Flight

by Victoria Glendinning

  The widow, Lady Cox, thanked him effusively for what he had said. Martagon had met her before, and not liked her much – a dyed blonde who had once been pretty. She was wearing heavy makeup and a furry black hat. Afterwards she sent Martagon one of Arthur’s ties as a memento, which caused him to suppose that Arthur could not have confided in her the details of his humiliation and betrayal. Lady Cox did not look like a person in whom one could easily confide. The tie seemed brand new, apple-green silk with white polka dots. Martagon had never seen Arthur wearing it. He had probably been given it for Christmas one year, since when it had lain in the back of a drawer. Martagon would much rather have had one of the creased, dim-coloured woollen ties that Arthur habitually wore with his shabby tweed suits at the office.

  The second address, which he did not deliver, and never even printed out from his computer, was about how an honourable man was let down by his friends, by his own intransigent personality, and by cut-throat modern business practices. It was an angry piece – doubly and impotently angry, because the tragedy was built in. It was no good saying ‘if only’. Arthur Cox was as he was, Giles and Martagon were as they were, and it’s an old sad story.

  But actions have consequences. We killed something in Arthur, thought Martagon. I am personally culpable, because I was his good angel and he trusted me.

  Giles is, in spite of appearances, a sensitive man – dangerously so. His sensitivity to the state of mind of others is part of his arsenal. He was careful and caring in his attitude to Martagon in the first weeks of the new dispensation, conferring with him over every minor decision. He nursed Martagon over this difficult transition, acting as an expansion joint does, absorbing unusual stresses without deforming the structure. Martagon was mollified by Giles’s apparent respect for his judgement. Perhaps it was true, what Arthur had said: that Giles wanted him not only for his professional excellence, but as some sort of moral ballast; he respected Martagon’s values as Martagon had respected Arthur’s.

  Giles and Martagon were now joint chief executives of Harper Cox. They retained on the main board an equal number of Cox directors and Harper directors. Some dead wood was pruned – not discarded, mostly, but redeployed. They terminated the leases on Cox & Co.’s Caxton Street premises and Harpers’ offices in Crawley as soon as they could, and acquired as their head office three thousand square feet in a factory conversion in Clerkenwell. Novelli’s restaurant on Clerkenwell Green, and the St John bar and restaurant in St John’s Street became their homes from home. They expanded the regional offices in the UK and overseas. Martagon recruited (as he put it), and Giles poached (as he boasted) bright new talent, male and female, from all over. Harper Cox was hot. They were the new kids on the block.

  There was a lot of work in progress from both sides to be seen through, but they started at once to look for new business. Cox & Co., shortly before the merger, had failed to win the coveted contract for a rural-access roads project in Zimbabwe. Alternative arrangements having fallen through, however, the project came up again. Harper Cox were approached directly; they did not have to tender competitively. Their proposal was accepted. Giles announced that he wished to have special responsibility for Africa; he wanted the Zim project for himself. Martagon let him have it. He himself would take Europe.

  Martagon had an ulterior motive: he had met a young German woman, Jutta, who worked in a bookshop in Berlin. She was shiningly healthy-looking, with an alluring waist-to-hip ratio, i.e., she was slim and curvy. Martagon responded to her instantly, bought a book he didn’t really want, and smiled at her. She agreed to meet him after the bookshop closed.

  With a startling rapidity, they became intimate. For three months they had been seeing each other, on her territory, at weekends. Jutta liked set routines. She would not take kindly to his spending months away on the other side of the world and, for the moment, he didn’t want to lose her.

  ‘You don’t sound all that keen really,’ said Amanda. ‘Are you in love with her?’

  ‘Well,’ said Martagon, ‘I’m not in love with anyone else.’

  ‘Are we going to get to meet her?’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Martagon, ‘but not yet.’

  In consultation with Giles, and while Harper Cox was the flavour of the month, Martagon decided to pitch for a few big European projects rather than a lot of smaller ones. The strategy paid off. They tendered for, and got, the main engineering contract for the new theatre just off the Potsdamerplatz in Berlin. The architect was Lin Perry, so it was quite a coup for Harper Cox.

