Flight

by Victoria Glendinning

  ‘And had you?’

  ‘Oh, sometimes. I was very young, Marteau, and away on my own for the first time. It was all an awful misunderstanding.’

  ‘I suppose I can see how it happened, just about. When was all this?’

  It was in the mid-1980s, when Martagon himself had been working with Arthur Cox. ‘I might have met you then in London too.’ His heart turned over at the thought that he had missed knowing Marina sooner. ‘You must have been all girly and new. Do you know what’s become of Jonathan?’

  ‘I expect he’s found a nice sensible English girl and settled down.’

  ‘Let’s hope so. Three children and a Volvo.’

  ‘And a nice dog!’

  Martagon found the story disturbing. Marina didn’t seem to see the pattern in her behaviour. She had no insight. In essentials, the story of Erik and the story of Jonathan were one and the same. However, she was older now, and more mature. Patterns can be broken. Forewarned, he would damn well see to it that history did not repeat itself a third time.

  The mistral was blowing strongly. In the walk from the car to the restaurant, Marina’s hair was whipped into knots and tangles. When she attempted to overcome the disorder her comb broke in two. ‘I hate this wind,’ she said. ‘I hate it, I hate it.’

  Her present distress was about her brother Jean-Louis. Over a bouillabaisse, which she hardly touched, she told Martagon that he was now challenging her right to the farmhouse and to the objects she had taken from the château. He was reneging on their previous agreements. In particular, he was asserting his right to the big chair. The Alexandrian chair, the chair she sat in. The chair with the sphinx arms. His long, handwritten letters, with paragraphs crazily highlighted in yellow, cited ancient laws of inheritance, which made no sense to her. He had rung her up, drunk, at two o’clock in the morning, threatening her life. That’s why she had told Martagon.

  He couldn’t bring himself to take it as seriously as she did. She seemed to him more agitated than frightened, and almost as if she was enjoying the drama. He tried to suggest as much, not unkindly.

  ‘No, Marteau, please, it’s not a game. It is serious. I am really terrified, I daren’t go to sleep, every little noise makes me think it is Jean-Louis coming to do something to me.’

  ‘Then he’s crazy,’ said Martagon. ‘You are crazy too. Have you seen your lawyer? Have you been to the police?’

  Marina dismissed the idea with a violent gesture, nearly knocking over her wineglass. Martagon caught it as it tipped.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. There are things about France you don’t understand. There’s absolutely no question of involving the police. It would make a public scandal. This is between Jean-Louis and me. It is a private matter, a family matter. What shall I do?’

  ‘You could let him have the chair, if that would quieten him down. Then we could fight for the farmhouse as a separate issue.’

  ‘He will never have the chair. How can you even think that? I want you to help me think how I can shut Jean-Louis up for ever. How I can hurt him very much. Either he will kill me in the end, or I will kill him. Really.’

  Martagon took both her hands in his across the table. ‘Look at me, Marina, and listen. If you go on like this, you are the same as him. As bad as him. It is folie à deux again. You must not let this idiotic thing with your brother ruin your life. Our life.’

  She looked at him from under her lashes, sideways, infinitely seductive.

  ‘Pierre would kill Jean-Louis for me, I know. If I asked him to.’

  ‘Well, I would not. Don’t even think about it.’

  ‘You are so English…’

  Martagon, exasperated, slapped down a 200-franc note on his sideplate, gripped Marina by the wrist, and half dragged her out of the restaurant and into the wind. He walked her along the rue des Catalans, the bay on their left, as briskly as he could get her to go, for twenty minutes, refusing to engage in any more talk about Jean-Louis. Then he turned and walked her all the way back to her car, and they sat inside it, free of the tearing wind, in a capsule.

  Martagon put his arms round the beloved woman beside him. ‘Darling love,’ he said, ‘I’ll always look after you. I’ll always help you. I’ll never abandon you or abuse you. You mustn’t be crazy. Or not too crazy. You can be a bit crazy, it’s part of what you are. But not so it separates me from you.’

  She clung to him, stroking his wrist, pulling at the hairs round his watch. ‘I want to be with you all the time. I am always all right when I am with you.’

  ‘You shouldn’t be alone in the house right now. Can you go and stay with Nancy or someone? Or have Nancy’s niece – what’s her name? The nice girl who works for you. Billie. Ask Billie to come and stay with you.’

