Permissible Limits

by Hurley, Graham

  ‘You’re talking about Old Glory?’

  ‘No.’ Ralph kissed me on the forehead. ‘I’m talking about you.’

  Harald turned up again next day. He phoned from the airfield and I invited him over for lunch. We had pasta and a salad at the kitchen table while he told me about his trip to the north. The BMW dealer had gone up for a spin in the Yak and bought two on the spot. Harald had phoned Steve Liddell with the good news and sent various faxes to his contact in Romania. With luck, Steve should be spannering again within the week.

  ‘You’re still with him?’

  ‘Sure. Someone has to be.’

  ‘After everything that’s happened?’

  ‘You mean Harvey’s Spit?’

  I looked at him a moment, wondering whether to update him on developments, then decided against it. It was a lovely day. The pasta, to my delight, was delicious. Why let the face in the photo spoil it?

  ‘Yes,’ I said lightly. ‘That’s exactly what I mean.’

  Harald ducked his head and reached for a napkin, wiping his mouth. He confessed a soft spot for young Steve. He said he’d decided to try and help him back on his feet. I said that sounded a pretty Christian thing to do and we were still talking about the Yak when I heard a knock on the front door.

  It was Jamie, Ralph’s grandson. He was wearing jeans and a lovely cotton shirt. He had a dark-green pullover draped over his shoulders, the arms knotted loosely around his neck. There was something familiar about his face, the way he smiled, but for the moment I couldn’t quite place it.

  ‘Did you run here?’

  ‘Afraid not.’

  He indicated a battered mountain bike propped against one of the garage doors. The frame was caked in mud, just like it should be.

  ‘You rode over?’

  He nodded, grinning. ‘Twenty minutes, door to door.’

  I invited him in but he shook his head. He had something for me. From Ralph.

  He gave me a brown Jiffy bag, standing uncertainly on the doorstep.

  ‘You want me to open it now?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘You’re sure you don’t want to come in?’

  ‘No thanks.’

  We looked at each other for a moment and it suddenly hit me who he looked like. Way back, in the Falklands, I’d had a boyfriend called Paul. Paul, at sixteen, was the image of Jamie. Same wild hair. Same white, almost milky skin. Same appetite for exercise and laughter.

  We said goodbye and I watched him slip his feet into the pedal grips before giving me a cheery wave and heading off back down the drive. As I turned into the house, I glimpsed Harald at the kitchen window.

  ‘Who was that?’

  I told him about Ralph and his grandson. We resumed our seats at the kitchen table. I felt the Jiffy bag, trying to guess what might be inside.

  ‘You mind if I open this?’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  While Harald picked at the remains of his salad, I prised out the staples in the Jiffy bag. Inside, wrapped in cotton wool, was a small

  diecast model of a Mustang. I held it up, showing it to Harald.

  ‘Sweet,’ I said.

  I landed it beside Harald’s plate, a perfect three-pointer. Harald didn’t seem the least impressed. With the Mustang was a Get Well card. When I opened it, a folded cheque fell out. I left the cheque on the table, reading the card. Ralph’s handwriting was impeccable, perfect copperplate. He felt the urge, he said, to cheer me up. The Mustang might do the trick and if it didn’t, the cheque might help. I was to spend it on anything I liked. If I wanted to treat it as a loan, so be it. If I preferred to think of it as a present, nothing would give him greater pleasure. He’d recently cashed in some old share certificates. The proceeds had gone to myself and Jamie. Equal shares.

  I picked up the cheque. It was for £5,000. I folded it again and slipped it into the pocket of my shirt, overwhelmed by the gesture.

  Harald was examining the Mustang. He looked, if anything, slightly glum.

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ he said, ‘about your financial situation.’

  ‘Don’t.’

  I began to collect the empty plates, carrying them across to the sink.

  ‘You need money, Ellie,’ Harald called, ‘and I’m happy to help.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I insisted. ‘You take it black, don’t you?’

  I turned round to find Harald looking at me, his face twisted in a tight little smile. Convinced I’d offended him, I returned to the table.

