Flight

 

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Contents

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Dedication

Arrivals

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Departures

Notes and Acknowledgements

Also by Victoria Glendinning

About the Author

Copyright

 

For Deborah Singmaster

ARRIVALS

When did it begin to go wrong, for Martagon? At what precise point did he step off the main path? It seemed that at last he had everything. He was at the top of his profession. He had found the love of his life.

*   *   *

June 24, 2000. The sun rises over Provence, drenching the countryside with light and colour from the lavender fields. The undulating ridges of purple stretch away into the haze, flanked by fields of vines in full fresh leaf, dancing in lines over the curve of the land. Sprinklers are already sprinkling, spraying the air with refracted light. The poplars do not stir. There is no wind, and no sound except the hissing of the sprinklers and the drone of bees already busy in the lavender.

It is going to be a perfect day.

An earth track runs along the edge of this lavender field and cuts through the vines. The track joins two villages, and intersects with the narrow road leading to the Château de Bonplaisir. Or, rather, it used to. Now, the track is going nowhere, its trajectory abruptly halted three kilometres on by a perimeter fence of heavy-duty steel mesh, three metres high. Tractors have already made a new path, turning sharply aside at the fence and working round it. In a generation or two, no one will know about the old track, or remember the château as it was before it became the airport hotel.

*   *   *

Martagon first went to the Château de Bonplaisir in the early summer of 1999, just after the contractors moved in to transform it into a hotel. He happened to be in Provence, making a site visit to the new airport under construction. He agreed, unwillingly, to meet the ex-owner of the château and check the inventories of the garden furniture, ornaments and statues, which had been overlooked.

Thus it was pure chance he met Marina de Cabrières at all.

It was meant, they said. We were waiting for each other.

*   *   *

That first meeting was more than a year ago. Today, the perfect day, is the grand opening of Bonplaisir, the new airport for Provence. It was planned to open ‘on time, on budget', as a millennium event. The official reason for the five months' delay was the danger of Y2K complications. The real reason is more shameful, and it concerns Martagon.

*   *   *

Martagon had heard something about Marina de Cabrières before he met her. Glamorous, people said. Capricious. She worked in film in Paris, in a dilettante kind of way. That was all he knew. He didn't realize that he had actually already seen her – until the glittering day when he stood with his briefcase, wearing a freshly pressed linen suit, in the shade of the archway that led into the great courtyard of Bonplaisir.

He had seen her a couple of months earlier, when he was sitting alone with a beer in the Madeleine café in Aix-en-Provence on market day, enjoying the scents from the spice stall outside the café and reading the
Herald Tribune.
She was with a group at the next table. He found he could not stop staring. Wherever he looked, his gaze returned to this red-haired, white-skinned young woman in a sleeveless yellow dress. He saw when she turned her head that there was a yellow silk flower in the knot of hair at the back. Her hair was drawn tightly back from her high forehead and her eyes were heavy-lidded and huge. He wondered how old she was. Early thirties, perhaps. It was hard to tell. She wasn't talking much. She seemed preoccupied.

Martagon stared.

When she got up with the rest of the group to leave, he saw how tall she was. She stood looking across the table at him for a long moment with a denim jacket slung over one shoulder and a blue string bag full of fruit dangling from her hand. It was Martagon who looked away first.

Women often looked at Martagon in public places and on the street. He was well used to that. This woman was different.

As she walked away he noticed that she did not have the slender, elegant legs he was expecting. Her ankles were not exactly thick, but they were … ordinary.

The man who loves this extraordinary woman, he said to himself, would love with particular tenderness her unremarkable, serviceable, rather disappointing legs.

He had never given her another conscious thought. But her image appeared, every now and then, unsummoned, in his mind's eye.

*   *   *

The sun has risen higher over the lavender fields, and the temperature has risen too. Inside the perimeter fence hundreds of people are frantically busy. The main runway glistens with fresh tarmac. On the apron, private jets and short-haul planes in bright liveries stand ready, like toys waiting to be played with. Workers –
les arabes
– who have been up all night pushing polishers round the translucent glass floors of the concourse are exhaustedly going over the same ground yet again.

From New York's JFK, American francophiles and pleasure-seekers, who have paid twenty thousand dollars per head, have already taken off on the inaugural flight of an Air France 747 to the new airport. Included in the ticket is a grand dinner at the Château de Bonplaisir. Limos will ferry the guests from the airport to the hotel along a new road lined with white oleanders and young olive trees. The passengers on the 747 are looking forward to what the publicity pack calls five-star grand-luxe accommodation in large high rooms furnished with museum-quality eighteenth-century beds and armoires and
toile de Jouy
bed-curtains and drapes. They sip their complimentary drinks, thirty-three thousand feet above the Atlantic.

