Flight

by Victoria Glendinning

  Arthur Cox saw his mission as a ‘civilizing’ one. Arthur thought he knew what was best for developing countries, which generally meant the inculcation of northern European values and attitudes – everything that spelt ‘civil society’ to Arthur – as well as what was best for the business.

  Cox & Co. were beginning to be seen at best as paternalist, at worst imperialist. They were continuing to tender, but failing to win contracts. Within the firm, only the chief planner, Tom Scree, was vociferous about the need for a change of ethos. Tom Scree was not one of Arthur’s favourites. The board should have been undertaking a major rethink, and identifying new markets. Arthur resisted change. Arthur was as he was.

  Giles Harper impressed on Martagon that the way ahead lay not only in identifying new markets but in reconfiguring existing ones. They should be going for contracts funded by international aid and development programmes, and co-operate with whichever of the proliferating NGOs (non-governmental organizations, which Arthur, as Martagon told Giles, still called ‘charities’) were operating in the different areas.

  ‘Making our profit by milking overseas aid, you mean?’

  ‘Look at it another way,’ said Giles. ‘We’d be putting our expertise at the service of the aid programmes. The poor and disadvantaged in emerging countries don’t need naïve idealists swarming all over them, with no practical skills and a load of theoretical bullshit. Emerging countries need bridges, dams, access roads. And for us, it is opportunity.’

  Giles made the word ‘opportunity’ sound sexy. Every new contact, every incoming call, was a possible opportunity, for him. Opportunity was what turned Giles on and opportunity was what kept him going. Martagon only learned later how many irons in the fire Giles had at any one time, and how little he worried about getting his fingers burned. Once Martagon saw a personal bank statement of Giles’s, lying openly on a table. If Martagon had been in debt to that amount he would have been a nervous wreck. Giles didn’t give a damn. He saved his energies for the next opportunity.

  ‘I’m not interested in money for its own sake,’ he told Martagon at lunch, ‘only for what it can do. I want the power that money gives me.’

  Even at that first lunch Martagon deduced that Giles had business interests on his own account, quite separate from the firm. Giles told a story about the great feeling he had, waiting alone at a deserted Stansted airport at three o’clock in the morning, with no sound other than the whine of distant floor-polishers, and he himself straining his eyes into the darkness for the lights of a private plane bringing him a load of bullion from Eastern Europe.

  ‘The romance of commerce!’ said Giles, running his fingers through his curly brown hair so that it stood on end. ‘Am I very ridiculous?’

  ‘You’re not ridiculous.’ Martagon, in return, told Giles about the time he stood on the quay at Lagos beside a man, a complete stranger, on a day when the skyline was speckled with incoming vessels. The stranger was raking the horizon with his eyes in a fret of anticipation. He told Martagon, in a strong Glaswegian accent, that he was expecting a cargo of car tyres.

  ‘Why car tyres?’ Martagon asked.

  The Glaswegian replied with a single sufficient word: ‘Shorrtage.’

  Shortage of something, for someone, means opportunity for someone else. That is the market. It is, in Giles’s phrase, the romance of commerce.

  ‘I worked out early on,’ said Giles, ‘that there were adults who did things or made things on their own account, and marketed them. I’d call them the self-employed, now. Then there were adults who did things or made things for a boss, in return for a wage or salary. Then there was the boss, who didn’t make things and I wasn’t sure what he actually did, either. But in the movies I saw he always had sexy secretaries, and talked on the phone a lot, and had a big empty desk, and people came into his office to be told what to do, or to be slagged off, or sacked.’

  ‘So you wanted to be him.’

  ‘I didn’t know how to get to be him. I just knew I didn’t want to work for anyone else. In that situation, the only thing left is to deal, to sell something for more than you bought it for. Like your “shortage” thing. It could be tyres, or a goat, or a load of firewood, or a bunch of bananas, or a bunch of power-stations in Venezuela.’

  ‘Why Venezuela?’

  ‘It’s just something that I – oh, don’t ask.’

