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rudder.
    The feeling of being in charge, of being able to float up or down in three dimensions, was quite overpowering and after a while I became bolder, experimenting with the rudder pedals, marvelling at how I could crab the Moth sideways with a little pressure from my right or left foot. It was fun, this new game, but it was scary, too. Climbing over Lochnagar, we disappeared briefly into windblown rags of cloud. They tore past the open cockpit, plunging us into a very different world - cold and grey - and I was glad to be out in the sunshine again, the Cairngorms still beneath us, the bare shoulders of rock and heather mottled with those same clouds.
    We landed back on the coast forty minutes or so later and Adam, I think, was pleased. That night, in bed, he said what a good pair of hands I had, and when we talked about how delicate flying was, how it needed a lover’s touch, I understood at once what he meant. In my head, the Moth was already stabled with Smoko, my beloved horse. Airborne, it had become a friend.
    Blessed with clear weather, we flew for the rest of April. Delighted with my progress, Adam deferred his departure for the next contract, and after twelve hours of instruction, I went solo. Three months later, with Adam in Africa, I sat the various tests for my Private Pilot’s Licence. Oddly enough, the first leg of the Navigation Flight Test took me back towards the mountains. The examiner was flying in the front cockpit. I had control from the back. The first leg was pretty undemanding - fifty miles on the same heading - and I had time to look down, still fascinated by how slowly the landscape seemed to unfold beneath us, still amazed at that strange, God-like feeling that flying imparts.
    Adam had been right. The Moth had uncaged me. I was free again. I was happy. I had lots to think about, lots to confront. Learning to fly had never been less than a challenge but instinctively I felt at home in the aircraft. I loved the feeling of freedom she gave me, the feeling that we could outrun the wind and the weather, scroll glorious pictures in the sky, cheat gravity itself. We trusted each other. We respected each other. We’d see each other through to wherever this extraordinary journey might take us. Poetic? Of course. But real, too. More real than I have the talent to describe.
    An hour or so later, when I side-slipped into Dyce for a perfect three-point landing, I knew the Nav Test was in the bag. I was right. More tests followed. I passed those, too. And when the examiner finally confirmed that the PPL was mine, I couldn’t wait to tell Adam.
    Trying to get a line through to Angola, where he was based, was a nightmare, and when the international operator told me she’d given up, I sat down and wrote him a long letter. In it, I tried to express what flying had come to mean for me. It was a way of saying thank you, of course, but it also obliged me to take an honest look at the first twelve months or so that we’d spent together. Our marriage was fabulous but I’d made a pretty rocky start in the UK and I knew it. I’d been weak. I’d been feeble. I’d let myself buckle under all the pressures that most people seemed to take for granted. Now, though, things would be different. Whatever Adam wanted to do with our lives, I was with him. Whatever he planned, I promised to make it work. And I did.

Chapter three
    By the time I got back from Ralph’s, it was nearly nine o’clock. I fed the cats, brewed myself a pot of tea and then sat beside the ansaphone, wondering whether I had the strength to cope with the fourteen recorded messages. Some, doubtless, would be friends and relatives, all of them well-meaning, few knowing quite what to say. One or two, judging by this afternoon, would probably have come from the media, yet more bids to tear a little flesh off the bone and expose it to the public view. For that, I had no taste whatsoever, and I finally solved the problem by phoning Adam’s parents in