Flight

by Victoria Glendinning

  No, not necessarily. Jean-Louis might have been dumped between the two doors in the cavity in the garden wall. The policemen wouldn’t have known the space existed.

  How had Jean-Louis planned to leave, taking the chair with him, had he not been interrupted? I suppose he had a plan. So many questions. It’ll all come out, in time. This story isn’t finished yet by any means. But I don’t care, actually. I don’t give a fuck what happens to either Jean-Louis or Pierre now.

  * * *

  ‘We are becoming the same person,’ she had said. ‘Only together are we each complete.’

  He tried to recall precisely what she had said in her letter, and couldn’t. He had only read it the once. He had been in shock, and shaking. He remembered exactly how it was set out, on a single A4 page, with wide margins, the lines of her familiar handwriting straight and even. She had begun with ‘M’, and ended with ‘M’, as she always did. As both of them always did. He remembered, more or less, her first sentences: ‘M – just in case you turn up. I don’t suppose you will. I waited and waited, and you didn’t come and you didn’t come and you didn’t even call. So I knew you weren’t coming. Then the telephone rang and I thought it was you but it was Jean-Louis.’

  Jean-Louis had told her he would be over first thing in the morning to take possession of the chair. Martagon couldn’t remember what she wrote next, but it must have been then that she contacted Pierre. He remembered the worst part all too well. Her telephone had rung again, very late. Again she thought it must be Martagon. But this time it was Lin.

  She thought I had decided to stay with Julie.

  I’ve just been hanging on by a thread, with Marina, all this time. The thread has snapped. It’s final.

  He remembered more from further down the page, but not word for word. He recalled the gist. Letters putting an end to love affairs have a terrible sameness about them. At the end she said she was getting the first plane to Paris, and was joining Lin. He had been asking her to go and live with him for a long time. For months, she said.

  And there was a PS: ‘Pierre will come over a little later and take George home with him. George will be OK with Pierre for the moment.’

  Pierre had left George behind, though.

  It didn’t matter that he couldn’t remember everything Marina wrote. She had gone away. She had taken herself away. She was not going to be with him ever any more. It was over.

  Martagon lay in the grass where she had lain, for hours, going over and over everything that had happened.

  * * *

  Some time in the late afternoon he thought how all the people would even now be arriving at Bonplaisir. The new structure would be filling up with voices and movement, fulfilling at last its function as a busy, complex working environment.

  He opened his eyes and sat up. He should have run over to the airport following Tim Murtagh’s call. What if his judgement had been wrong? What if the arrivals hall flooring drifted or cracked or shattered?

  There would be panic, horrific injuries, fatalities.

  His reputation, for what that was worth in the context of such a disaster, would be ruined for ever. Professionally he would be finished.

  Had his decision been based 100 per cent on his professional judgement? Had he been swayed – horrible word – by his intense involvement in the crisis with Marina?

  He searched his heart. No, I don’t believe so. I really don’t. Nevertheless I should have gone over to check it out, if only for Tim’s sake.

  Martagon had carried the Herald Tribune with him when he came out to lie in the grass. He had not opened it all day. Now he riffled through the pages. The report of an architectural conference held earlier in the month in New York caught his eye. The writer of the article had added his own comments:

  In my view, the main task of architecture today is to mediate between our inner and outer worlds. It is an art of redefining boundaries, of articulating thresholds, bridges, edges, borders and passages. It is an art of transitions – from one place to another, between subjective perception and objective reality, private and public space, and between different ecosystems … Floors morph into ramps, spirals into squares; escalators expand space as if through a camera lens. Reason is contorted by desire.

  Martagon let the newspaper fall. The art of transitions. Reason is contorted by desire. It surely is, and not only in architecture. Desire is contorted by reason, too. That’s the dual tension which keeps the whole show on the road. I wish it were not so. There is no singlehearted purity of being. Except at the moment of birth and the moment of death.

  DEPARTURES

  Some time in the late afternoon Martagon gets up, a little stiff, and goes back into the house. Marina left everything clean and tidy. There is a bowl of tomatoes on the kitchen table. No sign of the pigeon or of the rest of last night’s celebration dinner. She must have eaten it, or binned it, or packed it up like a picnic to take to Paris. She no doubt drank the Gigondas, during that long night.

  He opens the fridge, and takes out the bottle of champagne he had told her to put there. He holds his filled glass up against the light and sees the little bubbles rising from the bottom to the top, endlessly, on and on.

  I’ll tell you now, my darling, why they do that. Perhaps you really did want to know. Listen. There are no bubbles in the bottle at the time when it is corked. Fermentation meanwhile continues. When the bottle is opened the pressure is released and the gases escape in the form of bubbles, bouncing off the inside surfaces, off the invisible imperfections of the glass. You would see, if you stuck something – like chewing-gum – on the inside of the glass, how the bubbles would cluster on it and bounce off.

  He hears her husky voice in his head asking, again, ‘But why do the bubbles always fly up, and not round and round like a snowstorm?’

  ‘To find the air.’

  Suddenly he is less certain. He has forgotten. He is so tired.

