Flight (15 page)

*   *   *

His thinking about glass was changing as he changed, and as his knowledge and skill moved forward. He was working on the very edge and looking over it, while remaining just within the constricting terms of the building regulations and EC construction laws. When he first began to specialize, he had made an unquestioning connection between glass and lightness. The ideal he had had of transparency, of glass walls liberating space and removing the barrier between inside and outside, now seemed to him simplistic and even wrong. There had been a hysterical frenzy for transparency, triggered by expanding technologies. But the difference between inside and outside is central to organic life – our bodies, our homes, our perception of safety and danger. That's an anthropological truism. It's basic. Breach the barrier and there is only meaninglessness and disintegration. To appreciate lightness and transparency there must be a countervailing visual weight or darkness. An all-glass structure can be as oppressively opaque as a windowless bunker.

He was moving on in his mind somewhere beyond the mere design of transparent building skins. Or moving back to an old wisdom, perhaps; the traditional techniques to do with the colouring, shading, and decorating of glass had been known to craftsmen four thousand years ago. What interested him most now was an extension of what they knew: high-tech surface technology, coatings, dynamic sun protection, thermotropic layers, air-sealing, shading systems, machine-drawn coloured panels and coloured foils, and the unlimited effects possible by the creative use of lasers and holographic optical elements. What remained a constant was the drama of working with glass – its paradoxical elasticity and brittleness, and the challenge of outwitting gravity and danger. Something possible in theory, and on the drawing-board, must always be tested to destruction. Glass is unpredictable.

Thinking large, and with his mind filled with Marina, Martagon missed something small. Everything had been going very well. Bonplaisir was due to open ‘on time and on budget' in February 2000. Running through the specification for the point-fixing systems of the glass curves of the roof one afternoon in early December, he experienced a sharp stab of unease. It didn't look quite right. But it must be right.

He shared his worry with Giles. There were a lot of problems on the airport project. They were all tense. Lin had his anxieties too. Martagon went through this one with Tim Murtagh, the resident engineer at Bonplaisir, and the rest of the team a dozen times. It must be right.

He glanced at his watch. He had a flight to Marseille in a couple of hours. There wasn't time, now, to check his notes and calculations or go through the whole thing again on the computer. Marina was expecting him at the farmhouse. He had to be there, he wanted to be there, he was living only to be back with her. He could always make some local phone calls once he got to the farmhouse. He could run over to Bonplaisir and have a chat with Tim.

I have a right to my personal life, for God's sake. I'm not about to put in peril the only relationship that matters to me. He quashed his unease, packed his bag and left.

Once back with Marina, in paradise, everything dropped away. He stopped worrying about the point-fixing systems. They gave a little dinner party together for the first time.

‘It's for Virginie.'

Martagon had never even heard of Virginie.

‘She was the housekeeper at Bonplaisir from when I was a child, right up to when we sold it, but she was much more than that. She was a real mother to me, more than my poor mother ever was. It was Virginie who looked after me when I came home after the bad times, whenever I was ill or unhappy, she was always there, she didn't ask questions, she just was there.'

Virginie was ill herself now. She was old. Martagon winkled more out of Marina. She had paid for Virginie to go to a convalescent home after an operation, and she saw her regularly. ‘I owe her so much, I can never repay.'

This was yet another Marina, a caring Marina with a sense of obligation and responsibility. Martagon was touched. The dinner was designed as a thank-you to Virginie, and a celebration of her partial recovery.

‘She doesn't go out much, and soon she won't be able to. It's like a last treat – well, maybe it won't be her last treat but I'm afraid it may be.'

Billie, her assistant, came too. Yet again, he failed to meet Billie's aunt Nancy Mulhouse; she was in Texas. Marina had also invited Pierre, who was to give Virginie and her ancient husband a lift to the farmhouse in his jeep.

They couldn't find a tablecloth in the farmhouse, so Marina dragged the linen sheet off the bed – none too clean – and used that instead.

