Permissible Limits

by Hurley, Graham

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Sant’Ana.’ He scowled. ‘Just don’t bloody sign anything.’

  We’d come to a halt in the multistorey car park where Dennis garaged the Porsche. I said I was grateful for his support but there were things about Steve Liddell’s business he really ought to know. I told him about last night, about Harald’s interpretation of the accident and - worst of all - about the shortfall in the insurance.

  ‘Two hundred and fifty grand?’ Dennis couldn’t believe it. ‘That’s even worse than I thought, Liddell’s definitely stuffed.’

  He gazed out of the car, shaking his head. Someone had stuck a pebble of pink chewing gum on the grey concrete pillar beside the window. Finally, Dennis sighed, and reached for his briefcase.

  ‘Insurance companies like to move fast,’ he grunted. ‘It cuts down the legal bills.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘We’ve got less time than we thought.’ He frowned, sifting through a pile of documents. ‘And while we’re talking insurance, you might as well have the rest of it.’

  He extracted a bound copy of our last year’s accounts. With it came a photocopy I didn’t recognise.

  ‘This is Adam’s insurance policy. I’ve been hanging on to it as a fallback.’ He gave me a thin smile. ‘Just in case Sant’Ana starts acting like a bank manager again.’

  He handed me the policy. The print was tiny. Nothing made any sense.

  ‘Adam took out something called Aircrew Life and Loss of Licence cover. He’d had it a couple of years. It meant that losing his licence would trigger a hefty payout. Ditto dying.’ I looked away, hiding my smile. Sometimes Dennis could be so tactless, so blunt, it was almost comical.

  ‘You’re telling me there’s money due?’

  ‘Potentially, yes, but it isn’t as simple as it sounds. We’re dealing with the life element here. There’s a problem with proof of loss.’

  ‘Whose loss?’

  ‘Yours.’

  ‘You want proof?’ I looked at him at last, the smile gone. ‘You think this is some kind of picnic? Some kind of game? Who wants this proof? What proof are you talking about?’

  Dennis eyed me for a moment. Like so many single men, he lived in a world of his own - armour-clad, secure, cosy - and I think he was genuinely shocked that he’d angered me.

  ‘We’re talking small print,’ he said defensively. ‘The problem is the body.’

  ‘There is no body.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘But there’s no Adam, either. And that’s because he’s dead.’

  ‘Sure, but we have to prove it. That’s what they want, proof.’

  ‘You do mean a body.’

  ‘Yes, otherwise it’s hard for them to deem him dead.’

  ‘Hard for them. Are you serious?’

  I stared at him, furious. I’d had enough of all this talk of collateral, and periods of grace, and insurance shortfalls, and remote accountants in city offices who had difficulty deeming my husband dead. I had difficulties, too. I had difficulties conceiving another week without him, another month, a whole bloody lifetime. Something had happened, something had taken him away from me, and all I could do was thrash around in a swamp of impossible six-figure debts I could never hope to pay. My life was Adam. Adam was dead. The money stuff could wait. End of story.

  I reached across and slipped the life policy back into Dennis’s briefcase. He was still holding the bound accounts and I could tell from the expression on his face that there was yet more bad news to come.

  My fingers closed around the door handle.

  ‘I’m going home,’ I said. ‘I’ll be in touch.’

  I phoned the airport from a pay box on the street. The next flight to Southampton was full. If I wanted to return today, I’d have to wait until the first of the evening departures. I hung up, still fuming. Then I remembered Harald’s offer. I had the number of his mobile in my bag. When he answered I could hear the growl of a piston engine in the background.

  ‘Lucky you called,’ he said. ‘I was about to roll.’

  I took a cab to the airport. Harald was waiting for me in the Jersey Aero Club. He was wearing a leather jacket and a pair of blue Levi jeans and he was looking pleased with himself. He kissed me as we met and said his bag was already stowed. He showed me the Yak through the big picture windows on the airside of the club house. It had a high dual cockpit, one seat behind the other, and a big radial engine at the front. Even at a distance, I could see where the red and white paintwork was darkened and blistered from the fire in Steve Liddell’s hangar.

  We walked out across the grass and Harald helped me into the front cockpit. Unlike my Moth, the Yak wasn’t a tail-dragger and I had a good view forward over the nose. The cockpit felt roomier than I’d expected and when Harald had buckled himself into the seat behind me, and plugged in his headset, he talked me through the controls.

