Permissible Limits

by Hurley, Graham

‘Bad news first. Adam was in deeper than we thought.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’ve been going through the current accounts. He laundered some cash and put it Steve’s way. We’re looking at money here, Ellie. Not loan guarantees.’

  ‘Laundered?’

  ‘Yeah. Basically it was income from the Mustang, about seventy grand’s worth, but he disguised it.’

  ‘Why? How?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. If I tell you how he did it, I’d be here all night.’

  I nodded, forcing myself to concentrate. This was like life in the Blitz, I thought. Raid after raid. The masonry crashing around me.

  ‘That’s the bad news?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What’s the other bit?’

  ‘Steve’s private life. You remember that photo of the kid you noticed? The one on his desk?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s his little girl. Her name’s Minette.’ ‘Steve’s married?’

  ‘No, he had a partner. Chick called Michelle.’

  ‘Had?’

  ‘Yeah, she went off with some fella. Don’t ask me who. Crucified Steve, though. You can see it, can’t you? State of the guy?’

  I was still thinking of the little face in the photo on Steve’s desk. Dennis was right. No wonder Steve had looked so awful. No wonder the Spit had caught fire.

  I began to thank Dennis for getting in touch again, then I stopped. The photo I’d found in Adam’s office was still lying beside the phone. I tried to head off the question but there was no stopping it.

  ‘What does she look like? This Michelle?’

  ‘No idea,’ Dennis laughed. ‘Apparently she runs some kind of windsurfing school. Out on one of those nice little bays.’

  She had a name, this woman. Michelle. I sat in the car, parked in the darkness on a tiny track overlooking the lighthouse at St Catherine’s Point. This was the very bottom of the island. Beyond here, for umpteen miles, there was nothing but the trackless wastes of the Channel. Was Adam really out there? Had he really crashed? And even if he had, was there any point in caring any more?

  Michelle. I wound down the window, peering into the windy darkness, thinking of Steve Liddell and the little girl he’d lost to his one-time partner. No wonder he’d been reluctant to talk about the accident with the Spitfire. No wonder he’d looked so helpless, so beaten, so physically spent.

  It was cold outside and I shivered, winding up the window again, wondering whether it was late or not. Since Thursday, time had become somehow elastic, stretching and stretching, the days blurring into each other, a non-stop succession of phone calls, and half-understood conversations. With each of these exchanges it seemed to me that the news got worse and worse, tightening the corset into which Adam had strapped me. First the loan guarantee. Then the photograph on the beach. And now £70,000 he’d simply helped himself to. Where had it gone, that money? Had it gone to Steve, as Dennis seemed to believe? Or had it really been meant for Michelle? A token of my husband’s affection? A down-payment on some life they were planning together, once he’d dumped one or two bits of baggage? Like me?

  I shook my head, trying my best not to believe it, trying to give him the benefit of the doubt. The beam from the lighthouse swung left to right, a finger of light reaching deep into the Channel, and I found myself talking to him, murmuring questions, wanting to know the truth. Why had he done it? Wasn’t I enough for him? Weren’t we good together? Why blow it like that? The questions went round and round in my head, each one triggering a fresh doubt, a new uncertainty, and suddenly a phrase of Harald’s came back to me.

  He’d been talking about Adam’s involvement in Steve Liddell’s business, and one of the reasons Harald had had his own doubts about the loan guarantee was Adam’s reluctance to get - in his phrase - ‘hands-on’. He wasn’t with Steve, he’d said. He wasn’t where he needed to be. He wasn’t with the action. At the time, that hadn’t surprised me in the least. The small print of more or less everything in Adam’s life except his precious Mustang bored him stiff. But if he hadn’t been with Steve, where had he been?

  The implications of this question brought tears to my eyes, but the longer I sat there blowing my nose, the more I knew that the thing - just now - was beyond resolution. Coping by myself was no longer an option. I had to talk to somebody else.

  Ralph Pierson’s bungalow was only five minutes away. When I rang the bell, the door was opened by a tall youth in a tracksuit and trainers. He had freckles and a mass of curly red hair. He looked about twenty.

