Permissible Limits

by Hurley, Graham

  ‘First coat of primer goes on at the weekend. Second and third coats Tuesday and Thursday. By the time the FAA guy flies in, she’ll be back in full camouflage.’

  ‘I meant the black marks. There. You can see them.’

  I stepped across and ran my finger over the blemishes. The metal felt faintly greasy to the touch. By the time I turned round again, Harald was bent over an open wooden box. There was a metallic slithering noise and as I watched he pulled out a long belt of ammunition. There must have been hundreds of shells, each one seated in its shiny brass casing, the lead nose tipped in red.

  ‘Twenty-millimetre cannon.’ Harald nodded at the Messerschmitt. ‘Standard issue on the 109G.’

  I was still staring at the ammunition belt. The shells seemed so sleek, so beautiful. I couldn’t take my eyes off them.

  ‘And they’re real? Live?’ My fingers found what was left of the tape over the mouth of the cannon. ‘You’ve used them? Tried them out?’

  ‘Of course.’ Harald sounded amused. ‘How else do we test the guns?’

  ‘But no one…’ I shrugged, feeling hopelessly naive,’… minds?’

  ‘Minds?’ It was Chuck’s turn. He was laughing. ‘In the land of the free, ma’am? Minds? ‘

  Afterwards, Chuck drove us to the house. I sat in the back of the jeep, hanging on for dear life as we weaved and bumped over the parched grass. I couldn’t get the image of the cannon shells out of my head. What were they doing there? Why on earth would anyone want to fly around with belts of live ammunition? Crossing the runway, I thought of asking him but decided against it. Sooner or later, I knew full well that Harald would tell me anyway. One of the reasons he’d got me here, I’d decided, was to put me wise about real flying.

  The house was even bigger than I’d thought, a low, white, wooden-framed structure built around three sides of an inner courtyard. A shallow-pitched tiled roof overhung the veranda at the front and the slim fluted pillars that supported the roof lent the place a slightly colonial feel. With a couple of wicker chairs and a servant or two, I might have stepped into an outpost of the Raj.

  Chuck was lifting my bags out of the back of the jeep. I joined him on the newly surfaced drive, brushing myself down, still looking at the house. At the end of a line of garages stood a flagpole, and at the top I thought I recognised the limp folds of the Confederate flag.

  ‘Welcome to the Casa Blanca.’

  I turned round, shielding my eyes against the sun. Harald was behind the wheel.

  ‘You call it the White House?’

  ‘Sure.’ He nodded. ‘You speak Spanish?’

  ‘A little. We learned it at school.’

  ‘De verdad? ‘

  ‘Si.’

  Harald looked at me for a moment, his face for once betraying his surprise, then he said that he had to fly again. He’d be back before dark. Later, over a meal, we’d all have a proper chance to talk. I nodded and began to thank him for meeting me and flying me down but he waved my little speech away, pumping the accelerator and pulling the jeep into a tight turn. On the back, a line of stencilled white letters read Standfast Inc.

  ‘You coming in, ma’am?’

  I followed Chuck into the house. After the heat outside, the air-conditioning was a huge relief. Chuck led the way through a maze of rooms, cool parquet floors patterned by sunshine through the half-shuttered windows. There were pictures everywhere, mostly of aeroplanes, and one or two really nice pieces of low-slung bamboo furniture, but the place had a sparse, almost formal look to it, mostly - I think - because of the lack of clutter. Nothing ever seemed to have happened here. No one had half-read a newspaper, or half-finished a snack or a cup of tea, or paused for any one of those little self-indulgences that dot most people’s working day. In this respect, the house felt empty and austere and a little bit intimidating, and it was a relief when I saw Chuck come to an abrupt stop, rap lightly on a door and then step aside to let me through.

  I found myself in what I assumed to be a living room. The air-conditioning must have been on full blast because it felt even chillier than the hall outside. The window was fully shuttered and the only light came from a standard lamp in the far corner. In a big old armchair beneath it sat a tiny woman in a long black dress. She struggled to her feet the moment I walked in, pushing a blanket aside and supporting herself on an exquisite black ebony cane. We met beside her armchair.

