Those in Peril

by Smith, Wilbur

  ‘Pinot noir?’ Hector asked, and Grace gave him a questioning look, before she nodded.

  ‘So you know something about grapes and wines, young man?’

  ‘Hector knows just about everything about everything there is to know. Sometimes he can be a regular pain in the butt,’ Hazel explained.

  ‘Don’t be vulgar, Hazel,’ admonished Grace.

  The house was Cape Dutch, designed by Herbert Baker in 1910. Grace’s younger brother was waiting on the front porch to welcome them. He was a tall straight man in his early sixties, suntanned and with wide shoulders and flat belly from manual work on his beloved vines.

  Hazel introduced them. ‘This is Mater’s little brother, my uncle John, and this is Hector. Uncle John is the winemaker for Dunkeld.’

  ‘Welcome to Dunkeld. We have heard a great deal about you, Hector.’

  ‘As I have about you, John. Thirty-two gold medals for your wines over the years, and a ninety-eight-point rating from Robert Parker on your latest Cabernet Sauvignon.’

  ‘You like wine?’ John looked immensely gratified.

  ‘I love wine.’

  ‘Perhaps we can go down to the cellars for a little tasting when the ladies allow you a few spare moments.’ Hazel watched with barely contained amusement as Hector worked his special brand of charm on her family.

  On the second day Grace took him down to her cycad garden. It was noted by the Royal Botanical Society at Kew Gardens as being one of the most extensive private collections in Africa. The two of them spent half the afternoon in the garden together and by the time they returned to Dunkeld House the two of them were firm friends, and Hector had been given permission to employ her Christian name.

  On the last evening of their visit the entire family was served with dinner in John’s wine cellar. They returned to the big house with sparkling eyes, warm cheeks and garrulous tongues. Grace was only the tiniest bit unsteady on her feet. However, she pleaded a little headache and retired early, but before she went she offered her cheek to Hector to be kissed. The next morning John and Grace drove them out to Thunder City to see them off.

  ‘You will come to the wedding, won’t you, Mater? And you too, Uncle John.’

  ‘You have my solemn promise, Hazel my child. We will both be there,’ Grace replied and then she allowed Hector to kiss her cheeks, both of them, and told him, ‘Welcome to our family, Hector. For a very long time Hazel has needed a man like you around.’

  ‘I will be good to her, Grace.’

  ‘She’d better be good to you, or she’ll hear about it from me.’

  Hazel chose the first day of June for her wedding day, and she managed to whittle down the list of invited guests to a mere 2,460. Hector invited two: his younger brother Teddy and Paddy O’Quinn. Teddy declined the invitation. He had never forgiven Hector for being their father’s favourite. Paddy accepted and in addition took on the job of best man. Uncle John gave the bride away, and Cayla was her mother’s bridesmaid. In the wedding marquee a special armchair with velvet cushions was placed in the front row centre for Grace Nelson, who after a glass or two of Louis Roederer Cristal Champagne had been known to develop a slight list to port.

  The board of Bannock Oil voted to retire Hazel’s Gulfstream jet from service and replace it with a BBJ, a Boeing Business Jet. This reconfigured Boeing 737 could fly from LA to Paris non-stop at a speed of Mach .78. Its luxurious interior had been created by Gianni Versace. It boasted a full owner’s bedroom and bathroom suite, and accommodation for twenty other passengers. It was the directors’ little wedding gift to Hazel.

  Hazel’s wedding gift to Hector was a platinum and diamond Rolex Oyster Perpetual Day Date wrist watch engraved ‘H. from H. with eternal love’, and accompanied by a handwritten message on a gold-embossed letter-head:

  My dearly beloved,

  I promise to always walk ten paces behind you all my life. (Only kidding!)

  Your dutiful and submissive wife,

  Hazel

  Hector gave Hazel an artistic representation of his father’s signet ring which differed from the original by being set with a five-carat D flawless diamond and by being internally engraved, ‘To H. from H. For ever’. The note that accompanied it read,

  Empress of my Heart,

  Now you can keep the original ring in your notorious Swiss bank vault.