  ‘My name’s Ellie,’ I said hesitantly. ‘Is Ralph busy?’

  He stepped back, inviting me in. Across his tracksuit top, in white letters, it said: Aberdeen University - Department of Forestry.

  ‘Grandpa’s in there.’ He nodded at the open door to the lounge. ‘I think he’s still working.’

  I knocked at the lounge door. Ralph was sitting at his desk. He was wearing a baggy crew-necked Guernsey and a pair of dark-blue flannel trousers. The moment he saw it was me, he stood up.

  ‘Lovely.’ He gave me a kiss. ‘What a surprise.’

  We settled ourselves by the fire. He introduced Jamie, his grandson, and explained that he was staying a few days to sort out a couple of trees in the garden. Fresh from university, Jamie had found himself a tiny flat in Battersea and was trying to make a go of it as a tree surgeon. Coming from the treeless Falklands, I’d never heard the term before and I listened while Jamie explained. Trees, he said, were like people. They were living things. They needed love and attention from blokes with a bit of knowledge of the way they worked. Moving to London was a gamble, and so far the pickings had been lean, but the place was full of knackered trees and clueless owners and in the long run he was sure to make his fortune.

  Like his grandfather, Jamie had a lovely manner - gentle, funny, attentive - and we talked about London for a couple of minutes longer until Jamie excused himself, leaving Ralph and me by the fire. Evidently the lad ran every night, five miles at least, and Ralph, for one, was deeply impressed.

  ‘Lovely boy.’ He nodded approvingly. ‘Always has been.’

  I told Ralph what had happened over the last day or so. I didn’t spare him any of the details and I included finding the photo in Adam’s office. Ralph listened carefully, packing the bowl of his pipe with shreds of Erinmore Flake. I think he took my candour as a measure of my desperation because after I’d finished he produced a bottle of rum, a spirit he knew I liked, and poured me a generous measure.

  ‘To you.’ He raised his glass. ‘And to Old Glory.’

  I didn’t know quite how to take the toast. Was this the conclusion he’d drawn? That I should dig in and fight? If so, why? And with what? I arranged the questions in a sensible order and put them to him one by one, fighting to keep control of myself. Not very deep down, I felt ugly, and vindictive, and very, very hurt, but I was determined not to let it show. Ralph, of course, could see through all this but I think it suited him, too, to keep our little boat from being swamped. Just now, he said, it was important to hang on to a sense of perspective. These were early days and it would be easy to get things wrong. How could I be sure about the financial situation? How did I know that Dennis was right about the £70,000? And, most important of all, where was the proof that the girl in the photo was indeed Michelle? Lots of people went windsurfing. You didn’t have to own the show to get your photograph taken. I nodded.

  ‘Or screw someone else’s husband,’ I said.

  ‘Quite.’

  This was the closest I got to expressing the way I really felt and I heard myself apologising at once. Fond though he was of me, it was no part of Ralph’s responsibility to share my disgust, and I didn’t blame him when he abruptly changed the subject.

  After the war, Ralph had joined the BBC, moving through the ranks until he became an Outside Broadcast producer in the infant days of television. A move to one of the founding ITV companies had given him a bigger job and he’d oft
en told me some of the more colourful stories from those pioneering days. Now he was talking about Cowes Week, the great yachting jamboree. His bosses over in Southampton had wanted him to produce the first-ever live coverage. Most of the cameras had to be afloat, mounted on launches. The technical problems were enormous and everyone he spoke to said that even half-decent coverage would be impossible.

  ‘Impossible,’ he repeated.

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘We persevered. We took the problems one by one, and most of them we solved.’

  ‘But what about the ones you couldn’t?’

  ‘We ignored them. Or we boxed around them. Or we did any damn thing, as long as they went away.’

  ‘And did they?’

  ‘Mostly, yes.’

  I nodded, wondering quite how this early exercise in live television related to the wreckage of Old Glory and of what had once been a wonderful marriage.

  ‘So how did it go?’ I asked. ‘On the day?’

  Ralph laughed.

  ‘It was bloody good. It wasn’t perfect, nothing ever is, but it was lots of fun and we knew we’d given it our best shot.’

