‘And you?’
Harald smiled at me and shook his head. ‘Orange juice,’ he said, ‘I’m afraid.’
We toasted my solo. When I told him how brilliant he’d been, he turned his head away, not saying anything. We’d become really good friends by now, a simple straightforward relationship tempered and burnished by something I can only describe as a deep mutual respect. I think he knew how much I admired his patience and his airmanship and in return I like to think he’d put aside the little scene I’d made in the restaurant. Since that evening, neither of us had mentioned either Adam or Jamie and for that I was profoundly grateful. Coming to terms with something as potentially lethal as the Mustang lends a certain sense of perspective. A lot of things matter in this world and one of them is survival. Going solo was a much bigger phrase than I’d ever imagined.
Harald was unwrapping the tuna sandwiches. I could see the mayonnaise oozing over the thick slices of rye bread.
‘What next?’ I enquired.
‘Depends.’
‘On what?’
‘You.’
He handed me a sandwich. Service, I was glad to note, didn’t extend to anything as un-Harald as plates. I took a bite of tuna, realising how famished I was. Harald was still waiting for an answer.
‘I’m happy,’ I wiped my mouth, ‘to do whatever.’
‘OK.’ He nodded and looked away again. ‘Then how about this.’
He outlined a flying programme. We had just under three weeks left. If the weather held and there were no serviceability problems, we’d be looking at another forty hours or so in the air. He’d like to put me in one of the Cavalier Mustangs, a single-seater with the full armament fit. He’d be flying alongside in another Cavalier and we’d be sticking to the brief-sortie-debrief pattern he applied to all the formal conversion courses. Forty hours wasn’t a lifetime’s flying but it should give me, in his phrase, ‘a familiarity with the relevant SOPs’.
SOP means Standard Operating Procedure. Ten days at Standfast had given me a pretty good idea of what they might involve but I had to be sure.
‘What exactly do you mean, Harald?’
‘I mean putting all this to some use. Sure, it’s nice to fly around once in a while and take a look at the view, but the plane was built for a purpose.’ He began to doodle in the dust beside the blanket, using a bent old twig. ‘The Cavalier’s a workhorse. We hang stuff off it. Once you can fly the thing, you become the mailman.’
‘Mailman?
‘Yeah, the guys who come here are in the delivery business. Bombs, Willy Pete, Hell Jelly. You name it, we teach them how to make the drop.’
A crude aeroplane was taking shape in the dust and I gazed down at it, realising just how easy it was to slip into this world of Harald’s. Willy Pete was white phosphorus. Hell Jelly was napalm. Harald must have dropped tons of the stuff over Vietnam, and the combat skills he’d brought home doubtless formed part of the Standfast package.
I sipped at the champagne, thinking of the men I saw every morning, young pilots up from Central and South America, testing themselves against 12,000 pounds of vintage aeroplane.
‘You want me to do the full course?’
‘Bits of it.’
‘Including dive-bombing?’
‘Sure, and air-to-air, and tactical appreciations, and a little close-formation work.’ He looked down at the shape of the aeroplane in the dust and then tossed the twig away. ‘You’ll get a taste, maybe a little more than that. It’s just training really, dressed up as combat.’
Combat. He’d said it.
‘You want me to fight in the Mustang? Become a man?’
‘I want you to fly to your limits. This is one way of doing it.’
‘The only way?’
‘The best way.’
He reached lazily for the bottle and poured me more champagne. I’d had very little breakfast and the first glass had already begun to blur the edges of the day. I was made for this, I thought, stretching full-length on the blanket and trying to imagine what the dive-bombing course might entail. Away to the south, Standfast had a practice range, and when the wind was in the right direction you could hear the crump-crump of the little iron eggs I watched being loaded every morning.
I closed my eyes, waving away the insects.
‘Why do you have to fight to fly well?’
‘You don’t. Not if you have good hands.’
‘Do I have good hands?’
‘You have wonderful hands. You fly very well. You’re a natural.’
Good hands. Adam had used exactly the same phrase. Harald’s compliments made me tingle inside. That, and the champagne.
