Flight

by Victoria Glendinning

  My mother would have loved this garden. What would Marina make of it all? If everything goes according to plan, she will probably never even see it.

  Martagon felt a pang. Now that the job was over, he himself might not see these people or this place any more, either. Solitary himself, he had a weakness for happy families. He sometimes met couples in England whom he would like to have as friends. And, quite often, he never saw them again. It was as if every couple already had their long-established, close, familiar circle, and although they were interested in meeting strangers, there was really no need, or no room, in their lives for extra people. It was not an active or a hostile exclusion; it was as if it just did not enter their heads to enlarge the group.

  Because of the circumstances of his life, Martagon had no close group of his own apart from the Harpers and the people he worked with. He had friends, but he still had no tribe of his own. When on occasion he followed up a new acquaintanceship with a telephone call and the suggestion of another meeting, he never felt rebuffed. But he had sometimes sensed not only pleasure but surprise, and an anxiety, in the voice on the line. There were plenty of exceptions, of course, especially in London. Women on their own were generally all too pleased to hear from him.

  They had lunch outside – the first time this year that it had been warm enough, said Jane. Feeling contented and expansive, Martagon surprised himself by saying into a moment of quiet, ‘I love England.’

  He didn’t know what response he expected. Pleased smiles perhaps, placid agreement. Instead there was a silence, as if he had said something a bit shocking. Then Gregory spoke. ‘Well, one doesn’t often hear that said.’

  ‘Why not? The Scots love Scotland, the Welsh love Wales, the Irish love Ireland, and have no trouble saying so.’ He remembered his conversations with Marina: ‘The French certainly love France, and say so. Likewise Americans, Italians, everyone. It’s natural to love your country, isn’t it? You love this place, that’s quite obvious.’

  ‘This place, yes,’ said Gregory. ‘We do. There is not much beauty around in this country. Not in the towns, not in the daily behaviour, not in the laddish beeriness. There’s no beauty now even in English football. This is our safe haven, our world which we have made. Do you have somewhere special like that?’

  ‘I suppose I do … An old farmhouse among lavender fields and vineyards in France, in Provence.’

  ‘There you are! Not England.’

  They began to talk at him rather than to him, in fluent marital counterpoint. They knew he had been born abroad, had worked abroad, was always on the move. He was like all expats, with a sentimental dream of an England that had long gone even if it ever existed. Patriotism and nationalism were in any case petty and dangerous. They led to the social exclusion of minorities. They led to fascism. They led to war. So much was wrong in this country – the class system, the gulf between rich and poor, corruption in the police, racism, homelessness, greed, materialism, underfunded schools and universities, failing health service, disastrous public transport, congested roads, hopeless rail system, insensitive planning, agribusiness, the arms trade, the tabloid press, political spin, the drug culture, teenage pregnancies, family breakdown, dumbing-down of the BBC, craven sycophancy towards Europe – or else towards the US (they argued between themselves over that one).

  Martagon was not altogether surprised. He had heard most of this before, with different emphases depending on whether the speakers leaned to the left or to the right. He couldn’t guess which way Gregory and Jane voted, since their dissatisfactions seemed to cover the whole political waterfront. He thought they probably belonged to what Marina called la gauche caviar – they were ‘champagne socialists’. The difference this time was that he had never said, ‘I love England,’ before, because he had never before felt that he did.

  And why did he now? Because he was planning to make his permanent home elsewhere, and knew he was burning his boats, and needed to honour the country he was abandoning? Because his mother had loved England, and since her death he was seeing with her eyes as well as his own?

  He let them have their say. The parting shots were the same as the first: as a habitual expat, he had no right to make judgements about England. To hear him say, ‘I love England,’ was – well, it was just a bit embarrassing, Jane said.

  Her condescension nettled Martagon.

  ‘Embarrassing! Embarrassment is a third-class emotion. It’s so English, for God’s sake.’

