Permissible Limits (2 page)

I felt my stomach lurch. Eleven twelve was more than four hours ago.

‘
Maybe there was some problem with the transponder,’ I said quickly. ‘Maybe he turned back. Have you tried the French?’

I had a sudden picture, extraordinarily vivid, of Adam in a little café on the edge of some French airfield tucking into steak and frites, but even before the answer came, I knew I was fantasising. Had Adam really turned back, he’d have been on the radio in seconds, and even if the radio had gone U/S as well, he’d have made contact again after landing. He was far too good a pilot to have left the situation unresolved.

I clung to the telephone. According to the policeman, checks on airfields on the other side of the Channel were still awaiting the arrival of someone who spoke French. Now, he was talking about a search-and-rescue operation.

‘
Lee-on-the-Solent have put up a helicopter. They’re in touch with a freighter fifteen miles to the east of the impact point, and the Bembridge lifeboat’s on standby.’

Impact point? My grip tightened on the phone. I couldn’t get the bloody wall display out of my head.

‘
But the trace,’ I insisted, ‘the squawk, seven thousand. Tell me exactly what happened.’

‘
Ah…’ He paused for a second or two, apologetic, regretful. ‘I’m afraid I can’t, Mrs Bruce. I’m simply relaying the facts. They say he’s gone, disappeared. I’m afraid we may have to assume the worst.’

‘
But there wasn’t a radio message?’

‘
Not as far as I know.’

‘
Nothing?

‘
No.’

‘
So where was he? Whereabouts did it happen?’ Another silence. Then the policeman was back again. ‘He was just crossing the fifty-degree north line. Does that make any sense?’

I nodded. The fifty-degree north line was almost exactly mid-Channel. If this nightmare conversation was real, if Adam had indeed ditched, then he’d be out there now, a tiny dot in the ocean. At the height of summer, with no injuries, he could have paddled round for hours but in early February, even with his luck, I knew the prospects were bleak.

The policeman was asking me to stay by the phone. He might have more news within the hour. Before he rang off he was nice enough to ask me if there was anyone close who could stay with me. Lying, I assured him there was.

I remember very clearly the morning when I first met Adam. I was still living down in the Falklands on the sheep settlement where I’d grown up, a rather solitary, introspective nineteen-year-old, much given to moody, day-long excursions on one or other of the farm’s horses.

My favourite was a sturdy chestnut called Smoko. Like me, she had a passion for striking out across the trackless peat and the endless acres of tussock, riding for miles and miles until we were satisfactorily lost. Somehow, we always managed to return in one piece but the magic of the Falklands was the chance to be so overwhelmingly alone, and it was into that solitude that Adam, quite literally, dropped.

It was July 1982. Smoko and I had been reined in by the Argie occupation, and by the war that followed, and this was the first time since April that my father had judged it safe for us to venture out. Even so, we had to stick to areas declared mine-free by the army people and I was deep in one of the maps we’d been issued when I first heard the helicopter.

It was flying very low, following the contour of the hills from the direction of San Carlos Water. I remember shielding my eyes against the low winter sun, watching the little black insect grow quickly bigger. Despite the events of the past few months, Smoko had never quite got used to the clatter of the helicopters and I had to gentle her as the chopper circled us a couple of times before settling on to a nearby stretch of track. It was one of the big Royal Navy helicopters, squat, heavy, the dark-grey bulk of the cabin streaked with salt and oil. They called them Sea Kings and
they were forever flying low over the settlement, frightening
the sheep.

Even when the rotor had stopped turning and it was quiet again, Smoko was still nervous. We watched the pilot studying us from the cockpit. At length he unstrapped himself and appeared at the rear door. He stepped down on to the track and stamped some of the stiffness out of his legs. He was tall, well over six feet, and when he lifted an arm to wave I felt Smoko twitch beneath me. He walked over towards us. He’d taken off his helmet by now and his hair was flattened against his skull the way you look when you come out of the shower. He had a nice grin - spontaneous, unforced - and when he got close and took off his aviator sunglasses, I remember the colour of his eyes. They were the lightest blue, a shade my mother always referred to as ‘mischievous’.

He introduced himself, keeping his distance from the horse. Like most of the service people we’d seen, he looked exhausted, his pale face darkened with stubble.

He wanted to know which settlement I came from. When I told him, he grinned again.

‘
Gander Creek?’

‘
That’s right.’

‘
The Tranters?’

I have two sisters, one older, one younger. We’ve all been fortunate in our physical inheritance, absorbing a mixture of my mother’s long-legged Scandinavian good looks and my father’s wind-buffed Yorkshire sturdiness. I don’t think any of us thought of ourselves as beautiful - I’d much rather have had blue eyes than brown, and my smile is decidedly lop-sided - but we were all still single in ‘82 and it was plain that navy intelligence had spread the word.

Adam was gesturing back towards the Sea King. In a couple of days’ time, it was his winchman’s birthday. He said he owed the old bugger a decent night out and he wondered whether he and his crew and one or two others might drop over for a party. He’d seen the settlement from the air and he knew we had a community hall. He and his boys could muster plenty of Scotch, oodles of vodka, and the winchman had a sackful of disco tapes. They’d been fighting the war for longer than he cared to think about, and now the Argies had jacked it in, there was the bloody weather to contend with.

His mention of the weather made me laugh. Living in the islands all my life, I’d got used to the incessant wind and sudden curtains of squally rain. The thought that a Falklands winter might offer some kind of ordeal was wonderfully novel.

