Flight

by Victoria Glendinning

  ‘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.

  After three or four lengths he relaxed into a rhythm, mind and body functioning slower and smoother. His swimming instructor had told him that skills are perfected by performing the correct movement a thousand times, until a new pathway is carved through the tangled thickets of the brain, and the old bad-habit pathways are overgrown and obliterated. He saw himself slashing through jungles of weed with a curved sickle, which was the one his mother used to attack bramble patches. Then he was racing downhill through a forest on the mountain bike he was given when he went away to school, zigzagging between trees, bouncing off rocks, making for the track of brightness that led into the green valley.

  Martagon swam lengths. I want to be a good person. Adults want to be successful, even if being a good person is what they want to succeed at. Even if being a good person is something they try to hold on to while becoming successful – so as not to become a bad person. But Julie wasn’t thinking about success in the world’s terms, that was for sure. For her, it was about something else.

  Martagon came out of the pool and assumed, with his clothes, his normal self.

  * * *

  Martagon wanted the adventure of forming a new company and working with Giles. He felt reasonably confident that the merger would be good for Cox & Co. as well. It was a risk worth taking. It was, as Giles said, an opportunity.

  Early on, sitting in Giles’s Jaguar with him after a Caprice lunch, Martagon made two stipulations. The first was that if the merger went through, the name ‘Cox’ must be preserved in the newly constituted firm’s name. The second was that Arthur Cox must be titular chairman of the new company for at least a year.

  ‘Of course,’ said Giles, throwing up his lighter and catching it. ‘Not a problem.’

  Martagon, back in the Cox offices in Caxton Street, embarked on a series of discussions with Arthur about the pros and cons. They took the other board members into their confidence. Martagon felt sure they would all come round to his way of thinking, which he did not at this stage make explicit. His only doubts were about Tom Scree, and perhaps Mirabel Plunket – the bright young water-engineer, who now had a seat on the main board.

  It was a bit of a problem that Arthur himself, after an initial flare of interest, moved into his indecisive mode. Martagon should have expected that. He was not too worried, knowing Arthur as he did. He knew he had to give Arthur lots of time, and kept an affectionate watch over him. But then it seemed Arthur lost all confidence in the idea. As the weeks passed his hostility hardened.

  ‘I built this business up from nothing at all. Our people trust me. I’m not about to hand everything over to a bunch of ruffians with no integrity and no respect for anything except short-term profits and the bottom line.’

  ‘We wouldn’t be handing over anything. It would be a merger, not a takeover. If it ever happened.’

  ‘Don’t you believe it.’ Arthur assured Martagon that he knew how Harpers operated. ‘They don’t think like us. I’ve known old man Harper for years. He was always a small-time chancer, and that nephew of his is a big-time six-noughts chancer. I wouldn’t even trust him in charge of our Cirencester office.’

  The Cirencester office was a doss: high gloss, high fees, low-tech, low stress, private clients.

  Martagon said, cautiously, that on the whole he was rather impressed by Giles Harper.

  ‘Then you’re a fool. He’d be using you. He thinks you have a good reputation and some sense of honour and that it would rub off on him and do him credit with clients.’

  Martagon bided his time.

  ‘I’m trusting you,’ said Arthur. ‘I know I can. I’m trusting you not to lead Cox & Co. down the wrong path. You’re one of us. You don’t belong with those sorts of people any more than I do.’

  Martagon promised that he would advocate nothing which was against the interests of Cox & Co. ‘Why should I? I’d be cutting my own throat.’

  * * *

  After leaving the office that day Martagon went for his swim. Three lengths, four, eight, on and on until he reached the place in his mind where he went. I want to be a good person. Small children are neither good nor bad. They learn how to win approval and how to avoid punishment and how to survive. Martagon’s father was a devout Roman Catholic and had talked about saving his soul. That was theological shorthand. For what? Everyone kind of knew what it meant, just as they knew what a lost soul, an unsaved soul, was. Martagon ha
d no religious belief but something in him responded to those phrases.

  Martagon swam. I want to be a good person. It’s perhaps a question of what you are here for, what you are going to do with your life. You can be ‘selfish’ and follow your desires and do exactly what you want to do. That’s perfectly rational. Why should you waste your one and only life doing what you don’t want to do, making choices that go against your hopes and beliefs, against your personal success? That seems completely crazy, or at the very least highly neurotic. Almost, a death-wish. And yet, and yet … What about Arthur? I owe him so much.

