Permissible Limits

by Hurley, Graham

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I’m going across to the airfield. What do you think I’m doing?’

  ‘I’ll drive you.’

  ‘You can’t. You’ve been drinking.’

  It was my tone of voice that sealed it for Jamie. He looked at me for a moment, the surprise in his face giving way to a kind of wariness, then he shrugged and left me to it. Still waiting for the taxi people to answer the phone, I could hear him back in the kitchen, laughing at something Andrea must have said.

  When I got to the airfield, the hangar was locked. Dave Jeffries lived in Shanklin, a couple of miles down the road, and I gave the taxi-driver his address. When I rapped on the door and demanded the key, all he wanted to talk about was Florida.

  ‘Tomorrow, Dave. Just give me the key.’

  ‘But was it good?’

  ‘Brilliant. The key, Dave.’

  He began to babble about Standfast again, how amazing it must have been for me, but I cut him short.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Nothing, Ellie.’

  ‘Give me the key then.’

  With the greatest reluctance, he finally complied. When he offered to drive me back to the airfield himself, I said no. I could find my own way around. I even knew where the master switch was for the hangar lights. He’d have the key back in the morning.

  The taxi dropped me at the airfield. It was getting dark now and I stood in the twilight behind the control tower, watching the gulls wheeling over a pile of scraps from the Touchdown Cafe. It seemed years since I’d last been here. So much had happened to me. To my flying. Even to the way I thought about my poor dead husband.

  I walked slowly over to the hut Adam had used beside the hangar. I had the key on my own ring and the temptation was to go in and have a bit of a wallow, but I didn’t need to open the door to remind myself what it looked like, what it smelled like. All those things were there, imprinted on my memory, along with the wretched photo I’d found in his drawer. Thinking of the latter still hurt, but the weeks away had somehow diminished its importance. It was part of an episode I wanted to put to rest. My life had moved on. I’d gone solo.

  Access to the hangar is through a door on the side. The cold, oily smell of the place hit me at once. There are clear plastic panels let into the roof and what daylight there was left shed a pale ghostliness over the three planes inside. My old Tiger Moth was closest. I stepped across, running my fingers along the leather trim on the side of the open cockpit. I felt like a child who’d gone away to boarding school and returned to find a favourite old toy in the nursery. It looked so small, so primitive. Had I once been intimidated by this lovely old biplane? Had 135 knots once seemed the speed of light?

  I stepped back. The Mustang was over on the far side of the hangar, beyond the bulk of the big old Harvard. I could see the long, sleek nose and the extended teardrop canopy. Even from here she looked poised, eager, sniffing the air, ready for anything. What could possibly have gone wrong?

  I found the master switch for the overhead lights. The neon tubes flickered for a second or two before the hangar was bathed in a cold brilliance. I walked around the Moth, and the Harvard, and then stopped in front of the Mustang. It wasn’t our plane at all. Wrong colour, wrong finish. I couldn’t believe my eyes. This must be some kind of mistake, I thought. Dave Jeffries must have swapped our fighter for someone else’s, just a temporary arrangement, helping a mate out, a favour of some kind. That’s why he’d been so reluctant to part with the key. That’s why Andrea and Jamie had been so secretive in the kitchen.

  I gazed up at the aircraft. It was freshly painted in two shades of blue, a deep, rich navy for the underside of the wings and the bottom half of the fuselage, and a much lighter sky blue for the upper surfaces. I moved to the right, checking that it was, in fact, a dual cockpit, then my eyes went to the nose and I stopped again. It was, after all, our Mustang. In a flourish of deep red lettering, scrolled beneath the exhaust pots, it even had a name. Ellie B, it read. Ellie Bruce.

  I walked slowly around the plane, inspecting her from every angle, wanting to know who’d done this, and why. Only when I got to the tailplane did I spot the vital clue. High up on the rudder was a logo I recognised: the torch of liberty, grasped in an outstretched hand, the trademark emblem I’d last seen in celebratory icing, half a world away.