  ‘I’ll do that. It’s a good idea. Billie is a sensible girl, I can really talk to Billie. But when will you come?’

  He knew what she meant. ‘Soon. By the end of this year, when I have tied up my loose ends. We will get married next spring, perhaps, when your cherry-trees are in bloom. Do you think?’

  She looked at him, transfigured, unspeakably beautiful. ‘Will we really be married?’

  * * *

  On the plane back to London, he wondered why it irritated him so much when Marina said, ‘You’re so English.’ A lot of decent, straightforward people are English. Like Arthur Cox. Like Jonathan.

  Martagon thought about Marina’s ‘pattern’, and reminded himself that lots of young people screw up their love-lives in painful and dramatic ways. It had all been too soon for Marina, with Jonathan, she just wasn’t ready. As for Erik … But who was Martagon to criticize her, anyway? He himself was not always decent and straightforward. He’d let Arthur down, for a start. He banished the memory. That was quite different, of course.

  * * *

  Back home that evening, he found another message from Giles on his answering-machine. Giles was still anxious about Julie. She was still not answering the telephone. Apparently Hailu, Fasil’s father, was in London. Something bad might have happened. Did Martagon by any chance have a key to Julie’s flat?

  No, I don’t, thought Martagon. And then – yes, I think I do. There had been that evening after the Mahler concert when he had taken her home, had a coffee with her, and left his briefcase in her flat. He rang her office in the morning to ask if he could go in to pick it up, and she had told him about the neighbour with the spare key … But where the hell was it now?

  It was in a saucer in the kitchen along with two AA batteries, a radiator key, some German coins, and a red badge saying ‘What’s Love Got To Do With It?’, which had been slipped to him at some party by the developer’s wife who had invited him to the millennium bash.

  * * *

  He rang Julie’s bell, and waited. No response. He let himself into the flat. No one in the living room. He went through to the bedroom, like a burglar.

  Julie was on the bed, curled up, a box of tissues beside her.

  ‘It’s only me,’ he said, and went to sit on the chair by the bed. Julie had been crying. A lot. Her face was very pale.

  ‘Where’s Fasil?’

  ‘With Hailu. With his father.’

  ‘Is that the trouble?’

  She shook her head.

  Martagon went into the kitchen to make them both some instant coffee. It took a while to get Julie to tell him what was going on. Hailu had appeared from nowhere, that is from Ethiopia, and had been ‘really nice’. Hailu was a businessman now, with an import-export business in Addis. He was really lovely with Fasil. Hailu was staying with a cousin who lived off the Harrow Road. He had taken Fasil back there with him for a few days because Julie was upset and in trouble. Fasil was having a great time, Fasil was thrilled to see his daddy.

  ‘Hailu’s not trying to take Fasil away from me or anything. He’s a really good person.’

  ‘So what’s the trouble?’

  At this Julie began to cry again. Martagon waited.

  ‘It’s Tom…’

/>   ‘Tom Scree?’

  In fragments, between sobs and gulps of coffee, the story came out. Julie’s story.

  Julie had been going out with Tom Scree, that is, sleeping with him, for six months. Tom Scree was a wonderful lover and a wonderful person, she thought. Of course he was very busy, and important, but he came round whenever he could, nearly every day. He told her his marriage was dead, and she shouldn’t worry about it. He made her feel special, he told her they would be together for ever. She had been happy for the first time in her life, or at least since she had first been with Hailu in Norwich. There had been no one else in between.

  ‘So what happened?’ Anger was rising and spreading in Martagon like a forest fire. Plus a certain satisfaction. He’d been right about Tom Scree all along.

  What happened, basically, was that Tom got the peerage. Lord Scree of Leake was now under media scrutiny. There must be no sleaze to uncover.

  ‘You aren’t sleaze,’ said Martagon.

  ‘Anyway,’ said Julie.

  Lord Scree was moving on. What’s more, his wife Ann had let him know that she was interested in taking her proper place as Lady Scree. If there were going to be parties at 10 Downing Street and tickets for the new Royal Opera House and invitations to the Royal Academy annual dinner, she was going to be there. She was putting Lincolnshire on the back burner and they were looking at houses in Notting Hill.

  ‘But he told you the marriage was dead.’

  ‘He told me lots of things. She is still his wife. He’s a bit afraid of her, I think.’

