Permissible Limits (5 page)

‘
What will you do?’

‘
Write to the Bundesarchiv. That’s the German lot. Their records are over in Berlin. I gather they’re pretty helpful and I promised Karel I’d get back to him the moment they come up with something solid.’ He tapped the file containing the squadron records. ‘It’s all elimination, of course. Their pilots filed reports, just like ours. I imagine the chap we’re after’s probably dead, but if he survived…’ He frowned. ‘Are you sure you want to keep the Mustang?’

‘
Positive.’

‘
Only now’s the time…’ Ralph’s eyes were back on the mountain of books on the desk.

I shook my head and told him again that the aircraft was staying in the family. The phrase made him smile and he patted my arm before returning to his chair by the fire. The archival detective work, he said, had been a real pleasure, but a revelation, too. So many letters. So much cross-checking. So much light to be shed on those faraway days he remembered so well. For an hour or so, happily, I listened to him musing about his own little corner of the war, the aircraft he’d flown, the friendships he’d made, the moments when he’d battled for a kill, the conclusions he’d come to about exactly what it was that put the best fighter pilots way out ahead of the rest.

‘
And what was it?’

‘
Ruthlessness. Single-mindedness. Tunnel vision, if you like. The chaps who made it, really made it, were mostly bastards. They didn’t care about anyone else, just themselves. Funny that. They’d do well whatever line of country they went into. Peace or war, it wouldn’t matter.’ He nodded. ‘You had to get in close, as close as you could, and you had to have a certain kind of courage. Not normal courage, not what you or I would call courage, but something else.’

‘
What, exactly?’

‘
I don’t know, Ellie. It’s something I’ve thought about and thought about. A lot of these people were almost psychopathic. They had a sort of immunity.’

‘
To what?’

‘
Fear. They were pitiless, cold. You could feel the chill in them. It was as if something inside didn’t work properly. They had a kind of madness. Do you know what I mean?’

I told him I didn’t. He looked thoughtful, gazing at the glowing coals, and I was suddenly struck by a very different Ralph, altogether less sure of himself than perhaps I’d imagined.

‘
What about you?’ I asked gently. ‘Were you up there with them? These aces you talk about?’

‘
No.’ He shook his head, regretful.

‘
Did you try?’

‘
Yes.’

‘
And it didn’t work?’

‘
No.’

‘
Why not?’

He thought about the question, still looking at the fire, then he sighed, favouring me with a rueful smile.

‘
I never got close enough,’ he said, ‘if you want the truth.’

I told him it didn’t matter. Not to me. Then I was struck by something else.

‘
What about Adam?’ I asked him. ‘Would he have made it?’

He gave the question some thought. Then he shook his head.

‘
No,’ he said slowly. ‘He wouldn’t.’

‘
Why not?’

‘
You really want to know?’

‘
Yes please.’

‘
Because he was too human, too eager, too much in a hurry. And because he let his attention wander. You couldn’t afford to do that. Not if you wanted serious kills.’

I nodded, thinking of Adam, my puppy, my playmate, the glorious man who’d filled my heart, and shared my bed, and turned my life upside down.

‘
You’re right,’ I conceded. ‘But that’s why I loved him.’

Ralph smiled.

‘
And needed him,’ he said quietly.

Adam had been away in Africa a month before I realised what it was that I hated about Britain. We were still living in a draughty terraced house in Aberdeen, our first proper home after we’d married and Adam had got a job
flying
supply helicopters out to the North Sea oil rigs. The job only lasted nine months or so - Adam got bored - but it was through American contacts he met on the rigs that he landed the contract with the South African people. This new assignment took him out of the country for spells of three months or longer, and while he was away I did my best to make friends locally. We’d been out with several couples when Adam was still at home but I quickly discovered that operating as a single woman does absolutely nothing for your social life. The result, predictably, was loneliness.

This, to be honest, came as
a
surprise. At home, in the Falklands, I’d never given the need for company a thought. By choice, I was often out with Smoko on my own, but I’d never once felt lonely. Back at the settlement, I had two sisters, a mum, a dad, and good buddies amongst the young shepherds and roustabouts who lived in the cookhouse. A day’s ride away, there were more settlements, more friends, more conversation. But in Britain, where you couldn’t move for people, there didn’t seem to be the same sense of kinship. People were cautious, wary, suspicious even. The way you dressed, which
supermarket you went to, how much your husband earned, all these
things appeared to matter. Packed into a big city, each of us seemed infinitely more isolated and cut off than I’d ever noticed in the emptiness of the Falklands.

With loneliness came a longing to be home again, and on the gloomier days I began to drive out into the mountains, desperate for an hour or so when I could tramp around, and feel the wind on my face, and kid myself that I was back at Gander Creek. It never worked, of course, because there was always the drive back to Aberdeen, and the traffic jams on the ring road, and news of yet another stabbing on the TV once I’d got myself locked and bolted behind my nice big front door. As the weeks went by, I began to hate this half-life, and in my letters to Adam I must have said so because the moment he came home on leave he came up with the answer.

‘
I’ll teach you to fly,’ he said. ‘We’ll start next week.’

And we did. He’d made friends with one of the managers out at Dyce airport. The guy was also ex-navy and he had shares in an old Tiger Moth. A Moth is a biplane, one big wing on top of the other, and it’s
got
a little metal skid at the back which makes it, in Adam’s phrase, a tail-dragger. There are simpler ways of learning to fly than starting in a biplane but Adam, who was seldom less than sure of himself, wouldn’t entertain the thought of anything modern. An open cockpit, he assured me, was the very best introduction to what he promised would be a life-changing experience.

