Flight (3 page)

By the standards of Cox & Co. – Martagon saw this all too clearly after the merger – Giles was ruthless, both with staff and clients. He made cutting corners into a professional virtue. He delegated, and how. He created an internal market within the firm. He felt no obligation to familiarize himself with the detail of any project, and gave hell to anyone who should have known the detail and did not. Martagon was scared, excited and – fatally – flattered. He was mesmerized by Giles, and a little in love with him, as men can be in love with other men without ever wanting to make love to them or even thinking about it.

Martagon's father, who was fond of axioms, used to say that ‘God is in the details.' It was in the details that Giles's values and attitudes diverged from Martagon's. Perhaps, Martagon thought now, not God but the devil is in the details. Years later, he said to Marina: ‘I think Giles may be the devil.'

She was astonished. ‘You've always told me what good qualities he has. How he's a wonderful husband, and loyal to his friends, and so on.'

‘That's all true. Maybe he's not the devil. Maybe he's just the devil for me. He tempts me, he brings out a sort of materialism and unscrupulousness in me which I wish wasn't there, but it is and it scares me. He's my bad angel. Arthur Cox used to say that I was his good angel, and that used to be true.'

*   *   *

Arthur Cox took a paternal interest in Martagon when he first joined the firm, though for a while Martagon failed to recognize it as such. Arthur would call him into his private office for ‘a word'. He would stand with his hands in his pockets, jingling his small change, looking out of the window with his back to Martagon, and outline a problem. ‘I'd welcome your thoughts on this. A fresh eye. The papers are on the desk if you want to take a look.'

Martagon would come up with what he thought was the obvious solution, to be met with silence.

‘Well, yes', said Arthur at last. ‘That's one possibility. But I wonder if we couldn't do it differently.'

Half an hour would pass, while Martagon did his best to come up with other ideas, and Arthur showed every sign of indecisiveness. In the end Arthur would quite suddenly plump with apparent satisfaction for the first course of action they had discussed, and send Martagon back to his desk. Martagon gradually understood that Arthur, by nature, really did like to turn every possibility over and over. But more importantly, he was quite deliberately training Martagon how to marshal the options, how to separate the essential from the inessential – in short, how to think. About once a week Arthur took Martagon for a drink at the end of the day. Nursing his half-pint, he told long stories about the past heroes of the British engineering profession and their achievements, and about those firms that had overreached themselves, growing so large and grand that they no longer functioned effectively.

By osmosis, Martagon learned. In return he became Arthur's eyes and ears. It was he who spotted the quality of Mirabel Plunket. Arthur was too old-world to give immediate credence to the capabilities of a newly qualified female, but he took Martagon's word for it and put her on the fast track. Martagon was proved right.

‘You are my good angel,' Arthur said. Martagon knew that Arthur, as he grew older, relied on him more and more.

*   *   *

Martagon and Giles worked on the merger and planned their Camelot.

Giles was a Chelsea supporter, and always had a season ticket and, mysteriously, access to more. When Chelsea were playing at home, the two went together to Stamford Bridge to watch the match. Mostly, as the months passed, they met at the Harpers' house in Fulham, at Amanda's kitchen table or sitting in the garden. It was Martagon who first used the word ‘Camelot' to describe their planned joint venture. He meant it literally.

‘The Knights of the Round Table weren't sentimental softies. They were tough, in training, ready to fight their corner,' he said. ‘They were armed to the teeth with all the latest dark-ages technology and know-how.'

Giles did not read books, he never had. ‘Oh, you're so cultured!' he said mockingly.

But he liked that in Martagon. He really did. Maybe, thought Martagon, that's what he wants from me: my difference. I am coming from somewhere else. ‘Sir Lancelot and King Arthur didn't sit around all day drinking spritzers and making daisy-chains,' he said.

King Arthur. King Arthur Cox. How was he going to feel about the new Camelot?

‘They did have heavy-duty romances, though,' said Amanda. ‘From what I remember.'

‘They always ended disastrously,' said Martagon. ‘Anyway, this daisy-chain is for Julie.'