  Julie did some more crying. Martagon made some more coffee and elicited the rest of the story.

  Lord and Lady Scree were going to be a high-profile couple, in London. There was no way that Tom’s life with Julie could continue. He told her that nothing was for ever, that no one could take away what they had had together, but that it was over.

  ‘And there’s something else, as well…’

  The something else took longer to get out of Julie.

  ‘There were other people too. Women, I mean. Girls. Lots of them. Including in the firm.’

  Martagon racked his brains.

  ‘Mirabel Plunket?’

  Julie shrugged her shoulders. ‘He says that was just a one-night stand and that he regretted it. She became fixated – that’s what he said – and he just wasn’t interested.’

  ‘Poor Mirabel.’

  ‘There’s worse. OK, I’ll tell you. It’s so awful. I think he only told me all this horrible stuff so that I’d know that I had no special claim on him, that I wasn’t the only one. It’s what hurts more than anything. You know Dawn? The nice black girl?’

  ‘Of course I do. His secretary, who was Arthur Cox’s secretary.’

  Tom Scree, as he told Julie when he was breaking with her, had been Dawn’s lover too. A long-time lover. He had a child with her, a little girl. All the time he was seeing Julie, he had also been seeing Dawn and the child, whose name was Karen. Dawn had been dumped now, too. But he was going to pay Dawn money for Karen’s education.

  ‘And to keep her mouth shut, I wouldn’t wonder.’

  ‘No, he said he didn’t want to avoid his responsibilities.’

  ‘Well, he would, wouldn’t he? He’s such a hypocrite. How old is Karen?’

  ‘I don’t know. But younger than Fasil.’

  Martagon was silent. He was remembering the day of the fateful merger meeting at Cox & Co., when he had opened the door of Arthur’s office and found Scree and Dawn together in there, and Dawn obviously distressed – because of Arthur, he had thought then. She must have just discovered she was pregnant. Presumably she had taken maternity leave, later, when Martagon had already parted with Harper Cox.

  ‘What hurts most – what hurts most – is that he was so loving about Fasil, he used to talk about how mixed-race children were not disadvantaged, how the genetic mix gave them greater potential physically and mentally and in every way, how they were the future. And all the time he must have been thinking about Karen, not just Fasil … I just don’t know what to do. Will you help me? I haven’t told anyone about it. I haven’t seen anyone.’

  ‘Of course I will help you. If I can.’

  ‘Tom talked about you sometimes. I don’t think he likes you very much.’

  ‘That’s fine by me. I don’t like him very much either.’

  ‘He said you were involved with someone.’

  ‘We won’t talk about me now. We’ve got to think about you, we’ve got to get you right. And you must ring Giles. He’s really worried.’

  ‘I will. In the morning.’

  ‘Promise?’

  ‘Promise.’

  ‘Shall I come round tomorrow evening and see if you are OK?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He kissed her on the forehead and left.

  * * *

  It had been an extraordinary day. He thought of the two women, so different from one another, both needing his support. He had always known Julie as a ‘frail one’, but had he ever seen Marina in such a state before?

  Yes, once. Late last summer. The day they went for a picnic in the Luberon hills. It was his idea. She was against it: ‘It will be too hot, and there will be insects. Much nicer here on the terrace, in the shade.’

  ‘We can find shade up there. I absolutely love picnics.’

  There were two bicycles in the shed, locked in an angular embrace against a wall hung with sporting guns. Marina’s father had used the farmhouse as a hunting lodge, in the palmy days. They considered the bicycles, and decided against. They would take her Alfa.

  So they collected up bread and pâté and peaches, and a tomato salad.

  Martagon made the tomato salad. He always did, it was his speciality. He took it seriously. Slice ripe tomatoes quite thinly. Arrange them nicely, the slices overlapping. Sprinkle garlic, chopped not crushed, over the tomatoes, also a couple of ciboules – spring onions. A sprinkling of chopped parsley doesn’t hurt. Make a dressing with olive oil, white wine vinegar (not too much), one twist of salt, several twists of coarse black pepper, and a pinch of sugar. No mustard: it makes the dressing thick and opaque. You want the tomatoes to glisten. Spoon the dressing carefully and evenly over the herbs and tomatoes. Tear up a handful of basil leaves and scatter them on top. Do not turn or stir the salad. That not only spoils the neat arrangement, it makes the slices of tomato fall apart.

