Yearn (28 page)

Behind her she could hear Alan getting up and padding his way to the toilet; three minutes later it flushed. The sound of rushing water pulled her straight back to her nightmare—there had been the sound of rushing water in the background, and distant screaming. The image of a huge bank of dark blue clouds rolling across open sky, the shadow of which turned the water black below it, came back to her. It was a storm of biblical proportions, a storm that could change history. No, she hadn't summoned this weather—rather, the storm had called her to it.

Her reverie was broken by the sensation of a warm body pressing against her back and bottom, a warm body with an erection.

“Fancy a quickie before work?” Alan murmured into her ear as his hands slid around to her breasts and his hips executed a couple of comical thrusts that, unfortunately for Alan, made Phoebe think of an overenthusiastic dog.

“We've got about ten minutes,” he continued, a little more eager in his movements. For a moment Phoebe wondered whether Rupert's foreplay would be so ribald and clumsy. She couldn't imagine so; the weatherman seemed far more sensitive and romantic.

“Oh, what the hell . . .” Resigned, she allowed herself to be led to the bed.

 • • • 

That morning Alan drove her to work. Inside the office building they parted to go to their separate floors. Once Phoebe had reached her desk she was hijacked by one of the senior clerks wanting her to take dictation for a lecture he had to give at a conference.

Sitting in front of a large window with the warm sunshine falling on her back, Phoebe found it harder and harder to concentrate as his voice droned on. Once or twice she found herself doodling on her notepad—great stormy clouds, showers of heavy penciled dashes, hail. Was it possible there would be a huge storm the very next day? If anything the weather seemed unseasonably warm, even slightly humid, like an Indian summer. Her predictive nightmare was beginning to feel like a huge ethical dilemma, but whom could she warn and who would believe her?

Phoebe gazed through the glass partition at the rows of young women in the typing pool—all of them would be thrown into a maelstrom tomorrow, she couldn't helping thinking, remembering the image of trees flung like matchsticks into the air, electric wires vibrating like demented guitar strings between telegraph poles before snapping. People would die. People would drown. Thank God Rupert would warn them tonight, she thought, and again the warm rush of absolute power flooded through her. He would hear her dream, like he'd faithfully heard all the other dreams, regardless of any influence his fiancée had over him—true love would win out.

At lunch in a small Greek café around the corner from work, Phoebe fielded Alan's questions about where she'd been the night before.

“At my sister's,” she told him, gazing innocently into his eyes. “You know how she's been having trouble with her husband.” Disbelief did not leave his face. Phoebe leaned across and caressed his knee under the table. “It was nice making love this morning,” she lied. “Let's go to bed early tonight. . . .” Phoebe tried smiling seductively.

“I won't be back before ten; I've got to finish some reports at work.” Alan, still suspicious, fumbled with his pita bread. Phoebe's hand moved up his thigh.

“Never mind, love, I'll still be waiting,” she purred. Alan, placated, dropped both the pita and his questioning.

 • • • 

Phoebe poured herself a small glass of sherry, fed the meowing cat early, then switched on the end of the six o'clock news just in time for the newsreader to make some wry comment about a very late Indian summer before the program cut to the weather report. Rupert, in his suit, stood smiling, holding the pointer up against the map of the British Isles.

“Well, apart from the slight blip of the sudden squall early last night, with the mercury promising to hover around sixty degrees Fahrenheit, the weather has returned to being unseasonably warm for this time of year. Tomorrow we're looking at fairly clear skies, with the promise of a shower early afternoon . . .”

Phoebe let her glass fall to the floor, where it shattered. Profoundly shocked, she didn't even bother to look down at the spreading sherry.

“The storm! Why don't you tell them about the storm?!” she yelled at the TV screen, causing the cat to bolt out of the room.

On the screen Rupert seemed to hesitate, almost as if he'd heard her. Then, after a slightly perplexed smile, he continued: “This will be good news for gardeners or farmers who are hoping to slip in some last-minute gardening before the winter frosts. . . .”