  It was Harald’s doing, Harald Meyler. He must have contacted Dave, outlined a colour scheme and told him to get on with it. The excuse would have been my birthday, a surprise welcome-home present, lovely new colours for my trusty mount. I ran my finger over the leading edge of the wing. I’d lived with the company accounts for long enough to know just how much a repaint like this would have cost. The best paint jobs can take hundreds of hours of specialised work - stripping off the old paint, preparing the surfaces, applying primer, then layer after layer of top coat with light sandings in between. Add a final wash of protective polyurethane, and Harald would have been looking at a five-figure bill. Not that he’d have given the money a second thought.

  I stepped back, half-closing my eyes, trying to work out why I was so offended. Given the work involved, Harald must have commissioned the repaint weeks ago. The very fact that he’d done it that early confirmed that he’d wanted me in his display team all along. That’s why the flight programme had been so gruelling. That’s why he’d insisted on testing me to the limits. He’d not only reserved me a place in the Blue Angels but he’d assumed - presumed - that I’d be only too glad to accept.

  I nodded to myself, looking up at my shiny new toy. Harald had drawn a bead on me, chased me all over the Florida sky, welcomed me to his brotherhood of fellow fighter pilots, and left the rest to my better judgement. The fact that I’d said no, the fact that I was happy to go back to funny old England and pick up where I’d left off, must have come as something of a shock. No wonder he’d looked so crestfallen in the Denver restaurant. No wonder he’d barely summoned a smile when we’d said our goodbyes at O’Hare airport. Turning down the role of Harald Meyler’s wingman simply wasn’t in the script.

  I called another taxi from Dave Jeffries’ office, angry again. The fact that a major repaint like this would have kept the Mustang in the hangar for at least a month wouldn’t have crossed Harald’s mind. The fact that at least one set of Old Glory’s guests had been shortchanged was immaterial. The aircraft, and myself, were simply pawns, part of some far bigger gameplan. Our role, if we had one, was to be grateful. Money, in short, could buy anything.

  When I got back to Mapledurcombe, Jamie was still there. I took him into Adam’s study and shut the door.

  ‘When did the repaint start?’

  ‘A couple of days after you went.’

  ‘And you didn’t think to tell me?’

  ‘I wasn’t here but I gathered it was supposed to be a surprise. That’s what I was told, anyway.’

  ‘Who told you?’

  ‘Dave Jeffries. He was the one who’d been talking to Harald.’

  ‘And he just went ahead and did it? Without even asking me.’

  ‘Harald said it wouldn’t be a problem. He said you’d love it.’

  ‘That’s what he always says.’

  ‘Really?’

  Jamie couldn’t keep the reproach out of his voice. I was sitting on the edge of Adam’s desk. Most of the anger had gone now and the only thing I really felt was exhaustion. I held out my hand, tugging Jamie towards me. No wonder he’d been so insecure, so manic. No wonder he’d assumed the worst about me and Harald.

  ‘When I said I missed you, I meant it,’ I said simply. ‘I’m a difficult old cow. Ignore me.’

  It wasn’t what he wanted me to say, and I knew it, but the rest could come later. Jamie kissed me, then nodded at the phone.

  ‘Aren’t you going to give him a ring, then? Say thank you?’

  I shook my head, trying to smother a yawn.

  ‘No, I’m bloody not.’

  The rest of June came and went.
Thanks to my sister, I had a fantastic birthday, crowned by the arrival of an enormous jiffy bag from Gander Creek. My mother had knitted me a really lovely sweater with wool from our sheep and I passed it around the dinner table that night, showing it off to our American guests. They were very taken with the idea of growing up on the Falkland Islands, and Andrea and I kept them laughing for hours with tales from our misspent youth.

  As well, I got dozens of cards from family and friends, but - to my relief - nothing arrived from Florida. I was still pretty upset by what Harald had done to our Mustang, and although I was tempted to lift the phone and get one or two things off my chest, I thought it better to let the dust settle. He had, after all, taught me how to fly the beast, and for that I was more than grateful. As the days passed, and my anger cooled, I also warmed to the name scrolled so vividly beneath the engine exhausts. Ellie B had a lovely feel to it. My plane. My baby.

