Flight (17 page)

‘I never know what to wear in London,' she confided to him. ‘It's the skirt problem. A total nightmare. I always wear trousers, you see. I feel like a female impersonator when I get all dressed up, I feel as if I were in drag.'

‘You look very nice,' said Martagon, ‘though you could have worn trousers if you'd wanted. Look, Marina is, and so is Julie.'

‘Tom said he thought a skirt.' Ann Scree was anxious. So was Martagon, anxious the whole time, in case Marina should be bored.

Well, of course she was bored. The only question was, how was she going to handle it? Over drinks before the meal, in the sitting room, she sat talking to Giles. She was in sleek black Armani, and she had had her hair done for the occasion, curled and ringleted into a burning bush that stood out from her head. Whore's hair, thought Martagon, when she came down the stairs at his house, ready to go.

‘Marina, what are you
like!
'

‘What am I like?'

‘Pure heaven,' said Martagon.

In the Harpers' sitting room, she looked confident, exotic and female. Sitting beyond Giles with no one to talk to – Amanda and Scree's wife had gone into the kitchen – Martagon studied Scree with an intensity of dislike that had almost the fervour of love.

He observed, as he bit his nails and nursed his wineglass, Scree's social technique. Scree talked in a low voice, leaning well back in his chair. This compelled the women to whom he was talking – in this case Julie Harper and Mirabel Plunket – to lean sharply forward, their elbows on their knees, simply in order to hear what he was saying, and thereby, involuntarily, giving an impression of extreme and girlish eagerness. Scree was obviously getting off on the combined and exclusive attention of the two women, looking from one face to the other as he explained the full implications of the reform of the House of Lords with special reference to his own role as he saw it.

Mirabel responded by wriggling about on her seat, crossing and uncrossing her legs continuously, and fiddling with the buttons of her cream silk blouse. She kept putting up her hair in a knot then unwinding it again, shaking it loose as she posed some question, then winding it up again.

Julie sat still, as serious as a nun, the wide neck of her black sweater showing her thin throat and part of her shoulders, inviting speculation.

Scree's eyes raked them both, missing nothing – and flickering more and more frequently away and beyond them, to the sofa where Marina sat with Giles.

Amanda had set the table in their ornate but minuscule dining room, with Giles's
épergne
in the middle. Squashed round the table were Giles and Amanda (one at each end), with Tom Scree on Amanda's right and Martagon on her left. Ann Scree – Lady Scree – was on Giles's right. Marina was placed on Giles's left. Mirabel Plunket and Julie made up the party. Tom Scree dominated the conversation, his accent more pukka and public-school than usual – because he'd just been made a lord? Because his wife was there?

He's always been a name-dropper, Martagon was thinking, and the House of Lords is giving him a wonderful new raft of names to drop … Scree, sitting opposite him, was telling a long and intrinsically boring anecdote only in order to drop a particularly impressive name at the end of it. Or that's what Martagon presumed, having heard the anecdote before. When Scree got to the punchline, he fumbled it, he could not remember the name. ‘Oh, God,' he said, clicking his fingers, rocking in his chair, ‘this is terrible, you know exactly who I mean…'

Martagon, in contempt and pity, swallowed what was in his mouth, tersely supplied the missing name, and immediately refilled his mouth with steak-and-kidney pie.

‘Yes, yes, that's right!' said Scree, managing to make Martagon complicit in the whole dreary business, and Martagon the actual name-dropper.

Amanda floundered somewhat, not contributing much to the flow of talk, darting in and out of the kitchen. Julie, between Martagon and Lady Scree, seemed paralysed. She never was much of a talker at parties. Martagon noticed that she rarely took her great grave eyes off Scree's face.

Marina was in the middle of telling Giles about a film, now long forgotten, that she had starred in as a child. Martagon hadn't heard about this before and was interested; so was everyone else, so that now Marina held the table. She was being funny and entertaining, repeating her lines and her actions from the film. She made everyone at the table laugh and look at her and admire her. She may well be bored, thought Martagon, but there's absolutely no way that she can be boring.

Whereas Ann Scree … but Ann Scree was patently nice, and admired her horrible husband.

