Permissible Limits

by Hurley, Graham

  He finally made it around the tractor and I closed my eyes for a moment or two, glad of the silence between us, fixing the image of the young child in my mind. As we’d left the office, I’d taken the opportunity to have a good look. She had dimples, and lovely eyes, and a bright, trusting smile. She didn’t look the least like Steve Liddell.

  ‘I’m thinking of threatening the bank with an action,’ Dennis said suddenly. ‘What for?’

  ‘Dereliction of duty. They were happy enough to advance the money, take the interest, accept the security on the loan.’

  ‘So what else should they have done?’

  ‘Notify me.’

  ‘Have you asked them why they didn’t?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And what did they say?’

  We were on the outskirts of St Helier now. Dennis slowed for the short cut down to the harbour.

  ‘They said that Adam had told them he dealt with his own affairs. They said he had no time for fancy accountants.’ He glanced sideways at me. ‘Nice to be wanted, eh?’

  I spent another hour or so at Dennis’s office before finding somewhere to stay. Dennis was keen for me to meet the bank manager who’d fixed up the loan, and while we waited for his secretary to confirm an appointment, I dug some figures out of my own briefcase and ran through the advance bookings situation for the coming season.

  So far, we’d always opened Mapledurcombe for business during the first week in June. This gave us four clear months through to the end of September, generating enough revenue to keep our heads above water while giving us the chance to maintain the standards we’d set for ourselves. Currently, we were charging £150 per night per person for accommodation and all meals. For that sort of money, quite rightly, our guests expected the very best, and so far I’d resisted the temptation to extend the season in the belief that we’d probably buckle under the strain. This summer, though, I was assured of help from a couple of wonderful women in the village and as a result we’d decided to open a month early, on 2 May. Filling five months instead of four had been no problem. Already, in mid-February, we were oversubscribed.

  Dennis put the figures through his calculator. Like me, he projected the season’s gross takings at £168,000.

  ‘And that’s just board and lodging,’ I reminded him. ‘The flying comes separately.’

  ‘How much are you charging for the Harvard?’

  ‘Six hundred and fifty an hour. We’ve just put it up.’

  ‘And the Mustang?’

  ‘Two thousand nine hundred and fifty.’

  Dennis made small, neat notes on the pad beside his calculator. Like most accountants, sums like these made no visible impression on him. Everything on earth had a market price. If people were prepared to pay £17,000 for a day trip to Berlin and back, so be it.

  ‘What’s the bottom line on the Harvard? Costwise?’

  ‘Per hour?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I knew the figures backwards. I’d been through them a thousand times with Adam, tallying up all the various expenses involved just keeping the aircraft in flying condition. Fuel and maintenance cost a small fortune but insurance was the real killer. For the Harvard, we were currently paying £10,000 a year. The Mustang came in at nearly double that figure.

  Dennis was still waiting for the hourly cost.

  ‘Four hundred and twenty-five an hour for the Harvard,’ I said, ‘And around two thousand for the Mustang.’

  ‘And you’re serious about keeping the aircraft?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What about pilots?’

  ‘I’ve got a list as long as your arm. Most of them would do it for nothing.’

  Dennis, still bent over his pad, grinned. He knew as well as I did that laying hands on a classic warbird like the Mustang was every pilot’s dream. We were always getting letters from would-be hopefuls, but over the years Adam had built a list of maybe half a dozen pilots he really trusted, and I knew there’d be no problem keeping both planes crewed.

  I watched Dennis working through one last column of figures. He knew the average usage rate we’d established for each aircraft, the minimum number of flying hours we could be reasonably sure of selling each month.

  At length, he looked up. This was a sum I hadn’t done.

  ‘For both aircraft, ball park, we’re talking ninety-five grand.’

  ‘That’s over the season?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Total revenue?’ ‘Total net.’

  Net means profit after deducting all expenses. I tried to look pleased. In truth, it was more than I’d expected, though it didn’t, of course, take into account the cost of a new pilot. What kind of price should I put on Adam? Was there enough money in the world to buy me one last hour of his time?