  ‘This is Mrs Meyler.’ Chuck towered over both of us. ‘Harald’s mother.’

  ‘My name’s Monica, my dear, and you know something?’ She peered up at me, her eyes a filmy blue. ‘You’re every bit as pretty as Harald promised.’

  She held my hand in hers. Her fingers felt as fragile as twigs and her flesh was cold to the touch. In the light from the standard lamp, her face was the palest white, a thick dusting of powder softening the deeper lines, and I could see at once where Harald had got his cheekbones. As a younger woman, she must have been devastating.

  She was telling me about the sleeping arrangements. I was to have one of the guest suites away down the hall towards the back of the house. The room faced east, she said, and if I was brave enough to sleep with the shutters open, then I’d be the luckiest girl alive.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘The dawns, Ellie. They’re just spectacular.’

  She was still clutching my hand, an intimacy so instant it made me feel slightly uncomfortable. She was acting like she’d known me most of my life and I began to wonder exactly what Harald had been telling her. She was tugging me over to the window now, pausing every step or two to catch her breath.

  Chuck opened the shutters. The room was suddenly flooded with sunshine.

  ‘There. I show everyone.’

  I found myself looking out at a towering wall of green. It began the other side of a sturdy chain-link fence. There was a padlocked gate set into the fence and a paved path curled away into the dense vegetation.

  ‘When you’re rested, Ellie, we’ll take a walk, just you and me. Let’s see now. I’ve got black mangrove, white mangrove, wild coffee, cabbage palm, Brazilian pepper. I’ve got wild orchids, strangler figs, saw palmetto…’ She was counting them off one by one, exhausting the fingers of both hands. The list sounded like a menu, something to whet my appetite, and when she got to the end of the plants she’d catalogued, she started on the wildlife. Ants excited her. She could find me small black ones that hunted in packs, big black monsters that foraged alone, and a voracious red specimen that would chew me up for breakfast. When I obliged her with a shudder and said I hated all insects, she laughed.

  ‘I’m queen in my kingdom.’ She was still gazing out of the window. ‘You’ve nothing to fear.’

  For the first time, I detected something snagging in her accent, the slightest displacement of the normal stress, and I looked down at her again wondering where life had taken her before she’d settled down in Florida. Was she American born and bred, like Harald? Or had she come from somewhere infinitely more exotic?

  ‘Help me back to my chair, my dear. Take my arm.’ I began to guide her across the room by her elbow but she shook me free. ‘My arm, dear, don’t be frightened, it won’t fall off.’ I did what I was told. My hands aren’t that big but I could circle her upper arm without difficulty.

  We paused by the chair while she stooped to rearrange the blanket. On a shelf behind the chair was a line of photographs, most of them sepia, mounted in tiny silver frames. The same face peered out from at least three of the photos, a man in his twenties, heavy-featured, with slicked-back hair and a wary smile.

  Mrs Meyler had sunk back into the armchair, tucking the blanket around her knees as if she was expecting a journey of some kind. She peered up at me.

  ‘Well?’

  Nonplussed, I tried to smile.

  ‘It looks intriguing,’ I said, ‘that kingdom of yours. Does it go back a long way?’

  ‘Ten acres, my dear. Harald hates it, always has. That’s why I never leave, of course, never go anywhere. Th
e moment I went, he’d put the bulldozers in. Men are all the same, you know. They hate letting nature have its way.’

  I heard Chuck’s soft laugh behind me.

  ‘It’s a wilderness, Mrs Meyler. Harald just likes to tidy things up a little.’

  ‘Exactly, exactly: I felt fingers reaching for my hand again, and then a little squeeze. ‘What did I tell you, Ellie? Men do so like to interfere.’

  Chuck took me down the corridor to my room. It was grander than I’d expected, with beautiful Aztec-patterned rugs on the floor and a small en suite bathroom attached. There were lots of hangers in the built-in wardrobe, and a little fridge in one corner was stocked with cartons of mango and guava juice. A china vase on the chest of drawers held a single purple orchid, and someone - Harald presumably - had mounted a photo of a Mustang and positioned it on the little table beside the bed.

