Flight

by Victoria Glendinning

  ‘Ah,’ said Father Damian. ‘But I haven’t heard them for a month, Mrs F, have I? I’ve been looking forward to giving you absolution.’

  ‘Oh, all right,’ she said, ‘I don’t mind. You always do hate not to be in on everything.’

  ‘This is not about me,’ said Father Damian. ‘It’s hardly even about you. It is about Him. He absolutely insists.’

  As Martagon left the room he heard the two of them wrangling about their respective notions of the God in whom neither of them really believed. Or did they? They are both as mad as hatters, he thought. He sat in the spare bedroom on the bed that was always made up ready for him, and looked out over the neglected garden.

  When Father Damian had teetered off down the stairs, Martagon went back into his mother’s room. She was looking pleased with herself.

  ‘I really gave him something to think about today,’ she said. ‘He tries to get his own back because, of course, it used generally to be the other way round. What he really liked was confessing his own sins to me, in the old days. I used to put a tea-cosy on my head and look very severe. We did it in the kitchen.’

  ‘Mother!’

  ‘It was only a game, darling. We were younger then. You mustn’t worry.’ Suddenly tired, she sank down in her pillows. ‘I’ll tell you how I knew that I had got old. You must remember it, for when it happens to you. It was when I found myself sitting in a chair in the middle of the morning and doing nothing. Not thinking what I was going to do next, not reading the paper, not mending something, not watching TV or listening to the radio, not thinking even. Just sitting.’

  And then, in a frightened whisper: ‘Has my life been quite pointless?’

  ‘Of course it hasn’t…’ He catalogued her achievements as well as he could. ‘You looked after me, you looked after Dad, you’ve had lots of friends, you are a lovely person and we all love you, and you made your lovely Paradise garden.’

  ‘I grew a purple foxglove once. Or, rather, it grew itself, among the others at the bottom of the garden. Self-seeded. There it was. Not the ordinary pinky-purple they all are, but a real, dark, velvety, royal blue-purple, with black speckles inside. It was absolutely gorgeous.’

  ‘You never showed me.’

  ‘You were probably away. When the flowers began to go over I tied a ribbon round the stem so I would know which it was. I let the seeds ripen and saved the lot. I thought I would raise lots of purple foxgloves and become famous, they would be called Foley’s Foxglove, or Digitalis purpurea v. Foliensis. I even wrote to the Royal Horticultural Society about it. But nothing happened. The seeds didn’t germinate. Not a single one.’

  ‘Perhaps the colour confused the bees.’

  ‘Perhaps. Or it was just a sterile plant. I was ever so disappointed. There never was another one. So that was that.’

  ‘Perhaps the whole thing was a dream.’

  ‘It’s true I’ve always had a strong visual imagination. I can see people in my head as clearly as if they were really there. Can you do that too?’

  ‘I think so.’ He conjured up without difficulty the image of Marina, standing in the farmhouse garden and laughing, her hair blowing, wearing a red and white spotted dress. So far as he knew, Marina didn’t have a red and white spotted dress. But the image was very real.

  ‘Mum, did you ever have a red and white spotted dress?’

  She started poring over her patchwork quilt as if it were a newspaper, and pointed triumphantly at an octagon of red and white spotted cotton.

  ‘I loved that dress. It was the last year that we were in Dhaka. I had two made from the same paper pattern – wait while I find it – yes, this was the other one.’

  A blue and yellow diamond pattern. He didn’t remember it.

  ‘And this was one of your father’s shirts, and this was the curtains from your bedroom in the Dhaka house, do you remember?’

  He shook his head.

  She sighed. ‘I’d already passed the civil-service exam when I met your father, you know. But of course he was working abroad so I didn’t take it up.’

  ‘I can’t quite see you as a civil servant, Mum.’

  ‘Why ever not? I would have been very good. I’d have liked to work in the Ministry for the Environment. I’d have liked to have a proper career, like other people. Other women.’

  ‘One can’t do everything, that’s the trouble. If you choose A, you have to forgo B. It’s the same for everyone.’

