* * *
It occurred to him, when months later he was lying in the grass in the garden of Marina’s farmhouse, on the day of the airport opening: Perhaps, if my mother had not died, I would never have got involved – not so involved – with Julie.
FIVE
In London in the late autumn of 1999, following the death of his mother, Martagon was depressed. Ignoring the invitations on his mantelpiece, alone most evenings, he drank to make himself sleep. All he wanted was to be with Marina, in their enclosed and private world. Not as a substitute for his mother – no one could be less like her, or less maternal towards him, than Marina. He had never even seen Marina in the company of children.
He conjured up a picture of her with a baby in her arms and saw her as altogether lovely. But not quite real? Babies and small children cry and make demands. He knew that from Fasil, and had seen Julie’s patience, and her tiredness.
But, then, Julie was a single parent. Amanda had let slip that she and Giles were planning to start a family; that was perfectly easy to imagine. Amanda’s warm largeness, and her kitchen world, would absorb not one baby but two or three noisy, squabbling, lively, small people quite naturally. Giles might set out to be a disciplinarian, but in practice he’d be indulgent and ineffably proud. Amanda would be a focused mother, her relationship with Giles would change. The children would come first. How would Giles like that? Martagon’s mother always said that having a child transformed a woman’s life more utterly than love or marriage. He knew that although his parents loved one another, it was he, Martagon, who had given meaning to her life. He had experienced this knowledge as a burden, when he grew up.
Yet it was knowing he came first with her that gave him his sense of himself and his ability to be alone. Lapped in her approval, he didn’t need to prove anything to anyone, or test his attraction or value. That was a weakness, though, in some situations. Not enough drive – the thing Giles was getting at when he complained that Martagon lacked the killer instinct, wasn’t firing on all cylinders. Martagon sighed, and dragged his attention back to the plans and calculations on his desk.
* * *
He had every reason to go and see Marina often, because of the airport. He and the contractors, Heaney Mahon, were sourcing most of their materials in France, and using French firms both for the manufacture and the installation of his glass. Martagon used an empty bedroom at the farmhouse as his office. Sometimes Billie was there for the day, word-processing Marina’s revises and reports on scripts. She was an equable presence. Martagon hardly noticed her. She did not blaze like Marina did.
Now that the weather was growing cooler, they spent more time indoors at the farmhouse, and lit fires in the evenings. They talked and talked. Martagon was curious about other men she had been with. She didn’t want to tell him anything, at first.
‘Tous les hommes sont des salauds.’
‘Excuse me – I’m not a salaud, a shit if that’s what you mean.’
‘No, not you, Marteau. But I don’t know what to tell you. It always goes wrong … It went wrong with Erik.’
‘Who’s Erik?’
‘Erik Smedius. He’s Swedish.’
‘Film-director? Blood On the Snow? I really hated that movie.’
‘You are wrong. It’s a great movie, Marteau.’
She told him about her affair with Erik. It had started as pure fun. Erik was an idyll-maker, he had taken her on trips to Bali, to St Petersburg, and to his family home in the north of Sweden where they had been quite alone for two weeks, in the spring, with the snow melting and the wild flowers coming out. She had never been so happy. ‘I adored him, during those two weeks.’
‘So what went wrong?’
Marina shrugged. ‘I can’t explain. It sounds so stupid. We were on the plane from Stockholm, coming back to Paris, after that heavenly time. He was talking about our future life together. Suddenly I was shaking, in a panic. It was all too much for me. I was terrified. He was so intense, so serious, so happy, he was so much in love, I just could not take it. I began to be horrible to him, on the plane. He didn’t understand.’
‘I’m not surprised.’
‘I had to get away from him, from it. I broke it off, just like that. I told him when we got to Paris that I didn’t want to see him any more, I wanted to go back to Bonplaisir by myself and he wasn’t to ring up or write to me or anything.’
‘You ran out. That’s what you did.’