  Ralph Pierson had been thrilled with the material I’d been able to bring back from Karel Brokenka - snaps, mainly, and a big sheaf of photocopies from a diary he’d kept during the war - but like an idiot I’d forgotten to ask Harald for the cassette tape he’d recorded in Karel’s room at Shoreview. I had no secrets from Ralph - not as far as Harald was concerned - and when I told him how awkward it had been for me at the end, and how I wasn’t keen to get back in touch too quickly, he said he quite understood. He had the Standfast number, and when the time was right he’d put a call through himself.

  The one photograph that Ralph still needed for the book was the promised shot of the Luftwaffe pilot downed by Karel Brokenka. Ralph had been on to the people at the German archives yet again, and while it was true that they’d found the squadron file, there appeared to be some problem laying hands on the pilot’s photograph. The girl in charge of this research had gone off to New Zealand for a month’s hiking, so nothing could happen until she got back.

  Ralph by now knew more or less everything about me and Jamie. His intuition had served him well, and when he touched on it at all - which was rarely - it was simply to let me know how much good I was doing his young grandson. He was much more stable, much more mature, an altogether happier lad than the wayward, rather adolescent Jamie of his university days. Put this way, I felt more like his mother than his lover, but the relationship between us was deepening all the time, helped just a little by a couple of outings in the Mustang.

  Flying Ellie B, of course, was irresistible. The weather in June was off and on - a succession of Atlantic fronts with wonderfully clear, boisterous skies in between - but even so I managed a total of half a dozen flights. With the experience of Standfast behind me, I was now able to share Harald’s admiration for Dave Jeffries’ rebuild. Our Mustang, compared to the couple I’d flown over in Florida, was a pilot’s dream. Little modifications Dave had engineered in the cockpit - a flap lever offset here, an instrument slightly repositioned there - made it a friendlier, safer aeroplane, and when I took it up to altitude and inched the boost forward against the stops, she was an absolute delight to fly.

  It was on my second outing, flying back up-Channel after a sortie down to the Scillies, that I had the strangest experience. For once, the sky was absolutely cloudless. I was up at 9,000 feet, the sun behind me, the long chalk frieze of Lyme Bay off to my left. The Merlin was drumming away in front of me, and according to the map on my lap I was directly on course for that patch of mid-Channel where Adam had speared in.

  As I got closer, I began to think through that sequence of events all over again - how it might have happened, the mistakes he might have made - and I was still trying to draw up a shortlist of what Harald calls ‘adverse factors’ when I heard Adam’s voice. It was definitely him and it sounded so clear, so close, that I swear he was behind me, in the rear seat. At first, he was laughing. Not a laugh, really, more a chuckle. Then he told me that he was bloody pleased with what I’d done. I hadn’t been silly about things. I hadn’t bottled out. The trick now, he said, was to stay high, stay up-sun, and try not to lose it. There was a pause. Then he started chuckling again. Watch your six, he said. And keep the faith.

  Watch my six. Up there in the Mustang I took a fevered look in the mirror. Half-blinded by the sun, I loosened my harness and tried to turn round, still convinced that Adam was actually up there, with me in the aircraft. He wasn’t, of course, but when I landed back at Sandown and Dave Jeffries checked the rear cockpit, he found little crusts of mud on the floor beneath the pedals. They could have come from anywhere, but Dave is obsessional about keeping the cockpit clean, and when he swore that the back end had been spotless, I believed him.

  Later, I recounted the incident to Jamie. His flights with me in the Mustang had, in his phrase, made him fall in love with me all over again, but we were also back in the Moth together, picking up the flying lessons where we’d left off, and I was so disturbed by Adam’s brief reappearance that I made a point of taking the Moth out to that same point in mid-Channel, just to see whether it might happen again. It didn’t, alas, not least because the Moth would have got a bit overcrowded, but I was grateful to Jamie for taking it seriously. As curious as ever, he made me write it all down, and I later discovered that he’d shown it to Ralph, who wasn’t the least bit surprised. Flying during the war, aviators were forever bumping into the ghosts of their dead buddies, and when he mentioned it to me a couple of weeks later, he told me not to worry.

