Flight

by Victoria Glendinning

  ‘We can manage this business better, for a better return,’ Giles said to him, presenting yet another ‘opportunity’ which Martagon saw as ignoble short-termism. ‘That’s why we got together, isn’t it? You’re not properly focused, Martagon. You lack the killer instinct, you’re trying to drive with the handbrake on.’

  Giles talked a lot about the Harper Cox ‘core values’. Martagon gathered that by this he meant maximizing profits for the shareholders – among whom he, Martagon and Tom Scree, in that order, held the majority of shares.

  ‘I thought “core values” were things like honesty and integrity,’ Martagon said.

  ‘That goes without saying. Get a life,’ said Giles. ‘You’re such a prig.’

  Martagon was nettled. Giles had a point. Martagon began to feel not only resentful but inadequate. He began to be unwell. Nothing major. His gums hurt and bled. He picked up a nasty case of athlete’s foot at the pool. He cut himself shaving, and the tiny wound went septic. There seemed to be a lot more hair in his hairbrush than there used to be. He began to think the unthinkable: first, that he was going bald, and second, that he should leave the firm. It was the only right thing to do.

  * * *

  He wrote his letter of resignation to the chairman, Tom Scree. Within two days, the news was all over the office. Scree expressed his great regret, insincerely Martagon thought. Giles, however, came to him white-faced, chain-smoking. Martagon had never seen him so agitated.

  ‘You just can’t do this. What has happened to us? What has happened to our Camelot? What’s got into you?’

  Martagon hardened his heart, saying to himself that it was only Giles’s pride and his panic at what Martagon’s departure might do to the firm’s standing that were causing his distress.

  ‘There’s something big coming up which would be just up your street – a new airport in France. The competition for the design is about to be announced, I had it today from someone at Arup who’d heard it on the grapevine. It’ll be huge. They say Lin is interested. We should try to be involved. We should pitch for the main engineering contract. You can’t let us down like this.’

  Martagon shrugged. ‘Your business now, not mine.’

  ‘At least let’s discuss this, out of the office. Come and talk it all over at home – with Amanda. Like we always do, like the friends we are. We can sort it out.’

  ‘No.’ Martagon was exhausted. He had suddenly nothing at all to say to Giles, who after half an hour of cajolement, reproach, bribery – ‘What is it that you want, Martagon?’ – lost his temper.

  ‘Then we’ll buy you out. No problem. Clear your fucking desk by Friday.’

  Technically, Martagon should not have left immediately. But obviously, under the circumstances, staying on would have been too painful for all concerned. Arrangements were made. Martagon did not go and see Amanda, though he knew she would be bewildered and upset – both for Giles, and the firm, and for the close little unit that the three of them had become. Perhaps it was four of them. He felt the need to explain himself to Julie.

  He met her for a drink in Gordon’s basement wine-bar in Villiers Street near the Embankment, thinking she might enjoy its subterranean seediness as he did. She turned up with her backpack, looking concerned. She didn’t remark on the ambience. The scabby walls and dark, dripping brick vaults seemed just normal to her. Martagon started to tell her about leaving the firm.

  ‘I know about it already,’ she said.

  ‘Giles has told you.’

  ‘Yes, but I knew before.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘From Tom.’

  ‘How’s that?’ Martagon was astonished.

  ‘I see him sometimes. He takes me and Fasil out into the country. In his car.’

  Martagon had been planning to explain his resignation to Julie in terms of his antipathy to Tom Scree, so as not to speak badly to her about her beloved brother. Now, he saw with distaste, his strategy was inappropriate. Simply for something to say, he asked, ‘In his car? What sort of car does Tom have?’

  Julie said vaguely, ‘I think it’s a Viagra.’

  He looked at her sharply. There was absolutely no way of knowing whether she was making a joke or not. Perhaps she meant a Vectra, or a Vitara.

