Martagon was so enraged that he could hardly breathe.
Pierre didn’t return to his place. He lumbered out into the garden, presumably to relieve himself. After a few seconds Martagon followed him, knowing that the others would assume he was doing the same thing.
Outside in the cooler air, his head swam. He had drunk too much and too quickly. It was dark, but the garden was weakly illuminated by the light from the kitchen windows. Keeping in the shadows, Martagon moved quietly, following Pierre, who took the key from the nail in the massive garden wall and was unlocking the door. Perhaps he was intending to relieve himself in the field outside the garden. Or perhaps he habitually used the cavity in the wall between the two doors as a toilet. That was just the sort of disgusting thing he might do, thought Martagon.
Martagon knew that the second, outer door in the wall was locked, because he had locked it himself and taken the key into the house. As Pierre entered the cavity Martagon dashed forward and slammed the door shut, trapping Pierre in the narrow space. He couldn’t lock him in, so he leaned against the door, his feet and legs braced, pitting his whole weight and strength against Pierre’s efforts to open the door. He could hear the man swearing. He wasn’t going to be able to hold the door closed for long: Pierre was heavier than he was. What the hell was Martagon going to do next? His French wasn’t up to expressing his rage against Pierre verbally, and anyway his rage was ebbing. The wine singing in his veins, all he really wanted to do was to slide down with his back against the door and sit on the threshold laughing his head off.
Time to sober up, though. Pierre would start shouting soon, everyone would come running from the house, and then how would Martagon explain himself? The English sense of humour, perhaps: a practical joke. But he’d be a dead man. There were those old spades in the cavity, and Pierre would be murderous when he got out and saw Martagon.
There was a lull in the grunting and shoving from inside the wall. Pierre was thinking, or listening. All of a sudden Martagon moved away from the door and sprinted into the deep shadow under the olive trees. The noise Pierre made tumbling headfirst through the door muffled any other sound. Martagon moved swiftly through the trees away from the wall, so that when he emerged he encountered Pierre at an angle, seemingly coming from somewhere in the vicinity of the drive.
He thought, If Pierre goes for me I’ll have to smash his face to smithereens. But Pierre just muttered something incomprehensible and went back into the house. Martagon followed him, laughing inwardly. Nothing had happened. Another path not taken.
* * *
It became quite cold after midnight. Marina decided, at that late hour, to light a fire. She threw on to the blaze an armful of lavender from a vase, which made the air fragrant. When the guests had left, Martagon collected up the empties.
‘The six of us got through a dozen bottles!’
Marina shrugged. ‘It’s good wine, my darling,’ she said.
‘But old Monsieur and Madame hardly took any,’ he reminded her.
He started to say something about Pierre, but bit it back. The story of his half-baked exploit would sound foolish, and both he and Marina had drunk enough to say things that shouldn’t be said. He must summon the confidence to believe that Pierre was part of the past.
I do have that confidence. But I’m drinking too much these days, Martagon said to himself. I’d better watch it. Marina too. There is altogether too much alcohol in this relationship, even if it is good wine, my darling.
He and Marina remade their bed and slept entwined on the wine-stained tablecloth.
Martagon stayed for five days, and the parting was harder. Marina drove him to Marignane, the airport for Marseille, and for the whole hour they hardly spoke. He sat well away from her, looking out of his window at the landscape of pines, vines and baked earth, which soon for him would be only a memory. Marina generally drove with one hand on the wheel and the other lying between them, on the automatic gear lever. He often touched that hand with his, or twisted his fingers in hers – for a minute, or for five minutes. He often put his hand on her thigh – for a minute, or for five minutes, and her free hand would leap up to cover his.
Today both her hands were on the wheel. He did, without averting his gaze from his window, put his left hand on her thigh. Her bare forearm moved to crush his, but she kept both hands on the wheel. He pulled away his hand.
He glanced at her. Her profile was set, aquiline, the corner of her lovely mouth a little turned down. She passed a bent forefinger under one of her eyes. Were there tears in her eyes? Probably not. Probably just irritation from dust, or the sun.