  ‘The paths not taken … I missed an important turning somewhere, and then it was too late. You can’t go back. I have no real friends now either, no one I care about.’

  ‘I’m here, Mum.’

  ‘Jesus Christ was a genius,’ she said. ‘It’s simple. The world works perfectly well so long as people behave honourably towards one another. He understood that.’

  ‘I didn’t think that you believed in all that – that you believed in God.’

  ‘I don’t. God is the Oba of Benin. God is an alderman.’ She sighed.

  Martagon thought of Julie talking about the feebleness of the One in Three, but decided not to start in on it.

  ‘The trouble is,’ said his mother, ‘most people don’t.’

  ‘Don’t what?’

  ‘Don’t behave honourably.’

  ‘You behave honourably. You always have.’

  If only that were true, thought Martagon.

  His mother took a quick peep into the empty Sainsbury bag and sighed. ‘Can you take the pain away with you too?’

  ‘Do you have pain? We can do something about that. What does the doctor say?’

  ‘He says I can go home soon.’

  ‘Where’s home? You are at home. This is your home.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Look at all your things – look, your books, your hairbrush, your jewellery box, your picture of me and Dad, and all your clothes in the wardrobe.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Where do you want to be?’

  ‘I want to go home.’

  As he stood at her bedroom door, saying goodbye, she suddenly asked, in a completely ordinary voice, ‘How is your nice friend Giles these days? The one who wears those terrible ties.’

  ‘He’s fine. I’m working with him again, you know, but on a freelance basis. Giles is great, but I’m not sure that he is nice. Actually, he’s a bit of a shit sometimes.’

  ‘Sometimes it’s the one you’d least expect who turns out to be the good person, the honourable man. You can’t make a morality out of good taste in ties.’

  ‘You may be right.’

  ‘He’s got a good wife. I always had a lot of time for Amanda … You ought to settle down, have a home of your own. Have you got a nice girlfriend, darling?’

  Maybe it was that unaccustomed ‘darling’ which prompted him to say, simply, ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s good. Children.’

  ‘I seem to have left it a bit late, for them.’

  ‘Poor children. Waiting for you at heaven’s gate with their little satchels and wellingtons. Waiting and waiting. Like the time I was late picking you up from school at half-term and all the others had already been collected. I never saw such a woeful little face. I still think about that sometimes. Take all that jam I made, as you go. I’ll never be able to get through it.’

  He was thrown by the way she moved in and out of normality, like a fish flickering between shade and sunlight. He could tell it didn’t seem like that to her. She could see equally well in what to him was the murk of dementia. He wanted to please and comfort her, which was maybe why Julie’s face swam up into his mind when he answered her question about a girlfriend, not Marina’s. It was as if his mother could not only read but direct his thoughts, as she had when he was a small boy.

  * * *

  Downstairs in the kitchen, Martagon listened to Audrey for half an hour. He let her talk herself out.

  ‘You have been very good,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’ Then he spoke on the telephone to his mother’s GP, and to Social Se
rvices, and to her oncologist at Kingston Hospital. Getting through to speak directly to these people took a very long time and a lot of determination. Audrey made him a pot of tea.

  Before he left he went round the kitchen throwing open the doors of all the cupboards. He found what he was looking for. On a top shelf was a row of unlabelled jam-jars filled with some greyish substance, their greaseproof-paper covers secured by elastic bands. He opened one of the jars and inspected briefly the stinking papier-mâché sludge within.

  ‘Marrow jam, is it? That’s what she told me,’ said Audrey. ‘I couldn’t say when she made it. I don’t fancy it, myself. I’d say it had gone off.’

  He took down all the jars and, saying nothing more to Audrey, carried them in his arms outside to the dustbin.

  The GP had assured him that his mother had some time left. ‘She’s a strong woman.’ Martagon let himself believe it. It was late afternoon by the time he left. In the car, he thought about what she had said about children. His unengendered children waiting at heaven’s gate with their little satchels and wellingtons, not knowing it was too late, trusting him to come for them … Is that what she meant? He ate both the chocolate biscuits, a dry communion. They made him cough. He was weighed down with dread and loneliness.