  Dennis began to reach for his calculator again, a question on his lips, but something in my face must have persuaded him to rein in. Abruptly, he changed the subject, and he was still telling me about the powerboat he was thinking of buying when the call from the bank came through. He listened for a couple of minutes. Then his face darkened.

  ‘How come so soon?’ he growled. ‘What’s the problem?’

  This time the answer was brisk. He glanced at his diary and then agreed to meet at ten next morning. By the time he put the phone down, I was resigned to bad news.

  ‘They’re calling in the loan,’ he said angrily. ‘Bastards.’

  On our various trips to Jersey, Adam and I had always stayed at a little place called Au Bon Accueil, a small, narrow-fronted hotel trellised with Virginia creeper. It wasn’t cheap but the service was wonderful and the food even better.

  Au Bon Accueil was twenty minutes’ walk from Dennis’s office but by the time I got there I knew it was the wrong place to stay. We’d always booked the same bedroom - number 7 - and I knew that any sleep I managed to snatch would be haunted by memories from those glorious days. I was too exhausted for more grief and too raw for nostalgia. What I needed just now was a cheap B&B, a good night’s rest and the strength - somehow - to concentrate my few resources on rescuing Old Glory from the ashes of Harvey Glennister’s wretched Spitfire.

  I found a B&B in a side street off Val Plaisant. There was a pay phone in the hall beside the fish tank and I phoned Dennis to tell him where I was. He’d been kind enough to offer me the spare room in his harbourside apartment out at St Aubin and I thanked him once again for the thought. We’d meet tomorrow. After our appointment at the bank, I’d probably take the afternoon flight back to Southampton.

  Almost as an afterthought, I asked him for an honest assessment of our chances with Gulf Banking Services Corporation. Might they defer calling in the loan? Were banks usually this hasty? There was a silence on the line, unusual for Dennis, then he came back. Since I’d left, he’d had another call, followed by a couple of faxes. The first contained the schedule of interest payments. Three months into the loan, Steve Liddell already owed them £9,000 in back payments. That, said Dennis, was bad enough. What made it infinitely worse were the contents of the second fax, which detailed the small print of the agreement Adam had guaranteed. Most unusually, said Dennis, it contained a clause permitting the bank to foreclose on the loan in the event of a default, or under circumstances deemed otherwise non-compliant with the spirit of the agreement.

  ‘What does that mean?’ I said quickly.

  ‘You tell me.’

  ‘But who makes the judgement about the circumstances? Who does the deeming?’

  ‘They do.’

  ‘No appeal?’

  ‘None that I can see. Unless you fancy going to law.’

  ‘‘So what do we do now?’

  I watched the fish circling the tank, waiting for Dennis to answer. Trapped, I thought. Round and round and round for the rest of my life.

  ‘We’ll thrash it out with them tomorrow,’ Dennis said at last. ‘I’ll call by and pick you up.’

  That night, I ate alone in a bistro round the corner from Royal Square. I ordered a
n omelette and a salad and a small carafe of red wine. The fog had come down outside and I was glad of the way it swallowed me up when I left, huddled in the long cashmere coat Adam had bought me as a Christmas present. My resistance softened by the wine, I gave in to my worst instincts and retraced the route we always took after supper on nights when we found ourselves staying over on the island. I knew this was hopelessly self-indulgent, exactly what I shouldn’t do, but I didn’t care.

  Up the hill beyond Royal Square is the shell of the old Fort Regent. There’s a leisure centre in the middle of it now, but from the terrace on the front you can look out over the inner harbour towards St Elizabeth Castle and the gentle sweep of St Aubin’s Bay. Tonight, for once, I could see nothing through the swirling curtains of sea fog, and I walked slowly along the terrace, counting the benches until I got to the end. Here was where we usually stopped. Here was where we could look down on the neat rows of moored yachts in the marina, fantasising about the moment when Old Glory would have bought us a big, sturdy ocean-going forty-footer, and we could take a year or so off and circle the globe, threading landfalls together like beads on a necklace. In my heart, I’d always known it would never happen - Adam was far too impatient to depend on anything as fickle as wind and tide - but it had become an important promise we’d made to each other and I liked the feeling it gave me, just thinking about it.