  * * *

  Martagon went independent. He took some of his personal files home, and some to the two-room office suite he rented only a few hundred yards from the Harper Cox premises. He didn’t have the energy to look further afield, and he had to move fast. He had business cards printed, and headed stationery:

  MARTAGON

  Structural Engineering and Design

  Multi-Disciplinary Consultancy

  With a logo designed by himself of a hammer crossed with a long-stemmed martagon lily, making an X-shape.

  ‘You’re such a girl, my dear,’ said Lin Perry, when he saw the logo.

  ‘No, I’m not,’ said Martagon. He knew he was not.

  He took the Berlin theatre project with him from Harper Cox with Giles’s unwilling consent; it was after all Martagon himself, rather than the firm as a whole, with whom Lin Perry was working. The main task, now, was to determine the multiple and various specifications for the structural glass.

  Martagon set out to rebuild his career from scratch. Later, he saw that the painful break with Harper Cox was the best thing that could have happened to him. During the first thin months he did some design work for a firm that built expensive, bespoke, one-off conservatories. In the process he learned, as others in the field were also learning, how best to exploit glass as a ‘strong material’, and how to create all-glass structures with no supporting steel or wood anywhere. He designed glass beams and glass staircases. He gained confidence. He was working on using hollow tubes as supports, convinced that the load-bearing capacity of glass was still underestimated. He dreamed of designing a bridge – a footbridge – made entirely of glass. The technology was not up to speed for that yet, but in another couple of years it might be. He asked himself continually, ‘What if…?’ He grappled with problems of heat loss, condensation, ventilation. He wasn’t the only one at it – but he was positioning himself among the three or four architects and engineers at the cutting edge of his speciality, though he was too absorbed to realize this straight away.

  It took a year before there were more incoming than outgoing calls to his office, but after two of his structures were published in the technical journals the world started to come to him. Soon he was being offered more work than his small office – himself and two assistants – could handle.

  He was interviewed by a charming and clever woman for the Architects’ Journal, and gave a series of lectures on glass technology to post-graduate architects at the RIBA. He was invited to give papers at conferences and to sit on panels. He became a voice on radio programmes about state-of-the-art design. An article on the increasingly close and ambiguous relationship between architecture and engineering in Architecture Today featured his work flatteringly, and included a photograph of him. A production company invited him to present a TV series to be called Best Buildings of Our Century. He declined. He received – along with an increased flow of junk mail and charity appeals – invitations to previews of prestigious new buildings, and to gallery openings. People to whom he was introduced at these parties and gatherings shook his hand with smiles and nods of recognition when they heard his name.

  So Martagon was a success. But if the world had found him, he had not yet found himself, though he loved the work. He still felt adrift. Most weekends he went to Germany to see Jutta, who attached herself organically to his inner self whether he willed it or not – just as living tissue, he thought, creeps forward with mindless determination and cleaves to the ceramic glass of a prosthetic called the Douek middle-ear device. He’d read a paper about it. For he was reading and thinking about nothing but glass, obsessed by its unexpected elasticity and sudden fickle brittleness, and by the way it transmits, reflects and refracts light, sculpting the very air into
a form of his choosing.

  He experimented privately with working models in a workshop in Bethnal Green with a talented pair of Czech glass-workers, father and son. His clients found it hard to believe in the compressive strength of glass; making models was the best way of convincing them – and himself. (‘What if…’) Old Jan and Young Jan had no conception of impossibility, and no fear of trying out something new and rash for Martagon.

  Occasionally, during those five years in private practice, he saw Julie; and she told him about a novel called Oscar and Lucinda.

  ‘The woman in it inherits a glassworks and tries to build a glass church. It’s her lover’s idea. They have this obsession about it. They are both compulsive gamblers.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I haven’t finished the book yet. But I think something shatteringly awful is going to happen.’

  ‘I’d better read it, then.’

  ‘It’s very good. It won the Booker Prize. It’s not about now, it’s set in the late nineteenth century.’

  ‘Glass was in the air, then. Technology creeps along then suddenly takes a leap. Glass is in the air again, right now.’