  Back in Earl’s Court, he circled for a full twenty minutes before finding a free residents’-parking space. Another thing he didn’t like about England. Too many people, too many cars, especially in London. He remembered Giles saying, during a gossip about Tom Scree, whom they suspected of calling on married women in their homes for afternoon sex, ‘But I could never have affairs! Where would I park my car?’

  Martagon’s London base has always been this tiny house – an urban cottage – in Child’s Place, which is a short, narrow street off the east side of Earl’s Court Road, not far from the junction with Cromwell Road. It’s the only home of his own he has ever had. He bought it when he first joined Cox & Co., and had never seen any reason to move. He still has the same car from those days too, the second-hand silver-grey Porsche.

  His was an easy house to come home to, and an even easier one to leave. By now it looked like the pad of a student who was mysteriously approaching middle age, as was precisely the case. It was not very clean. There were piles of books, plans, printouts and drawings on every surface. Apart from two Piranesi prints in the hall, which had been his father’s, there was very little individuality about the furniture or decoration; nothing had been chosen because it was particularly attractive or because it suited the little house. He had furnished it sparsely from second-hand shops and from the cheapest Habitat ranges, out of his first Cox & Co. salary cheques.

  He was always travelling for his work, and the house was a perch, a pad, not a real home, though over the years he had made improvements and additions: a microwave in the kitchen, a power-shower in the bathroom, a work-station for his IT equipment, which dominated the minuscule sitting room, and a pair of halogen lamps. Over the fireplace in the sitting room hung a large semi-abstract gouache painting in greens and blues, vaguely reminiscent of a woodland scene. He had bought it out of embarrassment at a friend’s show, because he wanted to leave and felt he had been insufficiently appreciative of his friend’s work in the few minutes’ chat he had with him amid the roar of the party. It had been months before he went back to the gallery to collect his picture. The little red dot indicating ‘sold’ was still stuck to the bottom of the frame on the left.

  Martagon was fond of the painting. It grew on him. He always gave it a friendly glance when he came home. As soon as he got back from France, he had stuck in the right-hand corner of the frame a ten-by-eight colour photograph of Marina, his favourite from a whole reel he had shot in fifteen minutes in the lavender field. In this print she was smiling, protesting, thigh-deep in the lavender in a skimpy white dress, her head turned aside and her hair a halo of disorder. In the left-hand corner he had stuck another, smaller, black-and-white photo of Marina sitting in the grass reading, in the farmhouse garden. Behind her was the terrace and the long, low house. The shutters, which Marina had had painted olive green, came out dark in the picture; and the big fig tree, out of shot, cast its pattern of shadows on the flagstones of the terrace.

  The lavender-field picture was too large to stay upright, held in place only by the right-angle of the frame. Martagon found some Blu-Tack in his desk and stuck down the drooping upper left-hand corner of the print. Getting this right seemed absolutely important, much more important than work, or ringing the Harpers, or attending to the tottering pile of mail. When the photo was secured exactly as he wanted it he leaned his elbows on the mantelpiece and studied its every detail. Then he looked at the smaller one, letting what it showed remind him of what it did not: the approach to the house, down a rough track that led through a wood with overhanging branches forming a dark canopy overhead, then out into the sunlight and over a little bridge, with cherry orchards on both sides. From there onwards the house and garden were visible, screened by lines of olive trees on each side of the track, sheltered by steeply sloping vine-fields on three sides.

  He ached to be back there. Separating from Marina was like a surgical operation. He felt damaged, in shock, and homesick for a home.

  * * *

  White Gates had never been his home, but he didn’t like the idea that it would soon no longer be there in the background of his itinerant life. He had been thinking about the problem of the house all the time as he drove back, so as not to confront too soon the complicated grief about the real issue – his mother – which was waiting to assault him. He would never want to live there. But it was full of stuff – a lifetime’s accumulation. What would happen to all that? Perhaps he should buy a bigger place of his own, and furnish it with the family possessions. Leave Child’s Place, the child’s place, and move along. But by himself? He would not have the heart for it.

