Permissible Limits (17 page)

Harald got up, excusing himself from coffee. The green, skintight leather gloves he used for flying were out on the hall table. I followed him, still reeling.

‘
You’re off already?’

‘
I’m up to North Weald and they haven’t got lights. An hour ten in the Yak. I’ll just make it.’ He kissed me lightly on the cheek. ‘There’s one thing I haven’t mentioned. About the deal.’

‘
What’s that?’

He opened the front door, then turned back to me, slipping on the leather gloves, one after the other.

‘
You learn to fly the Mustang,’ he said softly. ‘And I teach you.’

Chapter six

Two days later, my sister arrived. The first I knew was a phone call the previous afternoon from my mother down in the Falklands. The whole family, she said, had been worried sick about me. How could I possibly cope on my own? How could I grieve properly when I had a business to run? All those planes to look after? Adam’s affairs to sort out? The latter phrase raised a grim smile and I was still trying to assure her that everything was under control when she told me that Andrea had already left.

‘
She’s on the Brize Norton flight,’ my mother explained, ‘The Tristar took off a couple of hours ago.’

Direct flights down to the Falklands operate from the RAF airfield at Brize Norton. Brize is up in Oxfordshire and I spent the rest of the evening reorganising everything so that I could put the car on the ferry from Cowes first thing and be at the airfield in time to collect her.

Andrea, at thirty-nine, is the oldest of us three girls and had always been
my
father’s favourite. She is undeniably the most attractive of all of us - long-legged, angular, blonde, with the kind of brooding
intensity that a
lot of
men find irresistible. She’s academically
bright too, the only Tranter to stand any chance of making it to university. Maybe because of this, she’s always preserved a careful distance from myself and Kate, and the news that she was flying eight thousand miles to take care of little
me
was, to
be
frank, a surprise. I was grateful, of course, and it would doubtless
be
lovely to see her again, but something didn’t quite gel. Given the fact that we’d never been especially close, just why was she making such an extravagant gesture?

I had my answer within minutes of meeting her in the arrivals hall. The big Tristar had been half an hour early, and Andrea was one of the first passengers through. A brand-new Berghaus anorak and beautifully cut jeans couldn’t disguise how much weight she’d lost. Never fat, she looked gaunt, even ill. When we kissed, her lips were cold. I pushed her trolley across the car park. It was a glorious spring morning, the sky a brilliant blue, the softest of breezes laced with the tang of aviation fuel.

‘
It’s freezing,’ Andrea complained. ‘Even the bloody Falklands was warmer than this.’

I was loading her luggage into the back of the estate car. Judging by the number of suitcases she’d brought, Andrea would be with me until Christmas. I began to babble some nonsense about the weather, how marvellous it had been, how everyone was worried about drought, but when I slammed the tailgate shut and looked up, Andrea was already sitting in the car, her head wreathed in cigarette smoke.

I joined her, slipping my keys into the ignition. ‘How’s Hamish?’ I asked brightly.

Hamish was Andrea’s husband, a big, hunky Royal Marine who’d married my sister six or seven years back and traded in his service career for the post of PE teacher at Stanley’s new secondary school.

Andrea was watching an elderly couple peering up at the destination board on a nearby coach.

‘
He’s left me,’ she said stonily, ‘the bastard.’

We took the Oxford road out of Brize Norton. By the time I was back on the A34, heading for Southampton, Andrea had told me the whole story. Hamish, she said, had been acting strangely for more than a year. At first, she’d put his evasiveness and his unexplained absences down to the sheer size of his workload. As well as a million and one responsibilities at school, he’d taken on the setting-up of a Falklands-wide football league. The league included teams from the army base at Mount Pleasant, and there’d been endless meetings, countless crises, umpteen cancelled fixtures, pressure enough to try any man’s patience.

Gradually, though, it had dawned on Andrea that there was more to Hamish’s mood swings and savage outbursts of temper than disputes about pitch size and refereeing qualifications. For one thing, their sex life - evidently never brilliant - had come to a virtual halt. For another, he’d begun to drink. Not sociably, in the way that the pair of them had always drunk, but sullenly and very often alone.

‘
I watched him changing,’ she kept saying, ‘I watched him becoming someone else. Do you know what I mean?’

She looked sideways at me, her fourth cigarette as yet unlit, but I kept my eyes on the road. For the best part of an hour I’d been hunting for parallels with my own errant husband, but so far - thank God - I hadn’t found a single one.

‘
No,’ I said, ‘I haven’t a clue what you mean.’

‘
Then you’re bloody lucky.’

‘
Lucky?’
I stared at her.

‘
Yes. Men are animals. Cowards, too, when it really comes down to it. Do you know what he said when I confronted him? He said it wasn’t his fault. He said I’d driven him to it. By being too strong. Too tough.
Tough?
Me? Can you believe that?’

I could. Six years away from the Falklands - not a single holiday, not a single flying visit - had softened my memories of Andrea. Now I remembered just how hard, how unforgiving she could be. For three years, as an only child, she’d been the very centre of attention, and deep down I’d always suspected she was determined to keep it that way. Hamish, I thought, might just have made a very wise decision.