  Far away, out at sea, I could hear the bellow of a foghorn. Then came another, and another, much closer. The balustrade was cold and damp beneath my hands and I shivered, imagining yet again the half-submerged shape of my poor drowned Adam, somewhere out there, wave-tossed and abandoned.

  Growing up in the Falklands, you get used to death. Out on the horse, it would be a rare day when I didn’t come across the carcass of a sheep, the bones picked clean by the circling buzzards, or a sick elephant seal, beached and helpless, waiting for the rising tide to claim him. Back in the settlement, when someone died, we’d dig the grave ourselves, spading down through the soggy black peat and then gathering in the late afternoon to lower the rough, newly nailed coffin and listen to my father intoning a verse or two from the Book of Common Prayer before the light failed and we went back to the cookhouse for a glum round of scones and whisky.

  That had been the small print of our daily lives, something we were used to. For me, dead bodies held no mystery, no fear. But what had happened to Adam was altogether different. There was no body. There were no goodbyes. Just a heap of memories, confused, entangled, shot through with his laughter and his sheer appetite for life. On occasions, when he chose to, Adam could be as gentle as any man I’ve known. The day when I got the news from the fertility clinic confirming that I’d never be able to give him a child, he was kindness itself. But the Adam I treasured, the man I wanted, and won, and loved, was the Adam who’d stepped out of the helicopter all those years ago and shot me the hack old line about giving his winchman a decent party. That, of course, had been a pretext but I hadn’t minded in the slightest because it spoke of boldness, and mischief, and a determination to seize the initiative that I had, in my own young life, never quite managed to master. Living with Adam, getting to know him, a little of that magic had rubbed off, and I knew now - with an absolute certainty - that his death would make me stronger yet.

  Quite why he’d guaranteed Steve Liddell’s loan was beyond me, and it certainly hurt that he’d kept the arrangement so secret. But already, in my mind’s eye, I could see him volunteering to share the load in this new adventure, scribbling a couple of signatures for the bank manager, ignoring the small print. The thought that Steve might fail - that he might come to grief - would never have occurred to him. Once Adam believed in someone, his faith and his commitment were total and there simply wasn’t room for anything as boring and mundane as failure. That’s why he’d been such a delight to live with. And that’s why, even now - facing an interview that might rob me of everything - I could forgive him.

  For some reason, I’d always been the one who woke up first in the mornings, and the thought of Adam’s face on the pillow made me smile. If I listened very hard, I told myself, I could hear him now, rubbing the sleep from his eyes, telling me to get back to the B&B, and treat myself to a large brandy, and join him in bed. Nothing sounded sweeter, and I blew him a kiss, turning away from what had once been our view, glad I’d succumbed to the wine.

  I was back at the B&B by nine o’clock. The woman had given me a key to the front door and I let myself in, trying to remember what she’d said about leaving the door on the latch. I was still wrestling with the lock when I heard someone calling my name. For a second or two I thought I was dreaming. Then I turned round, knowing it had to be true. Sitting on the chair by the fish tank was Harald Meyler.

  Chapter four

  At Harald’s insistence, we went out again. As tired as I was, he said he had news for me. He’d been hanging around for the best part of an hour for my return and there were pressing phone calls waiting for him back at the hotel where he was staying. When I asked him how on earth he’d found me, he smiled and said he’d talked to Dennis. His phone calls to Mapledurcombe hadn’t been returned. He’d guessed I’d probably come over to Jersey.