Martagon was already drunker than he would have wished to be.

‘What kind of therapist are you?' he asked Ann, across the silent Julie. ‘Structural? Mechanical? Electrical? Or just Civil?'

‘What kind of engineer are you?' she replied. ‘Jungian? Freudian? Cognitive? Behaviourist? Or just Alternative?'

Really Ann Scree wasn't too bad at all.

When everyone was leaving, dragging on their coats in the narrow hallway, Martagon had to nudge Marina – who was being over-tenderly embraced by Tom Scree, whom she had met that evening for the first time – towards the kitchen, in order to thank Amanda, who was loading the dishwasher. Marina, too, was a little drunk, and caressed him briefly, shamelessly, in the dark hall.

‘Do you think I should also tell our charming hostess,' she said, in her sexy stage-whisper, ‘that no one over the age of twenty-two should be
allowed
to wear an Alice band?'

Giles, helping Ann Scree with her coat, was a foot away. Martagon closed his eyes for a second and prayed that he had not overheard.

*   *   *

As he walked through London with Marina at his side, Martagon looked at the men who looked at her. He wanted to see what strangers saw. He observed in action what he knew from his own experience – that a man's reaction to a pretty woman is involuntary and automatic. Some were drawn to her face, the automatic first glance returning again, and again, as if the men's heads were twitched by a wire. Most stared only at her body, at her tits and belly, as if faces were an optional extra. A woman with a good body is desirable even if she has a face like a dog. Some men fixed Marina with a dull, torpid gaze while chewing or scratching themselves, like cattle watching a train go by. Like the street-corner men in Bangladesh who eyed his mother, when he was a child.

Now that nearly everyone in his circle knew, or at least suspected, that he and Marina were together, Martagon wanted to talk about her. After she went back to France, he wanted to say her name out loud, to hear her beauty praised.

He started with Julie, whose uncomplicated manner towards him never changed. She was also the one person he thought had not put two and two together.

‘What did you think about Marina? Did you like her?' he asked her casually, on the bus, after a concert he had taken her to at the Barbican. They had heard Mahler's first symphony. Julie had found it uncomfortable. Too wilfully disordered, she said. Almost embarrassing. Whereas for Martagon the music was miraculous, evoking the disturbance and fulfilment of passion better than words ever could. Not that he said that to Julie.

Julie was silent for a moment before she answered his question about Marina.

‘She's very – well,
theatrical,
don't you think? But I don't know how nice she is really. You can't tell.'

Julie did not seem to want to say any more, and Martagon didn't press her.

*   *   *

‘That was a great evening, thank you very much. What did you make of Marina?' he asked Amanda, in her kitchen, a week after the party.

Amanda, who was topping and tailing beans for supper, gave him a long look. ‘Well … Of course, she's incredibly glamorous. That amazing hair, and that suit … Is she rich? She looks rich.'

‘Yes I suppose she is, very rich now, because of selling the land and the château. Not that that's the point one way or another.'

‘Well, it must make a difference. It makes her not like other people. Not that she ever could have been, with her looks and that background.'

‘No, she's not like other people. You liked her, though?'

‘I honestly don't know, I was so busy getting the dinner and everything, I didn't talk to her properly, we didn't really connect.'

‘We must set up something else so that you can get to know her. She's really wonderful, she's great fun too.'

‘You're a dark horse, Martagon. Who would have thought it? Is it the real thing this time?'

‘It's the real thing.'

Then Giles came in and they changed the subject. When Martagon left, Amanda gave him a hug, which was unusual for her, and said, ‘Just remember, there are no free lunches.'

‘Yes, there are, if you are prepared to pay for them.'

‘Oh, Martagon. Take care of yourself, though.'

*   *   *

To Giles, in the pub, Martagon said: ‘Marina really enjoyed that evening. She asked me to say thank you. She really liked you and Amanda, and she loved what you've done with the house.'

Why on earth did he say that? Just in case Giles suspected she hadn't liked the house, and just in case he had overheard what she said in the hallway …

Giles raised an eyebrow. ‘A bit flamboyant, for my taste.'