  I lay there looking at it, and it was several minutes before I realised that it was our Mustang. I recognised the hangar behind, and the big dual cockpit, and the paint scheme that Ralph had so carefully researched, and the knowledge that Harald must have been poking around with his camera wasn’t altogether welcome. How many other shots did he have? What gave him the right to decorate this room of his with shots of Adam’s pride and joy?

  It was, of course, a daft question. Harald, after all, had bought forty five per cent of the plane and it was therefore entirely natural that he should have taken the odd photo. Putting it beside my bed was simply a thoughtful gesture, a way of cushioning my landing in this strange new world, and I was still smiling at my own ingratitude, and wondering whether or not to take a shower, when I drifted off to sleep. The last thing I remember hearing was the distant cackle of a Merlin engine. Harald, I thought, readying his own Mustang for take-off.

  I awoke hours later to a soft knock at the door. It was dark outside and the wind had dropped. When I opened the door, Harald was standing there. He had a towel in one hand and a thickish-looking book in the other. He was still wearing his leather flying jacket.

  ‘Take your choice.’ He held out the book and the towel. He was smiling.

  I took the towel. He looked disappointed. I nodded at the book.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘A little light reading. There’s no hurry. Tomorrow will be fine.’ He gave me the book, then glanced at his watch. ‘We’re eating around eight. That OK by you?’

  I rubbed my eyes and nodded. The last thing I wanted was food.

  ‘Sounds lovely,’ I said.

  The book turned out to be an instruction manual for the Cavalier Mustang, a specially adapted version of the fighter which was, as far as I knew, no longer in production. Adam had talked about them a couple of times, and I stood in the shower, soaping away the grime of the journey, wondering quite what part this particular breed of Mustang would be playing in Harald’s plans for the next stage of my flying career. The Cavalier is specially built to carry bombs and rockets. Some of the smaller Third World air forces were still using them.

  Towelling myself dry, I slipped back into the bedroom and began to leaf through the diagrams and accompanying text. Why on earth did I need to know about internally mounted munitions and external armament loads? When would I ever need to master the bomb-arming switch? I looked up at the little patch of sky I could see through the window, thinking about the red-tipped cannon shells again, remembering something Dennis Wetherall had once said. Harald had made his money in the arms business. Dennis had called him a merchant of death. At the time the phrase had seemed wildly excessive, Dennis at his most extravagant, but now - for the first time - I began to wonder.

  We had supper in a big, airy room at the back of the house. Beyond the insect mesh and the spill of light from the window I could hear cicadas and the stir of wildlife in the hot darkness. The temperature in the dining room was wonderful, dry and cool.

  Chuck had joined us for the meal and Monica sat at the head of the table, sipping tiny spoonfuls of soup between flurries of conversation. She’d tied up her hair with a twist of red ribbon and she looked like a child, perched on a tassled velvet cushion to bring her up to the level of the table. It bothered her somewhat, she said, that I’d flown all this way and yet didn’t know a soul. Harald, she was quite certain, would have told me nothing about the way things were around the Casa Blanca and so it fell to a woman - as ever - to see to what she termed ‘the basic damn courtesies’.

  When Harald raised his eyes to me and winked, she reached across to him, flapping her hand to mime a slap on the wrist. A thin red line of gazpacho was dribbling down from the corner of her mouth and I watched Harald attend to it with the tail of his napkin. He did it tenderly, with great deftness, and afterwards he adjusted the spoon in her hand so it was no longer upside-down. Monica appeared not to notice.

  ‘Did he tell you about Chuck, Ellie?’

  ‘No, Mrs Meyler.’

  ‘Monica, dear, you must call me Monica.’ She looked over at Chuck, then back to me. ‘He saved my boy’s life. Did Harald tell you that, I wonder?’

  Harald looked at Chuck this time. Both men obviously knew what they were in for but when Chuck tried to change the subject, I intervened. I was interested in this story. I wanted to know what had happened.

  ‘Was this recent?’ I asked. ‘Something that happened recently?’

  Monica threw her head back, a thin, piping laugh. ‘You call Vietnam recent?’ I watched her hand crabbing towards mine across the table. ‘And Harald never mentioned anything at all? ‘

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Well, well, then. It’s my pleasure.’

