‘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 Pierr
e 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.’
‘Does it work the same with people?’
‘I’m talking about the laws of physics. It’s all about what has to be done to maintain balance.’
‘I want to talk about people. What might be the outside force that spoils the equilibrium?’
‘You tell me, darling.’
‘The outside world? Too-high expectations? A third person coming in and causing jealousy?’
‘OK,’ said Martagon. ‘In physics, it’s friction that makes it all go wrong. Friction dissipates energy. Like when I change pounds into francs, a bit is creamed off in commission every time.’
They were sitting in the warm dark, swinging in the cushioned swing-seat, their bare arms and legs and feet touching.
‘We’re in equilibrium now, you and I,’ said Marina. ‘At this moment.’
‘Not really. We are swinging.’
‘In French we say se balancer for swinging. Balancing. Balanced.’
‘That’s just semantic chance.’
‘Don’t words mean anything, then?’
‘Words mean anything you want. Words can lie. The truth is what actually happens. The results of kinetic energy,’ and Martagon dug his bare heels hard into the grass, so that they swung higher. Overhead the stars swung too and Martagon felt a bit sick. I’ve had too much to drink, he thought. The stars went on swinging.
Astronomers call a star ‘perturbed’ when it loses its equilibrium because of the gravitational pull of something else. Perturbation is interesting because it can lead to the discovery of a new celestial body. Martagon was too tired to put this into words for Marina. He just said, ‘Can we go to bed now?’
* * *
Martagon and Marina did live in perfect equilibrium for long hours during their early days at the farmhouse. It was a simple house with tiled floors and only the basics when it came to furniture and equipment.
‘Minimalist,’ said Martagon, when he looked around for the first time. ‘Suits me.’
He wanted to protect and care for Marina – a new feeling, for him. She did not seem to need or want much looking after. He did, however, impress on her the need for better security. She left outside doors standing open, and only rarely locked the place up. It was only her fear of unannounced visits from her brother Jean-Louis that reconciled her to Martagon’s insistence that she closed and locked the spiked metal gates across the drive at night, when she was alone in the house.
When he asked if there were any other ways into the property, she led him across the garden to a high wall. It was immensely thick, built in the Roman way, she explained, which was still the Provençal way: two ‘skins’, or separate walls, of large irregular rocks and stones, with the gap between them filled in with rubble and topped with more rocks.
She opened the door in this garden wall and showed him a small dark cavity, empty except for a couple of spades, and beyond it another door set into the further side. This opened on to a track across the fields.
‘You should keep both these doors locked all the time,’ said Martagon, ‘and we’ll hang the key on a nail the garden side.’
Thus he perfected and protected their privacy. In the hot afternoons Marina read film scripts in bed while he worked on his laptop calculating loads and stresses, quantities and costs, at a table in the small shuttered room. Marina turned her pages silently. They breathed and moved silently. The stillness was like a trance, because they were together though apart.
On one of those hot, still afternoons Martagon saw that she had fallen asleep. He slipped into the bed beside her. She half woke and wound her legs – those loved legs – around his. Beneath the stillness and silence was agitation, because lying with her in this way made Martagon’s heart beat fast. The submerged agitation was quite enough for now. It was good that Marina did not find his liking for stillness and suspension a threat. There was always the certainty that in the end, or quite soon, or in the next second, the storm of longing would prove too strong and they would be overwhelmed, again. Passion was implicit in the stillness and silence.
He said, when she opened her great eyes, ‘You are the only person in all my life with whom I can be for hours at a time without getting frazzled.’
‘What is frazzled?’
Martagon’s French was not up to finding a translation. ‘It’s everything I’m not right now, so it doesn’t matter. But I must get up. I must ring Giles. He thinks I’m neglecting the work.’
‘And are you?’
‘Not really.’
‘Tell me more about Giles.’
‘I’ll make the call, and then we’ll go for a drink and I’ll tell you about Giles, and Arthur, and the merger. It was all a long time ago, but I still think about it.’
