Flight

by Victoria Glendinning

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Arrivals

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Departures

  Notes and Acknowledgements

  Also by Victoria Glendinning

  About the Author

  Copyright

  For Deborah Singmaster

  ARRIVALS

  When did it begin to go wrong, for Martagon? At what precise point did he step off the main path? It seemed that at last he had everything. He was at the top of his profession. He had found the love of his life.

  * * *

  June 24, 2000. The sun rises over Provence, drenching the countryside with light and colour from the lavender fields. The undulating ridges of purple stretch away into the haze, flanked by fields of vines in full fresh leaf, dancing in lines over the curve of the land. Sprinklers are already sprinkling, spraying the air with refracted light. The poplars do not stir. There is no wind, and no sound except the hissing of the sprinklers and the drone of bees already busy in the lavender.

  It is going to be a perfect day.

  An earth track runs along the edge of this lavender field and cuts through the vines. The track joins two villages, and intersects with the narrow road leading to the Château de Bonplaisir. Or, rather, it used to. Now, the track is going nowhere, its trajectory abruptly halted three kilometres on by a perimeter fence of heavy-duty steel mesh, three metres high. Tractors have already made a new path, turning sharply aside at the fence and working round it. In a generation or two, no one will know about the old track, or remember the château as it was before it became the airport hotel.

  * * *

  Martagon first went to the Château de Bonplaisir in the early summer of 1999, just after the contractors moved in to transform it into a hotel. He happened to be in Provence, making a site visit to the new airport under construction. He agreed, unwillingly, to meet the ex-owner of the château and check the inventories of the garden furniture, ornaments and statues, which had been overlooked.

  Thus it was pure chance he met Marina de Cabrières at all.

  It was meant, they said. We were waiting for each other.

  * * *

  That first meeting was more than a year ago. Today, the perfect day, is the grand opening of Bonplaisir, the new airport for Provence. It was planned to open ‘on time, on budget’, as a millennium event. The official reason for the five months’ delay was the danger of Y2K complications. The real reason is more shameful, and it concerns Martagon.

  * * *

  Martagon had heard something about Marina de Cabrières before he met her. Glamorous, people said. Capricious. She worked in film in Paris, in a dilettante kind of way. That was all he knew. He didn’t realize that he had actually already seen her – until the glittering day when he stood with his briefcase, wearing a freshly pressed linen suit, in the shade of the archway that led into the great courtyard of Bonplaisir.

  He had seen her a couple of months earlier, when he was sitting alone with a beer in the Madeleine café in Aix-en-Provence on market day, enjoying the scents from the spice stall outside the café and reading the Herald Tribune. She was with a group at the next table. He found he could not stop staring. Wherever he looked, his gaze returned to this red-haired, white-skinned young woman in a sleeveless yellow dress. He saw when she turned her head that there was a yellow silk flower in the knot of hair at the back. Her hair was drawn tightly back from her high forehead and her eyes were heavy-lidded and huge. He wondered how old she was. Early thirties, perhaps. It was hard to tell. She wasn’t talking much. She seemed preoccupied.

  Martagon stared.

  When she got up with the rest of the group to leave, he saw how tall she was. She stood looking across the table at him for a long moment with a denim jacket slung over one shoulder and a blue string bag full of fruit dangling from her hand. It was Martagon who looked away first.

  Women often looked at Martagon in public places and on the street. He was well used to that. This woman was different.

  As she walked away he noticed that she did not have the slender, elegant legs he was expecting. Her ankles were not exactly thick, but they were … ordinary.

  The man who loves this extraordinary woman, he said to himself, would love with particular tenderness her unremarkable, serviceable, rather disappointing legs.

  He had never given her another conscious thought. But her image appeared, every now and then, unsummoned, in his mind’s eye.

  * * *

  The sun has risen higher over the lavender fields, and the temperature has risen too. Inside the perimeter fence hundreds of people are frantically busy. The main runway glistens with fresh tarmac. On the apron, private jets and short-haul planes in bright liveries stand ready, like toys waiting to be played with. Workers – les arabes – who have been up all night pushing polishers round the translucent glass floors of the concourse are exhaustedly going over the same ground yet again.

  From New York’s JFK, American francophiles and pleasure-seekers, who have paid twenty thousand dollars per head, have already taken off on the inaugural flight of an Air France 747 to the new airport. Included in the ticket is a grand dinner at the Château de Bonplaisir. Limos will ferry the guests from the airport to the hotel along a new road lined with white oleanders and young olive trees. The passengers on the 747 are looking forward to what the publicity pack calls five-star grand-luxe accommodation in large high rooms furnished with museum-quality eighteenth-century beds and armoires and toile de Jouy bed-curtains and drapes. They sip their complimentary drinks, thirty-three thousand feet above the Atlantic.

  * * *

  In the late afternoon, the drone of the bees over the lavender merges with the whine of the 747 coming in to land. The event is beginning.

