Flight (2 page)

When he was doing his degree course, engineering students in British universities were, axiomatically, nerds in anoraks. His mother didn't know about anoraks. But she said, ‘Will you be coming home from work in blue overalls with spanners sticking out of the top pocket?'

Martagon explained to her the difference between a mechanic and an engineer.

He fought back by cultivating his appearance. He dressed in black from head to foot when it became the arty norm. He made a name for himself as an actor in the most experimental of the student theatre groups. He never lost sight of his aspiration to be an artist-engineer, and was determined to prove that an engineer could be as prestigious and high profile as he knew they always had been in continental Europe. He didn't fit in anywhere, in the England of his youth. If there was some tribe to which he belonged, it was scattered everywhere. He hadn't found it.

He decided that he would work largely overseas, and make an international name for himself. England, to Martagon, carried overtones of separation from parents, boarding-school, rain, adolescent depression. When he was young he conflated his first term at the English school with his father's death, as if the one had caused the other. The shadow of this notion, no longer consciously formulated, still lingered.

Martagon worked hard and was successful, helped along by new developments in the industry – especially in glass technology. Martagon, by the time Giles Harper approached him about the Bonplaisir airport project, was one of a small cluster of international stars who were changing the image of the profession and extending its boundaries.

The fact that Giles came to him at all was a measure of Martagon's value. The two had quarrelled five years previously, and gone their separate ways. Before that, they were great friends. Between them, they orchestrated the merging of Harper's with Cox & Co., and formed the new and profitable entity: Harper Cox.

Martagon was taken aback, just recently, when he mentioned to a younger colleague that he himself had had the good fortune to be trained by Arthur Cox – and realized that the name meant nothing at all. The firm Harper Cox was universally known in the construction industry. But Arthur himself was completely forgotten.

*   *   *

When, in the early 1980s, Martagon took his first job with what was then Cox & Co., it had already been one of the most respected British engineering firms for decades. Arthur Cox had been given a knighthood in Mrs Thatcher's first Honours List. But Arthur never changed. He was still Arthur Cox, and legendary in the industry. He was a bear of a man with a big baggy body and a big creased face under a shock of dry wiry hair, its brown fading to grey. He had a voice like a foghorn. He was austere, teetotal, dedicated, and ran the firm as if he were the father of a family.

That, as time passed and business practices changed, was the trouble. Arthur did not go in for participatory management. He could seem insensitive and reactionary. He had no notion of power-sharing. Yet his impulses were generous; he was not bent on making a private fortune. As the firm's profits rose on the back of overseas contracts, he set up the Cox Foundation, which funded, as it still famously does, libraries and cultural centres in emerging countries. Martagon is one of the trustees.

Arthur gave Martagon his first job and was unfailingly supportive of his work. After a very few years – scandalously few, some old-timers thought – Martagon had a seat on the main board. Martagon, in return, felt a fierce, filial loyalty to Arthur. All Arthur's people were loyal to him, for that matter, even those who worried about the way things were going.

Martagon still goes through bouts of guilt about the merger, especially at four o'clock in the morning when he cannot sleep. He has only himself to blame. But there was more to it than that. He could never say to anyone, ‘I was steam-rollered by Giles Harper.'

It would in any case have been more true to say, ‘I was seduced by Giles Harper.'

For Cox & Co., the merger was a disaster. All these years later, the old Cox people who remain do not really mesh with old Harper people. The culture is different. In his heart Martagon is for ever a Cox person, even though the Harper ethos turned out to have the edge, and even though he quit a couple of years after the merger. Martagon, telling the story, could never convey to anyone the personal drama, or the pain of betrayal.

*   *   *

It was Harpers who approached the Cox partnership, suggesting a merger. Giles Harper and Martagon, each representing his firm as CEO, met for the first time over an informal lunch at the Caprice. They found one another exciting. They were both young – early thirty-somethings, with Giles just a few years the elder – and alike in ways that they both found flattering. Or was it just Giles who was flattering Martagon? Who was wooing whom?