That, from Giles of all people!

‘She's a lovely woman, though, mate. Classy. Loads of personality. Quite a handful, I should think. I've heard she's pretty unstable, like the brother. You and her aren't really an item, are you?'

‘Well…'

‘You're a lucky man. Make the most of it. That sort doesn't stay around long. But keep your eye on the ball…'

‘It's all right, Giles, for God's sake, everything's under control now.'

*   *   *

Martagon had no desire at all to talk to Tom Scree – Lord Scree – about Marina. But Scree, meeting him in the reception area at Harper Cox a couple of days later, drew him aside. ‘Fine woman, Marina.'

‘Yes, she's beautiful, isn't she?'

Scree paused, eyeing Martagon speculatively. Then, ‘What I call a phallic woman. Older than she looks, I'd say. Wouldn't mind seeing her with her kit off, though.'

Martagon's first instinct was to thump him. His right fist, clenched, rose up all by itself. Then he pushed past Scree, out through the glass doors and into the street, breathing heavily, his armpits pricking with sweat. Tom Scree. What a shit. Worse even than I imagined. What a filthy little ferret.

All in all, Martagon rather wished he hadn't indulged himself by talking about Marina to his friends. He went for a swim.

What did Scree mean, a ‘phallic woman'? Psychobabble picked up from his wife, probably. Maybe it just means a potent, effective woman. Marina is certainly that. There's a lot of the male in her, even though she's so seductively female. There's a lot of the female in me, for that matter. We balance each other. We reinvent each other. She's not exactly what people mean when they say ‘feminine'. Female is what she is. Male is what I am, what she makes me.

Lovers inhabit a citadel of erotic imagination, in which they are brilliant, potent, beautiful – young. It's not quite how they are perceived. As soon as they left the citadel and engaged with the ‘real world', Marina became what Julie called theatrical, and he himself flailed about, seeking approval, risking betrayal.

Swimming lengths, Martagon wondered whether their world of love was inauthentic, illusory. Yet surely it was as ‘real' as anything else? I used to think that happiness was just a by-product. Now I think it's an attitude, or an orientation. When I feel like a loser, when I suspect the god has left me, I can climb back into the citadel and be safe and whole. There may be inflation, yes, hyperbole, yes. But the passion of love is still authentic. It's the only unarguable authenticity there is.

SIX

Martagon had other European projects to attend to as well as the airport. He couldn't bear to part with Marina even for a day unless he had to, so in March he took her with him on a site visit to the theatre in Berlin, now near completion and solemnly named the Neues Erasmustheater. She seemed excited by the idea: ‘I want to see what it is that you do, Marteau.'

They drove across the heart of Euroland from Bonplaisir in her new black Alfa Romeo – Lyon, Strasbourg, Frankfurt, Berlin, 1,500 kilometres. They took three days. It was their first little holiday together. He wanted to give her what her beauty and his love demanded, and booked a suite at the Adlon beside the Brandenburg Gate.

He took her to the office of Lin Perry's people first. Lin himself wasn't there, but Martagon showed her their models and Harper Cox's plans. She was amazed, as outsiders always are, by how small the auditorium was in comparison with the spaces needed for storing sets, for offices, workshops, rehearsal rooms, dressing rooms, staff canteen, public spaces, bars, restaurant, walkways, staircases, lights and flies … Martagon felt bound to explain that although Harper Cox were the consulting engineers on the site, he himself was only one of many outside consultants.

‘Harper Cox are responsible for the foundations and structure. Then there are acoustics engineers, and the M and E people – that's the mechanical and electrical engineers, for the lifts and stage lights and so on.'

‘And you are here for Harper Cox and Lin, because of the glass. You make yourself not important. You are not romantic, Marteau.'

‘I'm romantic about you, Marina. If you don't understand that, you don't understand anything.'

‘But about your work.'

‘About my work, too.'

It always did give Martagon a terrific buzz to see a big building under construction. That's what had kept him in the business, he told her – the continuity of the co-operative thorny process leading from concept to realization, and the creation of a new thing in the world that would last longer than anyone who had worked on it.