  This was getting warmer. Best shot I knew about. When it came to maximum effort, to working your socks off only to see your efforts wasted, I was one of the world’s experts.

  ‘But this is different,’ I insisted. ‘Making your programme, trying to get it right, you knew you could rely on the people around you. I can’t do that any more. I thought I could but I can’t.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Know?’

  I stared at him, then began to go through it all again. What Adam might have done with the money. Who Adam might have been seeing in Jersey. Where that left Old Glory. And me.

  Ralph looked thoughtful, sucking on his pipe. He was a past master at pointing the conversation in new directions. Anything, I thought bitterly, to avoid discussing Adam. What a bastard he’d been. How irresponsible. How reckless.

  ‘Remember when you took me up in the Moth?’ he mused.

  I nodded. We’d been flying together at the end of last summer, a belated thank you for all the work Ralph had been putting in on the book.

  ‘That was nice,’ I said defensively. ‘A nice day.’

  ‘It was better than nice. You fly well, really well. I didn’t tell you at the time but maybe I should now.’

  In spite of my anger, my bewilderment, I felt a little warm glow kindling inside me. Flying was something that even Adam couldn’t take away. Up in the clouds, the Moth and I were beyond reach.

  Ralph was talking about the Harvard.

  ‘How many hours have you done now?’

  I frowned, trying to remember. Adam had started me in the Harvard more than a year ago. After six hours I’d gone solo, and since then I’d done maybe another thirty.

  ‘And you feel happy in it?’

  ‘More or less. It’s not like the Moth, though.’

  ‘Bit of a carthorse?’

  ‘Not really.’ I shook my head. ‘It’s easy to think that, looking at her, but no, I wouldn’t call her a carthorse.’

  I thought hard about what I was trying to say. Adam, to his credit, had always had nothing but respect for the old trainer. Ours was one of the pre-war models and I remembered the first time he’d sat me in the big front cockpit, showing me the controls. He’d commented on the smell, a mustiness seasoned with Avgas and oil and old leather, and he’d told me it was common to every Harvard he’d ever flown.

  ‘Sixty years of fear,’ he’d grinned. ‘That’s what you’re smelling.’

  I looked across at Ralph, marvelling at his guile. He’d worked the old trick, the old magic. For a couple of minutes now, I’d thought of nothing but the challenge of keeping the Harvard airborne.

  ‘It was the controls I couldn’t get used to,’ I said. ‘You put in such big movements on the stick. The rudder needs a real kick. Adam used to say it was like flying a bowl of soup. It slops around everywhere and then you do something wrong, mess up the numbers, and it kills you.’

  ‘Did he say that, too?’

  ‘Yes.’ I nodded. ‘He didn’t play around all the time. Not with aircraft, at least.’

  The comment stalled the conversation for a moment or two. Ralph was staring at the fire.

  ‘You really loved him, didn’t you?’ he said at last.

  I smiled. Even now, it was a pleasure to admit it.

  ‘I did,’ I said, ‘And I think I still do. That’s the problem. That’s what I can’t sort out.’

  ‘Then don’t even try.’ Ralph reached forward, shifting one of the bigger logs with the poker. ‘None of us gets very much luck in this world. If you really loved him, if you trusted him, if you believed in him, then all those things matter. They’re rare, believe me. Especially the love.’ He looked up. ‘And Adam? He loved you, too?’

  ‘I thought so.’

  ‘Then think so now. I didn’t know him at all well. But what I saw was pretty convincing.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Ralph looked at me for a long time. I think he was trying to gauge how much I could take, how far he could go.

  ‘He was transparent,’ he said at last. ‘What you saw was what you got. He had no side to him. He always reminded me of a young labrador. Very alert. Very boisterous. Very eager.’

  I smiled again, gladdened. This was the Adam I’d fallen in love with, the Adam beside me in the wedding album. Young labrador was a brilliant description. He really belonged in a field, chasing rabbits.

  ‘He had a darker side as well,’ I said warily, ‘I wouldn’t pretend he didn’t. He could be difficult when things didn’t go his way.’

  ‘You mean sulky?’

