Flight

by Victoria Glendinning

  ‘He must make lots of money, surely, from something like this.’

  ‘Big projects like this theatre or the airport involve a massive financial turnover – but a turnover is what it is. Lin has to hire more people in his office, and so his profit is not nearly as big as you would imagine. By the time of the opening celebrations, he will already have had in nearly all the money due from the clients, months ago. So unless there’s another big project on the table, or unless the office has a steady line of minor bread-and-butter clients, the famous architect Lin Perry may have precisely zilch in the bank at the very moment when he is being most fêted and flattered.’

  ‘And the engineers?’

  ‘We live on the edge in the same way. We co-author, if you like, with the architect. We’re essential. We just get on with it, our basic job is to turn the architect’s vision into a structure that will stand up. Tomorrow you’ll see Lin’s design for the airport, just five sheets of paper, which got him through the first phase of the international competition. His drawings are impressionistic beyond belief, even though Harper Cox was already involved at that stage. The detailed working drawings were submitted at a big presentation to the jury in the second phase.’

  ‘So you guys make it stand up. But without Lin’s vision there would be nothing to make stand up.’

  ‘Correct. And working with architects on their visions is the fun bit. There’s an old joke in the industry, in England, about the difference between horrifying and terrifying: a building put up by an engineer without an architect is horrifying, and a building put up by an architect without an engineer is terrifying. But it’s not really like that any more. Particularly with specialities like my structural glass. A few architects’ offices actually include engineers nowadays, and vice versa. There shouldn’t really be rivalry, though there still sometimes is. It’s like in Oklahoma!, “The farmer and the cowman should be friends…”’

  Later they sang all the songs from Oklahoma! that they could remember, as they showered together in the hotel.

  * * *

  Lin Perry flew in from Paris that evening and came for a drink with them at the Adlon, striding through the foyer looking like a barbarian chief in the long shaggy white coat he had worn on the millennium night. Behind him came a South East Asian youth holding back a panting George on a lead.

  Lin greeted Martagon and Marina fondly – ‘My dears’ – in his beguiling New York intellectual’s accent. He introduced ‘Deng, one of my assistants’. He immediately sent Deng off to take George for a walk. George had a microchip in him now, Lin said proudly, a ‘pet’s passport’, so could travel in Europe with him.

  Lin then settled down to chat exclusively with Marina, bringing her loving messages from people in Paris whom Martagon had never heard of, and gossip about friends in Provence – Nancy Mulhouse, and French people with names that were the names of places. Martagon could only suppose that was because they were all vicomtes and ducs of somewhere or other. Every now and then Lin lapsed into rapid French – his French was perfect – then returned to English with an apologetic gesture towards Martagon.

  Martagon struggled not to feel redundant. He and Lin had a meeting fixed for the next day, so there was no reason for them to be discussing the theatre’s problems there and then. Martagon could see that it would be graceless, and excluding of Marina, if they were to talk shop now. He wished, though, that she did not look so sleekly happy talking to Lin. Being so much alone with her, this was a social Marina he had rarely seen.

  The real Marina is mine, he told himself, remembering the night.

  The other two had their diaries out now. ‘Oh, we can go, can’t we, Marteau?’ asked Marina, turning to him at last. ‘April the third? Nancy’s giving a big party for Lin’s birthday. It will be wonderful.’

  ‘Yes, you too, Martagon, of course!’ said Lin, quickly. All too clearly there had been no ‘of course’ about it.

  In any case Martagon didn’t even have to look at his diary. The third and fourth of April had been earmarked for weeks as the dates for a major get-together at Harper Cox in London for everyone working on the airport project. He had already begun to prepare the progress report he would have to present. There was no way that he could be absent.

  Marina looked devastated. That cheered him up a bit. She then looked cross, which cast him down again.

  ‘You go, anyway,’ he said to her.

  ‘Yes, yes, I’ll go.’