To look at, they were chalk and cheese. Giles's grey suit had a sheen on it. His emerald green tie had an even higher sheen. He wore a gold bracelet and a signet ring. When he smiled, he revealed half a gold tooth. He was stocky and muscular, already carrying a tad too much weight for his height. With his south London voice, and in working gear – hard hat, neon jacket and steel-toed boots – he could merge perfectly with the workforce on a construction site.

Martagon, in the same situation, was far more intimately engaged with the problems at ground level than Giles ever was. Yet he looked like an actor cast for the part by a self-indulgent director.

The differences in their self-presentation added a glint of razor-wire to their immediate rapport. They agreed they were both risk-takers. They liked living on the edge, moving around, feeling at ease wherever they found themselves. Harpers' main business was in the UK. Cox & Co. had their long-established international business, which Giles coveted. A merger between the two firms, with the emphasis on overseas expansion, could be a winner.

What both young men also knew – though neither referred to it directly – was that the Cox partnership, for the first time in its history, was losing money overseas. Martagon knew some of the reasons why. Emerging countries were beginning to produce their own engineers, and their governments to insist on local professionals forming part of the team. Sustainability, local opinion, local culture and long-term local needs had to be factored in to proposals and bids from outside firms.

Arthur Cox saw his mission as a ‘civilizing' one. Arthur thought he knew what was best for developing countries, which generally meant the inculcation of northern European values and attitudes – everything that spelt ‘civil society' to Arthur – as well as what was best for the business.

Cox & Co. were beginning to be seen at best as paternalist, at worst imperialist. They were continuing to tender, but failing to win contracts. Within the firm, only the chief planner, Tom Scree, was vociferous about the need for a change of ethos. Tom Scree was not one of Arthur's favourites. The board should have been undertaking a major rethink, and identifying new markets. Arthur resisted change. Arthur was as he was.

Giles Harper impressed on Martagon that the way ahead lay not only in identifying new markets but in reconfiguring existing ones. They should be going for contracts funded by international aid and development programmes, and co-operate with whichever of the proliferating NGOs (non-governmental organizations, which Arthur, as Martagon told Giles, still called ‘charities') were operating in the different areas.

‘Making our profit by milking overseas aid, you mean?'

‘Look at it another way,' said Giles. ‘We'd be putting our expertise at the service of the aid programmes. The poor and disadvantaged in emerging countries don't need naïve idealists swarming all over them, with no practical skills and a load of theoretical bullshit. Emerging countries need bridges, dams, access roads. And for us, it is opportunity.'

Giles made the word ‘opportunity' sound sexy. Every new contact, every incoming call, was a possible opportunity, for him. Opportunity was what turned Giles on and opportunity was what kept him going. Martagon only learned later how many irons in the fire Giles had at any one time, and how little he worried about getting his fingers burned. Once Martagon saw a personal bank statement of Giles's, lying openly on a table. If Martagon had been in debt to that amount he would have been a nervous wreck. Giles didn't give a damn. He saved his energies for the next opportunity.

‘I'm not interested in money for its own sake,' he told Martagon at lunch, ‘only for what it can do. I want the power that money gives me.'

Even at that first lunch Martagon deduced that Giles had business interests on his own account, quite separate from the firm. Giles told a story about the great feeling he had, waiting alone at a deserted Stansted airport at three o'clock in the morning, with no sound other than the whine of distant floor-polishers, and he himself straining his eyes into the darkness for the lights of a private plane bringing him a load of bullion from Eastern Europe.

‘The romance of commerce!' said Giles, running his fingers through his curly brown hair so that it stood on end. ‘Am I very ridiculous?'

‘You're not ridiculous.' Martagon, in return, told Giles about the time he stood on the quay at Lagos beside a man, a complete stranger, on a day when the skyline was speckled with incoming vessels. The stranger was raking the horizon with his eyes in a fret of anticipation. He told Martagon, in a strong Glaswegian accent, that he was expecting a cargo of car tyres.

‘Why car tyres?' Martagon asked.

