Flight (11 page)

‘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.

She was reticent, seemingly self-contained. There was an occasion when Tom Scree, at the Harpers' table, had been talking about how unsuited monotheism was to the human psyche, and the lengths to which Christianity had to go in order to sustain such an unnatural idea. The Holy Trinity, for example, making three gods into or out of one. Julie said quietly to Martagon, who was sitting beside her, ‘I could believe in the Three in One and One in Three if it wasn't just three. It's such a feeble number. It's either too many or not enough. If it was three hundred, or three thousand…'

‘What if it was
seventeen?
'

And she had laughed, spontaneously, at that. Julie did not often laugh, so that Martagon felt that she had given him a present. Or that he had given her one.

Julie had found her burrow: a basement with a bit of sooty garden behind. It was in that run-down stretch of Bayswater which consists of long streets of vast peeling stucco houses with pillared porches, all flats and bedsits and rip-off substandard hotels, with no corner shops. The burrow had two bedrooms, one of which she was letting cheaply to a Kosovan refugee woman who had found work in a bakery. She brought bags of unsold croissants and rolls back to Julie and Fasil every evening, and she baby-sat when Julie went out. Julie had made the place cosy in her own way with ethnic rugs and batiks, and pottery mugs and plates, and her books. An elaborate silver Ethiopian cross, which Hailu had given her when they married, hung from its chain on a nail over the gas fire. There were always Fasil's toys around and, of course, Fasil.

He had grown into an enchanting child. Martagon thought about him, too. Julie was transformed into a madonna when she sat with the five-year-old on her knee, reading to him, her light hair falling on his shiny black curls, her pale arms encircling his little brown body. She had stuck a blown-up photograph of herself and Hailu in their student days under the glass top of her coffee-table, and Fasil would stand at the table absorbedly tracing the picture with his finger.

‘Daddy,' he would say every time, and Julie would always reply, ‘Yes, that's Daddy, with Mummy, before you were born. Daddy's in Ethiopia. That's where he lives. In Ethiopia.'

Fasil would look intently up into her face and mouth the mysterious syllables, silently.

Martagon did not go to the flat very often. He had taken Julie to the cinema once or twice. He always let Giles know when he had seen her, and saw his face light up. Giles's perpetual concern for his sister was his one vulnerable point. Amanda, even now, did not have much time for Julie.

‘Poor Julie, she doesn't have a clue,' Amanda said to Martagon. ‘And she sponges on Giles.'

‘I think he's happy to help her out,' said Martagon.

‘Trouble is, he thinks the sun shines out of her arse. I wish she had a boyfriend. It's a pity Tom Scree is married. He's too old, but in every other way he'd be so right for her.'

‘I don't think so.'

Not long after that he went back to France, and met Marina de Cabrières, and the world was turned upside down.

FOUR

Back in London after his first weeks in France with Marina, Martagon slept for nine solid hours. On subsequent nights he could hardly sleep at all. He woke every hour, unable to be comfortable in his bed. From four thirty on, he gave up all hope. He ran out of thoughts. Apart from missing Marina, his mind seemed to have nowhere to go.

He gave himself a mental exercise. When he was a child, his mother used to talk about his ‘memory bank'. Every treat, every adventure, every mishap or triumph, was an investment in his memory bank. ‘It'll pay dividends later,' she would say. ‘Nothing is wasted. You'll see.' So now he made a conscious effort to check his investments. It passed the time, until morning came, and after a few nights of it he became addicted. The foreground of his life – even the work, even his preoccupation with Marina – became transparent, in those hours of musing and brooding. He saw straight through them to the background – the past. The pre-dawn hours, in this drifting state, with no particular agenda, passed in a flash or in an eternity; it came to the same thing. It was a state he would not have achieved had Marina been sleeping at his side. Even though he missed her so badly, he knew it was important to be alone for a while. He needed time to regroup.

He was ambushed by memories he had not had before, about the summer trip with his parents to the Tyrol when he was eight, just before he went to boarding-school in England. They were sitting, the three of them, in the garden of a chalet-restaurant where there was a small ornamental windmill.

There was a little wooden man connected to the windmill. The sails of the windmill turned faster or slower depending on how fast or slowly he turned a wheel attached to his arms, which jerked up and down. Martagon pointed out to his father how the windmill's sails came to a stop altogether when the wooden man stopped working the wheel.

‘Look again, Turk,' said his father. ‘Use your intelligence.'

Martagon looked again. He couldn't think what his father was getting at.

His father gripped him by the shoulders. ‘Look now,' he said, in his precise Irish-tinted voice. ‘It's not your man who is working the wheel. It is the wind which is working the windmill, and the wheel, and your man. You've got hold of the wrong end of the stick.'

That was the last holiday they had as a complete family. Martagon's father was already ill with the kidney disease that was to kill him, and finding the walks difficult. An old farmer passed them on the mountain track, wobbling along on a white bicycle, carrying a long scythe over his shoulder.

‘Are you going far?' he asked in German.

‘All the way,' replied Martagon's father. Then, turning to his wife: ‘Ah, well, now. Death overtaking me on the road – a phenomenon it would be impossible to invent.'

‘Death overtakes us all,' said his wife. They held hands. Martagon, trotting along attached to his mother's other hand, and listening, understood and did not understand.

‘Did you see his bike, Dad?'

‘I did.'

‘It was brand new. A mountain bike. I want one like that.'

‘I expect it was his grandson's,' said his father. ‘Or, anyway, it will be soon.'

Martagon was at school when his father died.

*   *   *

Early one morning in London, Martagon had a telephone call from Audrey, his mother's cleaning lady. Audrey said Mrs Foley was very poorly. Audrey said a whole lot more, the gist being that she was no longer able to manage. Something would have to be done.