  ‘It’s a good sign,’ he said. ‘In fact it’s a very good sign.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It means he’s happy. Just like Jamie.’

  Whether he was right about Adam, I don’t know, but he was certainly right about Jamie. As it dawned on him that I’d no intention of getting in touch with Harald, a lot of his insecurities vanished. We went flying in the Moth as often as his working hours permitted, and I began to push him harder and harder, setting him some of the traps that Harald had taught me. Ninety per cent of the time Jamie sailed through without even raising his voice, and once he’d logged fourteen hours, I sent him off solo.

  He did a couple of circuits at Sandown and then flew across the Solent and up Portsmouth Harbour before returning for a neat little three-point landing. We celebrated that night with a meal in a pub down in Ventnor, and for the first time since I’d got back we found ourselves having a sensible conversation about Gitta, his German girlfriend.

  ‘I want you to meet her,’ he said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you might make her see sense.’ ‘About the baby?’

  ‘Yes. And about us.’

  Talking about the baby made me feel uneasy. I’m passionate about kids, all the more so because I can’t have any of my own, but I’m equally aware that a mother has rights too. If I was Gitta, and Jamie was so plainly in love with someone else, I’m not sure I wouldn’t be talking about having an abortion.

  ‘It’s really nothing to do with me,’ I said. ‘It’s her business. And yours.’

  ‘Ours.’

  ‘No, yours. My love, you have to face up to it. If it’s over, and you keep telling me it is, then it’s her baby, her body, her decision.’

  ‘I don’t want her to kill it.’

  ‘So what do you want?’

  He sipped at his pint. I was getting to know him really well by now and I could tell by the expression on his face that he’d rehearsed this conversation.

  ‘What about adopting it?’ he suggested at last.

  ‘You can’t adopt it. It’s your child already.’

  ‘I didn’t mean me.’

  I stared at him. The implication couldn’t have been clearer. Jamie was asking me to become a mother. Of his child.

  ‘Me?’ I said weakly.

  ‘Us.’

  ‘But…’ I spread my hands wide,’… living together? Bringing it up? Becoming a family?’

  ‘Yeah, why not?’

  This was such a contrast to my last proposal - Harald’s laboured attempts to turn me into a Blue Angel - that I began to laugh.

/>   ‘You’re asking me to marry you?’

  ‘Not at all. There’s a problem with the baby. Rather than see it killed, we could give it a home. That’s all I’m saying.’

  I realised he was serious. The difficulties were obvious.

  ‘What about Gitta?’

  ‘I think she might agree.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it turns out she’s Catholic’

  ‘She never told you?’

  ‘I never asked.’

  ‘But it matters now? To her?’

  ‘Seems to.’

  He described a recent conversation they’d had on the phone. It seemed she was resigned to losing him but getting rid of the baby wasn’t as simple as she’d thought. A visit to an obstetrician had revealed an abnormality in her womb. It the abortion was to go ahead, it should happen very soon.

  ‘And?’

  ‘She’s having second thoughts.’

  ‘So what’s the deadline? For the abortion?’

  Jamie was grinning now. The fact that I hadn’t said no, hadn’t thrown a fit, was - to him - tantamount to agreement. He reached for my empty glass.

  ‘Early August,’ he said. ‘How about another one?’

  July was upon us days later. With it came a phone call from my accountant, Dennis Wetherall. The sound of his voice wasn’t entirely welcome. Within seconds, I was back in the mess that Adam had left me to clear up.

  ‘I’ve been drawing up the final accounts,’ he was saying. ‘I think you ought to come over.’

  ‘Put them in the post,’ I said at once. ‘I’m really busy.’

  ‘Really? I thought that sister of yours was in charge?’ Dennis sounded vastly amused.

  I lied for a moment or two about how we divvied up the work, but Dennis wasn’t having it. He obviously spoke to Andrea a great deal, and the fact that she was running Mapledurcombe virtually single-handed was beyond dispute. The moment I’d left for America I’d surrendered control, and unless she died, or fell in love, or something equally unlikely, that’s the way it was going to stay.