  The bubbles in a glass of champagne will always fly upwards, on and on, darling. They just will. Believe me. Until all the gases have escaped, and the wine becomes flat. But we would have finished the bottle, you and I, long before that happened.

  He goes back outside again and looks in at the open door of the shed, at the gun-racks on the wall, and the gap, and the bicycles they had never used. Clumsily, he grasps the handlebars of one of the two bicycles and wrenches it out of the embrace of its partner. He pumps up the tyres. It seems OK. He rides shakily off round the house, down the track, over the bridge.

  As he comes out of the shade of the wood he hears thunder and feels a few drops of rain. Within seconds, the sky darkens and the drops become a deluge. Martagon plunges on, turning on to the narrow road, which joins the web of similar roads winding between villages, not caring where he is going. The rain pours down, the wind blowing it straight into his face. He is soaked to the skin.

  I don’t have to go through with this agony. Yes, I do. I do have to go through with it. That is the deal.

  He pedals on. He has no option. He passes farm buildings where he could stop and take shelter until the worst of the thunderstorm is over. He notes each one but does not stop, knowing there is no avoidance of grief, and hoping that every particular stab of anguish endured is one that he will not have to bear again, and not realizing that his route through the network of country roads is circular until he recognizes the same hills, the same buildings and groups of trees, feels the jolts of the same potholes and rocks in the road, everything coming round again as the darkening landscape unfolds in front of him. On the horizon he glimpses brightness, as if the weather is about to clear. Then the storm comes down again and he is back where he started, pedalling with no idea of journey’s end.

  * * *

  When at last he gets back to the farmhouse the clouds are rolling away and the sun is shining again – not as if nothing has happened, but as if something tremendous has happened. The birds are beginning to sing again, one by one. Every leaf, every blade of grass swells with glossy life. M
artagon is not fooled. He is going to have to ride out his misery again, and again, and again. Losing Marina is a bereavement. Only for now, he is part of the grand calm.

  He takes a hot shower and smells on his skin the lavender soap, the smell of Marina. He dries himself with Marina’s used towels. He notes the absence of her white dressing-gown from its usual hook on the back of the bathroom door.

  He wanders out into the garden again and looks back at the house where they were happy. Extraordinary happiness. Perhaps with Lin, who won’t ask so much, she will find she can sustain ordinary happiness.

  I don’t think so. Happiness is not her natural climate. A drama queen. She won’t be able to hurt Lin, though, as she has hurt me. She won’t be able to get him as she got me. They have known each other a long time. She’ll have to accommodate his gay tastes, he won’t be vulnerable to her. Perhaps because she won’t have so much power over him, she will be able to stay with him. She’ll enjoy Lin’s carry-on, and the entourage – young Deng and all the other aides and assistants, run off their feet fetching and carrying for both of them.

  But she won’t have got him. She got me, totally. By saying we would have a child. By asking so much – to give up my kind of life for her kind of life, and making me believe it could work. You did that so well, Marina, like you do everything. You believed it all yourself, at the time. Because you really did love me, I know you did. Loving me was part of the process that was bound to end in – in ending it. You didn’t plan it that way. You never were any good at map-reading.

  It was I who could not be content with ordinary love, who had to have an extraordinary love. If it hadn’t been for Julie, if it hadn’t been for the disaster of my return trip, would Marina and I still be together? Maybe. But if it wasn’t going to be because of that, there would probably have been something else.

  All that stuff that bothered me about being a good person, about what is a good person. It’s not really the point, it never was. No wonder I didn’t get anywhere with it. It’s a vain question, a self-regarding question.

  The real point as I see it now is that life has to be for something. And if not for God – the universal metaphor – and if not for society as I find it, then for a vision of how the world could be, where we would be both honourable and happy. It’s the backward-looking longing for Paradise, for Camelot, the dream of an unspoilt world of integrity and sufficiency, which doesn’t even know what dishonour and evil are. Or else, it’s the forward-looking millennial vision of a world in which dishonour and evil shall be vanquished in a blaze of redemptive purity.

  A vision is a strategy, a solace, an aspiration, a solution even, to things being the way they are. Marina was that vision for me.

  For things, the way they are, are not wonderful. Not wonderful at all. But you can embrace the vision and live as if you could bring it about. A vision doesn’t grow out of nothing. It corresponds to something understood. I have inhabited a small part of the vision. Different small parts may be all that anyone ever apprehends. I knew it in real life and in real time, through love. Through Marina whom I have lost. Not mild, love-thy-neighbour-as-thyself kind of love, but transforming, consuming love, the creative-destructive kind, neither benign nor malign in itself but the blind cause of perturbation.

  Yet I was more aware of being near the still centre of everything, with Marina, than I have ever been in all my life.

  Tangling with this kind of love is a risk. Why does something always go wrong? Because risk-taking is not a narrative, it has no critical path. When everything is going wonderfully and you have heaven on earth, you feel you are magically protected and not subject to the rules of everyday. But every roll of the dice is random. The only certainty is a return to the mean. Nothing is for ever. Back to square one.