  The Lin Perry. The new Camden Public Library, the museum in Barcelona, the star-shaped sports centre in Singapore. Also, the one who was rude about Amanda Harper’s big bottom. Lin himself attracts admiring glances and photographers’ lenses whenever he makes an appearance – and not just because of his high professional profile.

  Martagon had read enough articles on Lin, before he ever met him, to know that he was what feature-writers call a cosmocrat. He is well known in the US quite apart from his architecture because he was, briefly, a basketball star in his student days. His father is a retired American general, his mother a famously lovely Chinese actress. Lin inherited his father’s height and heft, and his long, long legs. He also inherited his mother’s features and colouring.

  The result is startling. Lin looks like the chieftain of a hitherto unknown tribe. You could not guess what his native language might be. He speaks, in fact, in the attractively drawly, ironic tones of the cultivated New Yorker. He is much in demand on both sides of the Atlantic from artistic women with big hair and bank balances, the sort who host dinners for charity.

  Lin’s London base at this time was a massive loft near Tower Bridge, which he shared with George, an obstreperous Airedale terrier. George went everywhere with him. George had a peculiarly piercing bark, and he barked a lot. Martagon did not much like George, and George knew it. Lin was seen about with interesting women – a young first-time novelist, a dancer from Covent Garden – but he guarded his private life ruthlessly. Martagon hardly ever saw him alone. He moved around accompanied not only by George but by a variety of personable young male assistants from his office, who carried the bags and knew the detail. Lin is an ideas man, a broad-brush man.

  Lin took a liking to Martagon, as people do, but they didn’t become intimate. Their most fruitful professional conversations were on the telephone, when Lin seemed to expand and relax. He would ring Martagon at home at odd times – seven in the morning, eleven thirty at night – wanting to settle down to half an hour’s chat about the Berlin work. Lin kept Martagon on his toes, and Martagon liked Lin, and it was doing his reputation no harm at all to be working closely with the great Lin Perry. Jutta was still in Berlin, so his professional and private life dovetailed neatly.

  So far so good.

  Martagon and Giles hired a whiz-kid financial director who had been going through the books with a fine-tooth comb. The plan was to trim down the workforce to a hard core of high-quality engineering staff, and to hire specialist consultants – sociologists, geologists, economists, financial analysts, planners, environmentalists – on short-term contracts for specific projects. They had been putting off appointing a new chairman. Martagon and Giles had been taking turns to chair the main board.

  It wasn’t sensible to continue like that, and the other board members let it be known that they did not like it. The two of them were busy with heading up their own divisions, with restructuring the company, and with management problems, and there was no objective guiding hand at the helm.

  ‘The only disadvantage in appointing a chairman,’ said Giles, ‘is that he could get us, or one of us, fired. The board keeps an eye on management, the chairman keeps an eye on the executive.’

  ‘Nevertheless,’ said Martagon, ‘I’d feel more comfortable if we had a chairman. It’s better organizational practice. Do we want just a titular chairman – or someone who will be properly involved in day-to-day decisions? I could take some soundings, and look
out for someone suitable from outside, if you think that’s a good idea.’

  ‘No,’ said Giles. ‘No. We should invite Tom Scree to be non-executive chairman.’

  Martagon was speechless. He was disgusted.

  Giles, who had been conciliatory for so long over minor matters, insisted on having his way over this. He was supported by the rest of the board, who were all for it. Better, they said, the devil we know … Giles had presented the case for Scree, with a charming deference, as a tribute to Cox & Co., and a reparation for the dumping of Arthur Cox. Not that he used the word ‘dumping’. It would cost the firm less, too: Tom had intimated that he would be happy to move to part-time. To Martagon, Giles said privately that he only wanted Tom in the chair because Tom was too busy to be inconveniently hands-on.