  ‘You’re one of nature’s dealers. A trader.’ Martagon drained his glass of Chablis. Giles, who was not drinking, sipped his mineral water. Giles’s weaknesses were his sweet tooth, and nicotine. He ordered a crème brûlée and lit a Marlboro Light.

  ‘I’m a dreamer, too,’ he said. ‘And you?’

  ‘Oh, I’m a dreamer. But I’m not a dealer. I’m an investor, figuratively speaking.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘I get involved. I need to see a complex project through from beginning to end. I have trouble disengaging. Maybe because I don’t have too much in my life apart from my work. I don’t have a family, a particular person, to invest myself in.’

  ‘You must meet Amanda, my wife. And my sister Julie, she’s something special, although she’s got problems, she’s a bit of a naïve idealist.’ Giles paused and stubbed out his cigarette. ‘We could be complementary, you and I. We could help one another. All I know is, I want a very different life from the one my parents have.’

  Giles’s parents, as he told Martagon, live in Catford. His father works in John Lewis on Oxford Street selling white goods, as he has done all his adult life. His mother is bookkeeper to a small building firm. His father’s elder brother set up a small civil engineering company in Portsmouth, and Giles joined his uncle there on leaving school, qualifying as an engineer on day-release courses.

  As soon as he qualified he began to work all hours drumming up new business, starting at the top. Within a very few years the company was five times the size, operating nationwide and expanding, very tentatively, overseas. The head office moved from Portsmouth to Crawley, nearer London. Giles’s uncle still chaired the board, but he was ready to retire. Giles, to all intents and purposes, ran Harpers.

  ‘If you’re a dreamer,’ asked Martagon, ‘what’s your goal, your ultimate dream?’

  ‘I want Amanda and me to end up in a large comfortable house with a garden and a double garage and an indoor pool in a good part of west London, say Chelsea or Kensington or Notting Hill. And a house in the country for weekends. And children, and dogs. It’ll all cost a bomb. An absolute bomb. I want an establishment, and no money worries.’

  Martagon was surprised that Giles’s best dreams were, ultimately, so conventional. ‘I can’t envisage anything remotely like that. But then I’m a displaced person, I’m a wanderer.’

  ‘You’re a bit younger than me, and you haven’t got a family. You’ll see. And,’ Giles added, ‘I’d like to leave something of value – an institute or something, a bit like—’

  ‘Like the Cox Foundation?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  As they waited for the bill, they agreed that you can’t be like Arthur Cox without being – well, like Arthur Cox, and that’s the problem. They both laughed, and Martagon felt a flicker of guilt at the implicit slight to Arthur.

  That first lunch expanded into many, at weekly intervals, in the period leading up to the merger negotiations. It was business, and it was also pleasure. There was a private merger between Giles and Martagon long before the real merger went through. Giles quickly acquired an impressive grasp of the international business. Martagon became fascinated by Giles – by his barrow-boy flashness, his burgundy-red Jaguar – and, even more, by the way Giles ran Harpers.

  By the standards of Cox & Co. – Martagon saw this all too clearly after the merger – Giles was ruthless, both with staff and clients. He made cutting corners into a professional virtue. He delegated, and how. He created an internal market within the firm. He felt no obligation to familiarize himself with the detail of any project, and gave hell to anyone who should
have known the detail and did not. Martagon was scared, excited and – fatally – flattered. He was mesmerized by Giles, and a little in love with him, as men can be in love with other men without ever wanting to make love to them or even thinking about it.

  Martagon’s father, who was fond of axioms, used to say that ‘God is in the details.’ It was in the details that Giles’s values and attitudes diverged from Martagon’s. Perhaps, Martagon thought now, not God but the devil is in the details. Years later, he said to Marina: ‘I think Giles may be the devil.’

  She was astonished. ‘You’ve always told me what good qualities he has. How he’s a wonderful husband, and loyal to his friends, and so on.’

  ‘That’s all true. Maybe he’s not the devil. Maybe he’s just the devil for me. He tempts me, he brings out a sort of materialism and unscrupulousness in me which I wish wasn’t there, but it is and it scares me. He’s my bad angel. Arthur Cox used to say that I was his good angel, and that used to be true.’