* * *
What had happened was that the board of Cox & Co. had to decide formally whether or not they wished to proceed with merger negotiations. Martagon was in a quandary. He wanted to do the right thing. He was pretty sure that the right thing for the firm, and for himself, was to go ahead with Harpers. But that meant going against Arthur Cox’s wishes. He’d been playing Arthur along. He hadn’t been candid with him. That was a tactical and moral mistake. A compass error.
The only right thing to do now was to see Arthur before the meeting and confess that he was going to vote in favour of the merger. He dreaded Arthur’s disappointment and disillusion. He dreaded Arthur’s sadness, and anger, and accusations of ingratitude. But he had to do it.
He put it off and put it off. Finally, the day before the meeting, Martagon went to Arthur’s office after lunch, sweating. The tottering stacks of files had all been cleared away. Arthur was stuffing papers into his briefcase, clearly preparing to leave.
‘Can you spare me half an hour?’ said Martagon.
‘Sorry, old man. Family party. The grandson’s tenth birthday. Got to be there. Got to get an early train.’
‘Arthur, it’s really important.’
‘I’ll give you fifty seconds, then. Good training. As I’ve often told you, you should be able to articulate anything important within fifty seconds.’
That was rich, coming from Arthur.
‘It’s about tomorrow’s meeting—’
Arthur interrupted, snapping closed the catches of his briefcase, looking round for his overcoat, ‘I don’t want to hear it. Not another word. You know where I stand, and I know where you stand. Shoulder to shoulder, as we always have been.’
And he was gone, pushing past Martagon in the doorway, patting Martagon’s arm as he lumbered past.
Martagon did not try to follow him.
Next morning, as everyone herded into the first-floor boardroom at Caxton Street, Martagon put his head round Arthur’s office door. The room looked stark, as if it belonged to no one. ‘You all right?’ asked Martagon.
‘Bit of a cloud … bit of a cloud,’ said Arthur, his bulky body slumped in the chair. ‘I’m just coming.’ Then he raised his head and looked at Martagon. ‘Look here – I know you’ve got your way to make, I know you get ideas in your head, but I can rely on you when it comes to the crunch. If it comes to a vote, you won’t vote against me, Martagon, will you?’
Martagon opened his mouth to speak. Arthur cut in before he had got out a word, ‘Knew I could trust you. When it came to the
crunch. I’m just coming. You go on in.’
Lacerated by his longing to save Arthur from humiliation and defeat, Martagon prayed for a miracle.
* * *
It was a long meeting. They sat down at nine thirty in the morning, and emerged, exhausted, at half past five. Arthur chaired it badly. He hardly chaired it at all.
Martagon, as managing director, kicked off. He was well prepared, and ran over all the now familiar ground, setting out evenly the pros and cons, without explicitly indicating his own preference. But knowing that the only thing that would bring about the desired miracle – Arthur’s change of heart – was his own persuasive eloquence, he suspected that everyone else in the room could guess where his own hopes lay. He spoke for about twenty-five minutes.
After that, everyone around the table had a say, some at considerable length. There were questions, most of which could be answered by reference to some portion of the stack of papers in front of each board member. Mirabel Plunket voiced the anxiety all shared, but which none of the men would have come out with directly, or not yet, for fear of betraying their insecurity. So Martagon spoke again, to reassure the board that the continuing employment of the Cox & Co. staff would be, so far as possible, guaranteed under the terms of any merger. If – and at this stage it was still only if – negotiations went ahead, this would be his own first priority.
Dawn wheeled in a trolley with chocolate biscuits, cups and saucers, a milk-jug, and a big brown teapot. Everyone shifted and relaxed, welcoming the interruption.
‘Ah, rosy-fingered Dawn!’ Arthur said, essaying a smile.
Dawn, who was Ghanaian, looked up at him sharply from the trolley, mystified, suspecting a racist joke from where she least expected it. She loved Arthur. Martagon caught her in the passage when he went for a pee, and tried to explain that ‘rosy-fingered dawn’ was poetry about the sunrise, a quotation from Homer – ‘like “wine-dark sea”,’ he said, floundering.
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