered truthfully that I enjoyed his slightly weird views on life, and I didn’t mention that in his depressive periods he talked familiarly about suicide as if discussing an unimportant life choice like what tie to wear for early breakfast broadcasts.

  It was regard for his parents, and for his father in particular, that deterred him from the final jump into the path of a train (his preferred method of exit), and I reckoned that he had less self-hatred and more courageous staying power than many who’d given in to a death wish.

  At the time of Caspar Harvey’s lunch party, Kris Ironside at thirty-one had outlasted the macabre instincts of a succession of young women who had temporarily found the idea of suicide fascinating, and was beginning to face the possibility that he might yet make it to middle age.

  In appearance, apart from the overall tall and willowy build, he was noticeably good-looking, with pale blue intelligent eyes, wiry blond stick-out hair that refused help from barbers, a strong blond mustache, and, on screen particularly, a sort of half-grin that dared you not to believe his every word.

  He kept his flying pride and joy on White Waltham airfield and to its upkeep devoted the bulk of his income, gleefully informing anyone who would listen that it left aerobic exercises out of sight as a keep-fit heart-stresser. He greeted me at White Waltham with what I knew from experience to be supercharged happiness. His Cherokee, parked by the petrol pumps, was taking aboard fuel that was no more stable than himself, each wing tank being filled to overflowing to expel any water formed there by hot saturated air condensing as the aircraft cooled after last time out.

  Kris, never one of the old goggles-and-white-silk-scarf variety of pilots, was wearing a plaid heavy wool shirt with a Norwegian-knit sweater on top. He eyed my dark pants, white shirt and navy jacket and nodded approval: in some way he considered my all-too-conventional appearance to be a license for his own eccentricity to flourish.

  He finished the refueling, checked that the two wing tank caps were screwed on tight and then, having with my help pushed the little white airplane a short distance from the pumps (a small courtesy to other refuelers), he methodically walked round the whole machine, intoning his checklist to himself as he touched each vital part. As usual, he finished by unclipping and opening backwards each half of the engine cowling, checking that the mechanic hadn’t left a rag in the works (as if he would!) and also wiping the dipstick clean before re-inserting it down into the sump, to make sure there was a satisfactorily deep lake of oil there to lubricate the engine. Kris had never been one to take foolish chances when it came to flying.

  Once aboard and sitting in the left-hand (captain’s) seat he equally seriously completed his pre-starting checks—all switches in good order, and things like that—and finally started the engine, gazing concentratedly at its gauges.

  Used to his meticulous ways, I sat placidly waiting for satisfaction to relax the tension in his backbone and hands, until at last he grunted, switched on his radio, and informed the Sunday controller up in his glass tower that Ironside in his Cherokee required takeoff clearance for a simple flight to Newmarket, return expected at about seventeen hundred hours local time. Kris and the controller knew each other well; the exchange of information was a courtesy, more than an obligation. Cleared to taxi, allowed the tower. “Thanks, kiddo,” the pilot said.

  Kris was right, it was a lovely day for flying. The Cherokee lifted off lightheartedly with its easy load and swung round towards the north as it climbed away from base. The noise of the engine in a cross between a growl and clatter made casual conversation difficult, but talking anyway was ever superfluous up there higher than eagles. Pleasure as always sat like a balloon in my mind, and I checked our progress against the map on my knees with unalloyed contentment. Maybe one of these days ... why didn’t I ... learn to fly?

  Kris had drawn two straight lines on the wipe-clean surface of the air map, a dog-leg route to lunch. It was he who steered by the direction indicator, allowing for magnetic variation and a crosswind, and I with small triumphs who checked our passage over the roads and rivers two thousand feet below and pointed them out to him, earning grins and nods.

  From White Waltham we flew north to avoid crossing straight over London, turning northeast where the north-heading multi-lane M I highway reached the outskirts of the sprawling town of Luton, with its busy airport to the east.

  Kris yearned for some of the expensive avionic packages that would give him access to all the latest equipment that made air navigation easier. It cost him every spare cent, however, just to keep flying, so he navigated by dead reckoning and sharp-eyed passengers, and only once, he said, had he been disastrously lost.

  Dead reckoning delivered us safely alive into the Newmarket area, where he sought out a large house some way south of the town and, descending to a thousand feet or so, circled round it twice, causing figures below to appear waving in the garden.

  “Caspar Harvey’s house,” Kris shouted unnecessarily.

  I nodded O.K.; and as he was circling clockwise, with the wing on my side low to give me a good view, I brought out the handy little camera I carried with me always and took enough shots, I reckoned, to thank and please our host.

  Kris, breaking off from the circling, ascended again a few hundred more feet and gave me a Cherokee-eye view of the purpose-built town that the racing world called “Headquarters.” I’d talked a hundred or more times on the telephone or voice mail to the trainers who worked there. I’d corresponded with e-mail by the electronic ton. I knew voices and I knew characters, and it wasn’t only Oliver Quigley whose sharp anxieties begged assurances from me that I couldn’t give.

  Neither Kris nor I, as I’d checked with him before the flight, knew which of the many stableyards in Newmarket were identifiable from the air, and once over the place and thundering along at a hundred and twenty knots, I found I was sure only of one or two of the biggest.

