Flight Read online

  She was reticent, seemingly self-contained. There was an occasion when Tom Scree, at the Harpers’ table, had been talking about how unsuited monotheism was to the human psyche, and the lengths to which Christianity had to go in order to sustain such an unnatural idea. The Holy Trinity, for example, making three gods into or out of one. Julie said quietly to Martagon, who was sitting beside her, ‘I could believe in the Three in One and One in Three if it wasn’t just three. It’s such a feeble number. It’s either too many or not enough. If it was three hundred, or three thousand…’

  ‘What if it was seventeen?’

  And she had laughed, spontaneously, at that. Julie did not often laugh, so that Martagon felt that she had given him a present. Or that he had given her one.

  Julie had found her burrow: a basement with a bit of sooty garden behind. It was in that run-down stretch of Bayswater which consists of long streets of vast peeling stucco houses with pillared porches, all flats and bedsits and rip-off substandard hotels, with no corner shops. The burrow had two bedrooms, one of which she was letting cheaply to a Kosovan refugee woman who had found work in a bakery. She brought bags of unsold croissants and rolls back to Julie and Fasil every evening, and she baby-sat when Julie went out. Julie had made the place cosy in her own way with ethnic rugs and batiks, and pottery mugs and plates, and her books. An elaborate silver Ethiopian cross, which Hailu had given her when they married, hung from its chain on a nail over the gas fire. There were always Fasil’s toys around and, of course, Fasil.

  He had grown into an enchanting child. Martagon thought about him, too. Julie was transformed into a madonna when she sat with the five-year-old on her knee, reading to him, her light hair falling on his shiny black curls, her pale arms encircling his little brown body. She had stuck a blown-up photograph of herself and Hailu in their student days under the glass top of her coffee-table, and Fasil would stand at the table absorbedly tracing the picture with his finger.

  ‘Daddy,’ he would say every time, and Julie would always reply, ‘Yes, that’s Daddy, with Mummy, before you were born. Daddy’s in Ethiopia. That’s where he lives. In Ethiopia.’

  Fasil would look intently up into her face and mouth the mysterious syllables, silently.

  Martagon did not go to the flat very often. He had taken Julie to the cinema once or twice. He always let Giles know when he had seen her, and saw his face light up. Giles’s perpetual concern for his sister was his one vulnerable point. Amanda, even now, did not have much time for Julie.

  ‘Poor Julie, she doesn’t have a clue,’ Amanda said to Martagon. ‘And she sponges on Giles.’

  ‘I think he’s happy to help her out,’ said Martagon.

  ‘Trouble is, he thinks the sun shines out of her arse. I wish she had a boyfriend. It’s a pity Tom Scree is married. He’s too old, but in every other way he’d be so right for her.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  Not long after that he went back to France, and met Marina de Cabrières, and the world was turned upside down.

  FOUR

  Back in London after his first weeks in France with Marina, Martagon slept for nine solid hours. On subsequent nights he could hardly sleep at all. He woke every hour, unable to be comfortable in his bed. From four thirty on, he gave up all hope. He ran out of thoughts. Apart from missing Marina, his mind seemed to have nowhere to go.

  He gave himself a mental exercise. When he was a child, his mother used to talk about his ‘memory bank’. Every treat, every adventure, every mishap or triumph, was an investment in his memory bank. ‘It’ll pay dividends later,’ she would say. ‘Nothing is wasted. You’ll see.’ So now he made a conscious effort to check his investments. It passed the time, until morning came, and after a few nights of it he became addicted. The foreground of his life – even the work, even his preoccupation with Marina – became transparent, in those hours of musing and brooding. He saw straight through them to the background – the past. The pre-dawn hours, in this drifting state, with no particular agenda, passed in a flash or in an eternity; it came to the same thing. It was a state he would not have achieved had Marina been sleeping at his side. Even though he missed her so badly, he knew it was important to be alone for a while. He needed time to regroup.

