Read Online Flight by Victoria Glendinning - Free Book Online

felt a bit sick. I’ve had too much to drink, he thought. The stars went on swinging.
    Astronomers call a star ‘perturbed’ when it loses its equilibrium because of the gravitational pull of something else. Perturbation is interesting because it can lead to the discovery of a new celestial body. Martagon was too tired to put this into words for Marina. He just said, ‘Can we go to bed now?’
    *   *   *
    Martagon and Marina did live in perfect equilibrium for long hours during their early days at the farmhouse. It was a simple house with tiled floors and only the basics when it came to furniture and equipment.
    â€˜Minimalist,’ said Martagon, when he looked around for the first time. ‘Suits me.’
    He wanted to protect and care for Marina – a new feeling, for him. She did not seem to need or want much looking after. He did, however, impress on her the need for better security. She left outside doors standing open, and only rarely locked the place up. It was only her fear of unannounced visits from her brother Jean-Louis that reconciled her to Martagon’s insistence that she closed and locked the spiked metal gates across the drive at night, when she was alone in the house.
    When he asked if there were any other ways into the property, she led him across the garden to a high wall. It was immensely thick, built in the Roman way, she explained, which was still the Provençal way: two ‘skins’, or separate walls, of large irregular rocks and stones, with the gap between them filled in with rubble and topped with more rocks.
    She opened the door in this garden wall and showed him a small dark cavity, empty except for a couple of spades, and beyond it another door set into the further side. This opened on to a track across the fields.
    â€˜You should keep both these doors locked all the time,’ said Martagon, ‘and we’ll hang the key on a nail the garden side.’
    Thus he perfected and protected their privacy. In the hot afternoons Marina read film scripts in bed while he worked on his laptop calculating loads and stresses, quantities and costs, at a table in the small shuttered room. Marina turned her pages silently. They breathed and moved silently. The stillness was like a trance, because they were together though apart.
    On one of those hot, still afternoons Martagon saw that she had fallen asleep. He slipped into the bed beside her. She half woke and wound her legs – those loved legs – around his. Beneath the stillness and silence was agitation, because lying with her in this way made Martagon’s heart beat fast. The submerged agitation was quite enough for now. It was good that Marina did not find his liking for stillness and suspension a threat. There was always the certainty that in the end, or quite soon, or in the next second, the storm of longing would prove too strong and they would be overwhelmed, again. Passion was implicit in the stillness and silence.
    He said, when she opened her great eyes, ‘You are the only person in all my life with whom I can be for hours at a time without getting frazzled.’
    â€˜What is frazzled?’
    Martagon’s French was not up to finding a translation. ‘It’s everything I’m not right now, so it doesn’t matter. But I must get up. I must ring Giles. He thinks I’m neglecting the work.’
    â€˜And are you?’
    â€˜Not really.’
    â€˜Tell me more about Giles.’
    â€˜I’ll make the call, and then we’ll go for a drink and I’ll tell you about Giles, and Arthur, and the merger. It was all a long time ago, but I still think about it.’
    *   *   *
    What had happened was that the board of Cox & Co. had to decide formally whether or not they wished to proceed with merger negotiations. Martagon was in a quandary. He wanted to do the right thing. He was pretty sure that the right thing for the firm, and