  Lin, rising to leave, confirmed with him that their meeting in the morning was to be at nine. On hearing that Martagon was going to be taking Marina on to the site after their meeting, he offered to show them round himself. Martagon longed to say, ‘Don’t bother,’ but thanked him effusively instead.

  So Martagon was not in a good mood when he and Marina went on out to dinner at a restaurant recommended to them by Lin. Neither was she. She could not accept that his London meetings were so important that he could not be in France for Nancy Mulhouse’s party.

  ‘I thought you and I were together. For always. Are you always going to be somewhere else?’

  ‘Of course not.’ Obviously he would always rather be with her than not. At the same time he was disappointed and angry that she now seemed to have so little concern or respect for his work, and it showed in his voice. ‘I’m not going to Bangkok, for God’s sake, only to London, and missing one party isn’t a tragedy.’

  ‘Yes, it is, because it is an indication of how it’s always going to be.’

  ‘I do far less long-haul travelling now. But you know that’s how I’ve always lived, getting on planes and disembarking in strange new places with a job to do and people to organize and manage, and living in extreme ways – either working in pestilentially primitive conditions, or staying in five-star hotels. And, yes, always looking forward to being somewhere else.’

  ‘And when you get to somewhere else, are you then happy?’

  ‘Not always. Not particularly. I get terrible jet-lag. And I get lonely in the hotels in the evenings sometimes. I think I’m probably happiest of all when I’m on the train to Heathrow, or settling into my window-seat on the plane with the stewardess handing me a drink. Travelling first-class, in every sense.’

  ‘That can’t be an end in itself. So what, in every sense, is your destination?’

  ‘There has to be a central task, around which all the excitement and pleasure and power are spun. The central task is the work itself. I think I’m a bit uncomfortable with the idea of a destination.’

  ‘Then surely you are not on a real journey, a real path,’ said Marina. ‘You are just wandering about. Always wanting to be on the move, restless, planning your next trip. It’s a neurosis.’

  ‘I’m happy with the idea of being a wanderer. Or I have been.’

  ‘But it’s not good to be merely a tourist in your own life. Always moving along.’

  ‘Marina, I think you’re talking about yourself, not me. Take a grip. I have the central task, I told you, the work, it’s the steel core.’

  ‘The central task could be different. Work is work. The people who know how to live do as little of it as possible, it seems to me.’

  ‘Then they don’t really love their work, they only half love it.’

  ‘Is it only half a love, your great love for me?’

  ‘You are the most important thing that has ever happened to me. You have given me a reason for living, you have made the world beautiful to me. Without you, I would merely exist. I have discovered with you what love is. I have made you the centre and purpose of my life. It is for always. You are my shining light. You know that, Marina.’

  Marina smiled, seemingly satisfied. She was looking astonishingly lovely and luminous that evening. He saw how the other diners in the restaurant, both men and women, kept looking at her, as he himself had the first time he saw her in the café in Aix. She put her hand across the table on his, and said what she sometimes said in the private darkness of night, ‘We are becoming the same person. Only
together are we complete.’

  Then she put it to him.

  She had a proposition, she said. Why did he not give up his London base and come and live with her, all the time? That was what they wanted, to be together. She was rich now. She had enough money for both of them.

  They would let the farmhouse, and buy a pretty old house in a wonderful location, and renovate it and build on. He had all the expertise to direct the operations, to be the maître d’oeuvres. They would have everything exactly as they wanted, with a bedroom on the ground floor opening on to a private lawn hedged in with rosemary, like he’d told her he dreamed of. They would have an orchard and an olive grove and lovely gardens. They would create the perfect life. He could go on working on prestigious projects that really interested him. He could design and build his own studio, his own private space.

  ‘It sounds just too good, like a dream come true,’ he said, dazzled.

  ‘Why too good? Why should not dreams come true?’

  And the central task? Martagon gazed at Marina, thinking about it.