  * * *

  Arthur Cox took a paternal interest in Martagon when he first joined the firm, though for a while Martagon failed to recognize it as such. Arthur would call him into his private office for ‘a word’. He would stand with his hands in his pockets, jingling his small change, looking out of the window with his back to Martagon, and outline a problem. ‘I’d welcome your thoughts on this. A fresh eye. The papers are on the desk if you want to take a look.’

  Martagon would come up with what he thought was the obvious solution, to be met with silence.

  ‘Well, yes’, said Arthur at last. ‘That’s one possibility. But I wonder if we couldn’t do it differently.’

  Half an hour would pass, while Martagon did his best to come up with other ideas, and Arthur showed every sign of indecisiveness. In the end Arthur would quite suddenly plump with apparent satisfaction for the first course of action they had discussed, and send Martagon back to his desk. Martagon gradually understood that Arthur, by nature, really did like to turn every possibility over and over. But more importantly, he was quite deliberately training Martagon how to marshal the options, how to separate the essential from the inessential – in short, how to think. About once a week Arthur took Martagon for a drink at the end of the day. Nursing his half-pint, he told long stories about the past heroes of the British engineering profession and their achievements, and about those firms that had overreached themselves, growing so large and grand that they no longer functioned effectively.

  By osmosis, Martagon learned. In return he became Arthur’s eyes and ears. It was he who spotted the quality of Mirabel Plunket. Arthur was too old-world to give immediate credence to the capabilities of a newly qualified female, but he took Martagon’s word for it and put her on the fast track. Martagon was proved right.

  ‘You are my good angel,’ Arthur said. Martagon knew that Arthur, as he grew older, relied on him more and more.

  * * *

  Martagon and Giles worked on the merger and planned their Camelot.

  Giles was a Chelsea supporter, and always had a season ticket and, mysteriously, access to more. When Chelsea were playing at home, the two went together to Stamford Bridge to watch the match. Mostly, as the months passed, they met at the Harpers’ house in Fulham, at Amanda’s kitchen table or sitting in the garden. It was Martagon who first used the word ‘Camelot’ to describe their planned joint venture. He meant it literally.

  ‘The Knights of the Round Table weren’t sentimental softies. They were tough, in training, ready to fight their corner,’ he said. ‘They were armed to the teeth with all the latest dark-ages technology and know-how.’

  Giles did not read books, he never had. ‘Oh, you’re so cultured!’ he said mockingly.

  But he liked that in Martagon. He really did. Maybe, thought Martagon, that’s what he wants from me: my difference. I am coming from somewhere else. ‘Sir Lancelot and King Arthur didn’t sit around all day drinking spritzers and making daisy-chains,’ he said.

  King Arthur. King Arthur Cox. How was he going to feel about the new Camelot?

  ‘They did have heavy-duty romances, though,’ said Amanda. ‘From what I remember.’

  ‘They always ended disastrously,’ said Martagon. ‘Anyway, this daisy-chain is for Julie.’

  ‘That’s nice, she’ll like that,’ said Giles. ‘She really will.’

  Planes coming into land at Heathrow, at that hour in the evening, flew over the Harpers’ garden at an angle of forty-five degrees every few seconds. Martagon put down his daisy-chain to watch them. Long-haul planes, from the ends of the earth. The sky was clear, and Martagon could pick out their liveries and identify them.

  ‘Weird how they suddenly appear, as if they had just been created. There’s that split second between seeing a piece of empty sky and seeing a plane in it. It’s too quick, like as if time was the wrong category to be catching it in. And think of all those people, in all those planes. Escaping from somewhere, or coming home, or arriving somewhere new and exciting, or new and scary, and all finding – I don’t know what…’

  ‘Opportunity,’ said Giles. ‘Actually, what they find is Heathrow.’

  ‘Heathrow is purgatory. Something to be got through before you get to heaven. Or hell.’

  ‘How you do go on, Martagon. Get on with your daisy-chain, it’s wilting.’