  ‘It’s not that I’m ungrateful,’ I said. ‘It’s just that things are hard. To tell you the truth, things are bloody awful. But just now, just exactly now, I feel pretty good and… well… that’s about it.’

  I picked up the Get Well card and propped it on the dresser. In the lunatic world of classic aircraft, £5,000 was small change but that wasn’t the point. To Ralph, and I expect to Jamie, it was probably a fortune.

  Harald’s eyes followed me everywhere.

  ‘You’re sure about the Mustang? Five-fifty thousand bucks?’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure.’

  ‘You don’t want to sell it?’

  ‘I don’t want to part with it.’

  ‘What about some kind of leaseback?’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘I pay you the money, then I own it. You pay me some kind of nominal fee and keep using it. That way you get to unlock the value without having to kiss the plane goodbye.’

  I thought about it for a second. More small print. More contracts. More room for expensive mistakes.

  ‘No thank you,’ I said.

  ‘OK.’ Harald shrugged, reaching for the little diecast model. ‘Let’s say we do it another way.’

  ‘What other way?’

  ‘Let’s say we talk about the Harvard.’

  ‘The Harvard?’

  I paused, en route to the kettle. Back home, in Florida, this man had a small air force packed with really sexy aeroplanes. Harvards were two a penny, especially in the States. Why should he be interested in ours?

  Harald was looking thoughtful and I wondered what was coming next.

  ‘I’ll buy the Harvard,’ he said. ‘It’ll belong to me but you can keep it here.’

  ‘But why? Why do you want it?’ He began to drum his fingers on the wooden table top.

  ‘Two hundred and fifty thousand,’ he said softly. ‘A quarter of a million?’

  ‘Dollars.’ He nodded. ‘In one hit. Just say the word, I’ll sort out the paperwork.’

  I was still trying to do the sums: $250,000 was around £160,000, more than double the Harvard’s market value.

  ‘But why?’ I asked again. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘It’s a nice plane, one of the first I ever flew. Put it down to sentiment, Ellie. And just say yes.’

  This was beginning to sound like charity but I wasn’t sure that made much difference. Just now I was in deep, deep trouble and £160,000 was a bloody good start to getting out of it.

  ‘The Harvard stays here?’ I asked guardedly.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘And who pays the running costs?’

  Harald hesitated for a fraction of a second, long enough for me to realise that he hadn’t begun to think this thing through.

  ‘I do.’ He smiled. ‘My plane. My tab.’

  ‘So you own it?’

  ‘Sure. And I maintain it, borrow it from time to time, prior warning of course, and you get to bank the cheque.’ His fingers strayed to the little Mustang. ‘Does that sound like robbery?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘So is there a problem?’ ‘I’m not sure.’

  I was looking at the proposal from all sides, trying to spot the angles I’d missed. One of them was the tricky issue of just who owned the plane. Technically, half of it still belonged to Adam, and if DC Perry was right about having to freeze our assets for a year, then the Harvard wasn’t mine to sell. Dennis should be here, I thought. He’d find a solution in seconds
.

  ‘I need time,’ I said, ‘to think about it.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘You don’t mind?’ ‘Not at all.’

  Harald got up, excusing himself from coffee. The green, skintight leather gloves he used for flying were out on the hall table. I followed him, still reeling.

  ‘You’re off already?’

  ‘I’m up to North Weald and they haven’t got lights. An hour ten in the Yak. I’ll just make it.’ He kissed me lightly on the cheek. ‘There’s one thing I haven’t mentioned. About the deal.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  He opened the front door, then turned back to me, slipping on the leather gloves, one after the other.

  ‘You learn to fly the Mustang,’ he said softly. ‘And I teach you.’

  Chapter six

  Two days later, my sister arrived. The first I knew was a phone call the previous afternoon from my mother down in the Falklands. The whole family, she said, had been worried sick about me. How could I possibly cope on my own? How could I grieve properly when I had a business to run? All those planes to look after? Adam’s affairs to sort out? The latter phrase raised a grim smile and I was still trying to assure her that everything was under control when she told me that Andrea had already left.