  Oliver Quigley had told me often that his string could trot straight from his yard onto Warren Hill, but with the speed and the sunshine and my ground-to-air ignorance of the town’s geography, I wasn’t at all sure in wh
ich quadrangle stableyard stood Caspar Harvey’s equine investments, not to mention a filly due to run on Friday. To be on the safe side of pleasing the trainer, therefore, I snapped as many stableyards as I could.

  There wasn’t a horse to be seen, neither on the well-marked gallops nor in the stableyards nor on the horse walks (special paths for horses) which laced the town. There were upwards of twelve hundred aristocratic thoroughbreds down there somewhere, but at lunchtime on a Sunday they weren’t doing much but dreaming.

  Kris looked at his watch and headed south of the town, where he put the wheels down sweetly on the official grass strip that ran beside the part of the racecourse used in high summer—the July course. The Jockey Club not only allowed this but, to Kris’s indignation, charged a fee.

  He taxied back fast to where a Land Rover waited with a young woman in an ultra short skirt leaning against it.

  “Shit,” Kris said forcefully.

  “Why shit?”

  “He’s sent his daughter. He promised she wouldn’t be here.”

  “She looks O.K. to me.”

  Kris said “Huh” with pity for my ignorance and slowed the Cherokee, and, swinging it round neatly into a tidy configuration for parking, cut the engine.

  “Her name’s Belladonna,” Kris said. “Poison.”

  I unclipped my seat belt, unlatched the door, climbed out and jumped down from the wing. Kris, having checked his switches, scrambled after. I wasn’t sure he meant it about her name but he casually introduced us. “Bell, this is Perry. Perry ... Belladonna. Call her Bell.”

  I shook her hand. She said, eyebrows lifting, “Aren’t you ... ?”

  “I expect so,” I said.

  She looked sugar-sweet, not deadly. Fair hair, more wispy than regulated. Blue eyes with innocuously blinking lids. Pink-outlined lips with a smile that never quite left them. Even without Kris’s comment, I’d have been aware of witchcraft.

  “Climb in,” she invited, gesturing to the Land Rover. “Dad heard you circling overhead and sent me along. He’s mulling wine. He’d never leave with cinnamon floating.”

  Kris, apparently deaf to the instruction, was walking round his aircraft and patting it with approval, listening to the small cracking noises of the metal cooling. Its white painted fuselage gleamed in the sun along with the dark blue personalized insignia of a lightning flash and the registration letters that identified Kris worldwide: and in fact he had flown in enough countries to be known (not without respect) as the “the fussy English.” After his final landing on wet days he sponged and dried the undersides of the wings, not just the tops, to get rid of any mud thrown up by the wheels.

  “Get in, do,” Bell told him, opening the Land Rover’s front passenger door for him. ‘This party’s today, not tomorrow.”

  The antagonism between them was faint but positive. I sat in the rear seat for the five-mile drive to Caspar Harvey’s house listening to the semi-polite exchanges and wondering how far their mutual dislike would go, such as, would they save each other if it risked themselves.

  Caspar Harvey’s home proved to be more than halfway to grand but just definitely on the under side of ostentatious. The front, with small-scale Palladian pillars, seemed imposing, but the inside was only one room deep, and no one had tried to pretend otherwise. Entrance hall and sitting room, combined by a wall of arches, made a single space ample enough for the gathering of upwards of thirty people who stood around drinking hot red wine, eating handfuls of peanuts and talking about Newmarket’s main profitable crop—racehorses.

  Caspar Harvey, noticing Kris’s arrival, eeled his way, drink held high, until he could greet his guest within shouting distance in the throng.

  “I heard your overhead pass.” He nodded to Kris. “And welcome to you, too,” he added in my direction. “My trainer swears by your nose for rain. He’s here somewhere. Do I run my filly on Friday? My wife puts her faith in the stars. Have some wine.”

  I accepted the wine, which tasted melodiously of cinnamon and sugar, and followed his identifying finger to his trainer across the crowd, Oliver Quigley, a-quiver and visibly ill at ease.

  “Tell him it will be dry until Friday,” Harvey said. “Tell him to run my horse.”

  He was enjoying, I thought, his role of lavish host. Reprehensible of me to think also that the role itself meant more to him than his guests. His expansive gestures were like his setting: a conscious indication of wealth and achievement, but one that carefully fell short of a flourish of trumpets.

  I told him I’d taken aerial photos of his house and would send them to him, and, pleased, he invited me to take as many shots of his guests as they would allow.

  In body he was as substantial as in means, a heavy-shouldered presence with a thick neck and a trim gray grizzled beard. Shorter by only three inches than Kris’s willowy extent—as I was myself—Caspar Harvey would nevertheless have been noticeable at any height, or lack of it: he had, strongly developed, the indefinable aura that comes with success. I took his picture. He posed again, and nodded benignly at the flash.

  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 switchback.

  “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 gray-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 eyeglass 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, co
mpleting 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 inquired 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 socializing 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 quarreled.” 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 fetus 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 Steinem, 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 ... ’ ”