I heard the scrape of a match. The other woman’s name was Jacqui.

‘
Have you met her?’ I ventured.

‘
Met
her? I practically saved the woman’s life when she first arrived. Hamish took her out in the Land Rover and they walked up some bloody mountain or other. Longden. Two Sisters. I can’t remember. Anyway, it was raining, and the poor lamb got pneumonia.’

‘
You nursed her?’

‘
Yes, and fed her, and kept her amused. But that’s what you do, don’t you? When your husband brings some stray back from the airport and she’s too dozy to have found anywhere half-decent to live.’ She took a long pull on the cigarette, gazing moodily out at the budding hedgerows. So far, apart from a sisterly pat on the arm, she hadn’t said anything at all about Adam.

‘
But she moved out in the end
’,
I
prompted. ‘She must have done.
’

‘
Too right she did.’

She named a new development that sprawled up towards the ridge line that looked down over Stanley Harbour. Jacqui had rented a bungalow with a couple of colleagues from the oil exploration company where they all worked. It must be cosy, I thought, now that Hamish was there too.

‘
Do you see him at all?’

‘
Of course I do. You know Stanley. It’s hardly the kind of place you can hide yourself away.’

‘
I suppose not.’ I tried to sound sympathetic, ‘It must be difficult.’

Andrea reached forward, stabbing the remains of her cigarette into the ashtray.

‘
It’s murder’ she said savagely, ‘Thank God I can be some use here.’

We were back at Mapledurcombe by late afternoon. The sun was setting over the distant swell of Tennyson Down and
the
view from the bedroom that would be Andrea’s had never looked more fabulous. My sister gave it a passing glance. Fourteen hours in a Tristar seemed to have left her, if anything, with an excess of energy.

Already, in a brief tour of the house, she’d listed the items that needed attention. The little snug at the end of the downstairs hall to be tarted up. One or two bits of furniture in the dining room to be replaced. An old and much-loved rug in the room we used as a lounge to be rolled up and carted away to the dump. Life, with Andrea, had always been this way, a ceaseless assault on those little pockets of domesticity that you treasure and defend. Back home, as children, she’d always made a point of telling me exactly where to hang the Leonard Cohen posters in my room. Half a lifetime later, absolutely nothing had changed.

‘
You must be knackered,’ I said hopefully, watching her unpack. ‘We’ll have an early supper, then I’ll let you get your head down.’

Andrea threw me a look.

‘
Hamish used to say that,’ she muttered, ‘and now I know why.’

The next day was Friday, a week and a bit since I’d got the news about Adam’s accident. In eight brief days my world had turned upside-down and it was already obvious that Andrea’s arrival had given it yet
another
spin. We’d stayed up until one in the morning, fuelled by a bottle of duty-free brandy while she’d ranted on about Hamish. I’d done my best to make the right noises and - God knows - I was only too aware of the way she must have been feeling. Like me, Andrea had never been able to have children, and like me she seemed to have invested pretty much everything in a man who’d let her down. But at that point, I told myself, the similarities between us came to an end. Even with my own kith and kin I’d never be so open, so graphic, about my wounds. And never, come to that, would I be so vindictive about the man who’d caused them. Marriage is an on-going negotiation. Even in death, as I was beginning to discover, the process of give and take, of forbearance and forgiveness, never ends.

It was mid-morning before Andrea joined me in the kitchen. I was sitting at the table with a calendar and one of Adam’s ring-binder pads, trying to draw up a schedule of things to do before the opening of the new season. When Andrea peered at the grid of ringed dates and asked me what it all meant, I told her.

‘
So how many people are you expecting?’

‘
That first week?’ I consulted my list of bookings. ‘Three couples and a sweet old boy from Minneapolis who’s been over before.’

‘
Seven
?’

Without looking, I could visualise the curl of Andrea’s lip. From what little I’d told her about Old Glory, I think she must have been expecting an operation on an infinitely grander scale.

‘
Yes,’ I said, ‘seven. Our capacity’s eight but we’ve given Mr Olafsson a whole suite to himself.’

‘
And charged him single rate?’

‘
Of course.’

‘
Why do that? Isn’t the point of any business to make money?’

I blinked. I’d been expecting a little light flak from Andrea but nothing this concentrated, or this soon. Old Glory was mine now. I ran it. I made the decisions.

‘
He came over with his wife last time,’ I said defensively. ‘She died before Christmas.’

‘
Is that why he’s over again?’

‘
Yes.’

Andrea was bending down now, peering at my list of bookings. I could feel her breath on the nape of my neck.

‘
And did you give them the Mitchell Suite last time?’

‘
Yes.’

‘
And that’s why he wants it again?’

‘
Of course.’ I got up, pushing back my chair a little more forcefully than was strictly necessary. ‘Breakfast?’

Andrea sat on the edge of the kitchen table smoking a cigarette while I made her scrambled eggs on toast. She was much taller than me and the sight of her in one of Adam’s dressing gowns was oddly
disconcerting. Already, in twelve brief hours, I
felt
Mapledurcombe
somehow slipping away from me, shadowed by her presence. Now, in what I suspected was a bid to shift the conversation back to Hamish, she asked me how it had been in my own marriage.