Permissible Limits (38 page)

I found myself in what I assumed to be a living room. The air-conditioning must have been on full blast because it felt even chillier than the hall outside. The window was fully shuttered and the only
light came from a standard lamp in the far corner. In a big old
armchair beneath it sat a tiny woman in a long black dress. She struggled to her feet the moment I walked in, pushing a blanket aside and supporting herself on an exquisite black ebony cane. We met beside her armchair.

‘
This is Mrs Meyler.’ Chuck towered over both of us. ‘Harald’s mother.’

‘
My name’s Monica, my dear, and you know something?’ She peered up at me, her eyes a filmy blue. ‘You’re every bit as pretty as Harald promised.’

She held my hand in hers. Her fingers felt as fragile as twigs and her flesh was cold to the touch. In the light from the standard lamp, her face was the palest white, a thick dusting of powder softening the deeper lines, and I could see at once where Harald had got his cheekbones. As a younger woman, she must have been devastating.

She was telling me about the sleeping arrangements. I was to have one of the guest suites away down the hall towards the back of the house. The room faced east, she said, and if I was brave enough to sleep with the shutters open, then I’d be the luckiest girl alive.

‘
Why?’

‘
The dawns, Ellie. They’re just spectacular.’

She was still clutching my hand, an intimacy so instant it made me feel slightly uncomfortable. She was acting like she’d known me most of my life and I began to wonder exactly what Harald had been telling her. She was tugging me over to the window now, pausing every step or two to catch her breath.

Chuck opened the shutters. The room was suddenly flooded with sunshine.

‘
There. I show everyone.’

I found myself looking out at a towering wall of green. It began the other side of a sturdy chain-link fence. There was a padlocked gate set into the fence and a paved path curled away into the dense vegetation.

‘
When you’re rested, Ellie, we’ll take a walk, just you and me. Let’s see now. I’ve got black mangrove, white mangrove, wild coffee, cabbage palm, Brazilian pepper. I’ve got wild orchids, strangler figs, saw palmetto…’ She was counting them off one by one, exhausting the fingers of both hands. The list sounded like a menu, something to whet my appetite, and when she got to the end of the plants she’d catalogued, she started on the wildlife. Ants excited her. She could find me small black ones that hunted in packs, big black monsters that foraged alone, and a voracious red specimen that would chew me up for breakfast. When I obliged her with a shudder and said I hated all insects, she laughed.

‘
I’m queen in my kingdom.’ She was still gazing out of the window. ‘You’ve nothing to fear.’

For the first time, I detected something snagging in her accent, the slightest displacement of the normal stress, and I looked down at her again wondering where life had taken her before she’d settled down in Florida. Was she American born and bred, like Harald? Or had she come from somewhere infinitely more exotic?

‘
Help me back to my chair, my dear. Take my arm.’ I began to guide her across the room by her elbow but she shook me free. ‘My arm, dear, don’t be frightened, it won’t fall off.’ I did what I was told. My hands aren’t that big but I could circle her upper arm without difficulty.

We paused by the chair while she stooped to rearrange the blanket. On a shelf behind the chair was a line of photographs, most of them sepia, mounted in tiny silver frames. The same face peered out from at least three of the photos, a man in his twenties, heavy-featured, with slicked-back hair and a wary smile.

Mrs Meyler had sunk back into the armchair, tucking the blanket around her knees as if she was expecting a journey of some kind. She peered up at me.

‘
Well?’

Nonplussed, I tried to smile.

‘
It looks intriguing,’ I said, ‘that kingdom of yours. Does it go back a long way?’

‘
Ten acres, my dear. Harald hates it, always has. That’s why I never leave, of course, never go anywhere. The moment I went, he’d put the bulldozers in. Men are all the same, you know. They hate letting nature have its way.’

I heard Chuck’s soft laugh behind me.

‘
It’s a wilderness, Mrs Meyler. Harald just likes to tidy things up a little.’

‘
Exactly,
exactly:
I felt fingers reaching for my hand again, and then a little squeeze. ‘What did I tell you, Ellie? Men do so like to
interfere.’

Chuck took me down the corridor to my room. It was grander than I’d expected, with beautiful Aztec-patterned rugs on the floor and a small en suite bathroom attached. There were lots of hangers in the built-in wardrobe, and a little fridge in one corner was stocked with cartons of mango and guava juice. A china vase on the chest of drawers held a single purple orchid, and someone - Harald presumably - had mounted a photo of a Mustang and positioned it on the little table beside the bed.

I lay there looking at it, and it was several minutes before I realised that it was our Mustang. I recognised the hangar behind, and the big dual cockpit, and the paint scheme that Ralph had so carefully researched, and the knowledge that Harald must have been poking around with his camera wasn’t altogether welcome. How many other shots did he have? What gave him the right to decorate this room of his with shots of Adam’s pride and joy?

It was, of course, a daft question. Harald, after all, had bought forty five per cent of the plane and it was therefore entirely natural that he should have taken the odd photo. Putting it beside my bed was simply a thoughtful gesture, a way of cushioning my landing in this strange new world, and I was still smiling at my own ingratitude, and wondering whether or not to take a shower, when I drifted off to sleep. The last thing I remember hearing was the distant cackle of a Merlin engine. Harald, I thought, readying his own Mustang for take-off.

