Permissible Limits

by Hurley, Graham

  ‘He’ll have to be,’ I said wearily. ‘At this rate.’

  Dennis gave me another little lecture on the perils of high blood pressure, then said good night. About to hang up, I caught his voice again, an afterthought.

  ‘By the way, some guy’s been phoning for you. Jamie? That ring any bells?’

  I tried to phone Jamie but there was no reply from Ralph’s. I checked my watch. It was nearly nine, unusual for the bungalow to be empty. I put a call through to Andrea. My sister loves bad news, especially other people’s.

  ‘I’ve been trying to get you for ages,’ she said at once, ‘but your mobile’s switched off.’

  ‘That’s right. What’s happened?’

  ‘It’s Ralph. He’s had a stroke.’

  My phone calls eventually found Jamie at St Mary’s hospital, over at Newport. He’d been there since early morning, waiting for word from the Intensive Care Unit. Ralph had woken up feeling dizzy. Trying to make his way to the bathroom, he’d collapsed in the hall. The noise had woken Jamie and he’d found his grandfather face down on the carpet, unconscious.

  ‘Has he recovered at all?’

  ‘Nothing. Yet.’

  ‘Christ, I’m sorry.’

  I could hear the tension in his voice, the disbelief that something so catastrophic, so sudden, could have happened to someone so close. February the twelfth, I thought. The voice on the phone from Newport police station. Your husband’s overdue, Mrs Bruce. We may have to assume the worst.

  ‘I know how you feel, my love, if that’s any consolation.’

  ‘Thanks. I wish you were here.’

  I checked my watch again, pure reflex. I’m not cleared for night flying, and even if I was Sandown airfield doesn’t have lights.

  ‘I’ll come across first thing tomorrow,’ I said. ‘Will he be staying at St Mary’s?’

  ‘As far as I know.’

  ‘And you? You’ll be there?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  I gave him my love and told him to be strong and rang off. My mobile was in my bag. I’d kept it switched off because even now I was nervous of a surprise call from Harald. It would be typical of him to ring me out of the blue, bounce me into a conversation and elbow his way back into my life. Watch your six, I thought, and hope to God that Dennis was right about the guileful Inspector Roper.

  I flew back to Sandown the following morning. It was a ghastly day, low rags of dirty grey cloud racing up the Channel. We bucked and shied our way towards Sandown and I made a horrible landing in a strong crosswind.

  I phoned Jamie from the car en route to Newport and he met me at the front door of the hospital. It was obvious from his face that the news was bad. He looked awful, pallid and grey, just like the weather.

  ‘They say he may never wake up,’ he muttered. ‘I think he’s half-dead already.’

  The Intensive Care Unit at St Mary’s is up on the second floor. Ralph had a tube down his throat and wires coming out of his chest. A ventilator was doing most of his breathing for him and a drip on a stand was feeding clear liquid into one of his arms. Jamie was right. His face had somehow slackened. He looked waxy and his flesh felt cold to the touch. We sat on either side of him, each holding a hand, and after an hour or so the sister in charge asked us to go. There was a nice coffee shop we could use. If there was any improvement, we’d be the first to know.

  We went to the cafeteria. Jamie, for once, couldn’t face food.

  ‘Have you had anything since yesterday?’

  He shook his head. He looked bereft, completely lost, and when I suggested he go home for some rest he barely seemed to understand me. I took his hand. It was nearly as cold as Ralph’s.

  ‘Go home,’ I urged him. ‘I’ll stay here. If anything happens, I’ll phone. I promise.’

  He gazed at me, glassy-eyed with exhaustion. He couldn’t go back to the bungalow. He couldn’t face it. Not without Ralph.

  ‘Go to Mapledurcombe then. I’ll give Andrea a ring. Use my bed.’

  Reluctantly, he agreed. He had Ralph’s Peugeot and I walked down to the car park with him. He wanted to be sure I was staying at the hospital.

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Do you really think I’d be anywhere else?’

  He stopped beside the car. I think he was close to tears.

  ‘It’s not just Ralph,’ he said. ‘It’s everything.’

  ‘Everything?’