  All my love to the end of the road,

  Hector

  The wedding was a triumph, even by Texan standards. In defiance of custom the jollifications went on for three days. It was long after midnight on the third day when at last they bade an emotional farewell to uncle John, Grace and Cayla at the foot of the BBJ’s steps.

  ‘You are now legal. Even Granny Grace can disapprove no longer,’ Cayla told them. ‘Go to it with all your might and main, my children!’

  ‘Cayla Bannock, you are not a fishwife. Kindly do not speak like one,’ said Grace and burst into tears all over again. At last the bride and groom climbed up into the great jet, resplendent in its crimson and white livery, and it sped them across the Atlantic Ocean. When they landed at Farnborough airport in England a chauffeur-driven Bentley was waiting on the tarmac to take them into London. At the Dorchester hotel the general manager ushered them up to the Oliver Messel suite. They did not emerge again for two full days. They told each other that they must recover fully from jet-lag but they both knew that was a pathetic excuse. On the third evening they went to a Royal Shakespeare Company performance of As You Like It at the Globe. ‘If we go on like this, doing nothing but eating and sleeping, we are going to turn into a pair of fat sloths,’ she told him at breakfast on their private terrace the next morning.

  ‘When you say it like that with a sweet smile on your face, I know there is a kicker to follow. What are you going to get me into next?’

  ‘It’s a honeymoon special surprise, darling. The Ramblers Marathon is being run this Sunday. And you and I are in it.’

  ‘Twenty-six miles!’ he exclaimed.

  ‘Don’t forget the three hundred and eighty-five yards,’ she corrected him. ‘Anyway, what are you griping about? You have three days in which to train.’

  On Marathon Day it rained and there was a chilly northerly wind blowing, but they were holding hands when they crossed the finish line in the Mall outside Buckingham Palace in positions 2,112 and 2,113 out of a field of 30,000 runners.

  ‘That’s enough exercise for a few days,’ Hazel told him that evening as they sat at her special table tucked discreetly in the corner of Mark’s Club. ‘Tomorrow is culture and arts day.’

  Hazel had given the Storage Company the requisite week’s notice that she wished to view her paintings that they were holding in their vaults. She and Hector sat side by side on a white sofa in a room whose walls were draped with plain beige curtains so that there was nothing to divert the viewer’s attention from the paintings. These were carried in reverently one at a time by the company employees and placed on a white wooden easel before them. Then the men withdrew and left them to gaze enraptured at some of the loveliest tangible expressions of human genius in existence.

  ‘When David Livingstone discovered the Victoria Falls he said, “Sights such as these must have been gazed upon by angels in their flight,”’ Hector told her softly.

  ‘I understand how he felt,’ Hazel whispered back.

  Two days later they drove down to Berkshire to attend all five days of Royal Ascot. Hazel was a member so they had full access to the Royal Enclosure. Between races Her Majesty the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh circulated amongst the members in the parade ring. Hazel and Henry had often been guests of the Queen at Sandringham, so Her Majesty stopped for a moment to chat with Hazel and to congratulate her and Hector on their marriage. Prince Philip took Hector by the hand, and gave him one of his notorious piercing looks.

  ‘You are an African, aren’t you, Cross?’ he asked and his eyes twinkled with mischief. ‘How on earth did you get in here?’

  Hector blinked once, b
ut then he rallied quickly and shot back, ‘Ruddy Africans and Greeks! They get in everywhere. Don’t they, sir?’

  Prince Philip snorted with huge delight. ‘Third Battalion, the SAS, weren’t you? I hear you’re a good shot, Cross. We must have you up to Balmoral to give us a hand with our pheasants.’ He glanced at his secretary.

  ‘I’ll see to it, sir,’ the man murmured.

  When they moved on, Hazel whispered to Hector, ‘I am so proud of you! You gave the old devil just what he was asking for. But isn’t the Queen just the cutest little lady you ever laid eyes on?’

  On the fifth day Hazel’s horse The Sandpiper won the Golden Jubilee Stakes, and Hazel decided not to fire her new trainer after all. She held a celebratory dinner for twenty at Annabel’s. The US Ambassador was one of the guests, and in return he invited them to a reception at Winfield House, his official residence, the following week. Famously, the US government had acquired the house from Barbara Hutton in 1955 for a token payment of one dollar. Hazel decided that this was an appropriate occasion to retrieve the authentic Hutton diamonds from the bank vault in which they had been languishing.