  He was ambushed by memories he had not had before, about the summer trip with his parents to the Tyrol when he was eight, just before he went to boarding-school in England. They were sitting, the three of them, in the garden of a chalet-restaurant where there was a small ornamental windmill.

  There was a little wooden man connected to the windmill. The sails of the windmill turned faster or slower depending on how fast or slowly he turned a wheel attached to his arms, which jerked up and down. Martagon pointed out to his father how the windmill’s sails came to a stop altogether when the wooden man stopped working the wheel.

  ‘Look again, Turk,’ said his father. ‘Use your intelligence.’

  Martagon looked again. He couldn’t think what his father was getting at.

  His father gripped him by the shoulders. ‘Look now,’ he said, in his precise Irish-tinted voice. ‘It’s not your man who is working the wheel. It is the wind which is working the windmill, and the wheel, and your man. You’ve got hold of the wrong end of the stick.’

  That was the last holiday they had as a complete family. Martagon’s father was already ill with the kidney disease that was to kill him, and finding the walks difficult. An old farmer passed them on the mountain track, wobbling along on a white bicycle, carrying a long scythe over his shoulder.

  ‘Are you going far?’ he asked in German.

  ‘All the way,’ replied Martagon’s father. Then, turning to his wife: ‘Ah, well, now. Death overtaking me on the road – a phenomenon it would be impossible to invent.’

  ‘Death overtakes us all,’ said his wife. They held hands. Martagon, trotting along attached to his mother’s other hand, and listening, understood and did not understand.

  ‘Did you see his bike, Dad?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘It was brand new. A mountain bike. I want one like that.’

  ‘I expect it was his grandson’s,’ said his father. ‘Or, anyway, it will be soon.’

  Martagon was at school when his father died.

  * * *

  Early one morning in London, Martagon had a telephone call from Audrey, his mother’s cleaning lady. Audrey said Mrs Foley was very poorly. Audrey said a whole lot more, the gist being that she was no longer able to manage. Something would have to be done.

  Jill Foley lived out her long, contented widowhood in a 1930s house called White Gates, which had white gates, a crunchy gravel drive, and half an acre of garden. She had not lost her interest in flowers, and her garden – the English garden she had always longed for – became over the years her chief occupation. The house was in a built-up area rich in superstores, light industry, and sports fields. Beyond the suburbs, it was neither quite in London nor quite in the country. It was near the Thames, but not in sight of it. Martagon thought of it as sub-rural nowhere-land. It was everything that he most disliked about what England was becoming. He nearly always lost his way nowadays, when he drove to White Gates, and generally arrived in a bad temper.

  As Martagon joined the slow crawl of traffic leaving central London towards the south-west, he noticed that the year was turning. The green of the trees was dull and dusty; some of their leaves were already yellowing. As he drove, he was still thinking about that last Tyrolean holiday, remembering how he had scampered off a mountain track to pee in the pine forest while his parents walked on. His pee made a dark puddle in the squidgy forest floor. For fun, he ran further into the forest, zigzagging between the pines, arms outstretched, being a plane. Looking around, he could no longer see the path, or his parents. There were bad smells of things rotting, and weird noises from the dark pines. He began to run, and tripped on a root, falling on his face on the dank earth. He got up again and ran first in one direction, then in another. The
forest looked the same whichever way he turned. He shouted for Mummy, for Daddy, hearing his little-boy voice thin and weak, muffled by the encircling trees. He shouted and shouted, and began to cry. He was lost.

  Back with his parents on the path, he affected bravado. ‘I wasn’t really lost, I was only pretending. I’d have found my way back. You were lost, I wasn’t. I’d have found you all right if you hadn’t come looking for me.’

  ‘It was an ordeal, wasn’t it? You were Christian in Pilgrim’s Progress, or one of the Knights of the Round Table on a quest.’ His mother connived, as she would, with his face-saving strategy.

  His father was a man for accuracy, for keeping the accounts straight.

  ‘Ah, now, he was only having a pee. It wasn’t a quest or an ordeal, or a trial.’ Mr Foley’s illness made him even more irritably pedantic than usual.