  ‘There you are. We are English.’

  ‘If I had been a real foreigner, would you have been saying all these things to me?’

  They smiled and shrugged.

  ‘Nearly every point you made would be valid for any country in the developed world. Not all of them for all countries, but many of them. In lots of countries the gaps between rich and poor, and institutional corruption, are far worse than here.’

  They shrugged this off too. ‘That’s their business.’

  ‘Maybe this is what’s wrong with England,’ said Martagon. ‘The begrudging English can’t love their own country. Yet you love each other, and your children, and your friends, knowing that no one is perfect. A believer doesn’t stop loving God because of a few bad priests. And what if I had slagged England off for all the reasons you have just given me, instead of saying, “I love England”? Wouldn’t you have leaped to England’s defence for the same reason, that I don’t live here all the time and so know nothing about it?’

  At that they laughed, the subject was changed, another bottle was opened. Martagon was shaken nevertheless. He had not realized the extent to which he could be perceived as an outsider. Nor did he like the idea of the English as an insular people riddled with self-dislike, alienated within their insularity, like rats – no, mice – squabbling in a cage.

  Perhaps the trouble is that we English – for I am English, he thought – have always found our meaning-structure by administering other nations. The empire has long gone, and the British Isles are separating out.

  England has only herself to administer, and looks inward, and doesn’t like or even recognize what she sees. Gregory and Jane, and people like them, are part of the problem. They don’t involve themselves in practical politics. They are outside the political process unless they are given a place in the House of Lords like Tom Scree; they despise most politicians, and create their ‘safe havens’, as at Clump House, from where they give tongue about England’s inadequacies.

  Yet to make a garden grow is a fine thing in itself. It takes work. England needs weeding, fertilizing, pruning, cultivating. England needs to be cared for, and taught to care for herself again. Mother England. The garden of England. If only.

  On his way back to London, Martagon stopped at a country pub. He sat at a table by himself. There was a jolly group of people at the bar, among them a prosperous-looking man in late middle age. He raised his glass of beer and said heartily, ‘Now that’s as good a pint as you’ll see in a day’s march!’

  Back on the road, Martagon could not stop thinking about that man. He was so stagey, such a stereotype, like an actor playing a retired English military man in a bad movie. ‘A day’s march’, indeed. What crap. Yet the man was not being phoney or false. He was being himself. You couldn’t have got a 5p piece between him and the role he was playing. What would have happened if he had asked that man whether he loved England? He would have stared, and perhaps said gruffly, ‘What’s that meant to mean?’ He did love England, but he wouldn’t be able to say so simply, he would have had to crack some joke about disastrous cricket scores against the West Indies. He would have been ‘embarrassed’.

  Martagon wished he had put his theory to the test. He very nearly turned the car round to drive back to the pub. Instead he played the scene over again in his imagination, saying once more to the military-seeming man, ‘Do you love England?’

  This time the imagined conversation came out differently.

  ‘What’s that meant to mean? You collecting for s
omething?’

  ‘No. It’s just a question, I want to know whether you love England.’

  ‘Course I do. Goes without saying.’

  That’s the point about the English. What they really care about goes without saying, so they don’t say it.

  Martagon was confused by his foray into middle England. It reminded him of a conversation with Giles Harper, long ago, at one of their lunches before the merger when they were first getting to know one another. Giles was describing his sister Julie, whom Martagon hadn’t yet met then, as one of the ‘frail ones’ who occurred in nearly every family nowadays. More than there used to be? Martagon asked. Was not the incidence of frail ones more or less constant, only we all talk about it more freely and are more concerned? Giles was certain that there were more frail ones than in the past.