  She gave my hand a little squeeze. Harald had been flying with the Marine Corps. Home was an aircraft carrier on the South China Sea. He’d been out there the best part of six months, writing home every week or so. Then the letters stopped.

  ‘And you know why, Ellie?’

  I shook my head. Harald had started his third bread roll. Chuck was looking at the ceiling.

  ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘What happened?’

  Monica was looking at her son. Her silence finally stirred a response.

  ‘I was flying A-7s,’ he said simply, ‘and one night I screwed the pooch.’

  ‘Harald!’ Monica was outraged.

  ‘It’s true, I did.’

  I was still staring at Harald. Screw the pooch? Harald caught my eye. He must have seen my bewilderment.

  ‘I got myself shot down,’ he said. ‘We were way up north, Route Pack Six.’

  ‘What’s Route Pack Six?’

  ‘It’s an area of North Vietnam. The headquarters people divided the north into seven sectors. Six was the hottest.’

  ‘So what happened?’ Harald looked at me a moment.

  ‘You really want to bother with all this?’

  ‘Yes please.’

  ‘OK.’ He shrugged, wetting a finger and retrieving crumbs from the tablecloth, ‘The mission was pretty routine, part of the Rolling Thunder programme. We were looking for POL targets, that’s petrol, oil, lubricants. The gomers had these flak traps they used to bait. They got to be pretty good at it.’

  Chuck intervened with a grin. Gomers, he explained, was service slang for the North Vietnamese. I thanked him, turning back to Harald.

  ‘And flak traps?’

  ‘Chunks of airspace, like so.’ I watched his hands shape a box over his soup bowl. ‘They’re firing blind, of course, but they’re pretty much covering all the numbers, five hundred feet up to ten thousand. Pump up enough lead, it becomes a crap shoot. The laws of probability say you won’t make it.’

  ‘And you didn’t?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And Chuck? He was with you in the plane?’

  Harald and Chuck exchanged another glance. Harald’s hands were still poised over the soup bowl. I swear I detected just the slightest tremor.

  ‘Chuck was a rotorhead. He was flying one of the big rescue choppers out of Da Nang. We called them the Jollies. At night they’d come in over the DMZ, set
tle themselves down, and tune in to the strike freqencies.’

  ‘He pulled you out?’

  ‘Next day, yes.’

  ‘Saved your life?’

  ‘Without question.’

  I looked at Chuck. With enormous tact, he converted a yawn into a hollow cough. There was a long silence. After a while, I frowned.

  ‘So how come you screwed the pooch? Why was it your fault? I’m not sure I understand.’

  Harald at last met my eyes.

  ‘The Corsair’s a single-seater,’ he said quietly. ‘If you’re talking blame, the buck stopped with me.’

  After supper, Chuck disappeared. Harald walked his mother back to her room, and before the door closed I heard him kissing her good night. When he came back, he was carrying a cafetiere. The coffee smelled wonderful.

  ‘You want to come along to the den? We could talk there.’

  If I hesitated, I hoped it didn’t show. I was dog-tired, so tired I could barely get up from the table, but the stuff about Vietnam had intrigued me more than I cared to admit and I wanted to find out more.

  I followed Harald through the darkened house. I was trying to shape some kind of plan of the place in my head and I sensed we’d turned into the furthest of the two wings I’d seen when I arrived. Harald paused outside a locked door. I held the cafetiere while he fumbled for a key.

  The den, small and cluttered, reminded me at once of Adam’s office beside the hangar on the strip back at Sandown. The desk piled with paperwork. The brimming bookcases. The neatly folded maps. The shadowed pictures jigsawed across the wall. Even the smell was the same, a mixture of old leather, stale coffee and half-smoked cheroots.

  Harald waved me on to the low sofa that flanked the desk. When he switched on the little desk lamp beside his laptop, the light pooled on a stack of invoices. Before he tidied them into a drawer, I caught a glimpse of the top one. It came from Steve Liddell Engineering and for a second or two the sight of the familiar letterhead brought a lump to my throat. The last time I’d been over to Jersey was with Jamie. I remembered the landing he’d pulled off with the big commercial jet on his tail, and I remembered as well the night we’d spent together, waiting for the weather to clear up. More smells. More memories.