  ‘She’s on the Brize Norton flight,’ my mother explained, ‘The Tristar took off a couple of hours ago.’

  Direct flights down to the Falklands operate from the RAF airfield at Brize Norton. Brize is up in Oxfordshire and I spent the rest of the evening reorganising everything so that I could put the car on the ferry from Cowes first thing and be at the airfield in time to collect her.

  Andrea, at thirty-nine, is the oldest of us three girls and had always been my father’s favourite. She is undeniably the most attractive of all of us - long-legged, angular, blonde, with the kind of brooding intensity that a lot of men find irresistible. She’s academically bright too, the only Tranter to stand any chance of making it to university. Maybe because of this, she’s always preserved a careful distance from myself and Kate, and the news that she was flying eight thousand miles to take care of little me was, to be frank, a surprise. I was grateful, of course, and it would doubtless be lovely to see her again, but something didn’t quite gel. Given the fact that we’d never been especially close, just why was she making such an extravagant gesture?

  I had my answer within minutes of meeting her in the arrivals hall. The big Tristar had been half an hour early, and Andrea was one of the first passengers through. A brand-new Berghaus anorak and beautifully cut jeans couldn’t disguise how much weight she’d lost. Never fat, she looked gaunt, even ill. When we kissed, her lips were cold. I pushed her trolley across the car park. It was a glorious spring morning, the sky a brilliant blue, the softest of breezes laced with the tang of aviation fuel.

  ‘It’s freezing,’ Andrea complained. ‘Even the bloody Falklands was warmer than this.’

  I was loading her luggage into the back of the estate car. Judging by the number of suitcases she’d brought, Andrea would be with me until Christmas. I began to babble some nonsense about the weather, how marvellous it had been, how everyone was worried about drought, but when I slammed the tailgate shut and looked up, Andrea was already sitting in the car, her head wreathed in cigarette smoke.

  I joined her, slipping my keys into the ignition. ‘How’s Hamish?’ I asked brightly.

  Hamish was Andrea’s husband, a big, hunky Royal Marine who’d married my sister six or seven years back and traded in his service career for the post of PE teacher at Stanley’s new secondary school.

  Andrea was watching an elderly couple peering up at the destination board on a nearby coach.

  ‘He’s left me,’ she said stonily, ‘the bastard.’

  We took the Oxford road out of Brize Norton. By the time I was back on the A34, heading for Southampton, Andrea had told me the whole story. Hamish, she said, had been acting strangely for more than a year. At first, she’d put his evasiveness and his unexplained absences down to the sheer size of his workload. As well as a million and one responsibilities at school, he’d taken on the setting-up of a Falklands-wide football league. The league included teams from the army base at Mount Pleasant, and there’d been endless meetings, countless crises, umpteen cancelled fixtures, pressure enough to try any man’s patience.

  Gradually, though, it had dawned on Andrea that there was more to Hamish’s mood swings and savage outbursts of temper than disputes about pitch size and refereeing qualifications. For one thing, their sex life - evidently never brilliant - had come to a virtual halt. For another, he’d begun to drink. Not sociably, in the way that the pair of them had always drunk, but sullenly and very often alone.

  ‘I watched him changing,’ she kept saying, ‘I watched him becoming someone else. Do you know what I mean?’

  She looked sideways at me, her fourth cigarette as yet unlit, but I kept my eyes on the road. For the best part of an hour I’d been hunting for parallels with my own errant husband, but so far - thank God - I hadn’t found a single one.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I haven’t a clue what you mean.’

  ‘Then you’re bloody lucky.’

  ‘Lucky?’ I stared at her.

  ‘Yes. Men are animals. Cowards, too, when it really comes down to it. Do you know what he said when I confronted him? He said it wasn’t his fault. He said I’d driven him to it. By being too strong. Too tough. Tough? Me? Can you believe that?’

  I could. Six years away from the Falklands - not a single holiday, not a single flying visit - had softened my memories of Andrea. Now I remembered just how hard, how unforgiving she could be. For three years, as an only child, she’d been the very centre of attention, and deep down I’d always suspected she was determined to keep it that way. Hamish, I thought, might just have made a very wise decision.