I awoke hours later to a soft knock at the door. It was dark outside and the wind had dropped. When I opened the door, Harald was standing there. He had a towel in one hand and a thickish-looking book in the other. He was still wearing his leather flying jacket.

‘
Take your choice.’ He held out the book and the towel. He was smiling.

I took the towel. He looked disappointed. I nodded at the book.

‘
What’s that?’

‘
A little light reading. There’s no hurry. Tomorrow will be fine.’ He gave me the book, then glanced at his watch. ‘We’re eating around eight. That OK by you?’

I rubbed my eyes and nodded. The last thing I wanted was food.

‘
Sounds lovely,’ I said.

The book turned out to be an instruction manual for the Cavalier Mustang, a specially adapted version of the fighter which was, as far as I knew, no longer in production. Adam had talked about them a couple of times, and I stood in the shower, soaping away the grime of the journey, wondering quite what part this particular breed of Mustang would be playing in Harald’s plans for the next stage of my flying career. The Cavalier is specially built to carry bombs and rockets. Some of the smaller Third World air forces were still using them.

Towelling myself dry, I slipped back into the bedroom and began to leaf through the diagrams and accompanying text. Why on earth did I need to know about internally mounted munitions and external armament loads? When would I ever need to master the bomb-arming switch? I looked up at the little patch of sky I could see through the window, thinking about the red-tipped cannon shells again, remembering something Dennis Wetherall had once said. Harald had made his money in the arms business. Dennis had called him a merchant of death. At the time the phrase had seemed wildly excessive, Dennis at his most extravagant, but now - for the first time - I began to wonder.

We had supper in a big, airy room at the back of the house. Beyond the insect mesh and the spill of light from the window I could hear cicadas and the stir of wildlife in the hot darkness. The
temperature
in the dining room was wonderful, dry and cool.

Chuck had joined us for the meal and Monica sat at the head of the table, sipping tiny spoonfuls of soup between flurries of conversation. She’d tied up her hair with a twist of red ribbon and she looked like a child, perched on a tassled velvet cushion to bring her up to the level of the table. It bothered her somewhat, she said, that I’d flown all this way and yet didn’t know a soul. Harald, she was quite certain, would have told me nothing about the way things were around the Casa Blanca and so it fell to a woman - as ever - to see to what she termed ‘the basic damn courtesies’.

When Harald raised his eyes to me and winked, she reached across to him, flapping her hand to mime a slap on the wrist. A thin red line of gazpacho was dribbling down from the corner of her mouth and I watched Harald attend to it with the tail of his napkin. He did it tenderly, with great deftness, and afterwards he adjusted the spoon in her hand so it was no longer upside-down. Monica appeared not to notice.

‘
Did he tell you about Chuck, Ellie?’

‘
No, Mrs Meyler.’

‘
Monica, dear, you must call me Monica.’ She looked over at Chuck, then back to me. ‘He saved my boy’s life. Did Harald tell you that, I wonder?’

Harald looked at Chuck this time. Both men obviously knew what they were in for but when Chuck tried to change the subject, I intervened. I was interested in this story. I wanted to know what had happened.

‘
Was this recent?’ I asked. ‘Something that happened recently?’

Monica threw her head back, a thin, piping laugh. ‘You call Vietnam recent?’ I watched her hand crabbing towards mine across the table. ‘And Harald never mentioned anything
at all?
‘

‘
Never.’

‘
Well, well, then. It’s my pleasure.’

She gave my hand a little squeeze. Harald had been flying with the Marine Corps. Home was an aircraft carrier on the South China Sea. He’d been out there the best part of six months, writing home every week or so. Then the letters stopped.

‘
And you know why, Ellie?’

I shook my head. Harald had started his third bread roll. Chuck was looking at the ceiling.

‘
Why?’ I asked. ‘What happened?’

Monica was looking at her son. Her silence finally stirred a response.

‘
I was flying A
-
7s
,’
he said simply, ‘and one night I screwed the pooch.’

‘
Harald!’
Monica was outraged.

‘
It’s true, I did.’

I was still staring at Harald. Screw the pooch? Harald caught my eye. He must have seen my bewilderment.

‘
I got myself shot down,’ he said. ‘We were way up north, Route Pack Six.’

‘
What’s Route Pack Six?’

‘
It’s an area of North Vietnam. The headquarters people divided the north into seven sectors. Six was the hottest.’

‘
So what happened?’ Harald looked at me a moment.

‘
You really want to bother with all this?’

‘
Yes please.’

‘
OK.’ He shrugged, wetting a finger and retrieving crumbs from the tablecloth, ‘The mission was pretty routine, part of the Rolling Thunder programme. We were looking for POL targets, that’s petrol, oil, lubricants. The gomers had these flak traps they used to bait. They got to be pretty good at it.’

Chuck intervened with a grin. Gomers, he explained, was service slang for the North Vietnamese. I thanked him, turning back to Harald.

‘
And flak traps?’

‘
Chunks of airspace, like so.’ I watched his hands shape a box over his soup bowl. ‘They’re firing blind, of course, but they’re pretty much covering all the numbers, five hundred feet up to ten thousand. Pump up enough lead, it becomes a crap shoot. The laws of probability say you won’t make it.’

‘
And you didn’t?’

‘
No.’

‘
And Chuck? He was with you in the plane?’

Harald and Chuck exchanged another glance. Harald’s hands were still poised over the soup bowl. I swear I detected just the slightest tremor.