Phoebe's heartbeat quickened to a nauseating fast pace and her mind raced. She couldn't let this go—images of the nightmare swam across the kitchen ceiling, each increasingly more apocalyptic. Panicked, she picked up the telephone and dialed through to the switchboard of the BBC. Near tears, she pleaded with the operator, who, swept up by her obvious distress, put her through to the newsroom. Holding her breath, Phoebe watched the screen as Rupert appeared to receive a message through his hidden earpiece.

“We've just had a phone call from a concerned viewer, a Mrs. P. Rodehurst from Acton.” Phoebe winced: at least they could have got her surname right. Rupert continued: “She's phoned to tell us there have been reports that a major hurricane is about to hit southern England.”

Phoebe held her breath. “Now—now is the last chance you have to redeem yourself, Rupert,” she said, speaking to the screen, convinced that he could hear her somehow, in a dim, remote, semiconscious way. “Now is your chance to be the first to give the warning—this could make your career!” She thumped the table, making the laid cutlery rattle.

To her horror Rupert smiled weakly, his voice taking on a patronizing, soothing tone, as if he were speaking to a distressed four-year-old.

“Well, Mrs. Rodehurst, let me reassure you—we don't have hurricanes in England. And certainly looking at the reports from the Met Office plus the patterns of both temperature and wind change of the past few days, there is really no need for alarm. . . .”

“You bloody idiot! How could you betray me!” Phoebe screamed, throwing the remote control across the room, where it bounced against the wall. Unperturbed, Rupert continued, now pointing toward the right side of the map.

“There is actually a warm front coming in from France which should push the cloud buildup we experienced earlier today further across to the northwest. . . .”

Phoebe didn't bother waiting for the end of the program. Grabbing her car keys, she bolted toward the front door.

Twenty minutes later she found herself waiting in a corridor outside a door marked “STUDIO FOUR: News/Current Affairs and Weather.” A young girl carrying a clipboard came out of the door followed by the newsreader, whose face was covered in heavy makeup. Phoebe recognized her immediately. The newsreader was talking intensely to a small bearded man, who Phoebe immediately assumed must have been the director of the program. Wrapped in conversation, they didn't even glance at Phoebe, who pretended to be interested in the rows of photographs that lined the walls: celebrities all posing with the newsreaders. A second later Rupert stepped out into the bright fluorescent light.

“Rupert!” she blurted out, deluded by a sense of intense intimacy. Surprised, the weatherman stopped in his stride. He glanced over at the pretty blond woman who, despite her rather obvious sexual allure, had a strange feral grace that, against his better judgment, he found attractive.

“Do I know you?”

“Yes . . . well no . . . sort of. But that's not important, Rupert . . .” Again he found the way she pronounced his name—as if she'd known him for years—at once deeply disturbing and erotic. “. . . you are wrong! So wrong you don't know how you have endangered both your career and the British public,” she announced in such an authoritative tone that for one horrible moment Rupert thought she might possibly be government—or worse, MI5—coming to pursue some awful transgression he had unwittingly made on air. Best to play dumb, he told himself, but damn it, she was rather attractive. He started toward the exit; to his irritation Phoebe followed, running to keep up.

“I'm not sure what you are referring to but I'm sure my researcher will be able to—” He was forced to respond but kept his pace up anyhow. Phoebe grabbed his arm.

“The storm, Rupert, it's going to be huge, well into hurricane proportions, and it's going to hit Britain later today and for most of tomorrow.”

“Mrs. Rodehurst . . . ?” He stopped still; the memory of the whispered phone call during his report came back to him now with sickening clarity.

“Mrs. Rosehurst. To you, Phoebe.” She reached down and squeezed one of Rupert's limp hands, immediately sending a wave of desire through him that added considerably to his confusion. Phoebe held on to his hand, now raising it up near one of her large breasts in a dramatic fashion. “After all, with an understanding like ours . . .” she continued breathily.

Rupert's logic reached out beyond the fog of sexual desire that had temporarily derailed him—along with the maddening perfume that enveloped the woman. He snapped into professional detachment.