  Somehow it hadn’t occurred to me that I might be flying this machine but he dismissed my protests and started again, telling me to follow him round the cockpit, left to right. I did what I was told, my left hand gliding over the throttle, flap lever and undercarriage safety gate. The controls and instrumentation were nearly as rudimentary as the Moth, and I tightened the harness a little, settling in the bucket seat as Harald primed the engine. It burst into life, deep-throated, making the rivets dance around me, and I listened to Harald’s murmur on the intercom as he went through his checks while the needles on the temperature and pressure gauges slowly rose. The gauges were calibrated in percentages, something I’d never seen before, and Harald had begun to tell me about the little plane’s aerobatic capability when he broke off to request a clearance from the tower.

  ‘Jersey tower. Golf Alpha Bravo Tango Bravo. Radio check.’

  ‘Golf Alpha Bravo Tango Bravo. Jersey tower. Loud and clear.’

  ‘Roger, Jersey tower. Golf Tango Bravo. Taxi.’

  ‘Golf Tango Bravo. Taxi runway two-seven. QNH 1003.’

  Automatically, I reached for the altimeter, entering the QNH. QNH is the measurement of the current air pressure. Without adjustment, the altimeter gives a false reading.

  ‘The airframe’s stressed to plus seven.’ Harald was back in the world of aerobatics, ‘Isn’t that something?’

  Plus seven is a measurement of something called g. I’ve never fully understood the physics but getting to plus seven means doing something very radical indeed to the aeroplane, a turn as tight as a knot, a cartoon loop, a pull-out to the vertical after a high-speed dive. Do any of these things, and your body will suddenly weigh half a ton, and the blood will rush to your head or your feet, and if you’re still conscious you’ll wish you weren’t. At Adam’s insistence, I’d pulled g in the Moth, and more recently in the Harvard, but I’d never gone further than three. Seven sounded indescribably awful and I was still gazing fondly at a taxiing passenger jet behind us when Harald completed his run-up checks, steadied the Yak on the threshold of the runway and sought permission to take off. The tower came back at once.

  ‘Golf Tango Bravo. Clear take-off. Surface wind two-six-zero, five knots.’

  The main runway at Jersey runs due west. The wind, at 260 degrees, was more or less on the nose, ideal for take-off.

  ‘You have control,’ I heard Harald say. ‘Don’t be shy with the throttle. Give her a hundred per cent and plenty of right rudder. You’re looking for a hundred and ten k.p.h. for nose-wheel lift. She’ll fly herself off. Just point and squirt.’

  Point and squirt? A hundred and ten k.p.h.? Nose-wheel lift? It dawned on me that he was serious. I thought of protesting, of handing control back, but then I simply acknowledged the message. The passenger jet, a long, sleek MD-80, was waiting behind me in the queue for departure. I could see the row of curious faces pressed to the cabin windows.

  My left hand closed on the throttle. My right foot pushed on the rudder pedal. I eased the throttle forward, smoothly increasing the boost until the engine was howling and I felt the lever nudge agai
nst the stop. I slipped the brakes and the Yak surged forward, the spin of the prop yawing the aircraft to the left. More right rudder, I thought. I had one eye on the airspeed indicator: 50 k.p.h…. 60 k.p.h. The centre line on the runway was beginning to blur… 80 k.p.h…. 90 k.p.h. I felt the aircraft yaw again and caught it beautifully. Then the needle on the airspeed dial was passing 110 k.p.h. and I eased the stick back, letting the aircraft lift itself off the runway. I held it low for a second or two, making the most of the ground effect, the cushion of air between the plane and the racing tarmac, then I pulled on the stick again and we began to climb, the end of the runway slipping away beneath the nose, the sun splintering on acres of glasshouses in the fields beyond the airport boundary.

  ‘We’re VFR,’ I heard Harald say. ‘Fly zero four zero. Two thousand feet will be fine.’

  I banked the Yak into a shallow turn. VFR stands for Visual Flight Rules, which meant we were flying with our eyes, in clear weather, rather than on instruments, up in what Adam used to call ‘the clag’. The Yak felt beautifully balanced, the controls firm yet responsive, and I looked down at the island’s coastline as the starboard wing dropped. The startling blue of the sea and the lovely ochre yellow of the beach stretching away to the north never failed to excite me and I was still grinning when I heard the sudden hiss of escaping air.