  * * *

  When he was with Giles, everything seemed possible. But alone in his flat in Earl’s Court, Martagon worried not only about Arthur, but about which way Tom Scree was likely to jump. He found it hard to explain to himself his strong dislike for the man, and it bothered him. Scree was a lot older than him – probably in his mid-fifties, thought Martagon. His politics were, proudly, left-wing and unreconstructed Old Labour. That didn’t bother Martagon: he envied anyone with such certainties, as he envied people’s religious faith. Nor did Martagon resent Scree for being, still, so bloody good-looking – upright and fit, with cropped black-grey hair, tanned skin, blazing dark eyes.

  What did irritate Martagon beyond measure was Scree’s air of self-righteousness. Scree was a moral imperialist. He always had to be in the right. His face habitually wore an expression of pained nobility, as if he were standing out singlehandedly against all the evil of the world. As perhaps he was. He seemed to have no self-doubt. He seemed sure that he was a thoroughly good person. Again, as perhaps he was. That, for Martagon, was the problem.

  Scree was so unpretentious in the way he dressed and presented himself – he never wore a business suit, in an office milieu where a suit was simply an anonymous uniform – that his very unpretentiousness, his rough Tibetan sweaters and scuffed trainers, constituted an act of pretension. Martagon had introduced him to Giles, who asked them both together to Fulham for dinner. Julie Harper had been there too. Scree made Giles – with his flashy clothes and his gold jewellery – seem vulgar. Scree made Martagon feel obscurely in the wrong, always – as perhaps he was, he thought miserably, tossing and turning in his bed.

  Scree’s private life was an enigma. All Martagon knew was that he had a wife called Ann, who lived in Lincolnshire. Amanda Harper had gleaned over dinner that Ann was some kind of psychotherapist. She never came to London, and no one knew how often or how seldom Scree went home to Lincolnshire. When he was not working overseas, he seemed generally to be in London. But although Martagon had Scree’s London co-ordinates – his telephone number, and his mobile number, and his e-mail address – he had no idea where he actually lived.

  Scree was a master of the international aid-culture discourse – a matter of mainstreaming gender issues, empowerment, pro-poor growth, sustainability, replicability, capacity-building, good governance – necessary to win funding from government agencies for projects in emerging countries. Martagon agreed with the principles and concepts, but hearing Scree spouting the jargon made him want to throw up.

  Western firms, including Cox & Co., working in emerging countries, had to factor into the budget invisible backhanders to middlemen and facilitators. In the campaign against this institutionalized corruption, ‘transparency’ was the buzzword. ‘Transparency in public and in private life,’ intoned Scree, seemingly the very personification of integrity. Again, Martagon was wildly irritated. He found himself perversely arguing with Scree that practices which seemed to ‘us’ to be corrupt were in fact an oblique and traditional form of welfare, milking the rich – in this case the rich West – of a few millions to trickle down among functionaries and clerks whose salaries were rarely paid and, in any case, grossly insufficient to feed a family. Scree just looked at him. Scree, the high priest of transparency, was himself the most opaque of men.

  At the office things went from bad to worse. Arthur Cox seemed to be losing his grip. Arthur was staying later and later at the office, night after night, surrounded by files and printouts, amassing facts and figures for his case against the merger. He was driving his devoted secretary, Dawn, insane with fatigue.

  When he attempted to present his findings, he got lost in a fog. He would shamble in to Martagon with sheaves of papers in his big, shaking hands, and try to locate points and positions on the main grid of his arguments, sinking ever deeper into incoherence.

  Martagon was witnessing the terminal decline of Arthur Cox, and it grieved him. Martagon himself could extract and remember the key points and concepts from any mass of data. He could fillet complex documents, and quickly. Who had taught him these skills? Arthur Cox. But Arthur had lost the plot.

  ‘Arthur, we really don’t have to bother with most of this,’ Martagon said one afternoon, flipping through a stack of files that Arthur had dumped on his desk. ‘Look, this one, and this – they belong to the small print. And this one’s just brochure-speak. All we need to do ourselves is to have at our fingertips the key figures and the ins and outs of the really crucial issues. I could set them out on two pages of A4 for you if you’d let me. The lawyers and accountants will do the rest for us, if it came to merger negotiations.’

  Arthur snatched back the files and plonked his right hand firmly on top of them. He glared at Martagon with his tired, red-rimmed eyes. ‘Piss off, Martagon. What do you know about how this firm is run? Nothing except what you have learned from me.’

