Permissible Limits (49 page)

Suddenly, in the wake of the plane, there was an overpowering smell of Avgas. A fuel leak as well, I thought. That’s all the pilot would need.

‘
What happened?’

Harald was shaking out the blanket. Our picnic by the lake was evidently over.

‘
A dogfight turned nasty.’ He picked up the empty champagne bottle. ‘Couple of the guys had a row in the bar last night.’

I was looking for the Mustang again. From this distance it was impossible to judge whether or not he’d make the runway.

‘
They’re using live ammunition?’

‘
Sure. They shoot at drogues, normally.’ He shrugged. ‘I guess it got a little out of hand.’

After Harald dropped me at the Casa Blanca, I went to my bedroom. Early afternoon was always the hottest part of the day, and four glasses of champagne had put paid to any flying. I pushed the door open, grateful for the air-conditioning and the prospect of a long nap. Only when I pulled the sheet down did I see the letters.

There were three of them and I knew at once that they were all from Jamie. The same green Pentel. The same thick trademark kisses scrawled across the back of the envelope. I slipped into bed, trying to work out the dates on the postmarks. Quite deliberately over the past week I’d neither phoned nor written. The realisation that Jamie had lied to me in that first letter was deeply upsetting, and no matter how hard I tried to make excuses for him I knew that something had changed. Maybe all the stuff about Andrea ripping up my photos was poetic licence. Maybe he’d never meant me to take it seriously. But either way, there was a part of me that didn’t entirely believe him any more. If he’d lied about Andrea, what else shouldn’t I take at face value?

It was questions like these that ate away at my concentration and I knew only too well that the last thing I should take with me every morning were worries about my love life. The Mustang was the most demanding partner I’d ever met. And unlike Jamie, it could all too easily kill me.

Now, though, it was different. The last ten days had toughened me immeasurably. I felt strong. I felt immensely pleased with myself. And - a real surprise, this - I felt a tremendous sense of independence. Adam had been right all along. Flying can change your life.

The letters, as it turned out, were linked. Jamie had helpfully numbered each envelope, and as the pile of airmail paper grew and grew on the bedside table it began to dawn on me that I had acquired yet another role in his young life. Not simply his lover, and flight instructor, and long-distance correspondent, but also - his word, not mine - his confessor.

The story, as far as I could gather, centred on a woman he’d met at university up in Aberdeen. She was older than him, nearly thirty, and German. Her name was Gitta and she was nearing the end of a two-year course in business studies. Back home in Munich, she worked for one of the big German oil companies and one of the reasons her bosses had sent her off to Aberdeen was to brush up on her English. Once she’d graduated, there was an important job waiting for her down in the company’s London offices. Gitta was well-off, beautiful and newly divorced. Jamie, poor lamb, had fallen in love with her.

The affair had lasted nearly eighteen months. Gitta had been renting a big two-bedroomed flat up near the university, and Jamie had moved in. He’d never, he wrote, had any clear idea where the relationship would lead but the thought that it might one day end was inconceivable.

Gitta had come to obsess him. Sexually, she’d taught him everything he’d ever known. Mentally, she put him to shame. Every successive day had drawn him closer to her. Every night, he’d wanted more and more of her. He’d felt himself losing sight of the person he really was, a process of surrender that was both wilful and delicious. Gitta had swamped every last atom in his body. When he occasionally surfaced, and took an inventory, there was nothing left that was his. The word he used again and again was enslavement. He worshipped her. He followed her around. Pathetic. Needful. Lost.

Lost. I thought of Harald and his iron grip on life, on circumstances, on himself. Then I read on, trying to imagine Jamie with this lustrous, talented siren, the woman who’d taken my puppy-lover and put him on a lead, and dragged him down to London.

They’d found a house in Chiswick. It had three bedrooms and a garden shed in the back yard where Jamie could keep all the stuff he used for tree surgery. At first he’d assumed that life in London would be Aberdeen with sunshine. They’d sleep late, make love at noon, take long walks by the river. The reality, though, was very different. Transformed by her job, and her brand-new degree, Gitta had disappeared every morning to some office in the City he didn’t even want to visualise. When she came back it was late - often eight or nine at night - and she brought with her a life and a career that he found deeply threatening. People she worked with. Men she met for lunch. A whole cast of people who seemed to belong to something she called
Der wirklichen Welt.
The real world.

Poor Jamie. I sat back, thinking of him alone in Chiswick with his chain saw and his bewilderment and his big fat tubs of fairy dust. Every night, being Jamie, he’d try and revive a little of the old magic, and every night, being the bright young thing he undoubtedly was, he’d have to confront the terrible knowledge that whatever it was had gone. One of life’s blessings had been Gitta. And one of life’s crueller lessons was the realisation that she wasn’t, after all, his property.

She’d asked him to leave only a couple of months ago. She’d turned up, unusually, in mid-afternoon. He’d been typing out some estimates in the little back bedroom he used as an office. She’d sat him down on the bed and told him that she’d fallen in love with a City trader called Tom. Jamie had been denied even the comfort of knowing she’d been swept off her feet by a fellow German. No. Tom was something big in sugar futures. And he was every bit as English as Jamie.