  The Norwegian Ambassador was one of the other guests. He and Hector got on famously, and when he heard that Hector and Hazel were fly-fishermen, he invited them to try their luck on the five miles of water he owned on the Namsen River in Norway, which was one of the most famous big-fish rivers in Europe. When Hazel told Cayla of the offer, she shrieked so piercingly that Hazel had to hold the telephone at arm’s length.

  ‘Oh, I do wish I could be there with you, my darling mother. I do love you so. I really do. Please! Pretty please!’

  ‘What about your resolution to rub Soapy Williams’s nose in the dirt at the end of the year?’

  ‘That’s ages away. If you let me come I will work twice as hard when I get back, and I will love you for the rest of my life.’ Hazel sent the BBJ to fetch her.

  The waters of the Namsen were deep and wide. On the last day Hector and Cayla were fishing both banks of the same pool. Cayla threw a long cast towards him with her double-handed thirteen-foot Spey rod, and she let the fly drift through. Hector saw the silver flash deep beneath her fly like an enormous mirror catching the sunlight.

  ‘Steady!’ he yelled wildly. ‘There’s a bloody monster salmon tracking you. Don’t do anything. Let it swing through. When he takes don’t for God’s sake strike him. You’ll pull the hook out of his mouth. Let him take it down then lift it into him.’

  ‘I know! You told me a hundred times,’ Cayla squealed back.

  ‘Steady! Here he comes again.’ He watched the tip of her rod. The huge silver flank flashed deep in the river. ‘Steady, Cay. He’s still there. Oh, hell, he has refused. Bring your fly in and change it. Work quickly, Cay, he’s not going to hang around all day.’ She was waist-deep in the cold water but she stripped her fly back and bit through the trace with her strong white teeth.

  ‘What fly should I put on?’

  ‘What’s the smallest and darkest you have in your box?’

  ‘I have a No. 14 Munro Killer. It’s tiny!’

  ‘Tie it on, and cast it in the same place as before.’ In her haste the cast was clumsy and fell a little short.

  ‘Shall I pull it out, Heck?’

  ‘No. Let it fish through.’ He waited tensely. There was no flash in the water, but abruptly the fly line stopped swinging. ‘Wait!’ he shouted. ‘Don’t do a thing.’ He saw the tip of her rod jiggle and nod.

  ‘He’s playing with it. Don’t strike him. Please don’t strike him, Cay.’ Then the rod tip dipped slowly but purposefully. ‘Lift it into him! Now!’ She leaned back slowly putting her weight into the fish, the rod arching like a longbow. Nothing moved for a long moment.

  ‘I think I’ve hooked up on a rock on the bottom,’ she cried.

  ‘It’s a fish, a monstrous brute. Wait for it. He hasn’t realized that he’s hooked yet.’ Suddenly her reel screamed like a soul in purgatory, and the line hissed from it into the darkling waters.

  ‘Take your bloody fingers off the line or he’ll break you. He’s going to jump!’ The surface opened and the salmon came out in a burst of spray, like a silver projectile from a cannon’s mouth. Hector went cold when he saw the size of it. That skinny little girl of theirs was fighting way out of her class. She was hanging on grimly as the line raced out and the fish went greyhounding away down the river.

  ‘Hold on, darling! I’m coming,’ he shouted, ripping off his waders. Then barefoot and clad only in his long-johns he plunged into the current and tore through it with powerful overarm strokes. He came out on her side of the pool and splashed up behind her. He put his hands on her shoulders to steady her on the boulder-strewn bottom.

  ‘Don’t touch my rod,’ she warned him possessively. ‘This is my fish, do you hear!’ She knew that if he touched the rod it disqualified the catch. Hazel, who had been fishing the pool above them, was alerted by the commotion and she came running down the bank with her rod in one hand and the camera in the other.

  ‘What’s happening?’ she called, but both of them were too busy to reply.