  * * *

  The day that Martagon met Giles’s sister for the first time, Amanda had said, ‘Julie’s pretty screwed up at the moment.’

  She sounded as if she was warning him. She and Martagon were sitting, as so often, in the Harpers’ back garden, during that first summer of the merger discussions. Martagon was waiting for Giles, who was late back from the office. Julie, too, was expected.

  Martagon had noticed how Giles’s voice changed when he talked about his sister. He was fiercely protective of her. Martagon imagined that they still inhabited together their childhood world, in which there was complete mutual trust. Both had reacted against their limited, decent upbringing, leaving home as soon as they could.

  ‘They’re the opposite sides of the same coin,’ said Amanda. ‘Both extremists, both driven – but in different directions.’

  Julie, the younger, became left-wing and alternative, rejecting the ‘system’, dressing herself from charity shops, backpacking to India, volunteering, living on no money. She went on to do Development Studies at the University of East Anglia, when she met Hailu – a clever, handsome Ethiopian seconded for a year from the NGO for which he worked in Addis Ababa.

  Martagon had never heard the whole story.

  ‘I might as well tell you, since you’re more or less one of the family now.’ Succinctly, in her north-country way, Amanda filled him in. ‘The next thing was, Julie fell pregnant.’

  She and Hailu were utterly wrapped up in one another. Julie didn’t make friends easily, and Hailu was her first boyfriend. She didn’t dare tell her parents about Hailu and the coming baby. At the end of the academic year they got married, very privately, in Norwich. Julie didn’t even confide in Giles. Then she flew back to Addis with Hailu – as she informed her parents in a note posted at Heathrow.

  Hailu took the pregnant Julie back to his village to meet his family, and left her there.

  ‘Why did he do that?’

  ‘He thought it was the best thing to do. From what I can gather he’s a good young man. Though maybe not up to incorporating a wife into his life in Addis. But he didn’t mean to dump her, or not straight away. He told her he’d come and fetch her when he’d found them somewhere to live where they could have the baby. But he didn’t come back to the village.’

  Meanwhile Julie lived with his mother and sisters in the village – which was hardly a village, just a cluster of round huts, tokuls, in the middle of nowhere. It was a very poor area, a ‘food-deficit area’ in aid-agency language, one and a half days’ walk across the bush from the nearest permanent road, thirty miles from the nearest village with a market and shops.

  ‘If you
can call them shops,’ said Amanda. ‘They’d just be rickety single-storey shacks with tin roofs. Julie couldn’t write to anyone, and no one could write to her, she didn’t have an address even. Julie being Julie, she thought she ought to make a go of it. She still thinks she should have. But she couldn’t.’

  She had the baby – a boy – there in the tokul, and did not recover her health afterwards. She and baby Fasil were never well. Early one morning she put Fasil in a cloth on her back and walked the thirty miles to the big village, where there was some sort of a clinic. The clinic was closed. Hailu’s family used to walk all the way home across the bush by night in a group, but she was alone. She didn’t have their orientation skills, and she was frightened of hyenas. On impulse, she walked off down the motor-road, not knowing where it led.

  She was picked up at dawn by some Dutch aid-workers in a Land Cruiser. In Addis, they helped her to locate the NGO offices where Hailu had worked. He was no longer there, and no one could or would tell her where he was.

  The good Dutch people paid for a room for her in the Ghion Hotel, where she washed Fasil’s clothes and had a hot shower. Then, finally, she telephoned Giles.

  So Julie came home.

  She had underestimated her parents. They were non-judgemental, and immediately besotted with little Fasil. But Julie would not move in with them. She and Fasil were staying with an old university friend in Stoke Newington in north London.

  ‘She’s very hard to help,’ said Amanda. ‘She’s having a sort of nervous breakdown on her feet. And I mean on her feet. She’s kept up that African thing of walking everywhere, even now when she doesn’t have to. She walks miles, all over London, with Fasil in the buggy.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Martagon, increasingly interested, ‘it’s become a sort of addiction. Or a residual loyalty to that other life. Maybe she’s looking for Hailu without knowing that’s what she’s doing.’