The grief of leaving her made him angry, ungracious.
* * *
Once on the plane back to London, his unease about the fixings flooded back a hundredfold. He suddenly saw exactly what might have happened. His mind had been working on the problem without his knowing it.
He took a taxi to his office, switched on the computer, and concentrated. The bolts were the problem. It was a matter of a nano-measurement, but it mattered. It mattered absolutely. There might still be time. He rang Tim Murtagh at Bonplaisir. No answer. He looked at his watch. It was eight thirty – nine thirty in France. Everyone had gone home.
He passed a sleepless night. First thing in the morning he rang Bonplaisir again, his stomach churning as he waited for Tim to answer.
‘We’ve got it put together – I’m talking about the roof! The big top! – and we’ve got it up,’ said Tim. ‘It’s taken them four days, working overtime, but it’s up. We finished at six thirty last night. Looks great!’
‘It’ll all have to come down.’
* * *
With those few words, all hell broke loose over Martagon’s head – from Heaney Mahon, from the lawyers, the client group, Lin’s people, Harper Cox’s people, Giles himself. It was everyone’s worst nightmare come true.
Martagon had to convince them that there was no safe alternative. The great curved panels were compromised not only by having the ‘wrong’ bolts taken out. Two panels were damaged when Tim’s team and the contractors were bringing them down. The whole lot had had to be manufactured all over again, sending the cost of the project spiralling by millions of francs. The ‘liquidated damages’ – the pre-estimate of likely losses to be suffered in the event of delay – were well overshot. Bending the glass was a major operation, at a temperature of over 600 degrees centigrade. The manufacturers had already moved on to other work, with its own deadlines. Martagon’s new panels had to wait their turn.
The opening of Bonplaisir was postponed for five months. There was an ugly symmetry in this. Five months’ delay, because of five days Martagon had spent with Marina. If he had given his whole attention to the problem the moment he suspected an error, it could have been corrected before they began to erect the roof. Martagon did not attempt to deny responsibility. The salvaging of honour lay in acknowledging his dishonour.
‘How in hell did this happen, Martagon?’ said Giles, exhausted by another day of meetings and telephone calls. Giles had the experience to know that in a project of this complexity there were bound to be snarl-ups, and up to now had never implied that he thought Martagon was personally to blame.
‘I took my eye off the ball for a moment,’ Martagon said curtly. He did not say he had been with Marina. Nor did he tell Marina about the disaster.
Lin Perry did not come down on him like a ton of bricks. When he and Martagon spoke on the telephone, he wanted to talk mostly about George, who had a hernia problem. Lin knew exactly what he was doing. His publicity people got busy with their contacts in the British and French media and sent out press releases. They saw to it that all newspaper reports on the delayed opening made it absolutely clear that it was not due to any architectural design fault, but to engineering problems.
It was Giles who minded most – because of the money, because of Harper Cox’s reputation, because he personally had hired Martagon and put his trust in him. He didn’t say much
more about it, but Martagon felt the disappointment and anger behind his studied normality.
I’ll make it up to Giles. I don’t know how, but I will. Perhaps in some personal way that would really mean something to him.
There was egotism in this as well as remorse and a proper humility. Martagon didn’t like feeling morally inferior to Giles. He stopped going swimming, and put his energies into the work, not wanting to confront his own thoughts. Am I a messer, a wanker?
* * *
‘What are you doing for the millennium?’
Martagon was sick of the question. If he’d been asked it once in London, he’d been asked a hundred times. Yet here he was asking Marina all the same, over the telephone, ‘What are you doing for the millennium? We should be together. But you’d have to come to London, I can’t get away again right now, I’ve got too much to do. We have a bit of a crisis on our hands, I have to see people, do stuff. Will you come?’
She wasn’t sure. She thought not. She had a lot of work to get through by the end of the month. And then, Nancy Mulhouse was giving a big party in Provence, and there was another party she had been asked to in Paris. ‘You might come to Paris. It would be wonderful if we were in Paris together for the millennium, wouldn’t it?’
