Flight (6 page)

So they drank the wine – one bottle, and then, slowly, another bottle.

*   *   *

Before he left, he wrote down for her his e-mail address.

‘Why “marteau”?' she asked. ‘It means “hammer”.'

‘I know. It sounds like my name, only more aggressive, and suitable for someone working in the construction industry. I've worked mainly in Europe, I didn't want to sound too English. Not that I am, my father was Irish.'

‘You look very English. In the best way. If in French you say that someone's
un peu marteau
it means he's a bit crazy.'

‘I'm not crazy. I'm balanced, like a good hammer.' Balance, he told her, was important. A question of psychological equilibrium, between work and play, public and private, reason and passion. ‘I don't usually talk like this to women I've only just met, on a matter of business.'

He had imagined a visit of about an hour. In the event he stayed until dusk, reason draining out of him through a hole in the bottom of the world. There was only himself and her and the private life.

*   *   *

In those first days they told each other about their childhoods, as people falling in love do.

‘I'm a displaced person,' Martagon said to Marina. ‘I don't really belong anywhere.'

He told her about his childhood in Bangladesh, which was East Pakistan then. His father Liam Foley was an accountant with a firm of jute exporters, and they lived in a company house. He told her about his mother Jill, who was pretty and clever with that air of slight silliness which pleases most men. Like all Europeans they had servants, and a car with a driver. He was an only child.

‘You were a little prince,' said Marina.

‘And you, at Bonplaisir, were a little princess, in an enchanted castle. Dhaka was the armpit of Asia.'

Martagon's nightmares were – still are – about the beggars with eyes missing, in dusty rags, with no hands, banging their stumps against the closed windows of the car. Thud-thud, thud-thud. He was told by his parents to stare straight ahead and take no notice. The driver kept his hand permanently on the horn as they inched their way down unsurfaced streets and alleys crammed with rickshaws and bicycle taxis and people. Martagon suffered from carsickness, and sometimes had to ask for the car to be stopped so that he could get out and be sick on the side of the street. The Bangladeshi men standing around would stare at him, and stare harder at his mother as they fingered their private parts through the thin cotton of their
lunghis.

He told Marina what an embarrassment his first name had been to him. When he was seven or eight, and they still lived in Dhaka, his mother told him that ‘Martagon' was the name of an Alpine lily – a
pink
lily, for God's sake. He was appalled.

‘Martagon is a really strong, manly sounding name,' his mother said. She showed him the picture of a martagon lily in the illustrated flower-book she had. ‘Look how the petals curl backwards, making it look like a Turkish turban. The other name for it is the “Turk's head lily”.'

‘Is that why Dad calls me Turk?'

‘Yes, that, and because you are a young Turk.'

Martagon was not reconciled to his name by knowing that his mother loved flowers, and that on their honeymoon his parents had walked in the Alps where she had been overwhelmed by the beauty of martagon lilies growing wild along the mountain paths. When he went to school he announced he was called ‘Mart', which the other boys assumed was short for Martin.

He went on being Mart until he became a student, when the sonorous oddity of ‘Martagon' began to appeal to him. Now everyone he worked with, and people in the profession who knew of him only by hearsay, referred to him simply as Martagon, with no second name. He liked the modernity of this. Surnames, in a world where call-centres and public utilities dealt only in first names, were only for intimates.

‘And you?' he asked Marina. ‘What was it like, growing up at Bonplaisir? What did you all do all day?'

‘Maman drifted from one place to another … Breakfast in her bedroom, a tisane in the
petit salon
at ten thirty, lunch at twelve thirty in the dining room, then a little rest on the terrace – the same every day. I always knew where to find her.'

Martagon imagined Marina as a little girl, with a short frock and a mop of red hair, running across the courtyard.

‘We didn't have many visitors. Papa said visitors made Maman nervous. She was half Greek, she didn't have many friends. Papa spent most of the day in the library with his ancient Romans, he wrote learned articles about them and paid to have them published.'