‘I didn’t run.’
‘You ran out. My father used to bet on horses, it’s a racing term. It means that the racehorse suddenly opts out of the race and veers off-course, towards the rails, and won’t be brought back, and there’s nothing the jockey can do about it. It sounds to me as if you are – or were – frightened of such extraordinary happiness. Perhaps you are frightened of ordinary happiness too, I mean with a man. Are you?’
‘Maybe. I’m not used to it. I couldn’t handle it, not with Erik. Perhaps because he was so wonderful. He really was. I’m used to the horribleness of Jean-Louis, and Papa. When he was drunk. I loved Papa very much and he did things to me which were not nice, when I was little.’
‘You never told me that before. Poor Marina.’
She shrugged again. ‘It’s how it was. I am – how shall I say? – comfortable with it.’
‘But it sounds to me that you end up punishing men for what you think they are like. Or punishing yourself for – I don’t know, I’m getting in a muddle, and it sounds so trite.’
‘I know Erik was very sad for a long time. He did not understand. Friends told me. It was after Erik that I started up with Pierre.’
‘The wine-maker. You said to me once that he is a brute.’
‘He is a brute. But I’ve known him since I was a child, he is so familiar, he is part of the home world, he didn’t make complicated demands, he doesn’t love me. He likes sex, and he likes hurting. That’s why I say he’s a brute.’
‘Marina, it’s different now. It doesn’t have to be like that. You don’t have to hurt or be hurt any more. You’re safe with me.’
‘I think so.’
That night she lay in his arms peacefully. Then turned half away, saying as if to herself, ‘Everything is all right now,’ and fell deeply asleep. Martagon continued to lie still with his eyes closed, his body touching hers where it chanced to. In the hallucinatory state of half-dream in which reason sleeps and unreason wakes, a vapour-trail wreathed itself loosely round his head and around hers in a figure of eight; and around their bodies, and around their ankles. He breathed with her breathing. Their peace was a lake within which the waters of two rivers cannot be separated.
‘We are becoming the same person,’ she had said, as they went up to bed. ‘Only together are we complete.’
Martagon opened his eyes and saw the full moon shining through the skylight window. He looked at the bright flood of her hair on the pillow. He scrutinized her sleeping face. If her face were made unrecognizable by some terrible accident, would he still know her from her body? He tried to memorize her total appearance, to know her by heart like a poem, from the the pearly skin of her shoulders to her heavy, relaxed legs. She had painted her toenails an underwater shade of blue-green.
‘Everything is all right now.’ He would make it all right for her, and keep it that way.
Yet the moment was temporary and temporal and something would happen to end it. At the very least, one of them would have to get out of bed. And one of them would have to die before the other. He faced the reality of that. One of us does have to die before the other. But if the equilibrium exists at all, it exists, notionally, all the time. It’s just that we don’t always have access to it. Our separateness in the world, our disagreements and discordances, make reference to it. Disequilibrium can only exist because we know what equilibrium is.
* * *
Martagon, back in London, with Marina on his mind all the time that he was not working, found it hard to maintain his equilibrium, and to believe t
hat they were together even when they were apart. There was a signboard he passed just before Dijon whenever he was driving south to Provence. He always looked out for it – Partage des Eaux. He liked knowing he was crossing this line beyond which the rivers and underground streams stop flowing towards the Atlantic and start flowing towards the Mediterranean, towards Marina. Driving north, Partage des Eaux spelt separation.
He thought about himself, and her, and the way they were together. He thought about Marina as Marina. What was she doing, at any given moment, away from him?
What kind of person was she really? Surely no one so exquisite could be less than intelligent, honest, kind? Beauty is ‘only skin deep’ as they say. Beautiful people can be shallow or uninteresting or malevolent. He could not read her mind or her thoughts. She thought and dreamed in French, for a start. They had come together from different places, and he could not retrace the way she had come. The Château de Bonplaisir had formed her, and her world was there, and with the gratin of Paris society. If she were not so lovely, would I still love her – for her character, for her mind, which I can never really know?