  Indeed, Scree was letting it be known that his true interests reached far wider than the affairs of Harper Cox. He was working, unpaid, in what he could without misrepresentation call the voluntary sector – actually an international organization dedicated to conflict resolution worldwide, funded by a multi-millionaire ex-arms dealer and born-again Christian, domiciled in Houston, Texas.

  ‘Who is he? What’s his name?’ asked Martagon, fascinated.

  ‘You would not have heard of him. He’s a very private person. But the organization is called the Grid Group, you’ll have heard about that. There was quite a good piece about us in The Economist last week.’

  Scree and Martagon were having lunch at Novelli’s, at Martagon’s suggestion. If he was going to have to work with Scree, he had better try to get on better terms with him. They were meant to be discussing the teething troubles of Harper Cox, but did not get very far.

  It appeared to Martagon that Scree’s work for the Grid Group chiefly involved first-class air-tickets to first-class hotels in agreeable places, for conferences on the world’s potential trouble-spots. The proceedings were then edited, and circulated to government departments, newspapers and journals in Europe and the US, and to an impressive mailing-list of the internationally great and good.

  ‘The international community knows all about Bosnia, Burundi, Bangladesh,’ said Scree, picking at his halibut. ‘But it would take real insight to spot the spores of conflict in, say, Barbados.’

  ‘It certainly would. And even then, you’ve only got up to the letter B,’ said Martagon. ‘I must say, it’s a breathtakingly immodest programme.’ Martagon, who had come along with the best intentions, was finding it hard to overcome his dislike of the man.

  ‘Surely,’ said Scree, ‘it’s better to do something, to try and do something, than to do absolutely nothing, then throw up our hands in horror and amazement when violence explodes somewhere new.’

  ‘But you can hardly intervene before anything has happened.’

  ‘Public opinion and the media can prevent, or at any rate moderate, events. At the very worst, our government and the governments of other responsible countries will not be unprepared.’

  ‘You mean our governments will know in good time who to make a quick buck selling arms and warheads to, before we step in and piously bomb the same people to smithereens for making use of what we sold them? Can you prove that your group’s activities have ever had any influence for good, that is, towards neutralizing conflict before it can break out?’

  ‘You can’t prove we haven’t,’ said Scree, looking at Martagon with his bright fanatical eyes. ‘What’s your problem, Martagon? I can never make my mind up whether you are a cynic, or a complete innocent about how the world works.’

  Martagon could not figure Scree out either. Either he was a hypocrite or he wasn’t. Either he was Christ among the Pharisees, or he was the chief Pharisee.

  ‘What I was coming to,’ said Scree, ‘was that the Group’s next conference – in Bali, actually—’

  ‘Still not got beyond B, I see,’ said Martagon. ‘You’ve a way to go, Tom.’

  ‘This conference, which is a particularly important one, coincides with the date of the next Harper Cox board meeting. So I shall have to ask one of you to take the chair. Of course I’ll let you have my comments in writing, for reference, once we have agreed the agenda. Which reminds me, I’d prefer to have Dawn in my office instead of the woman I’ve got now. Dawn would be useful, she’s familiar with the procedure. She knows where to find things, and she is discreet. I know Arthur thought highly of her.’

  Dawn, since the merger, had been acting as secretary to Martagon. There was no reason why she should not now be transferred back to the chairman’s office. She would probably prefer it. As Scree said, she knew the procedure. Nevertheless, Martagon was irritated. Nor did Scree’s absence from a board meeting really matter a damn. Yet he was more than irritated by Scree’s casualness. He was infuriated. Chairing the board was Scree’s only crucial function now that he worked part-time for the firm.

  ‘Just one other thing,’ said Scree, hauling on his greasy, dilapidated leather jacket, while Martagon offered the waiter his company credit card to pay for their lunch. ‘I’d like to have Mirabel Plunket co-opted on to the main board. She has somehow got overlooked. She’s very good, and we absolutely ought not to have an all-male board.’

  ‘You may be right,’ said Martagon, well knowing that Scree was irrefutably right. Martagon knew, too, that he should have thought about Mirabel himself. Scree had, as always, succeeded in wrong-footing him.