‘So why all this military stuff? The toys for the boys?’
I opened one eye, feeling Harald’s shadow across my face. He was sitting with his back to me, his knees drawn up, and he began to muse aloud about fighter pilots, how competitive they were, how they were always keeping the score.
‘Is that important?’
The question seemed to surprise him. He glanced round, his face shadowed by the peak of his cap.
‘Of course it’s important.’
‘Why? Because it’s all about winning?’
‘Sure, but it’s more than that.’
‘You mean there’s something more important than winning?’
‘Of course.’ Harald ignored the mockery in my voice. ‘There’s control, too. Planning the thing out, leaving nothing to chance, making sure that bit of sky stays yours. You know what they say about combat?’
I looked up at him, thinking suddenly of my glorious solo flight, the feeling of just hanging there, bathed in sunshine, weightless, immortal. Was this what Harald meant by control? Or was there a darker secret?
‘Tell me…’ I murmured, closing my eyes again. ‘Tell me what they say about combat.’
‘It’s easy. You never fight a fair fight.’
‘You don’t?’
‘Never. You stack the odds. You choose the time and the place. You make sure you’re higher, tighter, smarter, faster. When I’m ready and you’re about to die…’ he laughed softly,’… that’s what a fighter pilot dreams about.’
Something in his voice penetrated the Krug. I sat up, swatting away the mosquitoes.
‘That sounds horrible,’ I told him. ‘That’s not my kind of flying.’
‘It isn’t,’ he nodded, ‘and that makes you very lucky.’
‘Lucky? Why? Don’t people have a choice? Do you have to be a fighter pilot? Think about the odds all the time? Dream about killing people? Is that compulsory? Or am I missing something here?’
‘You’re missing nothing. Like I say, you’re lucky.’
‘And you?’
‘I’m a fighter pilot.’
There was a long silence. Far away, I thought I heard the cough of a Merlin misfiring. I rolled over, still thinking about what he’d said.
‘You make it sound like a life sentence. What have you done to deserve this, Harald? Is it some kind of punishment?’
I’d asked the question partly in jest, but the moment I saw him flinch I knew I’d touched a nerve. I wanted to apologise, to tell him that I hadn’t meant to intrude, but when I tried to do just that he shook his head, telling me there was no need. He’d liked being a fighter pilot. It was one of the things he was good at. Never in a million years would he think of it as a punishment.
‘And hey, I still get to do it, still get to fool around, thanks to that place.’
He nodded in the direction of the airfield and plucked at a stalk of grass. He was trying to lighten the conversation, turn it away from himself, but I wouldn’t let him. I remembered something Chuck had said. Harald’s strung out tighter than a bow, he’d told me. He seems buttoned-down real good but underneath he’s pretty emotional and one day it just might all spill out.
‘What happened, Harald?’ I asked softly. ‘What made you this way?’
‘What way?’
‘So competitive all the time? So much needing to win
?’
He shook his head, brooding on the questions, refusing to answer, and I reached out and touched him gently on the shoulder, the way true friends do. We had a kinship. We were close. I wanted him to know that.
He looked up and for a second I thought he was going to tell me something important, something that might help explain this obsession of his with scores and kills and staying on top. Then, from the Jeep, came the trill of his mobile. The moment had gone. He was on his feet, checking his watch. Away to the east, the growl of the Merlin had grown louder. I swallowed the remains of my champagne and helped myself to another glassful. By the time Harald came back, I was practically asleep.
‘What’s the matter?’
Harald was standing beside me, staring out towards the east. He muttered something about an in-flight problem, and I got to my feet in time to watch one of the Cavalier Mustangs limping in towards the airfield. Smoke was feathering back from the exhausts, and as it flew low over us I could see that part of the rudder was hanging off. I watched it wallowing down the glidepath and I tried to imagine how tricky it must be for the pilot, fighting against the tug of the damaged tail.
Suddenly, in the wake of the plane, there was an overpowering smell of Avgas. A fuel leak as well, I thought. That’s all the pilot would need.
‘What happened?’
Harald was shaking out the blanket. Our picnic by the lake was evidently over.