  I heard the scrape of a match. The other woman’s name was Jacqui.

  ‘Have you met her?’ I ventured.

  ‘Met her? I practically saved the woman’s life when she first arrived. Hamish took her out in the Land Rover and they walked up some bloody mountain or other. Longden. Two Sisters. I can’t remember. Anyway, it was raining, and the poor lamb got pneumonia.’

  ‘You nursed her?’

  ‘Yes, and fed her, and kept her amused. But that’s what you do, don’t you? When your husband brings some stray back from the airport and she’s too dozy to have found anywhere half-decent to live.’ She took a long pull on the cigarette, gazing moodily out at the budding hedgerows. So far, apart from a sisterly pat on the arm, she hadn’t said anything at all about Adam.

  ‘But she moved out in the end’, I prompted. ‘She must have done.’

  ‘Too right she did.’

  She named a new development that sprawled up towards the ridge line that looked down over Stanley Harbour. Jacqui had rented a bungalow with a couple of colleagues from the oil exploration company where they all worked. It must be cosy, I thought, now that Hamish was there too.

  ‘Do you see him at all?’

  ‘Of course I do. You know Stanley. It’s hardly the kind of place you can hide yourself away.’

  ‘I suppose not.’ I tried to sound sympathetic, ‘It must be difficult.’

  Andrea reached forward, stabbing the remains of her cigarette into the ashtray.

  ‘It’s murder’ she said savagely, ‘Thank God I can be some use here.’

  We were back at Mapledurcombe by late afternoon. The sun was setting over the distant swell of Tennyson Down and the view from the bedroom that would be Andrea’s had never looked more fabulous. My sister gave it a passing glance. Fourteen hours in a Tristar seemed to have left her, if anything, with an excess of energy.

  Already, in a brief tour of the house, she’d listed the items that needed attention. The little snug at the end of the downstairs hall to be tarted up. One or two bits of furniture in the dining room to be replaced. An old and much-loved rug in the room we used as a lounge to be rolled up a
nd carted away to the dump. Life, with Andrea, had always been this way, a ceaseless assault on those little pockets of domesticity that you treasure and defend. Back home, as children, she’d always made a point of telling me exactly where to hang the Leonard Cohen posters in my room. Half a lifetime later, absolutely nothing had changed.

  ‘You must be knackered,’ I said hopefully, watching her unpack. ‘We’ll have an early supper, then I’ll let you get your head down.’

  Andrea threw me a look.

  ‘Hamish used to say that,’ she muttered, ‘and now I know why.’

  The next day was Friday, a week and a bit since I’d got the news about Adam’s accident. In eight brief days my world had turned upside-down and it was already obvious that Andrea’s arrival had given it yet another spin. We’d stayed up until one in the morning, fuelled by a bottle of duty-free brandy while she’d ranted on about Hamish. I’d done my best to make the right noises and - God knows - I was only too aware of the way she must have been feeling. Like me, Andrea had never been able to have children, and like me she seemed to have invested pretty much everything in a man who’d let her down. But at that point, I told myself, the similarities between us came to an end. Even with my own kith and kin I’d never be so open, so graphic, about my wounds. And never, come to that, would I be so vindictive about the man who’d caused them. Marriage is an on-going negotiation. Even in death, as I was beginning to discover, the process of give and take, of forbearance and forgiveness, never ends.

  It was mid-morning before Andrea joined me in the kitchen. I was sitting at the table with a calendar and one of Adam’s ring-binder pads, trying to draw up a schedule of things to do before the opening of the new season. When Andrea peered at the grid of ringed dates and asked me what it all meant, I told her.

  ‘So how many people are you expecting?’

  ‘That first week?’ I consulted my list of bookings. ‘Three couples and a sweet old boy from Minneapolis who’s been over before.’

  ‘Seven?’

  Without looking, I could visualise the curl of Andrea’s lip. From what little I’d told her about Old Glory, I think she must have been expecting an operation on an infinitely grander scale.