  The central task will be to use the freedom and experience that we have, to build our world. Accepting some necessary curtailment of freedom and new experience, in order to preserve what we are creating.

  There’s so much poetry, he thought, so many novels, so many theories, about the ways that things go wrong between men and women. The lyrics of songs dwell on loss of love, regrets, heartbreak. Gossip is always about infidelities and separations.

  The trouble is that grief and longing inspire the best poems, the best novels, the most heart-stopping songs, the most gripping gossip. There’s precious little analysis or art or even talk about goodness, happiness and fulfilment, apart from the fairy-story ending: ‘They lived happily ever after.’ And that should be the beginning of the story, not the end.

  He and Marina, two equal adults, can write that unwritten story by living it. By bearing witness. It is a privileged central task worth devoting the rest of life to.

  ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘Why should not dreams come true? We will be doing something exciting and new. It’ll take courage and determination because it won’t always be easy, darling.’

  ‘I know horrible things must happen, it’s the same for everyone. But we will be together and that will be – what was it you called it? – the steel core.’ Marina stretched her arm across the table and put her hand over his once more. ‘Marteau, I should like to have your child. Your children. Our children. And soon. I don’t have much time.’

  That, from Marina, was a rare kind of admission. She had always refused to tell him how old she was. Martagon took a deep intake of breath. His unengendered children, who wait at heaven’s gate …

  ‘Is that true, about having children? I can’t really believe it. We’ll think about it, darling.’

  ‘I think about it already, all the time.’

  And so, from then on, did Martagon.

  * * *

  In the morning, Lin and Martagon and Marina put on yellow hard hats, neon jackets and steel-toed boots to go on the site. Marina looked bizarrely elegant, and Martagon laughed at her. He had a whole raft of detail to be checked and inspected, but Marina was seeing the whole. He kept an eye on her. A construction site is noisy and scary if you aren’t used to it.

  Watching her, he experienced anew through her eyes the astonishing, timeless sight of hundreds of skilled men (and a few women) working intently and fast – riveting, welding, sawing, hammering, measuring, drilling, fitting, consulting with each other, shouting to each other across vertiginous spaces from planks across scaffolding and temporary stairways, moving up and down the structures like busy monkeys. It struck Martagon that Julie Harper, ‘not an arboreal animal’, would have hated it. Marina was loving it.

  Lin left them for a moment while they climbed to the very top and stood on a high platform under Martagon’s glass dome, looking down into the well of the auditorium. Everywhere there were crates, copper piping, joints, ducts, coils of cable, pieces of timber, panels, steel joists, girders, beams, valves, cisterns, dangling ropes, swinging lamps, piles of tools, and everything covered in fine dust. Marina, absorbed in the scene, leaned perilously over a scaffolding bar. Martagon had a nightmare vision of her falling from the great height. He pulled her back roughly.

  She was not pleased. ‘Don’t treat me like a child.’

  ‘Then please, darling, be more careful. There’s always the danger of falling, or of having something heavy fall on you, in spite of all the health and safety regulations. In the past, dozens of men would have had fatal accidents on a site like this one.’

  Lin reappeared and they clambered down a level, down ramps and round dark corners, emerging into dazzling sunlight on an exterior platform, to see an overwhelming panorama of the new Berlin rising above the old. Construction work everywhere, the skyline broken by towering cranes and gantries and, more or less opposite them, Norman Foster’s Reichstag building. Martagon pointed out to Marina the refurbished Stasi buildings and the great arches of fat pink and blue tubes straddling the streets, supplying and extracting water from deep excavations. He turned to Lin for help in identifying a spectacular new building, which had seemingly sprung up since his last visit. Lin was waiting well behind them.

  He shook his head, tight-lipped. ‘I can’t come any closer,’ he said. ‘I’m phobic about heights.’