  ‘It was, it was a test of character. I think he was very brave.’

  Martagon’s mother’s appearance was fixed in his imagination and memory at about this time; it tallied with the leather-framed photograph of her which she packed in his suitcase to take to boarding-school that autumn, and which he still had. Crossing Hampton Court Bridge, he saw in his mind’s eye her fluffy fair hair, her round blue eyes, and the silver brooch in the shape of a tortoise that was pinned on the lapel of the green coat she had worn for years.

  In the past, he had gone to White Gates for Sunday lunch quite often. In the early days of his friendship with the Harpers he had sometimes taken them along with him. His mother liked bustling around providing for the ‘young people’, and in good weather they ate at a table in her garden. But these days he didn’t go to see her nearly as often as he should – and not only because he was working abroad most of the time and, when he was back, dreaded the long time-wasting drive. She greeted his rare but regular telephone calls with ‘Well, hello, stranger! I thought you’d forgotten all about me. I’ve not been too well, you know.’ The archness and the reproach irritated him, so that he left it even longer before calling again.

  When he did go down to see her, she always seemed pretty well, though increasingly forgetful. She would press him to stay for a meal, for the night – the spare-room bed was always made up for him, just in case. This irritated him too, because it made him feel guilty. He would smilingly refuse to stay for the meal, even if there was a chicken already cooking in the oven. He never, ever, stayed a night. There was something about her yearning eagerness for his company that hardened his heart and made him recoil. If he had had a wife and children, he would be easier with her and less defensive. What he was defending himself against was becoming one half of a little unit, mother and son, all in all to one another, like when he was a young boy. He was ashamed of his lack of generosity but could not help himself. In any case, she never complained. She just let him go.

  * * *

  The white gates stood open. He glanced at the garden, untidy now with a shapeless, lolling, late-summer luxuriance. If his mother had been well, she would have disciplined the shrubs and herbacious plants, cutting back, shaping, staking, dead-heading. Martagon parked on the drive. He went to the nearest flower-bed and picked an overblown red dahlia. Audrey the cleaning lady, who must have been listening for the sound of his tyres on the gravel, stood at the open front door.

  ‘You didn’t need to do that, she’s got flowers upstairs already. Your mum’s in her bed. Been there ten days now, says her legs won’t carry her any further. She’s been waiting for you. Father Damian is expected, too.’

  Audrey panted upstairs after him. She halted him on the landing outside the bedroom door. ‘It can’t go on like this, you know. I can’t cope. Not the way she is. It’s too much, at my age. You’re going to have to make arrangements. I’m fond of her all right, but I can’t take the responsibility. I’m not family and I’ve got worries enough of my own.’

  ‘I’ll see to everything now, Audrey. I’ll come and talk to you in a minute.’

  * * *

  His mother lay in bed, sunken and diminished, her face creased and yellow. Her shoulders were wrapped in the worn old dust-grey pashmina shawl he remembered from childhood. He stuck the red dahlia in a vase of mostly dead Michaelmas daisies on her bedside table, kissed her forehead, and stroked the shawl. ‘You’re in fashion, Mum. All the girls in London have pashminas now, in all the colours of the rainbow.’

  She seemed unaffected by his arrival. He sat down on the chair beside her bed. ‘Mum? How are you? The garden’s looking pretty good.’

  ‘Paradise is a little disordered right now. All I want is to understand,’ she said. ‘Men don’t want to understand. They want to be understood. No, not quite that, even. They want to be forgiven.’

  ‘Do you really think that?’ Martagon, deprived of the expected initial ceremony of exclamations and embraces, struggled to join her in her flight of fancy from a standing start. ‘Men do want to understand. They have to. In my job, for instance, I have to understand a whole lot of things, or the buildings and bridges would just fall down.’

  ‘Those are “how” questions, not “why” questions.’

  ‘Mum, how long have you been ill? Why didn’t you tell me?’

  She said nothing and turned her head aside.

  ‘Look, here I am, asking you a perfectly good “why” question, and you don’t answer.’