The Glaswegian replied with a single sufficient word: ‘Shorrtage.'

Shortage of something, for someone, means opportunity for someone else. That is the market. It is, in Giles's phrase, the romance of commerce.

‘I worked out early on,' said Giles, ‘that there were adults who did things or made things on their own account, and marketed them. I'd call them the self-employed, now. Then there were adults who did things or made things for a boss, in return for a wage or salary. Then there was the boss, who didn't make things and I wasn't sure what he actually did, either. But in the movies I saw he always had sexy secretaries, and talked on the phone a lot, and had a big empty desk, and people came into his office to be told what to do, or to be slagged off, or sacked.'

‘So you wanted to be him.'

‘I didn't know how to get to be him. I just knew I didn't want to work for anyone else. In that situation, the only thing left is to deal, to sell something for more than you bought it for. Like your “shortage” thing. It could be tyres, or a goat, or a load of firewood, or a bunch of bananas, or a bunch of power-stations in Venezuela.'

‘Why Venezuela?'

‘It's just something that I – oh, don't ask.'

‘You're one of nature's dealers. A trader.' Martagon drained his glass of Chablis. Giles, who was not drinking, sipped his mineral water. Giles's weaknesses were his sweet tooth, and nicotine. He ordered a
crème brûlée
and lit a Marlboro Light.

‘I'm a dreamer, too,' he said. ‘And you?'

‘Oh, I'm a dreamer. But I'm not a dealer. I'm an investor, figuratively speaking.'

‘Meaning?'

‘I get involved. I need to see a complex project through from beginning to end. I have trouble disengaging. Maybe because I don't have too much in my life apart from my work. I don't have a family, a particular person, to invest myself in.'

‘You must meet Amanda, my wife. And my sister Julie, she's something special, although she's got problems, she's a bit of a naïve idealist.' Giles paused and stubbed out his cigarette. ‘We could be complementary, you and I. We could help one another. All I know is, I want a very different life from the one my parents have.'

Giles's parents, as he told Martagon, live in Catford. His father works in John Lewis on Oxford Street selling white goods, as he has done all his adult life. His mother is bookkeeper to a small building firm. His father's elder brother set up a small civil engineering company in Portsmouth, and Giles joined his uncle there on leaving school, qualifying as an engineer on day-release courses.

As soon as he qualified he began to work all hours drumming up new business, starting at the top. Within a very few years the company was five times the size, operating nationwide and expanding, very tentatively, overseas. The head office moved from Portsmouth to Crawley, nearer London. Giles's uncle still chaired the board, but he was ready to retire. Giles, to all intents and purposes, ran Harpers.

‘If you're a dreamer,' asked Martagon, ‘what's your goal, your ultimate dream?'

‘I want Amanda and me to end up in a large comfortable house with a garden and a double garage and an indoor pool in a good part of west London, say Chelsea or Kensington or Notting Hill. And a house in the country for weekends. And children, and dogs. It'll all cost a bomb. An absolute bomb. I want an establishment, and no money worries.'

Martagon was surprised that Giles's best dreams were, ultimately, so conventional. ‘I can't envisage anything remotely like that. But then I'm a displaced person, I'm a wanderer.'

‘You're a bit younger than me, and you haven't got a family. You'll see. And,' Giles added, ‘I'd like to leave something of value – an institute or something, a bit like—'

‘Like the Cox Foundation?'

‘I suppose so.'

As they waited for the bill, they agreed that you can't be like Arthur Cox without being – well, like Arthur Cox, and that's the problem. They both laughed, and Martagon felt a flicker of guilt at the implicit slight to Arthur.

That first lunch expanded into many, at weekly intervals, in the period leading up to the merger negotiations. It was business, and it was also pleasure. There was a private merger between Giles and Martagon long before the real merger went through. Giles quickly acquired an impressive grasp of the international business. Martagon became fascinated by Giles – by his barrow-boy flashness, his burgundy-red Jaguar – and, even more, by the way Giles ran Harpers.