  This was not Arthur’s way of relating to anyone, let alone the man whom he called his ‘good angel’. Martagon took a deep breath, and a risk. One of the many bonds between himself and the big man was that they had both been brought up reading Pilgrim’s Progress, and enjoyed quoting it at each other in incongruous settings, like a private code. Martagon said gently, ‘You’re in the Slough of Despond. You’ve got to get out of it … Think of it another way. Do you remember at the very beginning: “Do you see yonder wicket-gate? Do you see yonder shining light?” That’s the way we’ve got to go, perhaps. Onwards.’

  It didn’t work.

  ‘If you really think Giles bloody Harper is a shining light, you’re more of an idiot than I ever imagined.’

  Martagon grimaced. He did not, in truth, think that Giles was a shining light. But he had no shining light in his life to which he could dedicate himself. He did not know that he was looking for one, straining his eyes for it.

  Arthur harangued anyone he met in the offices and corridors, falling back on laboriously detailed anecdotes of Cox & Co.’s past triumphs. Martagon, with pain, heard the emptiness of the rhetoric. The message-to-noise ratio, as he put it to Mirabel Plunket, was all wrong.

  Mirabel took off her glasses and polished them harder than was necessary on the hem of her shirt. ‘It would be more effective, really,’ she said, ‘if Arthur just threw all the paperwork out of the window into the street and said, “I don’t like this merger and I won’t have it.”’

  Martagon had no idea what Mirabel’s own position was. They were all still playing their hands close to their chests.

  The surprise was, for Martagon, that Tom Scree now seemed not to be altogether hostile to the merger. Maybe Giles had wooed and won him, with what promises Martagon could not even guess. Martagon was beginning to realize that he himself was in Giles’s confidence precisely up to the point that Giles decided, and no further.

  ‘Have you been seeing much of Giles’s little sister?’ Scree asked. ‘Funny little thing. Julie. Could come to something, when she’s worked through her problems. She needs to be more centred. I said I’d give her a ring.’

  ‘I see her occasionally,’ said Martagon. ‘Generally at the house.’ He felt a fresh stab of irritation, compounded by an unwarranted jealousy, and despised himself for it.

  ‘Amanda Harper,’ said Scree, ‘now she’s really something else.’

  Whatever that means, thought Martagon, his dislike for Scree attaining critical mass. ‘Amanda’s OK,’ he said.
/>   * * *

  Amanda was definitely OK. She kept Giles, whom she deeply loved, on the straight and narrow path just by being herself. Martagon had never met a couple who were so thoroughly married. Tom Scree’s marriage was an enigma. Mirabel Plunket was in the process of separating from her husband. The Harpers were solid as rock.

  Giles liked to tease Martagon about his private life, and had a running joke about all his girlfriends having names beginning with J.

  ‘Was it Jessica last night, or Jenny, or Judith then? When is our Julie going to get a look in?’

  Martagon played along. The truth was, he was often alone in the evenings and at weekends. Not that he ever had any trouble attracting women. He never had to be surprised, or grateful, that a woman wanted him. He was tall and well made, and in repose his aquiline features looked sad. Women are attracted to a melancholy man, the unconscious fantasy of each being that she alone will be able to make him happy. When Martagon smiled his rare, slow, sweet smile, his face was transformed and his dark blue eyes came alight. Martagon’s smile was like a surprise present, and it drew people to him, of both sexes. He was very likeable.

  Attractive people, and those whom everyone likes, are often a bit aloof, out of self-defence. That was why Amanda found him difficult sometimes. She had taken a photograph of him standing in her garden – squinting at the sun, his dark hair lying on his forehead under one of Giles’s wide-brimmed straw hats, his mouth long and hard, handsome – unsmiling. She called it the ‘Lone Ranger’.

  ‘It’s very like you,’ she said. ‘You look as if there’s nothing you need from anyone. You look good in that hat – Giles shouldn’t wear big hats, they make him look like a mushroom, they don’t suit him.’

  There was no contempt or offence in what she said. Giles was flesh of her flesh, she could have been talking about what looked good, or didn’t look good, on herself.

  Martagon enjoyed being there with them, in the kitchen, in their warmth, quietly.

  He’d liked and wanted and even loved a lot of girls in his thirty-eight years, but he’d never been passionately ‘in love’. Or not for long. He feared and distrusted ‘in love’ as a hysterical frenzy, and hated the brief periods when he was overwhelmed by it.