  ‘Your “why” questions are never the right ones. They never were.’

  ‘Tell me something then, anything.’

  She took a deep breath and began to talk fast. ‘I was turning out the drawers. Sorting old papers, throwing things away. I came across some letters to your father, dozens of them, from a girl, or a woman, I don’t know who she was. Something came apart inside me, like the strands of a string, and I won’t ever put it together again. It was – what is the word? Something like “definitive”.’

  Terminal, thought Martagon, she means terminal. But he did not supply her with the word.

  ‘Oh, Mum, we know what Dad was like, he wasn’t that sort of person, it can’t have been important, you know he adored you.’

  ‘What shocks me most was that I never guessed, that I couldn’t tell. It was probably all my fault.’

  ‘What have you done with the letters?’

  ‘I boiled them.’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘I boiled them all up in my preserving pan. With sugar.’

  ‘What did you do that for?’

  ‘To preserve them. I put it all in jars. I’ve been waiting for you, to give you this,’ she said, indicating a plastic Sainsbury’s bag lying on the bed beside her hand. ‘It’s very important.’

  What did Martagon expect? More letters, family documents, photographs, perhaps.

  He peered into the bag then tipped its contents out on to the patchwork quilt. All there was inside were two chocolate digestive biscuits and dozens of bits of newspaper torn up very small.

  ‘Mum? What’s all this?’

  He knew her memory had been getting bad. She had always been what people call ‘original’, which can be a nice way of saying ‘eccentric’.

  ‘Can’t you see? It’s obvious.’

  He looked at the scraps of paper and the biscuits.

  ‘You tell me.’

  ‘These are my sins.’

  ‘The biscuits?’

  ‘Don’t be silly. All these…’ and she picked up handfuls of the scraps and let them flutter and fall back on to the bed and on to the floor beside the bed. ‘My sins.’

  Martagon took a deep breath. ‘That’s an awful lot of sins. I can’t really believe you have been so sinful.’ He tried a little laugh.

  ‘If you take them away now,’ she said, ‘I shall be absolved.’

  ‘Easy!’ He began to gather up the pieces of paper and to stuff them back into the plastic bag.

  ‘Not in there! Not in there!’ She tipped all the bits of paper out again. ‘You can’t take my soul.’ She clasped the plastic bag to her chest.

  ‘I don’t want you
r soul, Mum. I really don’t. You hang on to your soul. I can take your sins away in my pocket.’ He proceeded to stuff them in handfuls into his jacket pocket, while she watched him carefully. ‘They’ve all gone now, OK?’

  ‘There’s some down there – on the floor.’

  He picked them up. She lay back, stroking the plastic bag, fatigued.

  ‘What about the biscuits?’

  ‘There was one for your father and one for you.’

  ‘Do you want me to take them away too?’

  ‘You might as well, now. Nothing is for ever.’

  He put the two biscuits into his other jacket pocket. She never took her eyes off him. They could hear voices downstairs; Father Damian had arrived. He was parish priest at the nearby church of Our Lady of Dolours, which Martagon’s mother pretended was called Our Lady of Dollars, since Father Damian was always collecting for something or other.

  ‘Pass me my brush and comb,’ she said.

  Martagon sat in the background, on her dressing-table stool, while his mother exercised her remaining powers of enchantment on her old friend the priest.

  ‘What do you think heaven will be like, Father?’

  ‘I fear the worst,’ said Father Damian. ‘I fear the worst, I really do. Heaven is always described, by those who profess to know, in terms of emotions – peacefulness, happiness, that kind of thing. Not much there to occupy the enquiring mind, I fear.’

  ‘We won’t have minds, will we, in heaven?’

  Father Damian clicked open his holy box of tricks and extracted a thin white stole of office. He put it round his neck. ‘In that case,’ he said, ‘my requirement will be for a very moderate heaven, since mindless I am nothing, and my emotions tend to be only moderate in their intensity. Are you ready to make your confession, now, Mrs F?’

  ‘I already made a confession of my sins,’ she said, ‘to my son.’