  ‘What’s that?’

  My eyes were racing across the instruments. Our airspeed was fine, turn-and-bank fine, rate-of-climb OK. Then I heard a clunk beneath me, and Harald’s voice again. He sounded amused.

  ‘You forgot the undercarriage,’ he said. ‘The gear works off compressed air. Guess I should have mentioned it.’

  ‘Zero four zero,’ I muttered apologetically. ‘Two thousand feet.’

  Past Cap de la Hague, for the best part of seventy miles, there’s nothing but sea. We droned north for a while behind the big old radial engine, the aircraft steady beneath my fingertips. This was the kind of flying I was supposed to hate - enclosed cockpit, no contact with the slipstream and the elements - but Harald had been right. There was something about the Yak that imparted an immediate warmth. After only ten minutes, it felt like an old friend, utterly dependable. I glanced up, checking Harald’s face in the rearview mirror bolted to the top of the windscreen. He was peering at the little GPS he’d Velcroed to the dashboard in the back. The GPS is a hand-held device that tells you where you are by reference to various satellites. The readout is accurate to a hundred metres or something equally incredible, and after making all the usual jokes about playthings from Toys R Us, most pilots now swear by them. Happy with the readout, Harald was looking left and right, down from the cockpit, searching for something. I did the same, seeing nothing but the sea, flecked with whitecaps, and the distant wake of a westbound tanker.

  Abruptly, I felt the stick move between my fingers. Then Harald’s voice in my headphones.

  ‘I have control,’ he said.

  The port wing dipped and we went into a tight turn. The force of the turn began to drag at my face, the first signs of g, then the turn tightened even more and I felt the weight of my body fighting against the harness. The nose was down now and we were losing height rapidly, the windscreen a deep, deep blue as the Channel came up to meet us. Then, suddenly, Harald pulled the Yak out of the spiral dive, and we were circling a small boat. It looked like some kind of fishing smack. There were a couple of men on the tiny deck forward of the wheelhouse. We were low enough to see the glisten of spray on their yellow oilskins, and one of them waved as Harald waggled the Yak’s wings in salute. The boat disappeared beneath us and we began to climb again as Harald pushed the throttle forward.

  ‘She’s called the Frances Bevan,’ he shouted. ‘The guys are first-class.’

  We banked hard, still climbing, and looking out I could see the boat again, much smaller. Suddenly it dawned on me what he was talking about. This was the boat Harald had chartered to look for the remains of the Cessna. This was where Adam had gone down.

  I couldn’t take my eyes off the ocean. The swell was running west to east and the higher we got, the more distinct became the pattern of the waves, marching up the Channel. Thanks to the sunshine, it was an infinitely friendlier scene than I’d imagined, but it was the oddest feeling, gazing down from my seat in the gods, wondering for the umpteenth time just how Adam had speared in. He would have died in seconds, I told myself. It would have been the gentlest exit.

  ‘Remind me about the strip at Sandown.’ It was Harald again.

  ‘Two three,’ I said at once. ‘With this wind.’

  ‘Fine. You’re looking for stage one flap at one seventy. Finals at one fifty. Over the fence at one forty. Just fly her on. Don’t worry about the round-out.’

  He was asking me to land the Yak once we got to the Isle of Wight. I was still looking down at the waves.

  ‘No thanks,’ I said numbly. ‘You do it.’

  We landed at Sandown at noon. I retrieved my holdall from the luggage bay behind the rear cockpit, half-expecting Harald to take off again. He was heading north, up to a small private field near Manchester. He said he had a business contact there, a BMW dealer who was interested in buying a couple of Yaks for himself and his wife. I was on the point of thanking him for the lift when he unbuckled his harness and clambered down from the cockpit.

  ‘Wouldn’t mind taking a look at Ellie B,’ he said. ‘Is my baby at home?’

  Ellie B was Harald’s pet name for the Mustang. He’d started calling the aircraft after me during the last year, much to my husband’s amusement. Adam’s preferred name, which he’d never got round to painting on the nose, was Hot Pursuit.

  We kept the Mustang in our hangar on the south side of the airfield. Harald and I walked over together, not saying much. I couldn’t make up my mind about his little detour in mid-Channel. In one sense it was pretty close to the bone. In another, given the money he was spending trying to help me, I knew I should simply be grateful.