‘A dogfight turned nasty.’ He picked up the empty champagne bottle. ‘Couple of the guys had a row in the bar last night.’
I was looking for the Mustang again. From this distance it was impossible to judge whether or not he’d make the runway.
‘They’re using live ammunition?’
‘Sure. They shoot at drogues, normally.’ He shrugged. ‘I guess it got a little out of hand.’
After Harald dropped me at the Casa Blanca, I went to my bedroom. Early afternoon was always the hottest part of the day, and four glasses of champagne had put paid to any flying. I pushed the door open, grateful for the air-conditioning and the prospect of a long nap. Only when I pulled the sheet down did I see the letters.
There were three of them and I knew at once that they were all from Jamie. The same green Pentel. The same thick trademark kisses scrawled across the back of the envelope. I slipped into bed, trying to work out the dates on the postmarks. Quite deliberately over the past week I’d neither phoned nor written. The realisation that Jamie had lied to me in that first letter was deeply upsetting, and no matter how hard I tried to make excuses for him I knew that something had changed. Maybe all the stuff about Andrea ripping up my photos was poetic licence. Maybe he’d never meant me to take it seriously. But either way, there was a part of me that didn’t entirely believe him any more. If he’d lied about Andrea, what else shouldn’t I take at face value?
It was questions like these that ate away at my concentration and I knew only too well that the last thing I should take with me every morning were worries about my love life. The Mustang was the most demanding partner I’d ever met. And unlike Jamie, it could all too easily kill me.
Now, though, it was different. The last ten days had toughened me immeasurably. I felt strong. I felt immensely pleased with myself. And - a real surprise, this - I felt a tremendous sense of independence. Adam had been right all along. Flying can change your life.
The letters, as it turned out, were linked. Jamie had helpfully numbered each envelope, and as the pile of airmail paper grew and grew on the bedside table it began to dawn on me that I had acquired yet another role in his young life. Not simply his lover, and flight instructor, and long-distance correspondent, but also - his word, not mine - his confessor.
The story, as far as I could gather, centred on a woman he’d met at university up in Aberdeen. She was older than him, nearly thirty, and German. Her name was Gitta and she was nearing the end of a two-year course in business studies. Back home in Munich, she worked for one of the big German oil companies and one of the reasons her bosses had sent her off to Aberdeen was to brush up on her English. Once she’d graduated, there was an important job waiting for her down in the company’s London offices. Gitta was well-off, beautiful and newly divorced. Jamie, poor lamb, had fallen in love with her.
The affair had lasted nearly eighteen months. Gitta had been renting a big two-bedroomed flat up near the university, and Jamie had moved in. He’d never, he wrote, had any clear idea where the relationship would lead but the thought that it might one day end was inconceivable.
Gitta had come to obsess him. Sexually, she’d taught him everything he’d ever known. Mentally, she put him to shame. Every successive day had drawn him closer to her. Every night, he’d wanted more and more of her. He’d felt himself losing sight of the person he really was, a process of surrender that was both wilful and delicious. Gitta had swamped every last atom in his body. When he occasionally surfaced, and took an inventory, there was nothing left that was his. The word he used again and again was enslavement. He worshipped her. He followed her around. Pathetic. Needful. Lost.
Lost. I thought of Harald and his iron grip on life, on circumstances, on himself. Then I read on, trying to imagine Jamie with this lustrous, talented siren, the woman who’d taken my puppy-lover and put him on a lead, and dragged him down to London.
They’d found a house in Chiswick. It had three bedrooms and a garden shed in the back yard where Jamie could keep all the stuff he used for tree surgery. At first he’d assumed that life in London would be Aberdeen with sunshine. They’d sleep late, make love at noon, take long walks by the river. The reality, though, was very different. Transformed by her job, and her brand-new degree, Gitta had disappeared every morning to some office in the City he didn’t even want to visualise. When she came back it was late - often eight or nine at night - and she brought with her a life and a career that he found deeply threatening. People she worked with. Men she met for lunch. A whole cast of people who seemed to belong to something she called Der wirklichen Welt. The real world.