  Julie copied out for him a verse by a seventeenth-century poet, George Herbert:

  A man who looks on glass,

  On it may stay his eye;

  Or if he pleaseth, through it pass,

  And so the heaven espy.

  ‘He wrote another one,’ she said, ‘about man being made of “brittle crazy glass” until God anneals the gospel story in him. I don’t know what “anneals” means, though I can kind of guess.’

  ‘Anneals. That’s a technical term. To do with toughening, and fusing, by heat. I’m using annealed glass now. He must have been really interested in glass.’

  ‘I don’t suppose so. Not for its own sake. He was thinking about stained-glass windows in church illustrating Bible stories. He was interested in God. He was a vicar. And dead before he was forty.’

  Occasionally, as Martagon left his office in the evening, he saw a burgundy-red Jaguar shimmering round Clerkenwell Green, and quickly looked the other way. He had work, and friends; but sometimes he thought he would not mind too much if he, like the poet George Herbert, died before he was forty. Not so long to wait.

  * * *

  When, in early 1998, Lin Perry remarked in passing that he wished to hell he had him on the airport project, Martagon thought very little about it. He knew Harper Cox had the main contract, and he could not imagine Giles Harper ever wanting to work with him again.

  Then Giles rang him up out of the blue, sounding quite normal, as if there had been no break in their communication.

  ‘Look, Martagon, would you consider being a consultant on the Bonplaisir airport project? We’re going out to tender now. You know what the contractors are capable of in this area better than anyone. It’s all that glass. We’re going to need about two dozen different specifications for different sections, and we’ll need to get it right. It’s a real bugger.’

  ‘I’ll come in with you just for the tender process, if that would help. Off the top of my head, I’d say Heaney Mahon would be your best bet. They won’t be the cheapest, though. Irish. Part of the Celtic Tiger thing, a whole paw of it, you might say. And they’re doing a lot of edgy stuff with glass.’

  ‘That’s the sort of thing we need to know. Yes, please come in for the scrutiny of tender. I really want you on board for the implementation too, to see the project through. We’re quite far on but we’ve had some bad setbacks and from where I sit it looks like the whole strategy needs overhauling. We’re going to have to work bloody fast now.’

  ‘Giles. Wait a minute. I don’t know—’

  ‘You get on much better with Lin than I do, he wants you in on it, and it goes without saying that we do too. Look, I really need you, my old mate.’

  They met for a drink. Giles filled Martagon in, at length. Big projects take several years to get off the ground, and Harper Cox had been one of the main players from the beginning.

  The inspiration came from the Vaucluse region, as part of a plan to improve on the small airport already in existence at Avignon. The idea was to build a new flagship airport well south of Lyon, with the intention of diverting a profitable tranche of air traffic and tourism from the coastal airports of Nice and Marseille. Lin Perry’s design, as Martagon was well aware, had been the winner in an international competition.

  There had been opposition from the Marseille mafia, and delays while a commission of civil servants and the relevant ministries in Paris sat on the idea. But the départements adjacent to the Vaucluse came on board; a development corporation was set up; the finance came in from private and institutional investors. The budget for the terminal was 150 million francs, the target a throughput of 300,000 to 350,000 passengers a year – as airports go, these days, a small operation, as Giles said. The new 2F terminal at Charles de Gaulle in Paris, for example, had a budget of 2.5 billion francs. The Provence airport, which was to be called Bonplaisir, was more on the scale of Lille’s new passenger terminal.

  The name Bonplaisir came from the site, acquired with a lot of hassle and at great cost from a brother and sister, local aristos – ‘weird people, I gather, at each other’s throats’ – and was ideal, a flat piece of land with already excellent transport links, and with the Rhône and the autoroute on one side, and the new extension of the TGV railway line on the other. The airport would have its own railway station as part of the complex, though Harper Cox were not involved with that. Plus, the Château de Bonplaisir was thrown in, and would become a five-star hotel.