‘It would, my darling, it would be magical, but it’s true what I told you. I’ve got meetings back to back right until the very last moment.’
Marina was stubborn. Martagon was equally stubborn. Why would she never come to London? He could, conceivably, fly out on the evening of 31 December, though he most probably wouldn’t get a flight at this late date. Besides which the plane might fall into the sea, he told her, if the electronics went down. He didn’t believe that; but it was Marina’s turn to fit in with his requirements, just for once. Neither did he fancy sharing her at a party with le tout Paris, a horde of society and media types he didn’t know. If Marina had a fault, it was that she was wilful. She was also, perhaps, selfish. Her script-editing work was scheduled to suit herself. She could have come over a few days ahead of time, and done her work in his house. She had never even seen where he lived. Didn’t that interest her at all?
* * *
Amanda rang him at home first thing in the morning: ‘Have you seen the papers?’
‘No?’
‘Tom Scree has got a peerage! Tom is a lord!’
‘WHAT?’
‘Listen, I’ve got it here’ – there was a rustle of newsprint over the line – ‘Thomas Carew Scree, and then it says “For services to development”. And there’s a picture of him at the top of the page.’
‘I don’t believe it.’
‘Have a word with Giles.’
Giles had had no idea, he said. Tom would have known for some weeks, but certainly he hadn’t tipped the wink to anyone at Harper Cox.
‘But why Tom?’
‘Why not Tom? They have to give these things to someone. Tom gets what he wants. He must have gone all out for it. But he’ll be a proper working peer, the government’ll get their money’s worth.’
‘Do you mean he paid for it?’
‘Oh no, I don’t suppose so. But now I understand why he’s been in and out of the DfID office so much. And I saw him having lunch with the minister at the Caprice some time in the autumn. He’s been putting himself about, big-time. We saw him on Newsnight banging on about this group he heads up…’
‘The Grid Group. Conflict-resolution stuff. He doesn’t head it up, it’s some old Texan mogul.’
‘Right. Anyway. You’d have thought he did, by the way he was going on. And then do you remember he wrote that arse-licking letter to The Times defending some crap planning policy, back in the summer? Very Tom Scree, very New Labour.’
‘I never saw that,’ said Martagon. ‘I was in and out of France all summer.’
‘I wouldn’t have seen it either,’ said Giles, ‘you know I never read anything but comics. That’s what you think, anyway. But Mirabel Plunket saw it, and she showed me.’
‘Well, I’ll be buggered.’
‘Me too,’ said Giles. ‘But it’s good for the firm, it won’t hurt having “Chairman: The Lord Scree” on the Harper Cox letterhead. Or perhaps you don’t put “Lord Scree”. Perhaps you put “Baron Scree of Leake”.’
‘Of where?’
‘Leake. You have to be the lord of somewhere, don’t you?’
‘Is that Leak as in drip, or Leek as in Welsh vegetable?’
‘It’s where they live in Lincolnshire, in the Fens. Leake with an E. So, yes, drip, basically. We’ll have to give a party for him. A small dinner party, Amanda says. We’re going up to Amanda’s family in Wakefield for the millennium. Julie too. Big get-together. See you after that.’
Martagon knew the decent thing to do would be to ring Tom and congratulate him, but he couldn’t bring himself to.
* * *
‘What are you doing for the millennium?’
Martagon had a last-minute invitation from the wife of an acquaintance in the industry, a property developer for whom he had done some work. Her husband had chartered a launch to go up the Thames from St Katherine’s Dock to the Dome, and there were one or two places unfilled. Martagon knew that the woman fancied him. That was the reason he had been asked. He did not find her in the least attractive, but he was glad of the invitation, and accepted.
