Flight (23 page)

Martagon laid out his perfect tomato salad on an oval dish. Marina immediately tipped the whole thing into the plastic box, ruining the arrangement. Never mind.

They put the box with the other things into her blue string bag and added some paper napkins. Also knives. Two glasses. A big bottle of Evian and a bottle of rosé wine. Marina swept up a kelim rug from the floor of the room she called the
séjour
– the living room – and stuffed it into the boot of the car for them to sit on. Martagon was childishly happy.

They drove up the winding bumpy track, left the car, and walked. Martagon, behind Marina on a narrow track, looked with loving admiration at her long straight back, her neat waist, her classy butt, her dear chunky legs swinging along, creamy-white and smooth. Marina, because of her colouring, took care never to get sun-tanned, but she looked like a freewheeling fragment of the sun itself. She was wearing red shorts and a shocking-pink tank-top, her flaming hair licking her shoulders. Martagon felt hot just looking at her.

They chose to make their camp in a spot where sheep, looking like boulders, lay motionless under a clump of trees. It was the hottest hour of a hot day. They spread out the rug in the shade and ate their picnic. Marina had been right: there were ants, and flies, and beetles. The peaches were ripe. The juice spilled down their chins. They drank all the wine.

‘If I were to make love to you now, do you think the sheep would be scandalized?'

In the event the sheep, as with one mind, steadfastly looked the other way. Contented and sticky, Marina and Martagon went to sleep, separated because of the heat, at opposite ends of the kelim rug.

Martagon was deeply asleep when he heard the screaming. He surfaced and sat up. Marina was at a distance from him, out in the sun, hopping from one leg to another, twisting and turning, slapping at her face and neck and thighs, screaming and shrieking. She was covered with flies – clots and constellations of flies, piling on top of one another, moving and shifting and rising idly into the black swirling cloud around her and then returning to her bare skin. Seeing Martagon, she stood stock-still for an instant, the flies settling in masses on her exposed parts as on a cow or a corpse.

Martagon grabbed the rug and ran to Marina. He slapped off the flies and wrapped her up from head to foot in the rug. She stood there, shuddering, uttering single shrieks, as if she would never stop. Somehow he got her, and the blue string bag with the remains of the picnic and her red shorts stuffed into it, down the track and back to the car. She sat inert as he drove, still shivering.

‘I am so cold,' was all she said.

Back at the farmhouse she still could not get warm. Martagon made her take a hot shower. He set it going and adjusted the water temperature. He found and put into her hand a fresh piece of the lavender soap she particularly liked. She closed the cabinet door. He lay on the bed listening to the sound of the water as ten, fifteen, twenty minutes passed and she was still in the shower. In the end he opened the shower door, turned off the water, wrapped a big towel round her and dried her as if she were a child. For the rest of the day she lay in bed like a zombie, every now and then uttering shrill single shrieks. Martagon was alarmed. He wondered whether he should call a doctor. Marina became so agitated when he suggested it that he gave up the idea.

‘I'll be all right tomorrow,' she said. And she was. Martagon, though, sleeping alone in another room, had a horrible night, and dreamed the stumps dream. Thud-thud, thud-thud on the car windows. He awoke sweating, his heart beating fast.

*   *   *

The thing about my maenad Marina, thought Martagon in London, swimming lengths before work the next morning, reliving the horror of that picnic, is that she is easily alarmed, and her alarm is very extreme. It's just the same with this Jean-Louis business. He switched lanes, to get out of the way of a woman in goggles and a rubber cap doing an impressive racing crawl. I'll always be there to look after Marina. Someone in Provence, in the days when he had heard of Marina but not yet met her, had mentioned in a throwaway manner that she was ‘difficult'. Well, who wants an ‘easy' person? It would not be interesting. Giles had suggested she might be ‘unstable'. So what? I love her for her beauty and vividness. Not even that: I love Marina simply because she is Marina. It's like what I worked out before. One does not fall in love with a woman because she is a good person, though I think Marina is good. One does not fall in love with a woman for her common sense, any more than for her saintliness. Love is something that happens to you and then it becomes something you
do.
It's the act and fact of loving which is the point and the saving grace. The ‘worthiness' of the beloved is not even an issue. If it were, how could Marina choose me rather than a better person?

