Headlong

by Michael Frayn

  HEADLONG

  Michael Frayn

  Contents

  Title Page

  Aims And Approaches

  The Prospect Presented

  Early spring, yes.

  Do we know where Upwood is?

  The ironic understatement of the Churts

  I don’t know what the problem in the kitchen could have been

  It’s in the breakfast-room

  I recognize it instantly

  But I don’t. I don’t say anything

  What Are We Looking At?

  There are some paintings in the history

  Although the pictures appear to show four different

  Something, somewhere

  A short-lived setback

  By quarter past eleven I have it in front of me

  The Business Plan

  ‘Am I driving you to the station again?’

  I don’t bump into Tony

  My work on Bruegel wasn’t the only research

  ‘I was up in town yesterday’

  I must stop talking

  Kate’s sitting in front of the fan heater

  A Hint of Thunder

  So here’s the fundamental principle

  The history of the Netherlands

  No one could have known at this stage

  Not, so far as anyone knows

  Multa pinxit, hic Brugelius, quae pingi non possunt

  Thunder

  Bruegel shows his face quite literally in three of his pictures

  I gently open the ancient cover of the little volume

  I work my way slowly through the first Plantin edition

  The Little Walker

  ‘He’s just gone out,’

  I get into my car and start the engine

  The spring sunshine comes and goes

  As the day wears on

  Whatever he was painting that couldn’t

  Bruegel, I discover next day

  There he is, unprotected again

  The First Shipment

  I don’t walk up the drive

  ‘Chuck your boots in the hall,’

  And there it is

  Tilda’s lying on the picnic rug in front of the cottage

  ‘Delectable,’ says John Quiss

  The Land-Rover’s in the yard at Upwood next morning

  New blue Tony goes straight to the foot of the stairs

  What happens in the next few seconds

  Hard Cash

  The Spanish troops left the Netherlands

  Why, though?

  I feel about twelve years old

  Koenig Fine Art is the place I decide to try

  I drive back to Kentish Town in a state

  ‘The uneasiness, the terror

  Almost over now

  The Deal Done

  As I knock on the great front door

  Faster and faster flows the river

  The river lies motionless in the millpool

  We park the car in the shadows

  Results And Conclusions

  Author's Note

  About the Author

  Praise

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  Aims and Approaches

  I have a discovery to report. Many of the world’s great treasures are known to have been lost over the centuries. I believe I may have found one of them. What follows is the evidence for my claim.

  I’m in a difficult position, though. If my claim is not accepted by scholars I shall look a fool. If it is … then I shall be in a worse position. The circumstances of the discovery are such that I shall emerge not only as a fool but as an object of outrage and horror.

  I could say nothing, and no one would ever know. But if I have any pretensions to be a scholar – even to be a normally civilized human being – then I have an obligation to put my findings on record, so that my colleagues and successors, now and down the years, can evaluate them. And I must describe the tangled circumstances of this discovery of mine as fully and honestly as I can, because to arrive at a judgement they will need to examine them in the minutest detail.

  Well, perhaps it’s better to be known as a fool or a rogue than not to be known at all.

  It’s a painful prospect, though. Before I get to the end of this deposition I shall have to explain some shameful things. The anguish I feel about them is hard to endure. Even worse, though, is the anguish of my uncertainty about what exactly I have done.

  Now, where do I start?

  The obvious way would be to say what I think this treasure is. And at once a difficulty arises, because it doesn’t have a name. I could simply describe it, and in due course I shall, but it wouldn’t mean very much if I tried to now, because it’s never been described before, and no one has ever had the slightest idea of what it looked like.

  I think that the only way I can come at it, the only way I can bear to try, is to give up all attempt at a retrospective account. I shall have to go back in time to the very beginning, and relive what happened as it happened, from one moment to the next, explaining exactly what I thought as I thought it, when all the puzzles were actually in front of me, and what I was trying to do at each moment, given the possibilities that seemed open to me then, without the distortions of hindsight.

  This has its disadvantages. My tone’s going to sound inappropriately light minded at times. But that’s the way it was. The tone of most of the things we do in life is probably going to turn out to have been painfully unsuitable in the light of what happens later.

  So, from the beginning.

  We’re back in last year. Last year is now. It’s early spring. A particularly appropriate jumping-off point, as will become apparent.

  What’s the first sign that something unusual’s starting to happen?

  I suppose it’s a length of frayed twine.

  The same length of twine, it occurs to me, that will bring the story to its end.

  The Prospect Presented

  Early spring, yes. It’s one of those cautiously hopeful days at the beginning of April, after the clocks have made their great leap forward but before the weather or the more suspicious trees have quite had the courage to follow them, and Kate and I are travelling north in a car crammed with food and books and old saucepans and spare pieces of furniture. We’re on our way to the country.