  Martagon didn’t know enough about families to make a judgement. But if Giles was right, perhaps it was because there were no more certainties. The social structures are too fragile, the boundaries too translucent for true security. Everyone lives in glass houses. There is too much unsorted information beamed in from outside – information overload. Some people never find a culture they can thrive in, or they latch on to a shallow, temporary one in which they can’t put down roots. The strong ones, like Giles, are OK. They graze, they grow fat on the mixed diet. Giles, accounting for the ‘frail ones’, had said vaguely, ‘It’s because of the globalization of absolutely everything.’

  ‘But globalization is a relief to displaced persons, to people who don’t belong anywhere, like me, perhaps like Julie. We can belong everywhere, instead.’

  ‘Julie does belong somewhere,’ said Giles sharply. ‘She belongs with her family, she belongs with us.’ Goes without saying, he might have added.

  Martagon said aloud in the car the verse Julie had given him:

  ‘A man who looks on glass

  On it may stay his eye;

  Or if he pleases, through it pass

  And so the heavens espy.’

  Perhaps the view of heaven is inward, not outward. I must ask Julie what she thinks it really means.

  I recognize something of myself in Giles’s description of the frail ones, even though I am a healthy and successful man. I have no hinterland. I’m a figure in a landscape that stretches as far as the eye can see, with a network of paths taken or not taken, and no signposts. When Arthur Cox used to quote, ‘Do you see yonder wicket gate? Do you see yonder shining light?’, he was trying to teach me to take the long view in business at the expense of short-term profit-taking. It means more than that to me, now. Marina is my shining light, my destination. I used to be like the English tennis players, no BMT, no Big Match Temperament. Giles saw that. Perhaps I still am? No, I’m not.

  On the car radio he listened to a report about FIFA and the upcoming vote on the venue of World Cup 2006. England seemed to think she had a divine right to host the competition. But England was behaving appallingly – reneging on a gentleman’s agreement to support Germany for 2006 in return for Germany supporting England’s bid for Euro ’96. What’s more, the commentator recalled, the FA had reneged a couple of years ago on a signed agreement to support Johansson as FIFA president, because they thought Sepp Blatter would be more favourable towards England. Actually, Blatter was supporting Africa for 2006, so it was all pointless anyway. Beckenbauer, the veteran German player, was going around saying that once he had trusted ‘the word of an Englishman’.

  Perfidious Albion. Something had gone wrong. Dishonour, arrogance and gracelessness from start to finish. The good people are still there, though, in England. Getting on with it in thankless, badly paid, essential jobs. Looking after their families and communities. Pursuing their private passions. Cultivating their gardens.

  * * *

  Martagon was happy to get back to the cosmopolitanism of central London. He found two messages waiting for him at home. One was from Giles, asking him if he had been in touch with Julie in the last few days. Giles sounded anxious. The other was from Marina, asking him to call her. She sounded anxious too.

  Martagon had a busy schedule. When he understood just how distraught Marina was, he flew to Marseille just for the day. Only another month, he thought, with flickers of excitement and anxiety, and I shall be flying into Bonplaisir.

  Marina met him with the Alfa Romeo at Marignane, and they drove into the city, to the old port area, and found a place to have lunch. He parked the car some distance away, and they sat together without getting out. He was waiting for her to tell him what the trouble was, but she wouldn’t tell him straight away.

  ‘Tous les hommes sont des salauds.’ That’s all she would say.

  Martagon hated it when she talked like that. He looked away from her out of the car window. A mechanical excavator was lifting silt from the port in its dinosaur jaw. ‘You don’t think I’m a shit. You know I am not. And there was the other Englishman. You said he wasn’t a shit either. Who was he by the way?’

  ‘Is it the moment to talk about that? I have so much on my mind today.’

  ‘Yes, it is the moment.’ Suddenly, he did need to know.

  ‘It was when I was in London, when I ran away from everything at home. We were both so young. Just a girl and a boy, really.’

  She told him the story. Her young Englishman was a friend of her brother first, they had met on a skiing holiday. Jean-Louis had given her his London telephone number. His family lived in the country, and he was as lonely in London as she was. He was training to be a vet. ‘I liked that about him. I’ve always loved animals.’

