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“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.”