  Where is the country? Good question. I privately think it begins around Edgware and goes on until Cape Wrath, but then I don’t know much about it. Kate’s rather a connoisseur of the stuff, though, and it’s not the country for her, not the real country, until we’ve driven for at least a couple of hours, and turned off the motorway, and got on to the Lavenage road. Even here she’s cautious, and I can see what she means. It’s all a bit neat and organized still, as if it were merely a representation of the country in an exhibition. The hedges are machined smooth. There are too many stables and riding schools. We get impressive whiffs of decaying vegetable and animal waste from time to time, but we keep passing the wrong sort of houses – the sort of houses you might find around Edgware – and the people don’t look right. There aren’t many people to be seen, in fact, except in passing cars, like us. A lot of the cars are designed for rural life, it’s true – specially squarish vehicles very high off the ground, made to keep their occupants well clear of foot-and-mouth disease. But the people inside them look disconcertingly urban. And on the few occasions when we’ve got close enough to any of their occupants to smell them – when we’ve stopped for petrol at Cold Kinver, for instance, or organic vegetables at Castle Quendon – they haven’t smelt of earth or dung or mouldy turnips. They’ve smelt of nothing at all, just like us and the people we know
in London. I share Kate’s unease about this. We don’t want to drive a hundred miles out of London only to meet people who have driven a hundred miles out of London to avoid meeting people like us.

  The country, what we call the country, begins after we’ve turned off the Lavenage road down the unmarked lane just past Busy Bee Honey. After a mile or two the lane begins to fall away into a little forgotten fold in the landscape. The county council have evidently not investigated the state of the hedges here for some time. There’s a half-mile squish of mud and shit under the tyres where a herd of live cows goes regularly back and forth between meadow and milking shed. Beyond the undergrowth on the left at one point is a scattering of bricks and broken tiles, growing a mixed crop of nettles and ancient leaky enamelware. Rusty corrugated iron flaps loose on ramshackle empty structures abandoned in the corners of tussocky fields. Lichen-covered five-bar gates lean at drunken angles on broken hinges, secured with rusty barbed wire. We begin to relax our guard; this is the real stuff all right. This is what we pay a second lot of bills for.

  We’re both silent as we get closer to our destination. It’s not the authenticity of our surroundings that’s worrying us now. We’ve started to think about what we’re going to find when we arrive. This is our first visit of the year. How damp will the bed be? How cold the kitchen? Will the saucepans have been stolen? How much will the mice have eaten? Will they have scoffed crucial parts of the bedding again? Will they have started on the electrical insulation?

  This isn’t like any of our former visits. This time we’re coming not for the weekend, or even the odd week. We’re here for two months at least, possibly three or even four. Shall we be able to stand so much reality for so long?

  There’s another unsettling novelty about this visit, too – the long box jammed among all the junk on the back seat and held carefully in its place with two seat belts. Faint sounds are beginning to emerge from it. Kate twists round and gazes at the contents.

  ‘You did put the nappy-rash cream in?’ she asks.

  ‘We should have woken her up before. You’ll have to feed her before we’ve even got the fire alight.’

  Yes, what will Tilda feel about the country? How will she and the mice get along? Will she find the cold and damp as bracing as we do? Will she appreciate the reality of everything?

  I stop the car in the lake that collects in the dip by the wood where we found the dead tramp.

  ‘Perhaps we should turn round?’ I say. ‘Go back home?’

  Kate looks at me. I remember, too late, that this will count as yet another example of what she sees as my infirmity of purpose, my alleged sudden shifts from one project to another. But all she says this time is: ‘I’ll feed her in the car while you unpack. We’ll leave the engine running.’

  So we drive on, and the proposal to abandon the expedition is never put to the vote. And now here we are. There’s no sign to announce us, just a little track opening off to the left, and a certain unsurprised sensation of having arrived, that we recognize, even if visitors wouldn’t. Since we don’t know anyone round here who might want to visit us, though, this isn’t really a problem.

  We bump slowly up the track. But when we make the turn beyond the elders, from which this summer we’re hoping to get around to making elderflower wine, it’s not our familiar green front door that confronts us. It’s a length of fraying baler twine.

  There’s a lot of baler twine in real country. One of the ways you can tell this is real country is by how much of it’s held together with the stuff. Not just bales. Perhaps not bales at all – I’ve never seen bales of anything tied up with it. Bales of what, anyway? Everything else, though – black plastic sheeting, bright blue plastic bags, gates, trousers, agricultural machinery – everything that used to be secured with string or rusty barbed wire before baler twine was invented. It kinks and unravels, but no one ever throws it away, and it’s made of plastic, so it never degrades. Some of it’s pink and some of it’s orange, so it shows up well against the rural greens and browns. This particular piece is pink, and it’s tied across the rear of an ancient Land-Rover to hold its tailgate shut.

  No question about the authenticity of this vehicle. It’s as rural as a turnip.

  Kate and I look at each other. A visitor! And not some friend from London – a real countryperson. Perhaps, after only two years, local society is putting out friendly feelers.