‘What about the wine business?'

‘Papa wasn't a wine-maker, though my grandfather was. Our wine-maker was Pierre, the son of our old
viticulteur.
Papa sent him where the Napa Valley wine people train, at the University of California at Davis. Then he ran our operation. All Papa wanted to do was drink the wine. All the time. When Maman had her morning
tisane,
he opened his first bottle of the day. He drank like a – what is it that you say in English? We say, he drank
comme un polonais.
Like a Polish man.'

‘Like a fish. He drank like a fish.'

‘Fish don't drink.'

‘How come your English is so good?'

‘I had an English governess, and when I was first grown-up I went to London for about three years. I had to get away, I quarrelled with my father, with Jean-Louis, with everyone.'

‘I must say, with such a background it's amazing that you and your brother grew up to be normal.'

‘Jean-Louis is not normal. I am not normal either.'

‘All I know is,' said Martagon, unable to detach his gaze from her silky beauty, ‘that I've never met anyone like you before.'

Marina told him that when their parents died – in a car-crash, six years ago, her father driving – she and her brother Jean-Louis had had a long and bitter quarrel. The airport consortium approached them about selling the land and the château. She was for it, Jean-Louis was against it – passionately, hysterically. According to French law, the property was inherited by both children equally.

They wrangled for months. Jean-Louis, who had no viable trade or profession, was about to be married to a rich girl from Normandy. He planned to sell off the important paintings in order to have some cash in hand, and to live at Bonplaisir on his wife's money. He didn't want his sister living there too, and he couldn't afford to buy her out.

‘I was in his way. He wanted me dead. I think he did try to kill me once. Something with the car … when I was driving to Paris.'

In the end Marina won, but at a price. Jean-Louis's grand wedding took place at Bonplaisir just before the sale went through. There was a feast for two hundred guests at tables set out in the garden, and a string orchestra, and dancing. Marina was not invited. She was ostentatiously disinvited. The breach between brother and sister was total.

‘Pierre speaks to him sometimes, but I do not.'

‘What has become of Pierre, now the wine-making operation has closed down?'

‘Oh,' said Marina, smoothing her jeans over her knees, looking down. ‘I see him sometimes … He's a brute, actually.'

‘I may have seen him – before it closed, I used to turn in at the “Dégustation” sign and drive up the track to buy wine at the
cave.
'

‘Oh, he's dark, and short…'

Martagon could not remember. But something about the way Marina talked about Pierre upset his equilibrium, and he told her so.

*   *   *

Martagon and Marina had been seeing each other or talking on the telephone every day for a fortnight when he had to go back to London for a week of meetings. During that week their relationship took a leap forward without their realizing it. When they met again it was as lovers, even though they were not yet lovers.

Marina wanted to show him round the château before it was changed beyond recognition. ‘I still have my keys.'

The teams of workmen always made an early start, and knocked off for the day, after closing the place up, around four thirty. In the early evening, when an eerie quiet had fallen on the gardens, Marina let Martagon into the château.

They walked slowly, without speaking, through vast, dim, empty rooms. In each room Marina released the catch on the shutters and opened them a crack. Shafts of sunlight revealed particles of plaster-dust floating in the air. Coils of electric cable, bags of cement and paint-pots lay stacked in corners. All the walls and ceilings had been roughly covered with white undercoat, awaiting the redecoration. There was no glint of colour anywhere, and no sounds other than their footfalls and the creaks of doors and shutters.

In a small anteroom beyond the big salon Marina threw both the shutters wide open.

‘We'll need all the light from here in order to be able to see in the library. Papa used to work by artificial light, but the electricity is off in there.'

The library was the oldest room, she said. It was all that remained of the medieval fortress round which the château had been built.

‘The developers can't get planning permission to put windows in, so the builders haven't touched it. I guess it'll just be a storeroom.'