Poor Jamie. I sat back, thinking of him alone in Chiswick with his chain saw and his bewilderment and his big fat tubs of fairy dust. Every night, being Jamie, he’d try and revive a little of the old magic, and every night, being the bright young thing he undoubtedly was, he’d have to confront the terrible knowledge that whatever it was had gone. One of life’s blessings had been Gitta. And one of life’s crueller lessons was the realisation that she wasn’t, after all, his property.
She’d asked him to leave only a couple of months ago. She’d turned up, unusually, in mid-afternoon. He’d been typing out some estimates in the little back bedroom he used as an office. She’d sat him down on the bed and told him that she’d fallen in love with a City trader called Tom. Jamie had been denied even the comfort of knowing she’d been swept off her feet by a fellow German. No. Tom was something big in sugar futures. And he was every bit as English as Jamie.
A couple of months ago. I kept my diary in my grab bag. I flicked back through April, trying to remember exactly when it was that I’d first laid eyes on Jamie. It had been down at Ralph’s place. Jamie had been staying the weekend. I closed my eyes, leaning back against the pillow, remembering him coming in from his run, his face pinked with exertion, his runners caked in mud. It must have happened then, I thought. Heartbroken, homeless, sick of London, he must have fled south to the comforts of Ralph and his little bungalow by the sea. I thought of everything else that had happened to him - his father’s affair, the step-family he’d never known, his mother’s suicide - and I thought again of this German woman, Gitta, and everything he must have invested in her.
Gitta would have been the fresh start, the kind of headlong love affair that begins like a miracle and ends in a bitterness that I knew only too well. I returned to the letters. Losing Gitta, he said, was a blow so unexpected, so bloody unfair, that he’d seriously toyed with suicide himself. He could see no end to his grief, no point in carrying on, and it was only his contempt
for his father that had kept him from following his mother’s footsteps to the nearest station and chucking himself under a train. The Germans had a phrase for it. Gotterdammerung. The final curtain. Too bloody right.
I opened the third letter, as yet unread. Andrea had been right. After we’d said our goodbyes at Heathrow, Jamie had gone back into central London. He wasn’t clear, even now, why he’d done it, but there were ghosts to be laid, and accounts to be settled, and much, much sooner than he’d ever dreamed possible he felt strong enough, and dispassionate enough, to walk the half-mile from Turnham Green tube station and knock on the door and step back into Gitta’s life. She’d been alone. The thing with Tom hadn’t worked out. They’d talked for most of the night. He’d told her all about me, all about us, and at half past three in the morning Gitta had broken the news. She was four months pregnant. With Jamie’s baby.
I stared at the words on the page. Jamie? A father? Back in the hotel, that first night on Jersey, he’d hinted of shadows in his past, and reading about Gitta, and what she’d meant to him, I’d begun to understand. But this was something else entirely. He’d loved this woman, given himself to her, and now she was carrying his baby. What next?
The rest of the letter tussled with exactly that. There was no question, he said, that he and Gitta would ever get back together again. Gitta, it seemed, was all for trying but Jamie was insistent that it wouldn’t work. His life had moved on. There was me now, the relationship we’d built, the promises we’d made, the log book we’d jointly started for this new journey of ours. The phrases brought a smile to my face and I wondered what Gitta must have made of them. One day, I thought, Jamie might just take a risk or two with someone his own age. Not an ambitious divorcee. Or an even older widow.
I’d got to the last page now, and naturally enough the story took one final twist before the row of kisses waiting for me on the bottom line. Gitta had laid down an ultimatum. Unless Jamie was prepared to give them both another chance, she was going to have the baby aborted. Without a father, she had absolutely no intention of starting a family. I read the last paragraph again, not altogether sure that I understood what he was really saying. Was there a message here that he was too timid - or too young - to voice? Wasn’t he really telling me that he’d like to go back, that he’d never really got Gitta out of his system? And in that case, mightn’t the baby - assuming there was a baby - be nothing more than a pretext? A smokescreen behind which Jamie and I might disengage with honour?
Permissible Limits Page 32