  There had been feasibility studies, and reports from specialist consultants – a sociologist, an ecologist – to provide projections of the probable impact on the area, so that any ill-effects could be factored in and minimized. Harper Cox were contracted just for the terminal, not for the runways or the avionics. But it didn’t hurt to do some thinking about the meteorological aspects, because of the impact of the mistral on the terminal building. (Might have to use glass fins for windbracing, Martagon thought as Giles talked.) The main runway, for instance, was running north–south, so that the planes came in and took off with or against, but not across, the mistral.

  Giles told Martagon all of this and much more, and in great detail, talking hard for over two hours. He had Lin Perry’s original design and some of the plans with him. Martagon kept his cool. He asked a lot of questions. Giles outlined what would be Martagon’s particular responsibilities. He mentioned fees – just ballpark figures, he said. When finally he wound down, he looked at Martagon and said, ‘Well?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Martagon. ‘Yes, I’ll do it. I’ll come in with you.’

  His main work on the Berlin theatre was almost finished. Other projects on the drawing-board could be fitted in.

  The following weekend, in Berlin to visit Jutta, he told her that he could not go on with their relationship. Giles’s offer had given him the impetus to make the break. Without quite acknowledging the fact, he had been wanting to do it for months, both for his sake and hers – or so he told himself, though that was not how she saw it. The bottom line was that he did not love her. She was a keen bed-partner, and even more keen at planning their future together. He knew that was not what he wanted. It was a painful weekend. He did everything he could to leave her with her self-esteem and dignity intact, and feared that he had not succeeded.

  Then, with relief, he flew to Paris and saw Lin Perry. With Lin’s right-hand man he pored over the plans in Lin’s office near the Sorbonne, and he and Lin took George – older now, and mellower – for a walk in the Jardin du Luxembourg, talking everything over. Then he took the train down to Avignon and hired a car for his first site visit.

  The details of his consultancy still had to be finalized with Harper Cox’s finance director, but he was not worried about that. He felt as light as air. He saw his way ahead, clear and straightforward. He did not know that the airport project would also bring him Marina.
If he had had foreknowledge – which one never has – would he have decided differently?

  No.

  * * *

  He returned to the Harper Cox fold and to the Harper family, and began to see more of Julie again. She was not only older, as they all were, but better and happier, having walked away the worst of her unhappiness. She had put on weight – not much, she was still tiny, there was still nothing of her, but she no longer looked like an anorexic or a sickly adolescent from a food-deficit area. She was working for a reputable aid agency in Hackney, as project manager for several sub-Saharan countries.

  Martagon at first found it hard to envisage Julie managing anything. Then he began to realize how intelligent she was, and how conscientious. Unlike her brother she read all the time, borrowing books from the public library, and she remembered everything she read. She interested him, and he found himself thinking about her.

  He had never before met a woman with Julie’s absolute lack of coquetry and flirtatiousness. It was unnerving. He realized that the easy contact he made with most women – even with Amanda, and with women of all ages, plain or pretty – was based on the mutual acknowledgement of agreeable sexual difference. Not so, with Julie.

  This was oddly challenging and, after a while, alluring. Julie rarely asserted herself, yet she seemed open and – yes, even available, in the vulnerable, unaware way that a flower is available. She had no self-presentation or ‘manner’ when she talked to him, so she seemed naked. Talking to Julie is like talking in bed, he thought. She talks in that deadpan desultory way that one normally does only after making love.

  All this being so, and since she was not very skilled at making conversation at a supper-table, Martagon concluded that the only real contact a man could have with Julie was likely to be physical.

  Not that he had any physical contact with her, beyond social kissing at the end of an evening. He liked her but he did not desire her. If asked, he would have said, in the conventional sexual shorthand, that she was not his type. But once when she was playing with Fasil on the floor Martagon saw that under her usual droopy skirt she was wearing a startlingly white petticoat with a flouncy lace edge. It made him gasp. The white lace was just for herself, and he had to admit he was increasingly curious about that self.