The questions are meaningless. Marina is a world, and she has a world – several worlds. She is damaged perhaps, but not broken. What is important is that I love her and know I can take care of her. The real beauty is not in the love object but in the loving.
* * *
There were so many Marinas. She was a bad long-distance communicator. Martagon would e-mail her, and she would reply within a day or two. He longed always for the sound of her voice. But when they spoke on the telephone it was rarely a success. He only rang when he was missing her badly, and usually put the phone down after the call feeling disappointed, or dissatisfied. Marina had a quick, sharp tongue – he could well imagine her being ‘horrible’ to Erik. Over the phone, when he could not see her smiling face, she could sound dismissive or impatient just when he needed her to be loving and supportive. Perhaps it was a language difficulty. Her near-perfect English was deceptive, she missed the nuances.
He sent her picture postcards from the different places he went for his work, and the occasional short letter. He was no letter-writer and neither was she. In the days of Jutta, Martagon used to get letters twice a week at least – six or eight pages every time, each covered on both sides with her dense, curly handwriting. Jutta’s letters had been about what she was doing, what she was thinking, what she was reading, and how she was feeling. Jutta’s letters analysed his infrequent letters to her, and his character and personality, and her own, and their relationship – endlessly, and in depth.
In early days he had been touched and impressed by Jutta’s letters. Later, he had come to dread the familiar fat envelopes with German stamps, lurking in wait for him on the doormat in the mornings or when he came home from work. Long before he found the strength to break with her, he was just scanning them, quite unable to plough all the way through. One of the blessings of the end of their relationship had been the cessation of the letters – after, that is, a final spate of accusations, reproaches and pleadings, which had only gradually slackened and stopped.
It’s a terrible thing that once you’ve stopped wanting someone, all you long for is to get out from under and go on with your own life, somewhere else.
For a cool second he saw how it would be if he stopped loving Marina. No more heartache and longing, no more hectic agitation and raw vulnerability, no more inconvenience and endless plans and arrangements, no more anxiety about the future, more time for his work – and his mind emptied of her overwhelming image, set free to meander, like in the past.
The next second, as awareness of the reality of her returned in a hot flood, he knew he did not have that choice. Marina had given him a new self, more alive and vivid. He could never go back to what he had been – temperate, disengaged – even if he tried to. It was about his desire for Marina and sex with Marina but it didn’t stop with sex, it started there. The poem Julie had copied out for him was pinned up in his office. He had just been ‘a man who looks on glass’ before. Now he looked through it and saw, in the brightness beyond, how life should be lived.
* * *
His thinking about glass was changing as he changed, and as his knowledge and skill moved forward. He was working on the very edge and looking over it, while remaining just within the constricting terms of the building regulations and EC construction laws. When he first began to specialize, he had made an unquestioning connection between glass and lightness. The ideal he had had of transparency, of glass walls liberating space and removing the barrier between inside and outside, now seemed to him simplistic and even wrong. There had been a hysterical frenzy for transparency, triggered by expanding technologies. But the difference between inside and outside is central to organic life – our bodies, our homes, our perception of safety and danger. That’s an anthropological truism. It’s basic. Breach the barrier and there is only meaninglessness and disintegration. To appreciate lightness and transparency there must be a countervailing visual weight or darkness. An all-glass structure can be as oppressively opaque as a windowless bunker.
He was moving on in his mind somewhere beyond the mere design of transparent building skins. Or moving back to an old wisdom, perhaps; the traditional techniques to do with the colouring, shading, and decorating of glass had been known to craftsmen four thousand years ago. What interested him most now was an extension of what they knew: high-tech surface technology, coatings, dynamic sun protection, thermotropic layers, air-sealing, shading systems, machine-drawn coloured panels and coloured foils, and the unlimited effects possible by the creative use of lasers and holographic optical elements. What remained a constant was the drama of working with glass – its paradoxical elasticity and brittleness, and the challenge of outwitting gravity and danger. Something possible in theory, and on the drawing-board, must always be tested to destruction. Glass is unpredictable.
