Flight (10 page)

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.'

‘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.

‘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.'