‘Gabrielle Fox,’ I tell him. His hand is warm and a little sweaty.
‘I’m a therapist at Oxsmith.’
Dr Frazer Melville — who I pray is not going to be a weirdo — is studying my face sidelong with forensic interest. ‘Shall we re-enter the fray?’ He gestures at an empty table just inside the hall, near the shelter of a large pot-plant. When we have made our way to it, he pulls up a chair and sits himself opposite me. ‘So you’re a Londoner.’
‘You can tell just by looking?’ I ask.
‘Yes. As it happens.’
‘Are you some new breed of urban anthropologist?’
‘No, but I’m a Scot, and one fish out of water can spot another.’
‘It’s not London that does that. It’s the chair.’ It comes out more grumpily than I intend. ‘But if you’re a physicist, maybe I could pick your brains about something. I have a patient who has a kind of climate-and-geology obsession.’
The big Scot smiles. I like the splotch of green in his eye. It’s like a tropical fish darted in and set up home. And his teeth. I like Dr Frazer Melville’s teeth, too, which are white and even and not too small for his face. This matters to me. He is probably — though this is totally irrelevant — about forty.
‘Sure. But I’ll be honest with you. I’m not planningto stay here long. I hate these functions, and I hate wearing this ridiculous costume. There’s an Indian restaurant across the road that won’t poison us.’
Immediately, the prospect of rejecting a chaotic buffet scrum in favour of a quiet curry has distinct appeal. In addition, Frazer Melville’s accent entertains me enough to make me want to hear more of it, and I like his attitude to the charity event.
‘But if you’d rather stay here with the thoughtfully assembled, er,
I shake my head as a pesto confection glides past on a tray. ‘My turn to be honest. I can guarantee you that this thing I’m wearing is even more uncomfortable than your outfit, if we’re having a competition. I’m hitting seven out of ten on the pain scale here.’
‘Well, it may not be comfortable, but it’s flattering,’ he says, openly surveying my cleavage. ‘You’re a joy to behold, if I may say so.’ Oh well. I have put it on display, so it would be hypocritical to complain, I suppose. But I am on shaky ground.
‘My friend sent it. She’s a fashion buyer,’ I say quickly, feeling a radical blush spreading upwards from the flesh in question and blooming on my face like a Rorschach test.
‘What you need is food, Gabrielle Fox. I can see you’re hungry. May I?’
When he manoeuvres me out through the frenzy of the kitchen, I feel like a baby in a buggy kidnapped by its eccentric uncle.
Outside, I take charge of the chair again. The heat from the kitchen is still burning on my skin in the warm air. The blush hasn’t quite died down either. As we approach a zebra crossing side by side, I wonder whether I should tell him it’s my birthday. No: he’d offer to pay for the meal, and I can’t allow that. I stay on the pavement but Frazer Melville steps out jauntily, forcing two cars to brake hard. With a burst of inappropriate amusement, I realise that I am in the company of a man who might well turn out to be as dangerous as he is energetic.
Delhi Dreams, aromatic and low-lit, with flock wallpaper and red furnishings, is a classic British Indian with d6cor untouched since the 1970s. Ensconced at a quiet corner table, the physicist is telling me that he moved to Hadport from Inverness six months ago, having obtained a grant to continue his research at Hadport University. His background is pure and applied physics. He tells me that his current branch of study, fluid dynamics, covers a wide spectrum but, in the case of his PhD, involves the kinetics, pressure and flow of ocean currents. ‘But then I wanted to broaden things out, so I studied meteorology and started investigating air turbulence. Trying to discover why molecules move the way they do. Did you know that flocks of birds and shoals of fish and swarms of insects follow similar kinetic rules? It seems random but there’s a logic to it. There are lots of new theories around at the moment. None of which I can explain without drawing mathematical equations on a napkin and boring the pants off you. So tell me about this patient of yours.’
‘Meteorological or geological?’
‘Both. Just the other day she said, there was going to be a tornado in Scotland. And sure enough, there was.’
‘The one in Aberdeen?’
‘I have to admit I found it unsettling.’
He smiles. ‘You shouldn’t have because it’s emphatically a coincidence. Small tornadoes happen far more often than anyone realises. We get a lot in this country. Case dismissed. Go on.’
‘And she can sense things in people’s blood too, or so she claims. Blood and water and rock.’
‘They have more in common than you’d think,’ says Frazer Melville, tearing off his tie and shoving it in his pocket. The poppadums arrive and he attacks them with verve. ‘Why not make a note of what she says? Or better still, get her to write it down.’
‘She already does. She has notebooks full of drawings. But I don’t press her on the detail. It’s best neither to confirm nor deny a patient’s fantasy.’
‘That’s policy?’ This also seems to amuse the physicist. ‘You have a fantasy policy at Oxsmith?’
‘In a way. And not just at Oxsmith.’
‘But what if it isn’t fantasy?’
‘The paranoids really are out to get me? Istanbul really is about to be destroyed by a massive earthquake?’
He pauses mid-bite. ‘It’s on a faultline. So it’s a real possibility. Quite well-known.’
‘And there’s going to be a massive hurricane hitting Rio de Janeiro next week? On the twenty-ninth? She gets very specific. And it all seems to be Armageddon-related, one way or another.’
‘Para-catastrophology.’ He pulls out reading glasses to survey the menu we’ve just been handed by the waiter. Not forty, then, I think. A bit older. ‘A whole new field. Could put experts like me out of a job. There was a bloke in the States, in Vermont, called the Weather Wizard, he’s dead now. His real name was Louis D. Rubin. He looked at the clouds and predicted days when there’d be unusual weather. He was mostly right.’
‘So she might be right about this hurricane, for example? By picking up signs the rest of us can’t see? Because that’s what she’d claim.’
‘I’d doubt it. It’s still the hurricane season, and they’re getting bigger every year because of the increased air temperatures. But super-hurricanes are a complex phenomenon. With global warming, we’re seeing all sorts of things we haven’t seen before. That’s the trouble with trying to model anything on a computer: we only have the parameters of what’s already known. But Rio de Janeiro — highly unlikely, I’d say. It’s south Atlantic, and typically they’re in the north. The first on record was in 2002. Took a lot of us by surprise. But it may have marked the start of a trend.’
‘So what are the chances that she’s right?’
At this his eyes change shape and you can almost see his brain turn into a calculator. ‘Off the cuff? A thousand to one.’ He smiles suddenly. ‘I’d be happy to bet our next dinner on it.’ He takes a big bite of poppadum and crunches noisily.
I can’t help smiling too. I can’t be used to it, because it makes the muscles around my mouth ache. Is it possible that I am enjoying this evening after all? I agree to the bet, but insist that this dinner’s on me, because it’s my birthday. There. I have said it. Delighted, he orders champagne, for which he insists he’ll pay. Surprisingly, Delhi
