Permissible Limits (51 page)

Now, from God knows where, he’d produced a cake. The men crowded around. It was a big cake, a square thing. On top, in blue icing, someone had carefully reproduced the Standfast logo - an outstretched hand clasping the torch of liberty - and underneath, in pink, was my name.
Ellie Bruce,
it read,
Mustang Aviator.

I stared at it. I’d drunk rather a lot by now and it took me a while to realise that the cheering and the cries of ‘Bravo!’ were for me. I reached up for Harald’s hand. Getting two people on to a chair isn’t easy but we managed it. Harald had his arm round me. He was calling for quiet. Then he began to speak, very softly, in Spanish.

Harald’s Spanish was much better than mine but the drift of what he was saying was obvious. I’d climbed a mountain. I’d joined a club. I was one of the boys. I gazed down at the sea of faces around me. I was acutely aware of being the only woman amongst all these men but I couldn’t remember when I’d last felt so much warmth, so much simple human fellowship. Harald’s speech came to an end. There was a silence. They expected me to say something. The faces began to blur.

I rubbed the tears from my eyes. Harald’s grip had tightened. I did my best to clear my throat.

‘
I come from the Falklands,’ I began haltingly. ‘I grew up on a farm.’

It wasn’t the most tactful way to begin, not when there were one or two Argentinians on the course, but I didn’t care. This was an evening for home truths, and mine couldn’t have been simpler. I told them about Smoko, my beloved piebald grey. I described the days we’d spent out by ourselves, miles from anywhere, a happiness so complete I thought I’d never find it again. I paused. I could feel how tense Harald had become. Everyone was looking up at me, watching, waiting.

I raised my bottle.

‘
To Smoko,’ I said. ‘And to our Mustangs.’

Applause broke out. First a ripple, then a storm. I could see one of the young pilots asking for a translation, wondering exactly what it was I’d said, and the expression on his face when he found out was an image I’ll treasure for ever. They understood, these men. They understood about solitude, and challenge, and coming home safe at the end of it all. To have joined them was an enormous privilege.

An hour or so later, Harald drove me back to the Casa Blanca. I was drunk by now, and I hung on to the grab rail on the dashboard of the Jeep as we bounced across the grass towards the runway. I’d never seen Harald so relaxed. The party had also celebrated the certification of his rebuilt Messerschmitt and he was now making plans to ship the plane over to the UK. I was still on cloud nine, reliving those endless days on the Falklands, and mention of the Fighter Meet brought me back to earth. Harald seemed to be suggesting that I, too, might form part of the display team.

I tried to focus on his face.

‘
You mean flying? In our Mustang?’

‘
Yes.’

The bumping stopped as we crossed the runway. Somewhere in the darkness away to our left were three white lines and an awful lot of rubber. Was this why Harald was putting me through the hoop? Was he trying to turn me into a display pilot?

I tried to voice the question. Harald, I should have known, was rarely in the business of direct answers.

‘
Display flying is heavily regulated,’ he said. ‘It might sound simple but it isn’t.’

I agreed at once. Living with Adam had taught me just how fussy the CAA people could be. Even with his experience, getting a display authorisation had taken months of effort.

‘
But that’s the idea?’ I reached out to Harald to steady myself. ‘You’re going to turn me into a circus act?’

Harald glanced across at me, amused.

‘
We’ll
see. Depends how you shape.’

I looked across at him, expecting more, but he refused to elaborate. So far so good, he seemed to be saying. I sat back, my legs braced, watching the lights of the Casa Blanca getting closer. What would it be like, doing what Adam had done? Stepping into his shoes? Displaying our Mustang in front of tens of thousands of people? Could it possibly be any more difficult than the tests Harald had been setting me? Wasn’t it obvious that I could hack it?

Too many bottles of Sol wreck your better judgement. The Jeep came to a halt outside the Casa Blanca. Harald switched off the engine. I leaned over towards him, collapsing heavily against his shoulder. I could feel him trying to withdraw.

‘
I just want to say thank you,’ I said thickly. ‘For showing me a new life.’

Harald eased me back to the vertical. I kissed him on the lips.

‘
Thank you,’ I repeated.
‘Muchas gracias
’

‘
No problem.’

‘
Has it been a pleasure?’ I held him at arm’s length, trying to focus. ‘Be honest.’

He looked at me for what seemed an age. Then he led me very gently into the house. The next thing I remember was the click of my bedroom door closing behind me. I looked round. I didn’t want to go to bed and I resented the suggestion that I should. Instead, I went across to the window. The dark shadows of Monica’s wilderness loomed out of the night. I could hear the rustle of wind in the trees and the buzzing of a thousand insects. I headed back to the door. I wanted to know about the little cage she left there every afternoon. I wanted to know why she did it, what she put inside. There was a torch in the kitchen. I’d seen it.

I made my way back down the darkened corridor. Of Harald, there was no sign. I was tempted to find him, to invite him along for the ride, but I decided against it. Drunken lady pilots weren’t altogether to his taste, far too wild, far too unpredictable.

Torch in hand, I left the house and made my way along the chain-link fence. The gate, when I found it, was unlocked. I pushed it open, the light from the torch pooling at my feet. I began to wobble along the beaten earth path, sweeping the torch left and right, not knowing what I might find. The Sol had robbed me of fear. I didn’t even mind the clouds of mosquitoes settling on my bare arms. The path veered suddenly to the left, the vegetation pressing against me. It was noisier than ever in here and I began to giggle, wondering how insects ever got a decent night’s sleep, when the torch settled on something metallic.