  Martagon laid out his perfect tomato salad on an oval dish. Marina immediately tipped the whole thing into the plastic box, ruining the arrangement. Never mind.

  They put the box with the other things into her blue string bag and added some paper napkins. Also knives. Two glasses. A big bottle of Evian and a bottle of rosé wine. Marina swept up a kelim rug from the floor of the room she called the séjour – the living room – and stuffed it into the boot of the car for them to sit on. Martagon was childishly happy.

  They drove up the winding bumpy track, left the car, and walked. Martagon, behind Marina on a narrow track, looked with loving admiration at her long straight back, her neat waist, her classy butt, her dear chunky legs swinging along, creamy-white and smooth. Marina, because of her colouring, took care never to get sun-tanned, but she looked like a freewheeling fragment of the sun itself. She was wearing red shorts and a shocking-pink tank-top, her flaming hair licking her shoulders. Martagon felt hot just looking at her.

  They chose to make their camp in a spot where sheep, looking like boulders, lay motionless under a clump of trees. It was the hottest hour of a hot day. They spread out the rug in the shade and ate their picnic. Marina had been right: there were ants, and flies, and beetles. The peaches were ripe. The juice spilled down their chins. They drank all the wine.

  ‘If I were to make love to you now, do you think the sheep would be scandalized?’

  In the event the sheep, as with one mind, steadfastly looked the other way. Contented and sticky, Marina and Martagon went to sleep, separated because of the heat, at opposite ends of the ke
lim rug.

  Martagon was deeply asleep when he heard the screaming. He surfaced and sat up. Marina was at a distance from him, out in the sun, hopping from one leg to another, twisting and turning, slapping at her face and neck and thighs, screaming and shrieking. She was covered with flies – clots and constellations of flies, piling on top of one another, moving and shifting and rising idly into the black swirling cloud around her and then returning to her bare skin. Seeing Martagon, she stood stock-still for an instant, the flies settling in masses on her exposed parts as on a cow or a corpse.

  Martagon grabbed the rug and ran to Marina. He slapped off the flies and wrapped her up from head to foot in the rug. She stood there, shuddering, uttering single shrieks, as if she would never stop. Somehow he got her, and the blue string bag with the remains of the picnic and her red shorts stuffed into it, down the track and back to the car. She sat inert as he drove, still shivering.

  ‘I am so cold,’ was all she said.

  Back at the farmhouse she still could not get warm. Martagon made her take a hot shower. He set it going and adjusted the water temperature. He found and put into her hand a fresh piece of the lavender soap she particularly liked. She closed the cabinet door. He lay on the bed listening to the sound of the water as ten, fifteen, twenty minutes passed and she was still in the shower. In the end he opened the shower door, turned off the water, wrapped a big towel round her and dried her as if she were a child. For the rest of the day she lay in bed like a zombie, every now and then uttering shrill single shrieks. Martagon was alarmed. He wondered whether he should call a doctor. Marina became so agitated when he suggested it that he gave up the idea.

  ‘I’ll be all right tomorrow,’ she said. And she was. Martagon, though, sleeping alone in another room, had a horrible night, and dreamed the stumps dream. Thud-thud, thud-thud on the car windows. He awoke sweating, his heart beating fast.

  * * *

  The thing about my maenad Marina, thought Martagon in London, swimming lengths before work the next morning, reliving the horror of that picnic, is that she is easily alarmed, and her alarm is very extreme. It’s just the same with this Jean-Louis business. He switched lanes, to get out of the way of a woman in goggles and a rubber cap doing an impressive racing crawl. I’ll always be there to look after Marina. Someone in Provence, in the days when he had heard of Marina but not yet met her, had mentioned in a throwaway manner that she was ‘difficult’. Well, who wants an ‘easy’ person? It would not be interesting. Giles had suggested she might be ‘unstable’. So what? I love her for her beauty and vividness. Not even that: I love Marina simply because she is Marina. It’s like what I worked out before. One does not fall in love with a woman because she is a good person, though I think Marina is good. One does not fall in love with a woman for her common sense, any more than for her saintliness. Love is something that happens to you and then it becomes something you do. It’s the act and fact of loving which is the point and the saving grace. The ‘worthiness’ of the beloved is not even an issue. If it were, how could Marina choose me rather than a better person?