  ‘You have to turn him, Cay,’ Hector warned her. ‘There’s a waterfall around the bend. If he gets in there it’s bye bye blackbird. Tighten up on him slowly. Don’t jerk the line.’ Now he had a hold on the belt of her waders to prevent her being dragged into the deep water. She laid the rod in the crook of her left arm and palmed the reel with her right hand to brake the run of the fish. He began to slow and at last when there were only a dozen turns of backing line left on the spool of her reel, the fish stopped. The rod jerked from side to side as the salmon shook his massive head. Suddenly he turned and came back towards her as fast as he had run away from her.

  ‘Get that line out of the water,’ Hector told her. ‘Reel!’

  ‘You don’t have to scream in my ear,’ Cayla protested. ‘I’m doing it.’

  ‘But not bloody fast enough. Don’t argue. Reel, girlie, reel! If you give him a bight to pull against he will snap your leader like cotton.’ At the same time Hazel was contributing her advice from the bank, and trying to get them to pose for her camera. ‘Look at me, Cayla, and smile!’

  ‘Don’t you dare listen to that crazy mother of yours! Keep your eyes on the bloody fish!’ Hector warned her. The fish set off upstream like a silver shooting star. Hector hooked one arm around her waist and dragged her along after him, splashing and stumbling over the boulders. Howling like a pair of escapees from the mad house they chased after the salmon. The fish turned again and they were forced to turn with him and chase him back downstream. Back he took them and then around again. Suddenly, after almost a full hour of mayhem, the fish stopped and they could see him at last, lying on the bottom in midstream shaking his head like a bulldog with a bone.

  ‘You’ve broken him, Cay. He’s almost ready to come to you now.’

  ‘I don’t care about him. He’s almost bloody broken me,’ she whimpered.

  ‘If you swear again I am going to tell your granny on you, girlie.’

  ‘Go ahead. After this I am afraid of nothing, not even Granny Grace.’ Slowly and delicately she pumped the salmon closer to the bank, easing him a few inches off the bottom with each lift of the rod and then dropping the tip to wind in the slack line.

  ‘When he sees us he is going to make his last run. Be ready for it. Let him take all the line he wants. Don’t try to hold him.’ But the fish was almost done. His last run was less than twenty yards and then she was able to turn his head and bring him back towards the bank. In the shallow water he suddenly rolled onto his back in exhausted submission, his gill covers opening and closing like a bellows as he hunted for oxygen. Hector waded forward and slipped two fingers into his gills and, careful not to tear the delicate membranes, lifted his head gently until he could take him in his arms like an infant. He carried the fish to the bank and Cayla sat beside him waist deep in the icy river.

  ‘How much does he weigh?’ she asked.
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  ‘Over thirty pounds, but less than forty,’ he answered. ‘But it doesn’t matter. He’s yours for ever. That’s all that counts.’ Hazel knelt in front of them and photographed them with the great salmon across their laps and their faces alight with happiness.

  Hector and Cayla carried the fish between them into deeper water and turned him to face into the current so the water flowed through his gills. He recovered his balance and strength swiftly and started to wriggle to be free. Cayla stooped to kiss him on his cold slippery nose.

  ‘Adieu!’ She bade him farewell for ever. ‘Go and make lots of little fish for me to catch.’ Then Hector opened his arms and the fish’s tail thumped from side to side and he shot away into the depths. They laughed and hugged each other for the sheer joy of it.

  ‘Strange how good things always happen when you are with us, Heck,’ Cayla said with sudden seriousness. Hazel recorded the moment with her Nikon. That was how she would always remember her daughter.

  They flew on down to Paris and put Cayla on the commercial flight direct to Denver. There followed four long days of discussions with officials of the French Board of Trade, discussing import tariffs and the other problems of importing natural gas into France. Nevertheless they found time to spend an afternoon at the Musée d’Orsay admiring the Gauguins and another full day in the Musée de l’Orangerie with Monet’s water lilies. Then they went on to Geneva to attend another art auction. There was one item in the sale that Hazel wanted desperately: a lovely Berthe Morisot of a Parisian flower seller. This time Hazel found herself in a grim bidding contest with a Saudi prince. In the end even she had to capitulate, but she was furious.

  ‘You were right, Hector darling. These people are dangerous.’