It was another fence. I stepped towards it. It looked pretty solid, heavy-gauge mesh wired to sturdy timber posts. Beyond it, I could see the dull glint of water. I steadied myself against the nearest post. I was drunker than I realised. I closed my eyes a moment, willing the world to stop spinning, then shone the torch along the fence, trying to find some explanation. Why go to such lengths to protect this little pond? What could possibly justify all these precautions?

In the beam of the torch, a flight of rough wooden steps led up to a little viewing platform. Halfway up I stumbled, gashing my leg beneath my knee. I tried to hold the torch steady, swatting away the mosquitoes from the trickle of blood. I could feel nothing.

I made it safely up the rest of the steps. The handrail around the platform at the top was sticky to my touch. I leant against it, staring down at the water. At first I thought the long black shape beneath me was a log of some kind. Then, very slowly, it began to move. I closed my eyes again and shook my head, annoyed with myself. I shouldn’t have drunk so much. Harald had been right. Bed would have been a much more sensible option.

I opened my eyes, shone the torch down, then took an involuntary step backwards, rigid with shock. An enormous alligator was staring up at me. Its jaws were open and the flesh of its mouth was pink behind the savage rows of teeth, but it was the eye that I’ll never forget. It was a yellowy-greeny colour, the colour of evil, and it was staring up at me, unblinking. Very slowly, I began to retreat down the wooden steps. This brought me even closer to the alligator. I switched off the torch, not wanting to look, but its jaws were still open and the sour fish-stink of its breath was overpowering.

At the foot of the steps I turned and fled, my heart still thumping. At the end of the path, the gate clanged shut behind me and I lay against it, breathing hard, trying to rid myself of the sight and smell of the alligator. I understood now about the need for all these fences. But why the afternoon visitations? And why the empty metal cage afterwards?

After a while, calmer, I turned the torch on and followed the fence around the property. Above the hum of the insects and the dry rasping of the cicadas, I could hear music, something classical and immensely sad. There was a clarinet in there, diving and soaring, and I made my way along the path that skirted the pool.

Harald’s den was at the back of the far wing. His windows were open behind the insect mesh, and the light inside threw a soft white panel across the grass. I paused. I’d been badly frightened. There were questions I wanted answered. The Casa Blanca had begun to spook me. I stirred again and crept towards the window. Then I
stopped.
Harald
was sitting
at his
desk, the chair swivelled sideways,
his face in profile. In his right hand, held high, was a plastic model of an aircraft. It was a single-seater, propeller-driven, and at first I thought it was the Mustang he’d used when he briefed me. He held the little plane at arm’s length and he was flying it in long, graceful turns, perfectly matched to the music. It was like a child’s game, mesmeric, dreamlike, and I must have been watching for a couple of minutes before it dawned on me that this wasn’t a Mustang at all. It was too small. The profile was all wrong.

The music was coming to an end now and I edged a little closer to the window as the aircraft soared upwards. At the top of the loop, Harald held it perfectly still, and at last I had a chance to recognise the tiny swastika on the tail. The plane was a Messerschmitt, a 109, just like Harald’s.

The music ended. For a second or two the plane hung there, secure between Harald’s fingers. Then he let the little fighter fall, and in the busy silence of the night I heard the splintering of the wings and fuselage as it disintegrated on the desk below.

Chapter fifteen

The memories of that night have never left me - the party, getting drunk, the nightmare that awaited me in Monica’s wilderness - but the questions I wanted so badly to ask were quickly swamped by the rest of Harald’s flying programme. From the start, he’d promised to stretch me in every direction, and over the next three weeks that’s exactly what he did. The only physical evidence of that unforgettable evening was the gash in my leg, which quickly healed.

Item One on Harald’s training schedule was something he termed ‘precision targeting’. That meant sortie after sortie out to the bombing range, a ten-mile square boxed on to the Standfast air maps that Harald had specially printed at a little repro shop in Fort Myers. The range had once belonged to the Department of Defense and Harald had acquired what he called ‘sole deposit rights’ on a twenty-year lease, another little present from his friends in the Pentagon.

I never had the hours to turn myself into any kind of half-decent dive-bomber but I loved the disciplines it taught me. How to adjust the optical sight to the exact setting for - say - a forty-five-degree dive and a
3
,000-foot release. How to calculate the slant range and then factor in the wind speed. And
most important
of all,
how
to suddenly change your mind and recompute all the settings and still arrive at the roll-in point in time to wing the Mustang over into a dive and then track the nose slowly up until the pipper in the bombsight was centred on the target. Put this way, it sounds easy. The fact that I never once dropped a bomb closer than 75 metres convinced me that it wasn’t.

Alongside bombing, on alternate days, Harald introduced me to strafing. Strafing is the business of laying down machine-gun and rocket fire from the air. The Cavalier Mustang I was using had six .50 machine guns mounted in the wings. I knew from day one that Harald insisted on using live ammunition - the memory of those belts of shiny cannon shells for the Messerschmitt never left me - but on the sharp end, arrowing down from
3
,000 feet, the kick of the machine guns made me think pretty hard about exactly what it was that took men so easily to war. Other pilots I know say it becomes addictive and I believe them, because nothing on this earth prepares you for the raw excitement of watching the tracers streaking way ahead of you, pocking the earth below with tiny little blossoms of dirt as you walk the bullets towards the big orange target.

The first couple of times I did it I was hopeless, not least because I forgot to take my finger off the firing trigger. A full load of ammunition lasts just under ten seconds but I was so fascinated by the patterns I was making in the dust that I never wanted it to stop. Addiction, again. So simple. So sexy. So indescribably satisfying.