  I didn’t know what he meant but it was pretty obvious to both of us that this was neither the time nor the place to ask. It had started raining again and I took the keys from his hand, opening the driver’s door and helping him in. He might have been Ralph’s age. Something inside him seemed to have collapsed.

  I bent to the open window.

  ‘Andrea’s expecting you.’ I touched his face. ‘Get some sleep.’

  For the next eight days we shuttled back and forth to the hospital.

  Ralph stayed up in the ICU. His condition had apparently stabilised and he was certainly breathing without the help of the ventilator but there was no sign of any return to consciousness.

  Occasionally, in the hot afternoons, I thought I could detect the ghost of a smile and quite often he’d make gummy sucking noises like a baby, but apart from that he remained beyond our reach. Watching him for hour after hour - the slow rise and fall of his chest, the little sigh he uttered after the nurses had turned him - I sometimes wondered whether he wasn’t, after all, aware of what was going on around him. For that reason, I encouraged Jamie to talk to him and it was the oddest experience eavesdropping on these strange one-way conversations.

  Jamie began by concentrating on things they’d been doing together recently - gardening talk mostly - but as the days went by he began to reach further and further into the past, recalling the days when he and his parents would spend long weekends at Ralph’s house down in Dorking. Jamie floated these monologues on a thin raft of half-remembered incidents - little domestic things like a snowball fight in winter, or a birthday visit to a local stables - and listening to this version of Jamie’s childhood it was impossible not to believe how secure and how happy he’d been, a contentment all the more precious because of the way it had so suddenly been destroyed. The morning he told Ralph about the face of his half-sister at the door, and then described how he got the news of his mother’s subsequent suicide, had me close to tears and it was only then that I realised who Jamie was really talking to. It wasn’t Ralph at all. It was me.

  Every couple of hours we’d retreat to the cafeteria. Jamie had just spent the afternoon telling Ralph about Gitta. How much she’d meant to him. How she’d become the very centre of his life.

  I’d treated us both to cream doughnuts. Jamie had eaten barely half of his. I pushed his plate to one side, the way you do with picky kids.

  ‘She still matters to you, doesn’t she?’

  Jamie didn’t bother denying it. I’d just got the itemised bill for the calls he’d been making when he still had my mobile, so I knew it was true.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘she matters hugely.’

  ‘And you’ve been talking to her. About Ralph.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘But you’re frightened to tell me. So you tell him.’ He had the grace to look shamefaced. I took his hand and told him it didn’t matter.

  ‘It’s horrible, what’s happening to Ralph. That’s the important thing. The rest of it…’ I shrugged,’… it’ll all work out.’

  ‘But nothing’s happening to Ralph,’ he said hotly. ‘That’s just it. He just lies there. It could go on for months. Years.’

  He sounded petulant and bitter, as if he’d been the one who’d had the stroke, and I looked away, surprised. This wasn’t Jamie at all. The man I’d tumbled into bed with had been young and strong and beyond intimidation. Not this hunched figure, picking at the loose skin around a blister, raging at the unfairness of it all.

  I took his hand in mine, rubbing softly at the blister.

  ‘Why d
on’t you get her down here?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Gitta.’

  Jamie looked startled, not at the suggestion but at the fact that I was the one who’d made it. He stared at me for a long time.

  ‘Could you handle that?’ he asked at last.

  ‘Of course,’ I said lightly. ‘Could you?’

  She came down the next day and I met her at the hospital. She was tall - much taller than me - and there was a little bit of Andrea in the way she talked, punctuating her conversation with delicate little actressy gestures with her hands. She was undeniably beautiful - long legs, creamy skin, and soft auburn hair tied at the back with a simple twist of black velvet - but what was immediately evident was the closeness between them. To this day, I still don’t know how truthful Jamie had been about their relationship. Had it really ended? Had she really thrown him out for another man? Or had the crisis between them been triggered by something else? Like the realisation that she was pregnant?

  Jamie, of course, had wanted me to believe that this was a late development but looking at Gitta, I wasn’t at all sure. I’m no expert on pregnancy but to me she seemed infinitely more advanced than Jamie had suggested. Regardless of all the talk of abortion, I’d say that my carefree young aviator was very close to becoming a father.