So there he sat, squashed at a convivial table under cover on the upper deck with a bottle of champagne and a plate of lobster in front of him, and around him pleasant people, many of them professional friends or good acquaintances. His hostess was fully and shriekingly occupied with her husband’s guests and clients, so there was no danger from that quarter. He had his mobile phone with him so that he could ring Marina, as they had arranged, at midnight. He didn’t have much to say to anyone, but it was better than wandering the streets on his own, or sitting in front of the television in Child’s Place. Better to get pissed in company than by yourself. Idly, he watched people excitedly milling about, moving up and down the gangway that led to the lower deck where the bar was.
And then he saw them.
The stairway was momentarily deserted except for this couple slowly coming up. It was like watching a film in slow motion. A very tall, glamorous, eye-catching couple. When they reached the top, they paused. Heads turned.
The man was exotic, with slanting cheekbones and eyes and an impressive physique. He was wearing an extraordinary ankle-length overcoat made of some shaggy, whitish animal-hair. The woman also wore a long coat, of quilted mulberry-dark satin with an edging of glistening black fur down to the ground. One long white hand was on the stair-rail, the other held her coat together at the throat, half hidden by fur. Her flaming hair was piled on top of her head, with curling tendrils escaping to frame a lovely face.
‘Heavens!’ breathed the plump Irishwoman next to Martagon, with whom he had been chatting amiably about people they both knew in Dublin. The man opposite her, a stranger to Martagon, swivelled round to see what everyone was looking at, and turned back to the table.
‘Lin Perry and Marina de Cabrières,’ he said, with fat satisfaction. ‘Well, well. The A-list. We’re obviously at the right party.’
‘Wow!’ said the plump woman. ‘Do you know them?’
‘I know that’s Perry because I know what he looks like from photographs. And I met her once, at a party in the South of France. At Nancy Mulhouse’s, do you know her?’
‘No, no, I don’t…’ said the woman. ‘But isn’t she just gorgeous?’
‘I didn’t know she was going out with Lin Perry. There was some talk when I was down there that she was carrying on with a local man who makes wine. A very local man, by which I mean a bit of rough. She’s quite a number. Apparently she’s come into a lot of money. Sold the family silver or something.’
‘They make a lovely couple, though, don’t they?’
Martagon, who seemed to himself to have turned to stone, heard his voice say, ‘They aren’t a couple. She’s not going out
with Lin Perry.’
They looked at him with interest. Just at that moment the scene changed and there was a general rush towards the open section of the deck. Chairs were pushed back, tables half overturned, voices raised, as everyone scrambled for a good position. It was five to twelve, the boat was approaching the Dome, a magic mushroom throbbing with changing coloured lights; it was nearly time for the fireworks. Lin and Marina were swallowed from sight in the throng. Martagon remained at the table motionless, paralysed. He felt as if he had been hit on the head.
Either he believed in Marina and in her love for him, or he did not. He had moved light years away from his old, rational self. All belief, all trust, is irrational. Martagon made an act of faith.
At two minutes to midnight, alone where he sat, he retrieved his phone from his jacket pocket. He called up Marina’s number and pressed the ‘Yes’ button. She answered at once: ‘Where are you?’
‘Where are you?’
‘Darling Marteau, you won’t believe this, but I’m in London! On a boat on the river! I was in Paris, and Lin had these two tickets for Eurostar, and we came over this evening.’
‘Why didn’t you call and tell me?’
‘I wanted to give you a surprise, I wanted to make you suddenly happy! I had to come on this boat with Lin as he had been so kind as to bring me over, and when you rang like you said you would I was going to give you this surprise, it was a plan. Are you surprised? Are you pleased? Where are you, where shall I come and find you?’
‘Where exactly are you on this boat?’
‘Right at the front of it…’
And then their phones went down, since absolutely everyone all over the time-zone was ringing up someone else, because it was midnight and cannons were firing and hooters hooting and bells ringing and lasers shooting green arcs and fireworks blossoming in the sky and falling in bright showers over the gleaming dark Thames and on the crowds on the banks and on the small boat where Martagon fought his way through the crowd to Marina’s side and they were together for the millennium.
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