It's because I am I, because she is she, and together we are complete.

*   *   *

During that day Martagon concentrated on checking the specifications for the glass floor of the arrivals hall at Bonplaisir. This was the feature he was most excited about, and one of the hardest to get absolutely right. It had been done before, but not by him, and not in the way he was doing it. The idea had come to him soon after he joined the project, when he was leaning over a bridge in Regent's Park, watching the play of the evening sun on the water. The sun went behind a cloud and took all the silvery glitter with it. Martagon now saw through the surface – he saw darkly waving weeds, and the darting movements of small fish.

He went to the Glasstec Fair in Düsseldorf to look at high-tech production methods for what he wanted to do, and satisfied himself that it was possible. He explained his idea to Lin Perry, and to Giles, and they were all for it. The glass floor must of course be non-slip and opaque, and therefore sand-blasted – or, better, laser-etched. He was using hefty sheets of annealed compound glass with an acoustic layer to absorb sound, all mounted on glass supports calculated to a far higher load than they would ever be required to bear. But he would also – and this was his big idea – have a series of larger and smaller ‘pools' of clear, light green glass, beneath which the ducts, pipes and cables of the different services would be visible, painted in coded colours – like a coral reef, like sea-serpents, like the Sargasso Sea, said Martagon, his enthusiasm getting the better of him.

It put an extra burden on the engineers and fitters responsible for the services, since the under-floor area had to be scrupulously cleaned up; plus, work usually well hidden had now a design function, and was subject to aesthetic criteria, which did not always tally with the easiest way of accommodating the material. But they entered into the spirit of the thing and came up with some bright ideas of their own. Artificial fish, perhaps; or artificial sea-weed; or a mermaid? Or scales and fins painted on the pipes and cables?

I don't think so, said Martagon. He wanted a reference to underwater, not a Disneyland imitation of underwater. He did not want the functionalism of what was glimpsed in the ‘pools' to be disguised. The final effect was random. A Coke can was left where it fell, likewise an empty pack of Marlboro Lights. Martagon knew that the workmen were secreting small fetish objects of their own among the painted pipes and cables just before the floor was laid, like dogs burying bones. There were rumours of condoms, but Martagon, discreetly checking, hadn't seen any. He himself, surreptitiously, hid a small photograph of Marina between an emerald green pipe and a blue one.

The glass supports of the flooring had been tested to destruction. Martagon boasted that it would bear a convoy of trucks. Nevertheless, he sat at his computer going through the calculations again and again.

In the late evening Martagon went back to Julie's flat, because he had said he would. She was in bed, but not quite so desperately miserable. Fasil was back, and asleep in his room. Julie had had a bath and washed her hair. It fell pale and smooth round her wan face. She tried to smile at him.

He thought of what Marina always said. ‘Do you think all men are shits?' he asked Julie.

Julie said:

‘Believe it, men have ever been the same,

And all the Golden Age is but a dream.'

‘You have a motto for every occasion,' Martagon said. ‘You're like a Christmas cracker.'

‘It's Congreve,' said Julie. ‘His last poem.'

‘What's it meant to mean?'

‘It means that even if you are a shit, you're not any more of a shit than men always were. But I don't think you are one,' she said.

She was naked under the covers. Who put out a hand first? Their hands were dry and warm, gentle. Their touches were light but they carried the burning weight of knowing what passion was – transferred, transposed to another person. Perhaps it was the ache of that familiarity, and that difference, which made Julie gasp and Martagon suddenly pull back the duvet, and made Julie lock her arms round his neck and put her face up to his. After that, it was too late to remember anything, and there was only Julie and Martagon.