  He had a hire car outside. We drove slowly out of St Helier, the fog still thick, while he briefed me on the latest reports he’d received from the skipper of the boat he’d chartered. The vessel, he said, had been out in mid-Channel now for the best part of twenty-four hours, trawling up and down around the position the radar people had calculated as Adam’s point of impact. The word made me flinch and I half-listened to Harald’s quiet speculations about tidal drift, knowing in my heart that both of us had given up any hope of finding him alive. When I said as much, Harald simply nodded. Adam, in his view, would have been dead within minutes, if not from his injuries, then from hypothermia. So far, there’d been no sign of the wreckage that the search-and-rescue people had reported, and as far as he knew the naval frigate on the scene had also drawn a blank.

  ‘Isn’t that unusual?’ I wondered aloud.

  Harald nodded. We were still driving through the suburbs of St Helier. An entrance to some kind of drive loomed through the fog and I glimpsed a hotel sign as Harald drove in under a big stone arch.

  ‘It’s very unusual,’ he said at last. ‘Which is why we have to keep looking.’

  ‘But what does it suggest? To you?’

  I could see lights ahead. Harald had slowed the car to walking pace, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel.

  ‘He could have bellied in, stayed intact. That happens sometimes.’

  ‘But didn’t the chopper crew report wreckage?’

  ‘They did. But they might have got it wrong. The Channel’s full of trash, all kinds of garbage. Fly low enough, choose the right day, it looks like the logging season.’

  ‘But wouldn’t the aircraft float? If it was still in one piece?’

  ‘For a while, yes. Then…’ he shrugged, ‘… the cabin fills with water, the fuselage too. There’s a bit of buoyancy in the wings, of course, but he had full tanks on departure. I checked.’

  ‘With who?’

  ‘Steve.’ He glanced across at me. ‘You were up there today.’

  ‘That’s right. How did you know?’

  ‘Dennis told me. He said Steve looked wrecked.’ He frowned. ‘What did you make of him?’

  I thought hard about the question. Beyond a line of parked cars, the headlights picked out the front of what must have been Harald’s hotel.

  ‘I agree,’ I said bleakly. ‘I thought he looked terrible. In fact I thought he looked ill.’

  Harald brought the car to a halt and switched off the engine.

  ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘That’s why we have to talk.’

  The hotel turned out to be an old manor house, beautifully furnished. It had a look and a smell that reminded me, on a much grander scale, of Mapledurcombe: wood-panelled walls, swagged curtains, oriental rugs and some lovely antique furniture. Harald l
ed me through the reception hall. From a bar at the end, I could hear laughter.

  Heads turned as we went in. For a second or two they were strangers, these men, then I began to put names to the faces. Duggie Peterson. Alan Jessop. Miles Brenton. Display pilots from the airshow circuit. Men I’d bumped into at the weekends when Adam had been part of the same circus, hauling the Mustang around the sky in front of ten thousand people. He’d loved the opportunity to show off the plane, to stretch the flight envelope to its limits and pop in a trick or two that took even these veterans by surprise. On those summer days, the sky was Adam’s stage, and I remembered his face afterwards, the moment when he taxied back towards the line of parked aircraft, sliding back the canopy and waving to the crowd. At first, to my surprise, the gesture had made me slightly jealous. Now, it was a memory I treasured. My pilot. My prince.

  Harald did the introductions at the bar, before returning to reception to check for messages. Everyone did their best to tell me how sorry they were about Adam, and I swallowed hard, amazed at how public the knowledge had already become, and touched by how tongue-tied these men could be.

  Harald returned and led me to a table in the corner. Without checking, he bought me a large Scotch. When he sat down, he had his back to the pilots at the bar.

  ‘The guys flew in this morning,’ he explained. ‘We get together around now to sort out the schedule for the summer. That’s why I stayed over. That, and Adam.’

  He began telling me about a Fighter Meet planned for September and I half-listened, still watching the men at the bar, their body language, how easy they were with each other, recognising the breed to which Adam had belonged. They were like no other group of men I’d ever met. They had that self-confidence, that inner calm, that I’d only seen - oddly enough - in the Falklands. Shepherds have it, and drovers too. It comes with the knowledge that you’re doing something challenging and difficult that makes you entirely happy. Not once, I thought, are these men ever bored. To the frustrations and tedium of real life, like gravity itself, they seem immune.