Thinking large, and with his mind filled with Marina, Martagon missed something small. Everything had been going very well. Bonplaisir was due to open ‘on time and on budget’ in February 2000. Running through the specification for the point-fixing systems of the glass curves of the roof one afternoon in early December, he experienced a sharp stab of unease. It didn’t look quite right. But it must be right.
He shared his worry with Giles. There were a lot of problems on the airport project. They were all tense. Lin had his anxieties too. Martagon went through this one with Tim Murtagh, the resident engineer at Bonplaisir, and the rest of the team a dozen times. It must be right.
He glanced at his watch. He had a flight to Marseille in a couple of hours. There wasn’t time, now, to check his notes and calculations or go through the whole thing again on the computer. Marina was expecting him at the farmhouse. He had to be there, he wanted to be there, he was living only to be back with her. He could always make some local phone calls once he got to the farmhouse. He could run over to Bonplaisir and have a chat with Tim.
I have a right to my personal life, for God’s sake. I’m not about to put in peril the only relationship that matters to me. He quashed his unease, packed his bag and left.
Once back with Marina, in paradise, everything dropped away. He stopped worrying about the point-fixing systems. They gave a little dinner party together for the first time.
‘It’s for Virginie.’
Martagon had never even heard of Virginie.
‘She was the housekeeper at Bonplaisir from when I was a child, right up to when we sold it, but she was much more than that. She was a real mother to me, more than my poor mother ever was. It was Virginie who looked after me when I came home after the bad times, whenever I was ill or unhappy, she was always there, she didn’t ask questions, she just was there.’
Virginie was ill herself now. She was old. Martagon winkled more out of Marina. She had paid for Virginie to go to a convalescent home after an operation, and she saw her regularly. ‘I owe her so much, I can never repay.’
; This was yet another Marina, a caring Marina with a sense of obligation and responsibility. Martagon was touched. The dinner was designed as a thank-you to Virginie, and a celebration of her partial recovery.
‘She doesn’t go out much, and soon she won’t be able to. It’s like a last treat – well, maybe it won’t be her last treat but I’m afraid it may be.’
Billie, her assistant, came too. Yet again, he failed to meet Billie’s aunt Nancy Mulhouse; she was in Texas. Marina had also invited Pierre, who was to give Virginie and her ancient husband a lift to the farmhouse in his jeep.
They couldn’t find a tablecloth in the farmhouse, so Marina dragged the linen sheet off the bed – none too clean – and used that instead.
‘I’m not sure that it’s not a tablecloth really anyway,’ she said.
‘You are such a slut,’ Martagon said to her. ‘Such a gorgeous slut.’
He liked the way tall, strong Marina folded the tiny, wizened old woman in her arms and rocked her, when she arrived. He liked Virginie’s gaze of uncomplicated love for his Marina. He felt happy and proud at first, sitting at the other end of the flower-decked table as her acknowledged partner, struggling with his French, admiring the old woman’s unaffected dignity, joking with Billie, refilling her glass – and, even more often, his own.
It was the presence of swarthy, monosyllabic Pierre that soured the event for him. Pierre did not conceal his intimate familiarity with Marina and with the house. He told her, brusquely, there was too much salt in the daube. Late in the evening, when dessert was served and fresh wineglasses were needed, Pierre got up and fetched them from the kitchen without having to ask where they were kept. Holding in his right hand a cluster of glasses by their stems, Pierre leaned over Marina’s shoulder to put them on the table. He let his left hand rest heavily on the nape of her neck for a long moment, while looking straight across the table at Martagon with an expression of contempt and defiance. Marina gave no sign of noticing anything at all and went on talking.
Flight Page 11