  This was so surprising that Martagon warmed to him again. But Marina wasn’t happy either. She turned away from the panorama that so elated Martagon. ‘It spells money. It spells power. It spells Germany. You have to remember where I’m coming from. I am French, I am Greek, my Greek grandfather was killed by the Germans in Crete.’

  ‘Do you think the German people didn’t suffer too? Think of the bombing of Dresden. Think of what happened to Berlin itself, for that matter.’

  ‘The Germans brought it upon themselves.’

  ‘There’s always been the other Germany, the Germany of music and philosophy and liberal thought. The war and its horrors are all in the past, darling. Germany’s done penance. We have to move along.’

  ‘Move along to where? I am thinking, I have sold the house and the land that my ancestors cared for, and which was left in my care, for money, and for other people to make even more money. I shouldn’t have done it.’

  This was not the happy Marina of their life alone together, nor the socialite Marina of the evening before. This was yet another, self-doubting, insecure Marina.

  While they went round the theatre her proposition had always been in his mind. The dream come true. It would have to be his dream just as much as hers. No one can inhabit someone else’s dream without resentment. How would he survive as a person, without making his work the central task? He imagined the perfect house that they would make, and then saw it filled with chattering French people who were not his real friends, and international expats including bloody Nancy Mulhouse – who was growing monstrous in his imagination – and himself, drinking too much, and growing fat, and struggling with the language, with depression growing in him daily like a cancer. The seriously rich cut themselves off from the lives of ordinary people, they are made characterless by leisure, they are magnificent lepers, unable to be really at ease except with one another.

  But rich people can also do good, and use the wealth to make the world a better place. He knew examples of that too. Surely he could settle, find repose, make a home, have a family, become a good person. Their thoughts of last night had been the right ones.

  ‘My reasons for selling really were unworthy,’ she said, when they reached ground level. ‘Basically, it was just my desire to spite Jean-Louis and my fear of death.’ Two yards away a pneumatic drill was massacring an inoffensive stretch of pavement.

  ‘Fear of death? What on earth are you talking about?’ he shouted.

  ‘Fear of debt!’ she yelled back, and they laughed, and the bad moment passed.

  She waited while Martagon went into the Harper Cox Portak
abin to have a brief discussion about claddings, and to countersign contractors’ bills. There was a last-minute problem about the mastic in which an interior glass wall was seated. It wasn’t gelling properly. Martagon wrote out a variation order for a new specification, knowing it would add something to the costs. He ran through the schedule again and sorted out the sequence of remaining operations – the critical path – and had a word with the overall site engineer, a calm German. All the time he kept an eye on Marina through the window of the cabin: she was sitting on a bollard, her shoulders hunched. He suspected she was still disturbed. Or perhaps she was just cold. She had the most expressive body. He could read her body as he could not read her mind. Martagon was so attuned to her that he felt her unease as his own.

  When he had finished, they walked a while. He showed her the vast curved façade of the Sony building, and the new British Embassy, and the Daimler-Chrysler Building with its glass core shielded by louvred terracotta. She was interested but she was not a walker, and she soon flagged. So then they went and sat together for a long time in the Café Einstein on Unter den Linden and got a bit pissed on champagne, and she was her radiant self again.

  She held up a full glass against the light and gazed into it, close up.

  ‘What the hell?’ she said. ‘Do you like that expression? I learned it from Lin. What the hell? All I know is that here is a whole world of liquid gold with lots of clear little bubbles rising from the bottom to the top, on and on. Where are they all coming from? There’s nothing and nowhere for them to be coming from. And why do they all fly up, on and on, and not round and round like a snowstorm?’

  ‘For someone from a wine-making family, you are ill-informed.’

  ‘So tell me.’

  ‘You don’t really want to know, my love.’

  * * *

  Martagon was expected back in London. He had a dinner invitation from Giles and Amanda, which he had accepted, and an appointment with a bread-and-butter private client in the country, in Dorset, for whom he had designed a glass-covered swimming-pool in co-operation with a local architect who was refurbishing the property.