EIGHT

I can stop this whenever I want. It is just for now. Marina is seven hundred miles away.

Excuse me, so what difference does that make? What is the precise distance that makes betrayal OK? Seven hundred miles? Seventy miles? Seven miles?

The point is that this cannot hurt Marina. There is no way that she will ever know. The thing with Julie has absolutely no bearing on Marina and me, or on our future, or on the way we are. I am committed to Marina.

I can stop this whenever I want. It is just for now.

*   *   *

For three weeks, Martagon went to Julie's flat every evening. He discovered, among other things, that she was writing stories in her free time.

‘You really have come a long way,' he said, looking at the small pile of typescript on her table.

‘What do you mean?'

‘I mean you are in the driving seat. It's like you aren't wearing L-plates on yourself any more.'

‘I guess I've passed my test,' Julie replied drily.

‘What are you writing about?'

‘That one there's about a marriage.'

‘Can I read it?'

‘Certainly not. It's not finished.'

‘Tell me about it, then.'

‘What do you think about marriage, Martagon?'

‘I think a marriage, a good marriage, would be like the sea with the tide always going out or coming in, except when it's on the turn and the waves are still – but only for a moment, because nothing ever stays the same.' He was thinking about himself and Marina, and how it might be, for them. An act of faith at a time of faithlessness.

Julie raised her eyebrows at him, mocking. ‘Oh, my, Martagon. But you're dead right that nothing stays the same. My story is going to be called “The Worst Scenario”. I don't think I would ever marry someone I loved.'

‘You're so cynical.'

‘You're so romantic.'

‘I didn't used to be. I am now. I must be getting old. So tell me about the worst scenario.'

Julie told Martagon the outline of her story as they lay in her bed, after they had made love. Martagon held a strand of her hair between his fingers and thumb, rubbing it and rubbing it as Fasil did with the old piece of patterned cotton he used as a security blanket.

‘This man and this woman got married and were very happy together. Then he took a job that paid a great deal of money and took him away from home for fifty per cent of the time. She thought that was rather a lot. He did too. But he wanted the job, and the money, and he was used to travelling all the time for his work. She didn't want to stop him doing what he wanted, though she didn't care one way or the other about the money.'

‘Why didn't she go with him? My father worked abroad, but my parents were never separated.'

‘She could have, if he was posted to one country for six months or a year. But this is more like a long series of different trips, staying in hotels, moving around all the time. She could go and join him for holidays when he was in an interesting place. But to trail round with him all the time would be the life of a dog. Live like an airhead and you become an airhead. Anyway, she's got a career at home she doesn't want to give up. I haven't got all that thought out yet.'

‘You're right that it's not in the culture for spouses to go on all the business trips, however devoted the couple.' Martagon was remembering a night in the New Otani in Tokyo, back in the Cox & Co. days, when he had glimpsed from the lobby one of his colleagues disappearing into the lift with a Japanese hooker. He knew the colleague's wife and had visited them at home in Chelmsford. They were patently a contented couple. He had been surprised at the time – still was, when he thought about it.

‘Go on,' he said to Julie.

‘Well, they started out on the new life with mutual goodwill. They could handle this. And so they did, after a fashion. When he was away she worked, and saw her friends, and went out like a single person. So, when he was away, did he. It was all rather stimulating, really.'

‘And they were delighted to see one another when he came home,' said Martagon, wanting it to be true.

‘Sure. But he was always tired, and had his mail, and messages, and the office to attend to. Sometimes she had things arranged, which could well have included him, but he had so much to do, and they were her friends rather than his, so perhaps, he said, he'd give it a miss … As time passed they hardly communicated during his periods away, except about dates and times of his returns. He didn't really feel the need now for daily calls or e-mails; and she wouldn't have felt good if she'd faced up to how much she missed him. It was more positive to get on with her life. Sometimes, at his suggestion, when he was at home they would give a dinner party, mostly for old mates of his. They were both good people. It's just that what happens, happens.'