‘That's nice, she'll like that,' said Giles. ‘She really will.'

Planes coming into land at Heathrow, at that hour in the evening, flew over the Harpers' garden at an angle of forty-five degrees every few seconds. Martagon put down his daisy-chain to watch them. Long-haul planes, from the ends of the earth. The sky was clear, and Martagon could pick out their liveries and identify them.

‘Weird how they suddenly appear, as if they had just been created. There's that split second between seeing a piece of empty sky and seeing a plane in it. It's too quick, like as if
time
was the wrong category to be catching it in. And think of all those people, in all those planes. Escaping from somewhere, or coming home, or arriving somewhere new and exciting, or new and scary, and all finding – I don't know what…'

‘Opportunity,' said Giles. ‘Actually, what they find is Heathrow.'

‘Heathrow is purgatory. Something to be got through before you get to heaven. Or hell.'

‘How you do go on, Martagon. Get on with your daisy-chain, it's wilting.'

*   *   *

The day that Martagon met Giles's sister for the first time, Amanda had said, ‘Julie's pretty screwed up at the moment.'

She sounded as if she was warning him. She and Martagon were sitting, as so often, in the Harpers' back garden, during that first summer of the merger discussions. Martagon was waiting for Giles, who was late back from the office. Julie, too, was expected.

Martagon had noticed how Giles's voice changed when he talked about his sister. He was fiercely protective of her. Martagon imagined that they still inhabited together their childhood world, in which there was complete mutual trust. Both had reacted against their limited, decent upbringing, leaving home as soon as they could.

‘They're the opposite sides of the same coin,' said Amanda. ‘Both extremists, both driven – but in different directions.'

Julie, the younger, became left-wing and alternative, rejecting the ‘system', dressing herself from charity shops, backpacking to India, volunteering, living on no money. She went on to do Development Studies at the University of East Anglia, when she met Hailu – a clever, handsome Ethiopian seconded for a year from the NGO for which he worked in Addis Ababa.

Martagon had never heard the whole story.

‘I might as well tell you, since you're more or less one of the family now.' Succinctly, in her north-country way, Amanda filled him in. ‘The next thing was, Julie fell pregnant.'

She and Hailu were utterly wrapped up in one another. Julie didn't make friends easily, and Hailu was her first boyfriend. She didn't dare tell her parents about Hailu and the coming baby. At the end of the academic year they got married, very privately, in Norwich. Julie didn't even confide in Giles. Then she flew back to Addis with Hailu – as she informed her parents in a note posted at Heathrow.

Hailu took the pregnant Julie back to his village to meet his family, and left her there.

‘Why did he do that?'

‘He thought it was the best thing to do. From what I can gather he's a good young man. Though maybe not up to incorporating a wife into his life in Addis. But he didn't mean to dump her, or not straight away. He told her he'd come and fetch her when he'd found them somewhere to live where they could have the baby. But he didn't come back to the village.'

Meanwhile Julie lived with his mother and sisters in the village – which was hardly a village, just a cluster of round huts,
tokuls,
in the middle of nowhere. It was a very poor area, a ‘food-deficit area' in aid-agency language, one and a half days' walk across the bush from the nearest permanent road, thirty miles from the nearest village with a market and shops.

‘If you can call them shops,' said Amanda. ‘They'd just be rickety single-storey shacks with tin roofs. Julie couldn't write to anyone, and no one could write to her, she didn't have an address even. Julie being Julie, she thought she ought to make a go of it. She still thinks she should have. But she couldn't.'

She had the baby – a boy – there in the
tokul,
and did not recover her health afterwards. She and baby Fasil were never well. Early one morning she put Fasil in a cloth on her back and walked the thirty miles to the big village, where there was some sort of a clinic. The clinic was closed. Hailu's family used to walk all the way home across the bush by night in a group, but she was alone. She didn't have their orientation skills, and she was frightened of hyenas. On impulse, she walked off down the motor-road, not knowing where it led.