  Once Gitta had arrived, it was pretty obvious that she’d be around for a while. Neither of them explained how she could simply abandon her precious job - another mystery - but when I tactfully offered a spare bed at Mapledurcombe, Jamie didn’t appear to hear. There were three bedrooms at Ralph’s bungalow. After Gitta’s exhausting journey down from London, the least he owed her was a decent night’s sleep.

  Was I hurt? Of course I was. The early weeks of our relationship had been so simple, so straightforward. Jamie had been a puppy, full of sunshine and laughter and irrepressible energy. In some ways, as I was now beginning to realise, it had been like meeting Adam again, those first months down in the Falklands, except that Jamie had none of the steel that had made Adam - in the end - irreplaceable.

  Jamie was sweet and good-natured and lovely company but it seemed to me now that he was still bogged down in a rather delayed adolescence. Confusion was too small a word to describe what must have been going on in his young head and I knew that I’d have to do what he’d never been able to put into words. Our affair - glorious and headstrong and wilful though it had been - was over. Whether or not she’d ever really left him, this beautiful woman was back in Jamie’s life and I only had to register the look on her face to know what it was she wanted. The baby was for keeps. And so was Jamie.

  That should have got me off the hook with Ralph but oddly enough it didn’t. Ralph had been a very good friend of mine. When I’d needed someone to hold my hand, he’d been there, and the last thing I intended to do now was abandon him. One day, I was quite certain, he’d surface again and when that happened I wanted to be at his bedside.

  The week after Gitta’s arrival took us into August. It was the height of the season for Old Glory and I was doing what I could around the house to take the pressure off Andrea. This made me very much the unpaid helper - slave would have been a better word - and it felt odd to be in the chorus line at a show that was, after all, my own, but Andrea had made it plain that the price of her involvement in Old Glory was sole control, and for the time being - for me - that was an undeniable blessing. For one thing, I was getting more and more anxious about events in Jersey. And for another, I had to do some serious thinking about the Goodwood air show.

  I was over at Sandown airfield, oddly enough, when Dennis Wetherall got hold of me on the mobile. A pilot we used, Simon Pettifer, had just returned from a cross-Channel flight in the Mustang with one of our guests. It was a glorious day, hot and sunny, and the three of us were sitting on the grass beside the aircraft, reliving the old boy’s war.

  I retrieved the mobile from my bag. I’d rarely heard Dennis so excited.

  ‘They’ve arrested him,’ he yelled. ‘This morning.’ ‘Arrested who?’

  ‘Liddell. Roper phoned me a couple of minutes ago. I thought you’d like to know.’

  I thanked him for thinking of me but I wanted to know more. Did this mean that Steve Liddell had played some part in Adam’s death? Was that why they’d arrested him?

  ‘Roper won’t say, not yet anyway. He needs a result first.’

  ‘What kind of result?’

  ‘A confession, I guess. Liddell’s a heap of shit. A couple of nights without sleep and he’ll cough to anything.’

  I thought about it for a moment or two. Dennis was probably right about Steve’s state of mind - he’d looked like a zombie for months - but there was part of me that felt almost sorry for the lad. The more I’d thought about it, the more I was convinced that he was the least likely person in the world to have sent Adam to his death. To do that, you had to be clever as well as ruthless, and on both counts I suspected that Steve was less than qualified. No, something else had happened, something that Steve probably knew about but - so far - hadn’t chosen to admit.

  ‘What about Harald?’ I asked.

  ‘Not a peep. Gone to ground. No one’s seen him for months. Not round here, anyway.’

  ‘Isn’t that unusual?’

  ‘Very. It’s not illegal, though. He doesn’t have to come to Jersey.’

  ‘So where is he?’

  ‘You tell me. Tony Sant’Ana thinks Florida but he might be bullshitting. How about you? Heard anything?’

  I’d stepped away from the Mustang. The old boy was describing some long-ago episode, his Flying Fortress harried by dozens of Me 109s, and as I watched his bony hands weaving and looping I couldn’t help thinking of Harald. Was this why they’d pulled Steve in? Do you pressure the monkey to get to the organ-grinder?