  * * *

  Thoroughly confused, Martagon went for a swim. A good person doesn’t just keep society’s rules in the interests of peace and harmony. You could be virtually inanimate and still do that. A good person is active – pro-active, as Tom Scree would say – in creating the society he lives in, standing up against evil and injustice, risking his own well-being, even his life. If he doesn’t do that, the bullies will win. The strong will wipe out the weak. Arthur Cox was weak because he was old. That is nature’s way – in nations at war, within communities, in animal herds, among plant species. Humanity has taken it upon itself to mitigate this cruel process. Up to a point.

  But it is all process. We in the fat West have everything, but it won’t last. Rise and fall. Growth and rot. The new feeding on the detritus of the old. Martagon heaved himself out of the pool, for once unrefreshed, unrenewed. He dreamed his old dream about the handless stumps – thud-thud, thud-thud on the car windows. Only differently. The windows were shattered, scattering slivers of glass into the dark interior where he cowered and trembled. Sometimes, during this time, Arthur Cox came to Martagon in dreams too. Nothing happened, there was no story, just a strong presence. It was really a dream about a suit, the one that Arthur had worn for years. He saw in close-up the exact texture of the soft tweed. It looked greyish from a distance, but had a small black and white pattern of the sort called ‘bird’s-eye’. He saw in the dream the way the jacket hung out at the back from Arthur’s broad, stooped shoulders, and the baggy, unpressed trousers with turn-ups, and creases behind the knees.

  Where was that suit now? Probably Lady Cox had taken it to Oxfam.

  * * *

  It was several months before Martagon admitted to himself that he was unhappy at work. The only thing he was really enjoying was the Berlin theatre project. Lin’s design had caught his imagination. Lin had wanted Martagon on the project because he knew about his experience with structural glass: the theatre was topped by an asymmetrical glass dome, to carry a reference to Foster’s design for the Reichstag without seeming to parody or mimic it. It was a challenge, both structurally and aesthetically, and Martagon was absorbed by the problems. He enjoyed the contact with Lin and the frequent meetings with Lin’s people at his Paris office.

  Events were precipitated by two bad quarrels he had with Giles. The first was about Giles’s policy of winning contracts by deliberately undercutting the opposition, while knowing that the work could not possibly be done properly for the quoted sum.

  ‘We’ll up the costs when we’re on the job,’ said Giles. ‘It won’t be hard to find good reasons.’r />
  ‘I’m sure it won’t,’ replied Martagon, ‘the main reason being that we seriously underestimated in the first place.’

  ‘What’s your problem, Martagon?’

  The second disagreement was about Giles’s management style. He was fostering competition within the firm, so that each division was beginning to raise the ante, bumping up profit projections artificially so as to be allocated a bigger share of the budget. ‘Competition is the only incentive. There’s the market, and there’s the internal market,’ said Giles. ‘It’s the same difference.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Martagon. ‘Competition is turning into faction-fighting. And what happens when the projections aren’t met?’

  ‘Then we give them hell and tell them to do better next time. And they will, they don’t want to lose their jobs.’

  Martagon found himself brooding bitterly about matters that should have been water under the bridge by now. He went over and over Giles’s high-handedness over the merger: the dumping of Arthur, the telephone call to Scree during the key meeting. Giles might still not have told him quite everything: he might, during that call, have promised the chairmanship to Scree in order to copper-bottom his support for the merger. Giles’s pleasant agreeableness over so many things, at the beginning, might have been just a strategy to jolly Martagon along, knowing that the issue of the chairmanship was going to cause trouble and that he would have to be adamant.

  Giles, it seemed to Martagon, did not know the difference between management and manipulation. He was also taking too much money out of the firm for his salary and Martagon’s, which made Martagon uneasy.

  Martagon despised himself for resenting Giles’s style. His broodings were petty, if only because he knew that Giles thought of the two of them as inseparable partners, almost as brothers, Giles was just being Giles, which included an instinctive quasi-sibling rivalry.