Permissible Limits (28 page)

For a moment I thought he was going to fall into the trap, but then his eyes closed and he shook his head and shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

‘
This isn’t helping. I know what you want but I can’t -’ He shrugged. ‘There’d be no point.’

‘
There’s every point. He was my husband.’

‘
Yes, I know. And I’m sorry.’

‘
That’s what you said before. Sorry’s not enough, Steve. Sorry’s too easy. What I want from you might sound like the earth but actually it’s very simple. In fact it couldn’t be simpler. Did Adam have an affair with Michelle? Yes or no?’

‘
The money’s safe,’ he repeated. ‘I gave you a cheque.’

‘
Fuck the money. Just yes or no.’

I thought my language might shake the truth out of him but I was wrong. He just looked down at me, unyielding, and it was then that I realised that the conversation wasn’t going any further. We’d hit a wall. For whatever reason, Steve Liddell wasn’t going to tell me about Adam and his precious ex-partner.

I glanced over my shoulder. The taxi-driver lifted his wrist and tapped his watch. Across the other side of the hangar, muffled by a thin partition wall, I heard a phone start to trill. The summons made Steve physically flinch. I saw the uncertainty in his eyes, the overwhelming urge to turn his back and run. I reached forward, picking a curl of metal from the sleeve of his overall.

‘
Answer it, Steve,’ I said bitterly. ‘It might be something important.’

Back in the taxi, the driver had started the engine. ‘St Ouen’s Bay,’ I told him. ‘I’m looking for some kind of windsurfing school.’

Nearly an hour later, the taxi delivered me to a couple of deserted Portakabins on a patch of scrubby ground beside
the
long sweep of St Ouen’s Bay. Beyond the Portakabins, crudely gravelled, was half an acre or so of empty car park, buttressed at the far end by a line of three rusting freight containers.

I got out of the taxi and paid the fare. This time, come what may, I wanted to be alone. Whoever I talked to, however direct my questions, I was getting absolutely nowhere. I’d never felt so angry in my life and I needed time to cope with the consequences.

The taxi driver pocketed the £20 I’d given him and pulled the dented Renault into an untidy U-turn. I was glad when he’d gone. The silence, broken only by the cries of the gulls and the distant rasp of surf, was an immense relief.

I circled the two Portakabins. They were chocked up on concrete blocks and I had to stand on tiptoe to peer in through the windows. One room was evidently an office. It looked neat and businesslike and the calendar on the wall behind the desk was already showing April. On a chair beneath the window I could see a pile of clothes, but when I tried the nearby door it was locked.

Next along from the office was a classroom of some kind, cheap folding chairs drawn up in a semicircle around one of those big prop-up easels sales reps use in meetings. There was a triangular diagram on the plastic wipe-board, bold lines in blue Pentel, and I studied it a moment, trying to make sense of the thicket of little symbols. It was obviously something to do with windsurfing, how best to steer around three fixed buoys. Me, and Adam, and the bitch-queen Michelle, I thought. Wind force eight and rising. Hurricanes expected within the hour.

I quickly circled the other Portakabin then crossed the car park and checked out the containers. The big padlocks looked brand new. I tried each in turn, not knowing quite why, but none of them budged. I looked back across the car park again. There was a nicely painted sign across the width of the two Portakabins.
Ultra-Max,
it read.
Windsurfing for Girls, Guys, and Gods.
The turn of phrase made me shudder. Ultra-Max? Gods? What had Adam got himself into?

I leaned back against the container. In the early spring sunshine, the metal was already warm to the touch. I closed my eyes a moment, trying to think things through. Should I wait until someone turned up? Or should I find a phone box? And say I did, say I found a number for Michelle La Page, what would I do then? What would I say when a woman’s voice answered and I had to introduce myself and explain why I’d made the call? Should I be frank? Insist on a meeting? Somewhere nice and quiet, somewhere a bit like this, somewhere I could indulge my anger and circle this woman’s neck with my bare hands, and take a little modest revenge for all the grief she’d given me?

I smiled grimly, content to let this nonsense swirl around my fevered brain. Normally, I’m never this self-indulgent. On the contrary, I normally keep my emotions firmly in check. Letting go is strictly for people like Andrea, or - as I was beginning to recognise - Adam. One emotional basket case in the family was quite enough.

After a while, I had the urge to take a pee. I squeezed down the gap between two of the containers, looking for the shelter they’d give me at the far end. Squatting in the sunshine, I saw the mountain bike. It
was
red and shiny and brand
new.
Like the
containers, it was
padlocked.

Someone was here. Maybe it was Michelle. Maybe she was on site somewhere, watching me, wondering who the hell I was. Then I remembered the pile of clothes in the office. Jeans. A T-shirt. An anorak of some kind. I ran back across the car park. From the Portakabins, a line of paving stones led across to a gap in the sea wall. I looked down at the sand, gleaming wetly in the sunshine. Footsteps tracked away towards the distant line of breaking surf. I jumped from the sea wall and slipped off my shoes. Her feet were a size bigger than mine. Tall, I thought. Taller than me. Younger than me. More beautiful than me. But mine, now. There for the taking. I shook my head, gritted my teeth. Try as I would, the anger kept returning.

I peered seawards, shading my eyes from the sun. At first I saw nothing. Then came a flicker of movement, a tiny blob of colour, yellow and mauve, a child’s version of a sail, daubed on the gleaming silver sea. Even at a distance, the sail was moving fast, left to right, lifting from time to time, then slamming down again.