  ‘No, more frustrated than sulky. He always put so much in, he expected everything to work, all the time. When it didn’t, he felt…’ I shrugged, hunting for the right word.

  ‘Betrayed?’

  ‘Yes, betrayed.’

  I looked at Ralph for a second or two, then laughed. Full circle, I thought. Adam betrayed. Me betrayed. Maybe Ralph was right. Maybe things weren’t quite as obvious as they seemed. Maybe I should look just a little bit harder.

  Ralph had uncorked the rum bottle. I covered my glass with my hand, telling him I had to drive back, then it occurred to me that he, too, might have something to get off his chest. We’d never talked like this before. So intimate. So close. So candid.

  ‘Just a splash,’ I said, ‘would be lovely.’

  I leaned back in the chair, half-closing my eyes, listening to the silky trickle of the rum into my glass. Ralph, as ever, had dressed my wounds. Already, I felt better.

  ‘I was married for nearly fifty years,’ I heard Ralph say, ‘and we pretty much went through it.’

  I opened my eyes.

  ‘Went through what?’

  ‘Everything that you can possibly imagine. Our first baby died. We had a lot of financial problems. My wife had an affair.’

  ‘She did?’

  I was staring at him, ashamed that I hadn’t asked about the baby.

  ‘Yes.’ He nodded. ‘She’d been married before, of course. I don’t know whether I ever mentioned it. She’d had one of those wartime marriages. He was an American airman, as a matter of fact. Navigator on a B-17.’

  ‘What happened to him?’

  ‘He was killed in a landing accident. To tell you the truth, I don’t think Sally ever got over it.’ He lifted the glass to his lips, sipping the rum. ‘Years later, she took up with another American, a businessman this time. It was months before I twigged what was going on.’

  ‘She admitted it?’

  ‘She told me about him. The night before she left.’

  ‘Left?

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘With the kids?’

  ‘Kid. We only had one at the time. Jamie’s mother, Ruth. No.’ He shook his head. ‘Ruthie stayed.’

  ‘And your wife came back?’

  ‘Yes, in the end she did.
But it wasn’t right. Not then. Not ever, really. Not if you want the truth.’

  He broke off, plucking helplessly at the crease in his trousers, and I felt suddenly swamped with sympathy, a raw, hot feeling that threatened to overwhelm both of us. I got up and perched myself on the arm of his chair. When I covered his hands with mine, I could feel them trembling.

  ‘What are you saying, Ralph?’

  He looked up at me. His eyes were a milky blue.

  ‘I’m saying you should be thankful for what you had. It’s rare, Ellie. If it felt good, it was good. That’s all I’m saying.’

  ‘But -’

  He reached up, sealing my lips with his long, bony forefinger.

  ‘I mean it. Sally and I, bless her, were never right and we knew it. Knowing it and admitting it are two different things but at my age life finds you out. In the end there’s no pretending, no make-believe. You know what it was really like.’

  ‘And Adam?’

  ‘He loved you. I’m certain of it.’

  I left Ralph’s an hour or so later. Jamie had returned from his run, pinked with exertion, and the sound of him singing in the bathroom shower had broken the spell between us. I was more grateful than I could ever say to Ralph. I knew how much he’d risked by trying to help me and the fact that he’d succeeded was a tribute to his courage as well as his kindness.

  Before I left, he showed me the latest progress on the Mustang book. A month before the end of the war, Karel Brokenka - the Czech pilot who’d downed the Me 109 - had force-landed the plane in Sweden after a coolant failure. Years later, the Swedes had sold it on to the Israeli Air Force. After action in the Suez affair, Ralph said, the old warhorse had been bought by a Maltese entrepreneur and put out to grass. Quite what happened next wasn’t entirely clear but Ralph was still writing letters and sooner or later he was confident of pinning down the rest of the story. To me, our little fighter’s history sounded hopelessly complicated and I admitted as much as I stood on the doorstep, saying goodbye. Ralph put a hand on my arm.

  ‘Relax,’ he said. ‘You’re in a spin but it’s perfectly recoverable. Just take your hands off the controls and let the damn thing sort itself out.’

  I was still trying to find my car keys.