It was early April when we started, a raw, bright day with a chilly wind blowing in off the sea. We were flying from a private farm strip up the coast, about a forty-minute drive from Aberdeen, and when we got there I was delighted to find how rudimentary the set-up was. A scruffy old Portakabin. Fuel hand-pumped from forty-gallon drums. And a youth on a tractor to clear the cattle from the strip whenever someone wanted to take off or land. This was a world to which I needed no introduction. Gander Creek. Definitely.

I got changed in the Portakabin. It smelled of the fertiliser the farmer had stacked in bags at one end. Adam had found me a flying suit from somewhere or other but it was at least a size too big. Wearing an extra pullover filled up most of the space inside, and after I’d rolled up the trouser bottoms and the sleeves I felt like a badly wrapped parcel. Adam had produced a leather helmet, too, and a pair of goggles, but it wasn’t until we were walking out across the grass that I realised he was serious about me wearing them. Like the plane itself, with its struts and its wires, and the worn leather trim around the cockpit, the helmet and the goggles seemed like props from some period movie.

Adam helped me put them on, tightening the helmet strap beneath my chin and then adjusting the goggles so they sat snugly on my face. For this first flight, he’d let me sit in the front cockpit. Later, once the real training started, we’d swap seats. When I asked why, he said something complicated about the aircraft’s centre of gravity. In a month or so, fingers crossed, I’d be going solo. Flying solo, you always sat in the rear cockpit.

‘
So why don’t I sit in the rear cockpit now?’

‘
Because you’ll get a better view from the front.’

‘
What about you? Don’t you need the better view?’

‘
No problem. Just promise me you won’t throw up.’ He gestured at the open cockpit. ‘First time I flew, I covered the guy behind in breakfast.’

The story made me laugh and I clambered into the front cockpit, making myself comfortable while Adam ran through the controls. I did my best to memorise the basics - stick, rudder, throttle - but sitting there listening to Adam explaining the way the seat harness buckled and unbuckled, I remember thinking how odd the whole exercise was. Another reason for being so fed up with living in Britain was because of the restrictions, the feeling of being so hemmed in. Yet here was my beloved husband, binding me hand and foot on the promise that flying would give me back my freedom.

He finished the briefing with a word about the parachute. If we got into trouble, he’d let me know on the intercom. If the intercom didn’t work, he said playfully, he’d reach forward from the rear cockpit and tap me on the shoulder. Three taps meant bale out. Two taps meant stand by.

‘
And one tap?’

I remember him squeezing my gloved hand.

‘
Means I love you.’

The bellow of the engine terrified me. I hadn’t expected it to be so loud, so obviously powerful. The propeller was a blur in seconds and the wind gusting back around the cockpit suddenly tasted of burnt petrol. We bumped out across the grass. It had been raining for most of the winter and over the cackle of the engine I could hear the wheels squelching through the puddles of standing water. Because of the way the aircraft’s nose was tilted up, neither of us could see a thing and Adam had to weave the plane from side to side, checking left and right to gauge the turn for the marked strip down the middle of the field that constituted the runway. The Moth seemed clumsy, ungainly, poorly balanced, lurching from side to side every time we hit a divot or a rabbit hole, and I remember thinking how unnatural the whole thing felt. Smoko and I had been friends in seconds. Flying,
on first acquaintance, seemed a pretty
grim
substitute.

Hard against the hedge at the end of the strip, I listened to Adam murmuring to himself as he ran through some kind of checklist. He seemed completely at home, completely happy, and after he’d told me to adjust the little rearview mirror attached to the top wing, he gave me a grin and a thumbs-up before revving the engine and turning the aircraft into the wind. The Moth began to gather speed and I became aware of the control stick moving between my legs as Adam pushed it forward to lift the tail. I gazed out, feeling the slipstream tightening the skin around my goggles, watching the grass blur beneath the wing. We were racing along now, the bumping beginning to ease, then suddenly we were airborne, the little biplane crabbing sideways for a moment or two until Adam kicked it straight.

I felt myself grinning, and I looked back, straining against the harness straps, watching the Portakabin, and the tractor, and our battered old Sierra grow smaller and smaller until they disappeared altogether. I’d flown a lot in the Falklands, sometimes in planes little bigger than this one, but flying in the Moth, with its open cockpit and churning engine, was something so different, so new, that I began to understand why Adam had recommended it with such vigour.

The needle on the altimeter was passing 1,200 feet. Away to the west I could see the shadowed wall of the Cairngorms. Beneath us, a perfect line of breaking surf stretched north towards Peterhead and Fraserburgh. Adam was singing now. He had the worst voice in the world, and absolutely no memory for lyrics, so he made them up the way he improvised so much of the rest of his life, and he was still murdering one of the early Beatles numbers when he dropped the little biplane’s nose, revealing a fishing boat and a cloud of seagulls several thousand feet beneath us. I watched the boats get bigger quickly. The note the wind was making in the wires that cross-braced the wings got shriller and shriller. Then the stick came back towards me, and my stomach fell away, and Adam pulled the nose of the Moth up and up until I could see nothing but sky. For a moment we were upside-down, the beat of the engine much slower, then the Moth came off the top of the loop and I watched the coast revolve around us, a whole 360 degrees, until we’d levelled out, the engine churning away again as if nothing had ever happened. The noise Adam could hear in his earphones was quite unprompted, a spontaneous round of applause, my own glad admission that - yet again - my lovely husband had been right.