She was picked up at dawn by some Dutch aid-workers in a Land Cruiser. In Addis, they helped her to locate the NGO offices where Hailu had worked. He was no longer there, and no one could or would tell her where he was.

The good Dutch people paid for a room for her in the Ghion Hotel, where she washed Fasil's clothes and had a hot shower. Then, finally, she telephoned Giles.

So Julie came home.

She had underestimated her parents. They were non-judgemental, and immediately besotted with little Fasil. But Julie would not move in with them. She and Fasil were staying with an old university friend in Stoke Newington in north London.

‘She's very hard to help,' said Amanda. ‘She's having a sort of nervous breakdown on her feet. And I mean on her feet. She's kept up that African thing of walking everywhere, even now when she doesn't have to. She walks miles, all over London, with Fasil in the buggy.'

‘Maybe,' said Martagon, increasingly interested, ‘it's become a sort of addiction. Or a residual loyalty to that other life. Maybe she's looking for Hailu without knowing that's what she's doing.'

‘Maybe.'

A door banged. It was the lattice door that separated the sideway of the house from the back garden.

Coming towards them was a painfully thin young woman with stringy pale hair. She didn't look to Martagon at all like Giles. She was wearing a long denim skirt, a whitish T-shirt, and trainers. A small backpack hung from one shoulder, and she carried a little bottle of Evian water. Martagon stood up.

‘Martagon – Julie. Julie – Martagon,' said Amanda, waving a hand, not stirring from her flowered garden lounger.

They shook hands, and Martagon saw that Julie had the same large greenish eyes as her brother.

‘Have my chair.'

‘No, thank you.'

Julie squatted on the grass. Her voice was thin and strangulated. She hung her head and her hair fell in strands over her face.

‘Where's Fasil?' asked Amanda.

‘With my friends. I've been looking for a flat.'

‘Did you see anything you liked?'

Amanda's voice had an edge to it. It struck Martagon that she was afraid Julie would have to move in with her and Giles, and that the idea did not please her.

Julie, sensing hostility, raised her head. ‘Where's Giles? It's him I really want to see.'

‘He'll be here any minute,' said Amanda, and to Martagon, ‘Giles is going to help Julie buy a flat.'

‘What kind of thing are you looking for?' he asked.

‘A basement.'

‘A basement? Rather dark and damp, surely,' said Amanda. ‘A top flat, where you could see trees and the sky, would be less depressing.'

‘I can't bear stairs, and all that scuttling up and down. I'm not an arboreal animal.'

That made Martagon smile. Suppressing the inclination to be facetious about the exigencies of land-use in densely populated areas, he asked her, ‘What sort of animal are you, then?'

‘A burrowing animal.'

‘I hope you find a good burrow, then.'

He laughed, and then saw that laughing was wrong. Julie was crying. Tears dripped down her face and on to her T-shirt.

‘I'll get the tissues,' said Amanda wearily, heaving herself off her lounger and traipsing back towards the house. Martagon didn't know whether it would be better for Julie if he followed Amanda into the house, or if he stayed.

‘What is it?' he said. ‘Please don't cry.'

The silent tears became choking sobs. She was trying to say something to him. She raised her head and her wet, candid eyes met his. ‘All I wanted, all I want, is to be a good person.'

Martagon was on the grass on his knees beside her, his arms around her, rocking her. He could feel her bones through her clothes. ‘You are a good person.'

‘No, I'm not.'

‘You are. I can tell you are. I want to be a good person too.'

‘And are you?'

‘I don't know. I don't think so.'

Amanda came back with a box of tissues. She raised an eyebrow at Martagon over Julie's bent head. He released Julie and sat on his chair again.

*   *   *

What Julie had said was a trigger for Martagon. ‘I want to be a good person' is a childish formulation. There is no sophisticated, grown-up way of expressing it.

Martagon went for a swim. When he was in London, he swam at the Kensington and Chelsea public pool. He hated going to the gym. He hadn't inherited his parents' love for mountain walks. Swimming was what he did. It was his exercise and his drug. For forty minutes or an hour, he swam lengths.