Flight by Victoria Glendinning Read Free Book Online Page B

– one bottle, and then, slowly, another bottle.
    *   *   *
    Before he left, he wrote down for her his e-mail address.
    â€˜Why “marteau”?’ she asked. ‘It means “hammer”.’
    â€˜I know. It sounds like my name, only more aggressive, and suitable for someone working in the construction industry. I’ve worked mainly in Europe, I didn’t want to sound too English. Not that I am, my father was Irish.’
    â€˜You look very English. In the best way. If in French you say that someone’s un peu marteau it means he’s a bit crazy.’
    â€˜I’m not crazy. I’m balanced, like a good hammer.’ Balance, he told her, was important. A question of psychological equilibrium, between work and play, public and private, reason and passion. ‘I don’t usually talk like this to women I’ve only just met, on a matter of business.’
    He had imagined a visit of about an hour. In the event he stayed until dusk, reason draining out of him through a hole in the bottom of the world. There was only himself and her and the private life.
    *   *   *
    In those first days they told each other about their childhoods, as people falling in love do.
    â€˜I’m a displaced person,’ Martagon said to Marina. ‘I don’t really belong anywhere.’
    He told her about his childhood in Bangladesh, which was East Pakistan then. His father Liam Foley was an accountant with a firm of jute exporters, and they lived in a company house. He told her about his mother Jill, who was pretty and clever with that air of slight silliness which pleases most men. Like all Europeans they had servants, and a car with a driver. He was an only child.
    â€˜You were a little prince,’ said Marina.
    â€˜And you, at Bonplaisir, were a little princess, in an enchanted castle. Dhaka was the armpit of Asia.’
    Martagon’s nightmares were – still are – about the beggars with eyes missing, in dusty rags, with no hands, banging their stumps against the closed windows of the car. Thud-thud, thud-thud. He was told by his parents to stare straight ahead and take no notice. The driver kept his hand permanently on the horn as they inched their way down unsurfaced streets and alleys crammed with rickshaws and bicycle taxis and people. Martagon suffered from carsickness, and sometimes had to ask for the car to be stopped so that he could get out and be sick on the side of the street. The Bangladeshi men standing around would stare at him, and stare harder at his mother as they fingered their private parts through the thin cotton of their lunghis.
    He told Marina what an embarrassment his first name had been to him. When he was seven or eight, and they still lived in Dhaka, his mother told him that ‘Martagon’ was the name of an Alpine lily – a pink lily, for God’s sake. He was appalled.
    â€˜Martagon is a really strong, manly sounding name,’ his mother said. She showed him the picture of a martagon lily in the illustrated flower-book she had. ‘Look how the petals curl backwards, making it look like a Turkish turban. The other name for it is the “Turk’s head lily”.’
    â€˜Is that why Dad calls me Turk?’
    â€˜Yes, that, and because you are a young Turk.’
    Martagon was not reconciled to his name by knowing that his mother loved flowers, and that on their honeymoon his parents had walked in the Alps where she had been overwhelmed by the beauty of martagon lilies growing wild along the mountain paths. When he went to school he announced he was called ‘Mart’, which the other boys assumed was short for Martin.
    He went on being Mart until he became a student, when the sonorous oddity of ‘Martagon’ began to appeal to him. Now everyone he worked with, and people in the profession who knew of him only by hearsay, referred to him simply as Martagon, with no