  Dennis didn’t know but thought it was only too likely. Before he rang off, he promised to keep me in touch. Roper had just twenty-four hours before he had to apply to his superintendent to keep Steve Liddell in custody. After another couple of days, the remand would have to go before a magistrate unless Roper had the evidence to formally charge him. The latter, according to Dennis, was now a foregone conclusion. Maybe I’d like to pop over? Join the party? Be ready for the mediafest?

  ‘What mediafest?’

  ‘The papers, TV, radio, all that horseshit. This is one big story, Ellie. There’s talk already of a movie. Some kind of documentary. If we play it right, it could mean serious money. You and that lovely aeroplane? Just think about it.’

  My heart sank. I’d had quite enough media attention when Adam speared in. I hated the way that total strangers suddenly assumed they’d become my best friend. I loathed the hands on my arm, the cloying sympathies, the murmured requests for just one more shot. These people were every bit as ruthless as Harald, except they went to extraordinary lengths to disguise it.

  I said goodbye to Dennis and settled on the grass again. Our guest was nearly in tears over the memory of a dead buddy, a waist-gunner called Mervyn who’d taken a cannon shell in the chest. He looked across at me, trying to apologise, trying to explain.

  ‘You never get over it, Ellie,’ he said. ‘Even fifty years later, it’s still with you.’

  I glanced up at our newly painted Mustang, thinking yet again of Adam.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said.

  That night, back at Mapledurcombe, I got another call from Jersey. I’d taken Simon out for a meal and delivered him back to the hovercraft at Ryde and I was feeling - for the first time since Gitta’s arrival - moderately cheerful. Simon was in on the planning for the Goodwood air show and had talked me through the flying programme. The organisers had settled on the eightieth anniversary of the RAF as the show’s theme and I was to appear after a quartet of Spitfires as part of the American tribute. Mustangs hadn’t been around for the Battle of Britain but over the last two years of the war they’d shared the skies over Europe with the later marks of Spitfire, and it was altogether appropriate that Ellie B should do her
bit in front of the Goodwood crowd.

  Just thinking about tens of thousands of upturned faces made my pulse quicken, and I was trying to share a little of this excitement with Andrea when the phone went. It was a woman’s voice, and for a moment I couldn’t quite place it. Then I remembered the pub in the little village up from the beach on Jersey, and the tumble of black ringlets, still wet from the shower.

  ‘Michelle,’ I said. ‘How are you?’

  She said she was OK. She’d got my number from Steve Liddell’s address book. She hoped I didn’t mind her phoning.

  ‘Not at all. How can I help you?’

  ‘It’s difficult. You know he’s been arrested?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, it’s about that. I’ve got something for you, something you ought to take a look at.’

  ‘What is it?’

  She wouldn’t tell me but I knew from the tone of her voice that it must be important. This was a different Michelle - subdued, apologetic, almost respectful - and Iwondered what on earth had happened.

  ‘Do you want me to come over?’

  ‘Yes please. I can’t send it. And I can’t get away, not in August.’

  I looked at my watch. Tomorrow’s forecast was good. If I got up early, I could be on Jersey by - say - half past eight.

  ‘How would that be?’

  ‘Fine. I’ll meet you at the airport. You know the Aero Club?’

  ‘Of course.’ I paused. ‘Then what?’

  I heard her quiet laugh.

  ‘Then it’s up to you. What I’ve got to say won’t take five minutes. After that, you’re on your own.’

  She was more right than she could ever have imagined. I lay awake that night, sweltering in the heat, trying not to imagine what Jamie and Gitta might be up to down in Ralph’s bungalow. I’d seen them only yesterday, over at the hospital. They’d been sitting in the coffee shop together, holding hands, and it spoke volumes that Jamie had beamed up at me, absurdly proud of this relationship he’d rescued from the dump bin. No longer his lover, I think he’d assigned me a new role, not unlike the one that Ralph must have played. I was older, and wiser, and doubtless had his best interests at heart. Next thing, he’d be asking me for advice.