*   *   *

In the late afternoon, the drone of the bees over the lavender merges with the whine of the 747 coming in to land. The event is beginning.

Giles Harper, chairman of Harper Cox, the main consulting engineers to the project, is already at the Château de Bonplaisir, waiting for his wife Amanda to finish dressing and doing her face. Giles sits on the edge of their giant bed looking out into the gardens through a window framed by elaborate pink and white drapes. He has given up smoking; and he is smoking, using a gilded floral Limoges dish from the bedside table as an ashtray. This is, or should be, a great day for Giles. The name Harper Cox is up there with the names of the other main players on an electronic roll of honour unfurling continuously in the departures hall.

He is anxious. He can see on his laptop, open on the console table between the high windows, the e-mail message from
[email protected]
.

‘Not coming. Something terrible has happened. Martagon.'

Giles is past being surprised by anything Martagon does. It was the ‘something terrible' that exercised him. Could it be something Martagon now knew, or suspected, about the glass flooring? He knew from his chairman that there was a last-minute query. The site engineer had been anxious and attempting to contact Martagon.

Giles has quite enough imagination to envisage the first running crack, to hear the gun-shot sound, and to anticipate the screaming panic as the floor of the arrivals hall collapses in lethal shards and cubes, tipping hundreds of people down to bloody injury and, for some, death on the floor below, which in its turn … But his thoughts tend to the pragmatic. If anything at all goes wrong with the complex glass structure, Martagon's special responsibility, it will bring disgrace on Harper Cox. It will be the end of Harper Cox.

Much more likely, Giles thinks, that something has happened to Martagon himself. Whatever else Martagon is, he's not a coward.

‘Martagon's a shit,' says Amanda, coming into the bedroom from her bathroom. She is pregnant, and has bought for the occasion a shimmery floating dress of mixed blues and greens. Her blonde hair is held back from her forehead with a blue velvet Alice band.

‘You look really nice,' says Giles. He remembers Marina's sultry, mocking voice saying to Martagon in the hall in the Fulham house, after that awful dinner party, ‘No one over the age of twenty-two should be
allowed
to wear an Alice band.'

‘Martagon's not a shit,' says Giles.

‘I'm only thinking about how often he's let you down. Not to mention your sister.'

Giles's sister Julie is not coming to the opening of the airport. No one knows where she is at this moment.

Giles puts his head in his hands. He is a hard man, except where his sister Julie is concerned.

‘So he's not a shit,' says Amanda. ‘He's just weak, arrogant, dishonourable, you name it. Marina's the shit, is that it? It's always the woman's fault, is that what you really think?'

‘Marina is … Marina is something that just happened to Martagon. The most serious thing that has ever happened to him.'

‘Like a disease. Well, she'll be here this evening, I don't doubt, all dolled up like the Queen of Sheba.'

It was not such a perfect day after all. Suddenly, in the late afternoon, there was a thunderstorm. But it passed.

*   *   *

Marina will not be at the airport opening. And thirty miles away from Bonplaisir, Martagon Foley has been lying on his back all afternoon in the long grass under an olive tree in the garden of Marina's farmhouse outside Cabrières d'Aigues.

It's no good asking questions unless you are going to get some answers. Martagon doesn't even know what the right questions are. He will stay there as the day declines, trying to think. He is in shock. All he knows for sure is that he has lost his love, and maybe his honour and his reputation as well.

ONE

Martagon the singleton, and Giles and Amanda Harper the married couple, go back a long way.

Martagon was a reader, though not a writer. He had his mother's love of stories and pictures, and also her way of describing things in terms of something else, as part of an oblique mission to explain.

Amanda Harper found him annoying at times: ‘I never know what to make of you, I never know where you're really at. Can you ever see anything straight?'

‘I'm completely transparent. What you see is what you get.'

‘But I don't get you,' said Amanda.

Martagon liked Amanda a lot but did not fancy her in the least, and she knew it. In that sense she had indeed not ‘got' him, and it needled her. Once when she complained about Martagon to Giles, he had replied, unperturbed, ‘Martagon's a law unto himself. He's an original.'

‘He'll come a cropper one of these days,' said Amanda.

His mother had wanted him to be a teacher. She wanted him to be a ‘good person', and she said he would make a good teacher. The idea filled him with gloom. He did not want to be a ‘good teacher' even though he did, profoundly, want to be a good person, even though he wasn't sure, as a boy, what that meant. Being a good person seemed to involve courage, endurance, honesty, generosity – old-world virtues, the very words a little quaint.

He also wanted adventure, and risk. Having failed to be accepted to study architecture, he settled for engineering – a way of making and doing not unlike the way of a creative artist, and not incompatible either with being a good person or with making a good income. His hope was to live on the edge, and to work on the boundaries between engineering, architecture and fine art.