‘
We’ve got a date, then?’

Rather cautiously, I told him it might be possible, but when he said he’d prefer Sunday to Saturday I realised that for him, at least, the party was as good as fixed. He gave me another grin, then extended a gloved hand close enough for me to reach down and shake it.

‘
Nice horse,’ I remember him saying, ‘I’ll try not to frighten it next time.’

It was dark before the police phoned back. I’d been forcing myself around the house, coupling one job to another, fighting the temptation to think too hard about Adam’s wretched Cessna. There had to be some way the West Drayton people had got it wrong. Either that, or Adam had already been picked up. Some fishing boat or other. Some passing mermaid. Anyone, as long as he was still intact.

‘
Nothing, I’m afraid.’

‘
Nothing at all?’

For the first time, I was close to tears. Tears are what happens when you can no longer find the words to keep the lid on all the stuff bubbling up inside. When the policeman came back with another of his sensible questions, I sank into the nearest chair, choked with emotion.

‘
Was he carrying marker dyes?’ he asked for the second time. Dyes stain seawater red. Or green. Or yellow. Damn all use if it happens to be dark. ‘Mrs Bruce?’

Tm sorry.’ I reached for a tea towel, the kitchen a blur. ‘Give me a moment.’

He faltered, then told me that the coastguard would be in touch if there was anything to report. The search was resuming at first light but realistically, unless something exceptional had happened, they were looking at an MPD. Official jargon always gives me the shivers, how cold it can be, how brutally efficient. MPD means Missing Presumed Dead.

I was trying hard to focus on the Aga. Adam used to stand there, I thought. It was his favourite spot, the place he chose to warm his bottom, and unzip his flying suit, and talk me through his latest sortie in the Mustang, or the Harvard, or even my little Moth. Our whole life had been built around these moments, sharing our respective days, comparing notes, swopping stories, sharing a glass or two of scrumpy from the farm down the lane before I busied around with the oven gloves and dished up supper. All that laughter. All that warmth. Gone.

‘
There’ll be a reference to the AAIB,’ the policeman was saying, ‘So you should expect a call from them, as well.’

The AAIB is the Air Accidents Investigation Branch. Until now, thank
God, it had been nothing more than another of those
eternal aviation acronyms.

‘
Of course,’ I said dully. ‘I expect I’ll be here.’

After the policeman had rung off, I went upstairs to the bedroom. Since we converted Mapledurcombe, Adam and I had been living in one wing of the house, a little self-contained suite of rooms off-limits to guests. Having no children, nor much in the way of visiting friends, this corner of the house had been ours to keep exactly as we pleased. The fact that it was so scruffy, so lived-in, was - I
suspect - a delight to both of us. The business we’d chosen to run imposed the highest standards. Here, we could be ourselves.

I lay on the duvet in the darkness, my hands stretched out above my head, my fingers tracing the shapes carved in the bedhead. We’d had the bed longer than we’d had the house. It was French, a big, solid, handsome thing that weighed a ton. Adam had found it in an auction room on Jersey, and shipped it back to the mainland. Like the Aga, and my old bike, and a couple of dozen other items, it had become part of the geography of thirteen years of marriage: comforting, ours, always there. Alone, without Adam, I realised that none of it meant anything.

I must have drifted off to sleep. I awoke to hear the phone ringing downstairs. It was Harald. It was half past midnight. He was in Cowes. He wanted to come over.

By the time he arrived, I had the water boiled for coffee. I heard a car crunching up the drive and I opened the front door to find Harald getting out of the taxi. He bent to the driver’s window.

‘
Give me fifteen minutes,’ I heard him say.

In the hall, Harald held me at arm’s length for a moment or two, then enveloped me. His leather jacket smelled of oil, Avgas and the little black cheroots he occasionally smoked. To my surprise, he was trembling.

‘
Shit,’ he said twice.

I almost asked him what was wrong but the question, of course, would have been idiotic. Over the last year or so, Adam and Harald had become very close. Adam called him a buddy, which for him was rare. Like me, he took few risks with real friendship.

On the panelled wall beside us I’d recently hung a painting that I’d commissioned for Adam’s last birthday. It showed the Mustang skimming the top of a bank of cotton-wool clouds. The nearside wing was slightly low and the artist had done a wonderful job on our sleek silver bird, but I’d been especially pleased with his figurework. The pilot was sitting well back in the cockpit, and the grin on his face could only have belonged to Adam.

Harald couldn’t take his eyes off the picture. He’d been to Mapledurcombe a number of times but the last couple of months he’d been back in the States and I don’t think he’d seen it.

‘
Spooky.’ He was still looking at Adam. ‘You know something?’

‘
No.’

‘
I think he knew.’ ‘Knew what?’

Harald glanced round at me. For a man in his late fifties, he didn’t carry an ounce of spare flesh.

‘
I think he knew the way he’d go, the way it would happen. He’d never make old bones. Those sort of guys never do.’

I stared at him. I had the feeling it was meant as some kind of compliment, a reassurance even, but it had exactly the opposite effect. What Harald was telling me was unambiguous, a big, fat full stop at the end of the worst day of my life.

‘
You think he’s dead?’

‘
I think he’s happy.’

‘
Happy?
What a horrible thing to say.’

‘
Not at all. He was the best. Believe me, the best.’

We had coffee at the kitchen table. Harald never drank alcohol but I helped myself to a tumbler of Adam’s precious malt whisky. I’d never tried it before and I’ve never touched it since. Even now, just the smell of malt is enough to make me want to throw up.