“Look, I appreciate your interest in the program, and in particular the weather report, however you really have no need to panic. You have both my and the London Meteoro-logical Board's word that Britain will not be under siege tonight or tomorrow—not from the weather, not from the French, not from the Soviets, and certainly not from the Germans,” he joked, then saw with dismay that Phoebe hadn't smiled. In fact her expression had now intensified into one of deathly seriousness.

“Oh, Rupert, if you only knew how terrible the mistake is that you're making. I know you're wrong, and just think how this is going to impact on your reputation, Rupert—you will only be remembered as the one who always got it wrong, because I can reassure you that this storm will be the storm of the century, I know it.”

“Does this prediction have any scientific basis? Or is it all just tea leaves and the way the autumn leaves are curling?” he snapped tersely, then remembered to snatch back his hand. Phoebe planted herself firmly in front of the tall weatherman, took his chin between her fingers (a gesture that thoroughly unnerved him), and made him look into her eyes.

“Do I seem familiar to you? Think hard, Rupert. Is there anything about me that you remember? My face, my eyes, the sound of my voice?” Again vertigo swept through Rupert as, for one ghastly minute, he recalled a particularly woeful period of promiscuity just after finishing university. The idea that Phoebe might be one of the young girls he seduced then abandoned rattled through him like sudden indigestion. Surely not . . . yet somehow she did seem familiar.

“Are you a friend of Penelope's?” he ventured, rather hoping she wasn't.

“You mean your fiancée?” Phoebe didn't bother to disguise the disgust in her voice. Rupert nodded cautiously. She certainly didn't sound like one of Penelope's upper-class girlfriends, many of whom were an annoying combination of stupid and arrogant.

“Absolutely not. Does she ever actually watch you, you know, on TV?”

“Weather's not her thing,” Rupert retorted. “She has other attributes.” Although at that moment he was having trouble remembering what they were. He glanced down the corridor; the exit sign was beckoning. He couldn't afford to be seen with a mad fan; he had to get rid of her or at least get outside. He started walking, and again she followed.

They turned a corner and walked into the car park lift. It was empty. As the doors slid closed, Phoebe suddenly realized she was alone and within intimate proximity of her idol.

“Then how can she really know you, or appreciate your genius?” she murmured as sexily as she could.

“That's not important to me,” Rupert replied, now acutely aware that he was lying. The fact that Penelope displayed no interest in his career was a source of great secret frustration to him.

“It is to me. You see, that's how you know me. I've been watching you for months, and you might not know it consciously but we have a connection, a psychic connection.”

Rupert glanced at the light panel indicating each floor, suddenly aware of how long the lift was taking. Despite finding her physically attractive, the intensity of this strange young woman made him nervous. Phoebe moved closer, the scent of her closing over Rupert like a fog, a suffocating miasma. The weatherman shuffled discreetly backward until his back was against the wall of the elevator.

“I don't believe in such matters; I'm a scientist,” he protested.

Stretching up on her toes, Phoebe started to mimic the weatherman's gestures and vocal inflections.

“Tomorrow will start with a gloriously sparse blue sky. By midday there will just be a sprinkling of cumuli . . .” Her arms and hands swept through the air in perfect mimicry, her fingers copying his particular flourishes—it was beautiful, it was genuflection, it was worship, and it was disturbingly exact. Watching her, Rupert was surprised to find himself both blushing and hardening. He thrust one hand into his pocket, hoping she hadn't noticed his erection.

“Okay, so you're a fan, but what's this got to do with whether tomorrow will bring a hurricane or not?”

“I dreamt it last night.”

The lift shuddered to a halt and the steel door slid open. Rupert stepped forward but Phoebe blocked him.

“You have to believe me. I've dreamt the correct weather for the past few months. And every following night on the six o'clock news you've given the weather report exactly how it's been in my dreams, except for tonight's program. Tonight you got it wrong. Profoundly wrong. Please, Rupert, people are going to die and it's going to be on your watch. Are you going to be able to live with that?”