She led Martagon down five stone steps and unlocked the heavy door of the library.

Inside, the air was musty. Martagon could just make out, by the borrowed light from the doorway, a low ceiling and walls lined on three sides with empty bookshelves. Great slabs of stone formed the floor. The walls and shelves had been painted, once, in a colour that had faded to an indeterminate grey-green. The paint on the shelves was flaking off, and the one blank wall was discoloured with damp patches, and darker rectangles where paintings used to hang. Against this wall was a long dark shape like a boat, or a coffin.

‘This room always looked quite normal to me, before we moved everything out,' said Marina. ‘I had no idea it was in such a terrible state.'

She moved suddenly to a wooden door, about twelve inches square, set into the wall at shoulder height, and struggled with the latch.

‘It's hardly ever been opened,' she said, breathless from her efforts. ‘Not since I was a child, I don't suppose.'

Martagon went over to help her. She stood close beside him while he released the latch and worked on the thick little door with the aid of the penknife from his pocket.

The door swung open – not on to the dark little cubbyhole or cupboard that he had been expecting. It was an unglazed opening on to a framed fragment of the world beneath a cobalt sky, with a view over fields and vines, a curve of the river, and the forested hills beyond, gilded by the evening light. A miniature of pure beauty leading to infinity. Martagon took Marina in his arms and kissed her for the first time. It was not enough, for either of them.

‘Now, please,' he said.

‘Now, here?'

‘Yes.'

The long dark thing, in the square of brightness from the little window, was revealed as a couch. She stripped, slipping off her dress and kicking off her black pants. No bra. Pearly skin and a fiery triangle. Neither of them was shy and neither of them was frantic. What they were doing was natural, inevitable.

*   *   *

Yet for Martagon, making love with Marina was not a homecoming. It was more extraordinary than that. Nor was it an escape, as it often had been before, with other women.

‘An escape from what?' she asked, when he tried to explain this to her, propped on one elbow on the uncomfortable couch, stroking her face and her hair.

‘From thought. From myself. I don't know. I'm not escaping from anything, with you. It's the very opposite. I didn't know this was how it could be.'

Not a homecoming, not an escape – but an astonishing revelation of a new universe of experience. It might take him the rest of his life to explore and know it, and there was nothing more important.

Marina captured his stroking hand and looked up at him, her pupils enlarged. Her voice even huskier than usual, she told him that he was a beautiful man. ‘You are beautiful everywhere, but specially here. I have been looking and looking at this part of you all these long days.'

She was caressing his forearm and his thin sunburned wrist, where the dark hairs curled round his watch.

‘Of course,' she said, ‘that was because it was the only naked part of you that I could see, then…'

When finally she moved from the couch he watched as she retrieved the black pants from the floor, shook the dust off them, and put them on.

‘Well, we've done it now,' he said, not knowing exactly what he meant.

‘Yes,' she said, standing over him, looking straight at him. ‘We've done it now.'

‘No going back?'

‘No.'

So it began. Martagon was calm, and confident, and at peace with himself and with her.

*   *   *

But the following night, in the garden of Marina's farmhouse, he was thinking about her old friend Pierre again. He knew in his bones that Pierre and Marina had been more than friends. Maybe they still were.

‘If Pierre ever comes round you again,' he said, ‘I may beat him up.'

‘What is your problem with Pierre? You are with me and he is not.'

Martagon said to Marina the thing he had thought to himself, when they had first talked about Pierre. ‘He upsets my equilibrium.'

‘But, Marteau, if there is perfect equilibrium nothing can ever happen.'

The Provençal night had three sounds. At dusk, the frogs began to croak. Then, the nightingales began to sing. Later, when the nightingales packed it in, it was the turn of the owls.

‘A system in equilibrium,' said Martagon, ‘is only unchanging till it's acted upon by some outside force. But that doesn't go on for ever, either, and then a steady state is resumed.'