‘I'm not sure that it's not a tablecloth really anyway,' she said.

‘You are such a slut,' Martagon said to her. ‘Such a gorgeous slut.'

He liked the way tall, strong Marina folded the tiny, wizened old woman in her arms and rocked her, when she arrived. He liked Virginie's gaze of uncomplicated love for his Marina. He felt happy and proud at first, sitting at the other end of the flower-decked table as her acknowledged partner, struggling with his French, admiring the old woman's unaffected dignity, joking with Billie, refilling her glass – and, even more often, his own.

It was the presence of swarthy, monosyllabic Pierre that soured the event for him. Pierre did not conceal his intimate familiarity with Marina and with the house. He told her, brusquely, there was too much salt in the
daube.
Late in the evening, when dessert was served and fresh wineglasses were needed, Pierre got up and fetched them from the kitchen without having to ask where they were kept. Holding in his right hand a cluster of glasses by their stems, Pierre leaned over Marina's shoulder to put them on the table. He let his left hand rest heavily on the nape of her neck for a long moment, while looking straight across the table at Martagon with an expression of contempt and defiance. Marina gave no sign of noticing anything at all and went on talking.

Martagon was so enraged that he could hardly breathe.

Pierre didn't return to his place. He lumbered out into the garden, presumably to relieve himself. After a few seconds Martagon followed him, knowing that the others would assume he was doing the same thing.

Outside in the cooler air, his head swam. He had drunk too much and too quickly. It was dark, but the garden was weakly illuminated by the light from the kitchen windows. Keeping in the shadows, Martagon moved quietly, following Pierre, who took the key from the nail in the massive garden wall and was unlocking the door. Perhaps he was intending to relieve himself in the field outside the garden. Or perhaps he habitually used the cavity in the wall between the two doors as a toilet. That was just the sort of disgusting thing he might do, thought Martagon.

Martagon knew that the second, outer door in the wall was locked, because he had locked it himself and taken the key into the house. As Pierre entered the cavity Martagon dashed forward and slammed the door shut, trapping Pierre in the narrow space. He couldn't lock him in, so he leaned against the door, his feet and legs braced, pitting his whole weight and strength against Pierre's efforts to open the door. He could hear the man swearing. He wasn't going to be able to hold the door closed for long: Pierre was heavier than he was. What the hell was Martagon going to do next? His French wasn't up to expressing his rage against Pierre verbally, and anyway his rage was ebbing. The wine singing in his veins, all he really wanted to do was to slide down with his back against the door and sit on the threshold laughing his head off.

Time to sober up, though. Pierre would start shouting soon, everyone would come running from the house, and then how would Martagon explain himself? The English sense of humour, perhaps: a practical joke. But he'd be a dead man. There were those old spades in the cavity, and Pierre would be murderous when he got out and saw Martagon.

There was a lull in the grunting and shoving from inside the wall. Pierre was thinking, or listening. All of a sudden Martagon moved away from the door and sprinted into the deep shadow under the olive trees. The noise Pierre made tumbling headfirst through the door muffled any other sound. Martagon moved swiftly through the trees away from the wall, so that when he emerged he encountered Pierre at an angle, seemingly coming from somewhere in the vicinity of the drive.

He thought, If Pierre goes for me I'll have to smash his face to smithereens. But Pierre just muttered something incomprehensible and went back into the house. Martagon followed him, laughing inwardly. Nothing had happened. Another path not taken.

*   *   *

It became quite cold after midnight. Marina decided, at that late hour, to light a fire. She threw on to the blaze an armful of lavender from a vase, which made the air fragrant. When the guests had left, Martagon collected up the empties.

‘The six of us got through a dozen bottles!'

Marina shrugged. ‘It's good wine, my darling,' she said.

‘But old Monsieur and Madame hardly took any,' he reminded her.

He started to say something about Pierre, but bit it back. The story of his half-baked exploit would sound foolish, and both he and Marina had drunk enough to say things that shouldn't be said. He must summon the confidence to believe that Pierre was part of the past.