A couple of months ago. I kept my diary in my grab bag. I flicked back through April, trying to remember exactly when it was that I’d first laid eyes on Jamie. It had been down at Ralph’s place. Jamie had been staying the weekend. I closed my eyes, leaning back against the pillow, remembering him coming in from his run, his face pinked with exertion, his runners caked in mud. It must have happened then, I thought. Heartbroken, homeless, sick of London, he must have fled south to the comforts of Ralph and his little bungalow by the sea. I thought of everything else that had happened to him - his father’s affair, the step-family he’d never known, his mother’s suicide - and I thought again of this German woman, Gitta, and everything he must have invested in her.

Gitta would have been the fresh start, the kind of headlong love affair that begins like a miracle and ends in a bitterness that I knew only too well. I returned to the letters. Losing Gitta, he said, was a blow so unexpected, so bloody unfair, that he’d seriously toyed with suicide himself. He could see no end to his grief, no point in carrying on, and it was only his contempt for his father that had kept him from following his mother’s footsteps to the nearest station and chucking himself under a train. The Germans had a phrase for it.
Gotterdammerung.
The final curtain. Too bloody right.

I opened the third letter, as yet unread. Andrea had been right. After we’d said our goodbyes at Heathrow, Jamie had gone back into central London. He wasn’t clear, even now, why he’d done it, but there were ghosts to be laid, and accounts to be settled, and much, much sooner than he’d ever dreamed possible he felt strong enough, and dispassionate enough, to walk the half-mile from Turnham Green tube station and knock on the door and step back into Gitta’s life. She’d been alone. The thing with Tom hadn’t worked out. They’d talked for most of the night. He’d told her all about me, all about us, and at half past three in the morning Gitta had broken the news. She was four months pregnant. With Jamie’s baby.

I stared at the words on the page. Jamie? A
father?
Back in the hotel, that first night on Jersey, he’d hinted of shadows in his past, and reading about Gitta, and what she’d meant to him, I’d begun to understand. But this was something else entirely. He’d loved this woman, given himself to her, and now she was carrying his baby. What next?

The rest of the letter tussled with exactly that. There was no question, he said, that he and Gitta would ever get back together again. Gitta, it seemed, was all for trying but Jamie was insistent that it wouldn’t work. His life had moved on. There was me now, the relationship we’d built, the promises we’d made, the log book we’d jointly started for this new journey of ours. The phrases brought a smile to my face and I wondered what Gitta must have made of them. One day, I thought, Jamie might just take a risk or two with someone his own age. Not an ambitious divorcee. Or an even older widow.

I’d got to the last page now, and naturally enough the story took one final twist before the row of kisses waiting for me on the bottom line. Gitta had laid down an ultimatum. Unless Jamie was prepared to give them both another chance, she was going to have the baby aborted. Without a father, she had absolutely no intention of starting a family. I read the last paragraph again, not altogether sure that I
understood
what he
was
really saying. Was
there a message
here that he was too timid - or too young - to voice? Wasn’t he really telling me that he’d like to go back, that he’d never really got Gitta out of his system? And in that case, mightn’t the baby - assuming there was a baby - be nothing more than a pretext? A smokescreen behind which Jamie and I might disengage with honour?

I shook my head, at a loss for an answer, and when I read the last letter for a third time I realised that in all probability he didn’t know either. Life, for Jamie, had piled confusion upon confusion, and just now the kindest thing I could do was talk to him.

The kitchen was empty. I took the cordless phone, and the local directory with the international codes, and returned to my bedroom. This time, I dialled my own mobile number, assuming that Jamie had hung on to it.

It rang and rang. I sat on the side of the bed, trying to picture where he might be. Down at Ralph’s bungalow? Out on a run? At last, the number answered.

‘
Hallo?’

The sound of Jamie’s voice brought the blood to my face, a big, whole-hearted, warm feeling that told me everything I wanted to know. I did miss him. A lot. And I wasn’t quite as independent as I might have thought.

‘
Where are you?’

‘
In the car. Hang on, I’ll pull over.’

There was a pause while he parked, then - within seconds - I
found myself telling him about the adventures of the last ten days, partly out of excitement, and partly as an apology for not getting in touch. When I got to the more dramatic bits - bombs, rockets, dogfights - Jamie couldn’t stop laughing.

‘
I thought the war was over?’

‘
Not here it isn’t. Harald says it’ll be good for my flying. He thinks every pilot should drop a bomb or two. He says it’s like aerobics. He says it tones you up.’

At the mention of Harald, the laughter stopped.

‘
How is he?’

‘
He’s fine. And before you ask, he’s been the perfect gentleman. We go flying every day. He’s taught me loads. He’s made me realise what a lousy pilot I’ve been. But that’s just about it. You’ve got him wrong, Jamie. He’s old enough to be my father.’

I winced at the phrase. Jamie’s letters were still all over the bed. Jamie was asking me again about Harald. He couldn’t keep him out of the conversation. Why was he bothering to teach me all this stuff? What was the point?

‘
I don’t know. Yet.’

‘
Will he ever tell you?’

‘
I’m not sure. He has this theory about stretching the envelope, but actually I think it’s much simpler than that. It’s boy’s stuff. He never grew up.’

There was a long silence. Outside I could hear Monica’s voice, and when I took the phone to the window she was out there again with the metal cage, alone this time.

‘
So when are you coming back?’

The date on my ticket was
5
June. I confirmed there’d been no change of plan. Jamie sounded relieved.

‘
Back for your birthday, then?’

‘
Absolutely. Bet your life.’

I asked him whether he was missing me. I was looking at the letters.

‘
Hugely. All the time. And the flying, too. Life’s a drag at ground level.’ He paused. ‘You got my letters?’

‘
I just read them.’