  My father would say, we screw up because of original sin. Put it another way. There is a design fault in us. We are absolutely bound to screw up. I wish my father had not died. He would be seventy now, if he had lived. That’s not really old. I should like to have known him better. I should like to have asked him whether there’s not perhaps a design fault in his God, since He is said to have created us in His image. That would explain a lot. There’s a design fault in you, Marina. There’s a design fault in me. All I can do is aim for perfection outside myself in the structures – material or immaterial – that I design. That’s my job. Always I fall short.

  Except with tomato salad, Marina. That’s not nothing, either.

  A good person – I can’t get away from that formulation now – gets on with it, keeps going, keeps building, holds on to the vision, starting all over again every time.

  * * *

  Martagon shuts George up in the kitchen and wanders off out of the garden and down the track. He crosses the bridge over the stream. He stops on the middle of the bridge, pulls a yellow sock out of his pocket, extracts the small sapphire and diamond ring from its toe, looks at it briefly in the palm of his hand, and drops it into the stream. He puts the sock back in his pocket because he doesn’t know what else to do with it. He follows the track through the wood, where it is already dusk. He comes out of the wood into the evening sunlight again, thinking about what has happened, mapping a hinterland.

  He strikes up off the track at an angle towards the hills behind the farmhouse, following the rising ground along the edge of the field of vines. From here he can see the farmhouse and the garden. It was from here that the farmer saw Marina drive off, from here that he watched Jean-Louis and Pierre. The farmer has gone home and Martagon is alone on the high ground.

  He looks down into Marina’s garden. My God. The jeep is driving up to the farmhouse. From here, it looks like a toy. As if he were watching a play from the upper circle of a theatre, Martagon sees Pierre get out, fumble for a key, open the kitchen door and emerge with George on the lead. George is pulling back, bracing his paws on the ground, twisting his squared-off Airedale jaw to escape the lead. He looks as if he is trying to bite. Pierre drags him to the vehicle. George, giving up the struggle, jumps in with the help of a forceful leg-up from Pierre. Pierre goes back to the house, locks up, returns to the jeep and drives away.

  Poor old George. Not such a horrible dog, really. Lin can depend on George the way Marina can depend on Pierre.

  She’ll end up with Lin in Copenhagen. She’s had good times in Scandinavia before. Perhaps she’ll contact her old lover Erik Smedius and they’ll all get together and have a good laugh about the old days. I wish I were dead.

  Martagon turns away from the empty arena of the garden and focuses closely on what is within his range. He notices the blue of copper-sulphate spray on the vine-leaves and sees that the grapes are forming. He looks at the rose bushes planted at the ends of the vine rows. They are there for a purpose. Marina told him that disease in the roses presages disease in the vines. The roses are like miners’ canaries. They are modest and functional, not like the gross blooms in Regent’s Park. He scrutinizes a particular rose, past its peak, its simple, single, yellow-pink petals distorted and blotched. An ant moves agitatedly among the pistils. He memorizes the rose as he did not memorize Marina’s letter.

  The sun is going down. Its slanting rays glitter on the stream below and throw into relief the vines dancing across the hill, outlining their sharply angular black stocks, limbs petrified in mid-motion, casting shadows.

  Above, the vapour trail of an aeroplane hangs in the sky. There is no wind at all. This is the best time of the day in Provence. Earth, air and water are held in perfect balance. Just for now, because nothing is for ever. Tomorrow the mistral may shake the vines and rattle the poplars.

  I wish I were dead. Yes, I may do just that, in the end. To be out of a world where Marina is, somewhere, where I can’t be with her. Not now, though, while I am unhinged. To end it all now would be the grand romantic gesture. But when I choose. Maybe never. It would be another failure, a betrayal of life, the dishonourable course.

  I already know how to work, and how to love. That’s
not nothing. It shouldn’t go to waste. I’ll just keep going.

  Martagon walks on towards his unknown destination.

  Though Martagon doesn’t know it yet, the airport at Bonplaisir is a terrific success. The party is in full swing. Nothing has gone wrong, and nothing will go wrong. It is a triumph.

  The mistral will not come tonight. Tomorrow will be a perfect day.

  Notes and Acknowledgements

  The first line of the poem by George Herbert (1593–1632) from which Julie copies out a stanza is ‘Teach Me, My God and King’. The lines about stained glass to which she refers are in Herbert’s poem ‘The Church Windows’.

  Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey (1988) is published in paperback by Faber & Faber.

  I have taken the liberty of advancing the decision made about the venue for the World Cup 2006 by about six weeks.

  The article which Martagon read in the Herald Tribune for 24 June 2000 was ‘Not Just ANY Philosophy: An Architecture of Ideas’ by Herbert Muschamp.

  I am grateful to the following for what they have said or written, privately or publicly, formally or informally:

  James Carpenter, Sir Jeremy Dixon, Michael Dobbs-Higginson, Dr Ellis Douek, Hugo Glendinning, Professor Paul Glendinning, Bill and Diane Hodgkinson, Tim Macfarlane, Deborah Singmaster.

  The following works have also been relevant to the writing of this novel:

  Sophia and Stefan Behling (eds), Glass (1999)

  Marcus Binney, Airport Builders (1999)

  Richard Sennett, The Conscience of the Eye (1991), The Corrosion of Character (1998).