  Fumbling for his doorkey outside the house in Child’s Place, he unloosed from his pocket a flurry of his mother’s paper sins, which fluttered away on to the damp pavement, where they stuck. He let them lie. Once in the house, he took off his jacket, upended it over a black rubbish bag, and shook it. The sins fell out of the pockets, some of them into the bag, some on to the kitchen floor. For the rest of the evening, off and on, he retrieved stray sins from where they had drifted – under the sink, out on to the hall carpet, from the soles of his shoes.

  He gave himself a large whisky, and another. Then he sat down and e-mailed Marina.

  M: I love you. Would you ever, could you ever, come and live with me in England? M.

  He sat and waited for an answer. It came, but not until one o’clock in the morning.

  M: I am just back from having dinner with Lin P. and Nancy M. at La Fontaine in St Martin de la Brasque. I had the courgette flowers and then the lapin, exactly like when I was there with you. I miss you every moment. Lin is very excited about what you are doing with the glass. Nancy says you are her man of mystery because she still has not met you. Marteau, I love my country and my life here. I love you too. Would you ever, could you ever, come and live with me in France? M.

  Martagon went up to his bed. He curled up, chilled and lonely, under the dank duvet, racked with shuddering dry sobs because his mother was dying.

  * * *

  In the event he had to go abroad again almost at once, to Berlin, where there was a design crisis with one of the subcontracted companies on his theatre project. The Harpers were sympathetic and helpful about his mother. Giles finalized the arrangements that Martagon had set in train, to have Mrs Foley transferred from White Gates to a hospice at Thames Ditton, and Amanda and Julie went with her and saw her settled. Julie told Martagon that she said, on their last visit to her, ‘It’s such a relief to me. You are his family now.’

  ‘And so we are,’ said Julie, without sentiment. ‘You know we are.’

  Within two weeks at the hospice, Mrs Foley went home. That is, she died.

  Martagon heard the news by telep
hone. Sitting in his overheated hotel room, he became icy cold, and the autumn sunshine outside took on a black glitter. He remained cold until after the funeral.

  He was honest with himself. It was not that he was going to miss her unbearably, not that at all. What chilled him, body and soul, was the enormity of death – her death – and the pity of it. Where was she now, the real she? Gone. Gone where? He was appalled when he thought of how he had kept away from her, withholding himself, with a lack of kindness and generosity of which he should have been incapable.

  The stock phrase ‘the dear departed’ did, he discovered, mean something. His mother was dear to him and she had departed. For most of his adult life, she had never gone anywhere at all, and it had been his departures that counted: ‘I can’t stay, Mum, I have to be at Heathrow in a couple of hours.’ Now it was she that had gone, departed, taken her departure. He was the one left behind.

  Martagon sold White Gates – it went within a month. He sent most of the contents to auction, and the residue to Oxfam. He gave Audrey five thousand pounds and told her to take any of his mother’s clothes and handbags that she wanted, and she sensibly took the lot.

  He kept his mother’s books. He gave Giles and Amanda six Irish eighteenth-century silver spoons, which had come from his father’s family. He gave Julie his mother’s tortoise brooch. He took back to Child’s Place her wedding ring and her engagement ring, a small sapphire set between two even smaller diamonds, and the family photographs, his mother’s old walking-boots, her curved sickle – her ‘slasher’ as she called it – and the worn old pashmina shawl.

  He wished, afterwards, that he had also kept her patchwork quilt, the palimpsest of his childhood. Looking at it might have triggered more memories, of things that he had forgotten about his father and mother. And he began to think about her – about the trajectory of her life, the paths taken and not taken; her longing for Europe and England when she lived in Asia, her pleasure in the long dreamed-of English garden, which she created all on her own. Because his mother had loved England he began, in a spirit of enquiry, to think a bit about England, too.