I do have that confidence. But I'm drinking too much these days, Martagon said to himself. I'd better watch it. Marina too. There is altogether too much alcohol in this relationship, even if it is good wine, my darling.

He and Marina remade their bed and slept entwined on the wine-stained tablecloth.

Martagon stayed for five days, and the parting was harder. Marina drove him to Marignane, the airport for Marseille, and for the whole hour they hardly spoke. He sat well away from her, looking out of his window at the landscape of pines, vines and baked earth, which soon for him would be only a memory. Marina generally drove with one hand on the wheel and the other lying between them, on the automatic gear lever. He often touched that hand with his, or twisted his fingers in hers – for a minute, or for five minutes. He often put his hand on her thigh – for a minute, or for five minutes, and her free hand would leap up to cover his.

Today both her hands were on the wheel. He did, without averting his gaze from his window, put his left hand on her thigh. Her bare forearm moved to crush his, but she kept both hands on the wheel. He pulled away his hand.

He glanced at her. Her profile was set, aquiline, the corner of her lovely mouth a little turned down. She passed a bent forefinger under one of her eyes. Were there tears in her eyes? Probably not. Probably just irritation from dust, or the sun.

The grief of leaving her made him angry, ungracious.

*   *   *

Once on the plane back to London, his unease about the fixings flooded back a hundredfold. He suddenly saw exactly what might have happened. His mind had been working on the problem without his knowing it.

He took a taxi to his office, switched on the computer, and concentrated. The bolts were the problem. It was a matter of a nano-measurement, but it mattered. It mattered absolutely. There might still be time. He rang Tim Murtagh at Bonplaisir. No answer. He looked at his watch. It was eight thirty – nine thirty in France. Everyone had gone home.

He passed a sleepless night. First thing in the morning he rang Bonplaisir again, his stomach churning as he waited for Tim to answer.

‘We've got it put together – I'm talking about the roof! The big top! – and we've got it up,' said Tim. ‘It's taken them four days, working overtime, but it's up. We finished at six thirty last night. Looks great!'

‘It'll all have to come down.'

*   *   *

With those few words, all hell broke loose over Martagon's head – from Heaney Mahon, from the lawyers, the client group, Lin's people, Harper Cox's people, Giles himself. It was everyone's worst nightmare come true.

Martagon had to convince them that there was no safe alternative. The great curved panels were compromised not only by having the ‘wrong' bolts taken out. Two panels were damaged when Tim's team and the contractors were bringing them down. The whole lot had had to be manufactured all over again, sending the cost of the project spiralling by millions of francs. The ‘liquidated damages' – the pre-estimate of likely losses to be suffered in the event of delay – were well overshot. Bending the glass was a major operation, at a temperature of over 600 degrees centigrade. The manufacturers had already moved on to other work, with its own deadlines. Martagon's new panels had to wait their turn.

The opening of Bonplaisir was postponed for five months. There was an ugly symmetry in this. Five months' delay, because of five days Martagon had spent with Marina. If he had given his whole attention to the problem the moment he suspected an error, it could have been corrected before they began to erect the roof. Martagon did not attempt to deny responsibility. The salvaging of honour lay in acknowledging his dishonour.

‘How in hell did this happen, Martagon?' said Giles, exhausted by another day of meetings and telephone calls. Giles had the experience to know that in a project of this complexity there were bound to be snarl-ups, and up to now had never implied that he thought Martagon was personally to blame.

‘I took my eye off the ball for a moment,' Martagon said curtly. He did not say he had been with Marina. Nor did he tell Marina about the disaster.

Lin Perry did not come down on him like a ton of bricks. When he and Martagon spoke on the telephone, he wanted to talk mostly about George, who had a hernia problem. Lin knew exactly what he was doing. His publicity people got busy with their contacts in the British and French media and sent out press releases. They saw to it that all newspaper reports on the delayed opening made it absolutely clear that it was not due to any architectural design fault, but to engineering problems.