  The hangar doors were open and I could see our engineer, Dave Jeffries, standing on a pair of steps, working on the big Merlin engine. Dave had been with us for the best part of four years. Adam had found him at the RAF’s Battle of Britain Memorial Flight, up at Coningsby, where he’d been on the point of leaving his fitter’s job, and had tempted him south with a year’s contract to work for Old Glory. After the beautiful job he’d done rebuilding the Harvard, Adam had retained him to work the same magic on the Mustang, and he’d been with us ever since. Yet another reason, in my book, for not getting over-involved with Steve Liddell.

  Harald stood beside the Mustang, gazing up. He numbered three Mustangs in his warbird collection back in Florida, but he’d always had a soft spot for ours. The moment he’d first laid eyes on it - the rebuild fifty per cent complete - he’d told Adam that Dave’s work had been outstanding. He’d said it matched anything he’d seen in the States and he’d lost no time trying to buy it for himself. Adam, of course, had said no, but when we finally agreed on Harald taking a forty-five per cent stake, the price he paid was extremely generous. For that, I was certain, we owed a huge vote of thanks to Dave.

  ‘How is she?’

  Harald was looking up at Dave. The two men had always got on well. The same directness. The same disinterest in small talk.

  ‘She’s fine.’ Dave gestured at the big four-bladed propeller. ‘I split the hub and replaced the spider seals the other day. Good as new now.’

  ‘How many hours on the old set?’

  ‘Ninety odd.’

  Dave reached for the lead light, moving it along the engine bay, pooling light on the glistening valves either side of the exposed camshaft, and I thought again of Steve Liddell and his empty hangar, the concrete floor blackened where the Spitfire had gone up in flames. Harald was talking about boost pressures now and I left the two men to it, walking out into the sunshine and then looking back at our precious aircraft. The Harvard was in there too, a squat, heavy World War II trainer that I’d more or less maste
red thanks to Adam, but the jewel in our crown was undoubtedly the Mustang.

  Just the shape of the aircraft, the way it sat on its big, wide undercarriage and its neat little tail wheel, told you everything that you ever wanted to know. The big red spinner at the front, the long silver nose, the pert bubble canopy, the bulge of the underslung radiator, there wasn’t a line on the aircraft you’d ever dream of changing. It was like an animal. You could almost reach out and stroke it. You could almost feel how slippery, how fast it was.

  I heard Harald laughing, something he didn’t do too often, then he was out in the sunshine again, joining me on the grass. Dave had made a little plaque for him, a replica of the original registration on the cockpit dash, and after he showed it to me he tucked it into the top pocket of the denim shirt he was wearing beneath the leather jacket. He stood beside me, watching a young student pilot making heavy weather of a touch-and-go. Then he jerked a thumb back towards our hangar.

  ‘You know the offer’s still there,’ he said. ‘You only have to say the word.’

  I nodded. Harald had never made any secret of his desire to buy the rest of the Mustang. He’d even named a price that would, in my present predicament, make life a great deal easier.

  ‘Four hundred and ninety-five thousand dollars,’ I murmured. ‘It’s written on my heart.’

  ‘I’d go higher,’ he said at once. ‘We could talk about five hundred and fifty.’

  ‘Really?’ I looked at him, almost tempted, then he reached out and patted me on the shoulder, as calm and unhurried as ever.

  ‘Think about it,’ he said. ‘There’s no rush.’

  I returned his smile. He gave me a brief hug and then said goodbye. He’d phone me if there was any news from his boys in mid-Channel. In the mean time, I was to take care. He gave me a nod and a smile and walked away. I watched him circling the Yak, bending to inspect the tyres, then I returned to the hangar. Dave was about to break for lunch and we talked for a couple of minutes while he gloved his hands in Swarfega, getting rid of the oil and the grease. For the moment, I told him, we had to go easy on the maintenance budget. Not that there was a crisis. Not that there was any kind of financial problem. But Adam’s death had naturally turned things upside-down, and just now I was keen to get my bearings before taking the next step. Dave nodded and said it wouldn’t be a problem. He was older than Adam and myself, barely a year off his fiftieth birthday, but he’d always liked Adam and I know the accident had shaken him badly.