I followed the footprints towards the water’s edge. It must have been a couple of hundred yards at least. My mouth had gone dry. Adam had been here, I kept telling myself. I had rights, obligations even.

The sea was less rough than I’d expected, a boisterous little chop that broke in spumy bubbles at my feet. The windsurfer was closer now, a figure in a wetsuit clearly visible. The wetsuit, like the sail, was yellow and mauve, and her body was hanging out over the water, her back inches from the racing waves. The way she controlled the board, freeing it one moment, reining it in the next, reminded me of Smoko, my horse at Gander Creek, and the longer I watched her, the more obvious the parallels became. She and the board were indivisible, a single entity, just the way that Smoko and I had been, and as I followed her wild progress from wave top to wave top it became all too obvious what Adam must have seen in her. The same eagerness. The same athletic abandon. Except that she was younger, and sleeker, and altogether more ruthless.

I must have waited at the water’s edge for the best part of half an hour. I knew she’d seen me because she began to stitch a course closer and closer to the beach, taking little glances as she hauled the board round at the end of each run. Eventually she cruised to a halt in the shallows and hopped off. I recognised the hair, the way it lay over her shoulders, long, dark curls. And I recognised the expression, playful, anticipatory, curious. Close to, she had lovely skin, smooth, olive, a hint of foreign blood.

‘
Hi? Come down for a booking?’ She bent to the board and fiddled with something. The mast and sail came away in her hand.

‘
My name’s Ellie Bruce,’ I said tonelessly. ‘Adam was my husband.’

‘
Who?’

‘
Adam.’

Standing upright again, she wiped the wet sand from her hands. The name had taken the smile off her face.

‘
Shit,’ she said quietly.

We stood there looking at each other for what seemed an age. Finally, she picked up the board and held it out.

‘
Do me a favour?’

The question threw me completely. I wanted to hit her. I wanted to throw myself at her and wrestle her into the water and push her face way down into the sand until she stopped struggling and quietly died. Instead, she showed me how to carry the board, one hand hooked into a footstrap.

‘
I’ll take the rig,’ she said. ‘The wind gets in the sail. It can be tricky.’

The board was lighter than I’d thought. We walked together up the beach, the situation more surreal by the second. Little Ellie Bruce. Sherpa to her husband’s lover. Where the sand began to dry out, I stopped.

‘
Here’s far enough,’ I said.

Michelle kept walking. From where I was standing, the attraction was obvious. The long legs. The lovely body. How fit she must be. How supple. I caught her up, empty-handed, and hauled her to a stop. She was holding the rig by the mast and the boom. The wind began to fill the sail. She laid it carefully on the sand.

‘
We don’t need to do this,’ she said.

‘
I do.’

‘
Yeah, but I don’t.’ She sniffed, then sealed one nostril with her forefinger and blew hard. The gesture caught me by surprise. So male. So aggressive.

‘
So how long was it going on?’ I’d stepped around the sail, blocking her path up the beach. No escape, I wanted to say. Time to straighten one or two things out.

‘
How long was what going on?’ She sounded careless, almost bored, as if she’d dealt with the same question a million times.

‘
You and Adam. You and my husband.’

She shook the water from her hair and then unzipped the top of her wetsuit. It was a wholly ambiguous gesture, at once natural and
provocative.

‘
That’s ridiculous,’ she said. ‘I don’t have to answer that.’

‘
You do.’

‘
Why?’

‘
Because I’m here. Because he was my husband. Because I want to know.’

Her fingers were still on the big plastic zipper. She was playing with it, sliding it up and down, studying my face with an expression I couldn’t quite place. Curiosity? Pity? Apprehension? I didn’t know.

‘
Who chased who?’ I said. ‘Tell me that.’

‘
No one chased anyone. There wasn’t any chasing. This is pathetic.’

‘
Was it the money, then?’

‘
What money?’

‘
The seventy thousand pounds.’ I gestured towards the Porta- kabins, up beyond the sea wall. ‘I don’t suppose he knew about your father. All that ready cash.’

This time there was no mistaking her expression. She was outraged.

‘
What are you talking about? Father?’

I told her what I knew about Bernard La Page. He was immensely rich. He’d staked the windsurfing school. So in the end, Adam hadn’t needed our chequebook.

‘
Who told you that?’

‘
What?’

‘
About my father? Paying for all this?’ She kicked the mast of the rig. She was pale with anger.

I stared at her, beginning - for the first time - to doubt myself. Had Dennis got it wrong? Had she raised the money some other way?

‘
Your father’s rolling
in it,’ I
insisted.
‘Are
you telling me he didn
’t help you?’

‘
Help
me? He kicked me out, disinherited me. Not that I care.’

‘
Why? Why would he do that?’

Like Steve Liddell, Michelle obviously wasn’t in the business of giving me straight answers. I began to rephrase the question but she stepped towards me and came very close, her voice almost a whisper.

I’m adopted,’ she said. ‘Did your accountant tell you that?’

‘
No,’ I admitted.

‘
OK, so that’s number one. Bernard adopted me at birth - and you’re quite right, I had a big fat legacy coming. But number two, I blew it by going to live with Steve. Not only did I live with the guy, I had his child. On this island, believe it or not, class matters. And the one thing that buys you class is money. OK, my father has lots of money. Lots of money buys him lots of class. Steve was skint. Steve was the bottom of the heap. My father thought he was dirt. Told me so.’