  Giles Harper, chairman of Harper Cox, the main consulting engineers to the project, is already at the Château de Bonplaisir, waiting for his wife Amanda to finish dressing and doing her face. Giles sits on the edge of their giant bed looking out into the gardens through a window framed by elaborate pink and white drapes. He has given up smoking; and he is smoking, using a gilded floral Limoges dish from the bedside table as an ashtray. This is, or should be, a great day for Giles. The name Harper Cox is up there with the names of the other main players on an electronic roll of honour unfurling continuously in the departures hall.

  He is anxious. He can see on his laptop, open on the console table between the high windows, the e-mail message from marteau@blink.com.

  ‘Not coming. Something terrible has happened. Martagon.’

  Giles is past being surprised by anything Martagon does. It was the ‘something terrible’ that exercised him. Could it be something Martagon now knew, or suspected, about the glass flooring? He knew from his chairman that there was a last-minute query. The site engineer had been anxious and attempting to contact Martagon.

  Giles has quite enough imagination to envisage the first running crack, to hear the gun-shot sound, and to anticipate the screaming panic as the floor of the arrivals hall collapses in lethal shards and cubes, tipping hundreds of people down to bloody injury and, for some, death on the floor below, which in its turn … But his thoughts
tend to the pragmatic. If anything at all goes wrong with the complex glass structure, Martagon’s special responsibility, it will bring disgrace on Harper Cox. It will be the end of Harper Cox.

  Much more likely, Giles thinks, that something has happened to Martagon himself. Whatever else Martagon is, he’s not a coward.

  ‘Martagon’s a shit,’ says Amanda, coming into the bedroom from her bathroom. She is pregnant, and has bought for the occasion a shimmery floating dress of mixed blues and greens. Her blonde hair is held back from her forehead with a blue velvet Alice band.

  ‘You look really nice,’ says Giles. He remembers Marina’s sultry, mocking voice saying to Martagon in the hall in the Fulham house, after that awful dinner party, ‘No one over the age of twenty-two should be allowed to wear an Alice band.’

  ‘Martagon’s not a shit,’ says Giles.

  ‘I’m only thinking about how often he’s let you down. Not to mention your sister.’

  Giles’s sister Julie is not coming to the opening of the airport. No one knows where she is at this moment.

  Giles puts his head in his hands. He is a hard man, except where his sister Julie is concerned.

  ‘So he’s not a shit,’ says Amanda. ‘He’s just weak, arrogant, dishonourable, you name it. Marina’s the shit, is that it? It’s always the woman’s fault, is that what you really think?’

  ‘Marina is … Marina is something that just happened to Martagon. The most serious thing that has ever happened to him.’

  ‘Like a disease. Well, she’ll be here this evening, I don’t doubt, all dolled up like the Queen of Sheba.’

  It was not such a perfect day after all. Suddenly, in the late afternoon, there was a thunderstorm. But it passed.

  * * *

  Marina will not be at the airport opening. And thirty miles away from Bonplaisir, Martagon Foley has been lying on his back all afternoon in the long grass under an olive tree in the garden of Marina’s farmhouse outside Cabrières d’Aigues.

  It’s no good asking questions unless you are going to get some answers. Martagon doesn’t even know what the right questions are. He will stay there as the day declines, trying to think. He is in shock. All he knows for sure is that he has lost his love, and maybe his honour and his reputation as well.

  ONE

  Martagon the singleton, and Giles and Amanda Harper the married couple, go back a long way.

  Martagon was a reader, though not a writer. He had his mother’s love of stories and pictures, and also her way of describing things in terms of something else, as part of an oblique mission to explain.

  Amanda Harper found him annoying at times: ‘I never know what to make of you, I never know where you’re really at. Can you ever see anything straight?’

  ‘I’m completely transparent. What you see is what you get.’

  ‘But I don’t get you,’ said Amanda.

  Martagon liked Amanda a lot but did not fancy her in the least, and she knew it. In that sense she had indeed not ‘got’ him, and it needled her. Once when she complained about Martagon to Giles, he had replied, unperturbed, ‘Martagon’s a law unto himself. He’s an original.’

  ‘He’ll come a cropper one of these days,’ said Amanda.

  His mother had wanted him to be a teacher. She wanted him to be a ‘good person’, and she said he would make a good teacher. The idea filled him with gloom. He did not want to be a ‘good teacher’ even though he did, profoundly, want to be a good person, even though he wasn’t sure, as a boy, what that meant. Being a good person seemed to involve courage, endurance, honesty, generosity – old-world virtues, the very words a little quaint.

  He also wanted adventure, and risk. Having failed to be accepted to study architecture, he settled for engineering – a way of making and doing not unlike the way of a creative artist, and not incompatible either with being a good person or with making a good income. His hope was to live on the edge, and to work on the boundaries between engineering, architecture and fine art.

  When he was doing his degree course, engineering students in British universities were, axiomatically, nerds in anoraks. His mother didn’t know about anoraks. But she said, ‘Will you be coming home from work in blue overalls with spanners sticking out of the top pocket?’

  Martagon explained to her the difference between a mechanic and an engineer.