  ‘I didn’t know that – which reminds me, I’ve been meaning to ask you for ages, but I keep forgetting. Why are there dog-bowls on the kitchen floor at the farmhouse? You don’t have a dog, unless it’s a secret dog.’

  ‘What an odd question. Why should you be interested in that?’

  ‘I’m interested in everything about you.’

  ‘The dog-bowls are for George. Lin leaves him with me sometimes when he has work to do and meetings and so on at the new airport.’

  ‘Horrible dog.’

  ‘No, no, he’s a very nice dog … Shall I go on telling you?’

  ‘About the vet. So what was he like?’

  ‘He was simple and sweet, not smart, and not experienced, and he wasn’t a city person, he liked walking. Neither of us had much money, we would get a train out of London at the weekends and go for walks, and he would tell me the English names for trees and flowers. He thought I was like he was. I mean, he had no idea how complicated life was. My life, anyway. But I did love him because – well, for every reason, and I tried to be what he wanted me to be. He’d never had a real girlfriend before.’

  ‘He must have adored you.’

  ‘Yes. That’s why it got so awful, in the end.’

  They had slept together, in the flat in South Kensington that Marina shared with another French girl. Then he asked her to marry him. He was that sort of young man – conventional, singleminded, not very imaginative perhaps. He had their life all planned out. They would wait till he qualified, and then he’d get a practice in the country, and they would start a family.

  ‘And I said yes. I was so touched by his wanting it, by him wanting me. No one had ever asked me to marry them before. But inside, I felt sick. I squashed the feeling down.’

  ‘Was it the thing I said to you before, that you perhaps couldn’t cope with the idea of being happy, the way ordinary people are happy?’

  She didn’t know the answer to that.

  The crisis came when he arranged for them to go down and visit his family for the weekend. They lived in Shropshire. (Marina found it hard to pronounce ‘Shropshire’ and had to spell it out before Martagon got it.) They were going to tell his parents they were engaged.

  ‘We were on the train, going away for that weekend. I was wearing a blue dress he specially liked. And after about half an hour I began feel ill. I had to say something or do something. I was desperate. He didn’t notice,
he was reading the paper. I was in the corner seat, I just sat staring out of the window.’

  The train stopped at a station and people got in and got out. Just as the guard was blowing the whistle for the train to start, Marina jumped up, opened the train door and was out on the platform as the train began to move away.

  ‘I didn’t decide to do it, in my mind. I hadn’t decided anything. I just did it. Like when you suddenly get out of the bath, without having actually decided to, do you know what I mean? Only it wasn’t like getting out of the bath. The train was already moving, I fell over and hurt my knees, and my bag spilled open and everything in it rolled all over the platform. By the time I had picked myself up, the train was gone. So I didn’t see … I didn’t see Jonathan’s face. That was his name, Jonathan. He was so good.’

  ‘Poor bloke.’

  ‘I never saw him again, ever.’

  Martagon’s mouth fell open. Outside the car, the excavator halted its grinding movement abruptly, mud and stones spilling from between its teeth. The operator jumped down from the cab of the machine and walked away. Lunchtime.

  ‘But, darling, what you did was cruel and it solved nothing. The way through is the only way out, you have to go into a problem to get out the other side.’

  ‘Don’t you be horrible to me too.’

  ‘What do you mean, “too”?’

  ‘I had to be cruel. To make him see. Also I was in such a state, you’ve no idea. Like I said, I didn’t decide anything, it happened.’

  ‘You say you loved him, and you let him love you, but then you hurt him. Like with Erik.’

  Marina had gone straight back to France that same day, back to Bonplaisir and the comforting arms of Virginie. She made Jean-Louis call Jonathan to say it was all over. ‘Jean-Louis betrayed me, though. He said horrible things about me to Jonathan. He said I had been seeing other men all the time anyway.’