  He fought back by cultivating his appearance. He dressed in black from head to foot when it became the arty norm. He made a name for himself as an actor in the most experimental of the student theatre groups. He never lost sight of his aspiration to be an artist-engineer, and was determined to prove that an engineer could be as prestigious and high profile as he knew they always had been in continental Europe. He didn’t fit in anywhere, in the England of his youth. If there was some tribe to which he belonged, it was scattered everywhere. He hadn’t found it.

  He decided that he would work largely overseas, and make an international name for himself. England, to Martagon, carried overtones of separation from parents, boarding-school, rain, adolescent depression. When he was young he conflated his first term at the English school with his father’s death, as if the one had caused the other. The shadow of this notion, no longer consciously formulated, still lingered.

  Martagon worked hard and was successful, helped along by new developments in the industry – especially in glass technology. Martagon, by the time Giles Harper approached him about the Bonplaisir airport project, was one of a small cluster of international stars who were changing the image of the profession and extending its boundaries.

  The fact that Giles came to him at all was a measure of Martagon’s value. The two had quarrelled five years previously, and gone their separate ways. Before that, they were great friends. Between them, they orchestrated the merging of Harper’s with Cox & Co., and formed the new and profitable entity: Harper Cox.

  Martagon was taken aback, just recently, when he mentioned to a younger colleague that he himself had had the good fortune to be trained by Arthur Cox – and realized that the name meant nothing at all. The firm Harper Cox was universally known in the construction industry. But Arthur himself was completely forgotten.

  * * *

  When, in the early 1980s, Martagon took his first job with what was then Cox & Co., it had already been one of the most respected British engineering firms for decades. Arthur Cox had been given a knighthood in Mrs Thatcher’s first Honours List. But Arthur never changed. He was still Arthur Cox, and legendary in the industry. He was a bear of a man with a big baggy body and a big creased face under a shock of dry wiry hair, its brown fading to grey. He had a voice like a foghorn. He was austere, teetotal, dedicated, and ran the firm as if he were the father of a family.

  That, as time passed and business practices changed, was the trouble. Arthur did not go in for participatory management. He could seem insensitive and reactionary. He had no notion of power-sharing. Yet his impulses were generous; he was not bent on making a private fortune. As the firm’s profits rose on the back of overseas contracts, he set up the Cox Foundation, which funded, as it still famously does, libraries and cultural centres in emerging countries. Martagon is one of the trustees.

  Arthur gave Martagon his first job and was unfailingly supportive of his work. After a very few years – scandalously few, some old-timers thought – Martagon had a seat on the main board. Martagon, in return, felt a fierce, filial loyalty to Arthur. All Arthur’s people were loyal to him, for that matter, even those who worried about the way things were going.

  Martagon still goes through bouts of guilt about the merger, especially at four o’clock in the morning when he cannot sleep. He has only himself to blame. But there was more to it than that. He could never say to anyone, ‘I was steam-rollered by Giles Harper.’

  It would in any case have been more true to say, ‘I was seduced by Giles Harper.’

  For Cox & Co., the merger was a disaster. All these years later, the old Cox people who remain do not really mesh wit
h old Harper people. The culture is different. In his heart Martagon is for ever a Cox person, even though the Harper ethos turned out to have the edge, and even though he quit a couple of years after the merger. Martagon, telling the story, could never convey to anyone the personal drama, or the pain of betrayal.

  * * *

  It was Harpers who approached the Cox partnership, suggesting a merger. Giles Harper and Martagon, each representing his firm as CEO, met for the first time over an informal lunch at the Caprice. They found one another exciting. They were both young – early thirty-somethings, with Giles just a few years the elder – and alike in ways that they both found flattering. Or was it just Giles who was flattering Martagon? Who was wooing whom?

  To look at, they were chalk and cheese. Giles’s grey suit had a sheen on it. His emerald green tie had an even higher sheen. He wore a gold bracelet and a signet ring. When he smiled, he revealed half a gold tooth. He was stocky and muscular, already carrying a tad too much weight for his height. With his south London voice, and in working gear – hard hat, neon jacket and steel-toed boots – he could merge perfectly with the workforce on a construction site.

  Martagon, in the same situation, was far more intimately engaged with the problems at ground level than Giles ever was. Yet he looked like an actor cast for the part by a self-indulgent director.

  The differences in their self-presentation added a glint of razor-wire to their immediate rapport. They agreed they were both risk-takers. They liked living on the edge, moving around, feeling at ease wherever they found themselves. Harpers’ main business was in the UK. Cox & Co. had their long-established international business, which Giles coveted. A merger between the two firms, with the emphasis on overseas expansion, could be a winner.

  What both young men also knew – though neither referred to it directly – was that the Cox partnership, for the first time in its history, was losing money overseas. Martagon knew some of the reasons why. Emerging countries were beginning to produce their own engineers, and their governments to insist on local professionals forming part of the team. Sustainability, local opinion, local culture and long-term local needs had to be factored in to proposals and bids from outside firms.