  I get out to investigate, still in the wrong shoes, still not in country mode, balancing delicately from island to island in the mud. There’s a huge barking, and two dogs the size of full-grown sheep come bounding round the side of the cottage. I’m a little taken aback to be kept off my own property by guard dogs – no, not a little taken aback, quite substantially taken aback, smack into the mud I’ve been avoiding. I’m wrong about the dogs, though; they’re not keeping me out – they’re welcoming me to the country, enthusiastically thrusting their wet snouts into my groin, and wiping their paws confidingly down the front of my sweater. By the time their owner appears round the side of the cottage as well, I look almost as real a part of the scenery as he does. And a more real countryman than him neither Kate nor I have yet set eyes on.

  ‘Heel!’ he says, in an effortlessly landowning kind of voice, and the dogs become instantly subservient. I’m tempted to lie at his feet myself, but find the ground a little too muddy, at any rate until I’ve got my country trousers on, and instead take the hand he’s holding out.

  ‘Tony Churt,’ he says. ‘One of your neighbours.’

  He has the grip of a man who’s used to wringing the necks of wounded game birds. He’s taller than me, and as I raise my eyes to meet his I have plenty of time to take in mud-splashed boots, then mud-coloured corduroy trousers, and a mud-coloured check jacket. There are holes in his mud-coloured jersey, and any hint of garishness suggested by the triangle of muddy green flannel shirt above it is counteracted by his muddy brown tie. He even has a gun, properly broken, in the crook of his arm. His long face, stretching away above me towards a mud-coloured flat cap, is the only feature that doesn’t quite fit the prevailing colour scheme. It’s simultaneously raw and bluish-grey, with little overlooked dribbles of dried blood where the razor’s nicked it.

  ‘Thought you might be round the back,’ he says. ‘Skelton said you were coming down.’

  Mr Skelton, as Kate and I call him, is the man who fixes the local pumps and septic tanks. We phoned ahead to book his services. I introduce Kate. Tony Churt raises the mud-coloured cap, and reveals a brief glimpse of receding mud-coloured hair.

  ‘Glad to meet you at last,’ he says. ‘I’ve heard so much about you both.’

  ‘From Mr Skelton?’ asks Kate. Though why not? A man who understands your sewerage might have a lot he could tell about you.

  ‘From everyone.’ Everyone? The woman in the paper shop, who knows which papers we take? Charlie Till, who knows what size of free-range eggs we prefer? ‘We’re all so pleased to have you down here. Great bonus.’

  The country is taking us to its muddy bosom, at last. And Tony Churt has a faint smell that I find instantly and reassuringly authentic. It’s the sign that we’ve always missed in the few other people we’ve got near enough to sniff, though exactly what it is I find difficult to say. There’s dog in the mixture, certainly, and the tarry trace of oiled waterproofs. Also the harshness that goes with a certain kind of rugged woollen cloth. Something else, too. Something stiff and morally bracing. Carbolic soap and cold water, perhaps.

  ‘Laura and I wondered if you might like to come over one evening,’ he says. ‘Dinner, why not?’

  ‘How kind of you.’

  ‘Nothing special. Say hello. Tell you the local gossip. Get you to tell us what’s going on in the great world out there. We get a bit out of touch down here. Monday week? Tuesday? When would suit you?’

  I mention Tilda.

  ‘Bring her. Of course. Wonderful. Plenty of rooms to park her in. Upwood. Know where it is? So we’ll say Monday week then? Ei
ghtish? That fit in with feeding times? We might possibly ask you to help us with a little advice while we’re about it, if we may.’

  A little advice. Of course. As I reverse to let him out, an alarm goes off inside the car with shattering loudness. Our clever little daughter is trying to warn us that someone is breaking into our lives.

  Do we know where Upwood is? Yes, even we know where Upwood is. It’s the big rambling house half-hidden in the trees at the head of our private valley. And now of course we know who Tony Churt is as well. He owns the valley.

  Well, not all the valley. Not the patch of land around our cottage, for instance. Our property, as the urban owners of odd half-acres in the country like to tell you humorously in such circumstances, marches with his. The march isn’t long enough to make either property very footsore, it’s true, but it gives us a bond. We’re fellow landowners. Neighbouring proprietors. Brother magnates.

  By the time I’ve got three fan heaters whirring and a great log crackling in the hearth, with Tilda full of her mother’s milk asleep in front of it, and four assorted oil stoves scenting the rest of the cottage with the cosy stink of paraffin, we’re in curiously high spirits. There are fresh patches of damp in the bedroom, it’s true, and strange efflorescences on several walls. The mice have eaten the towels and left droppings inside the refrigerator. Other, more surprising changes have come to light, too. I put on a pair of country trousers that I find hanging in the bedroom cupboard and can’t get them done up round the waist. They’ve shrunk in the damp. Or is it me that’s expanded? Am I catching largeness off Kate? I look at her moving slowly and bulkily about, stacking supplies of nappies on shelves. Three months after the birth and she’s still enormous. She rolls a little as she walks. She does – she rolls! I laugh at her. She smiles at my laughter, and frowns to know the cause of it. I don’t say anything, but when she sits down on the long stool in front of the fire to gaze at Tilda, as the grey spring evening outside the windows deepens into night and the three of us fill our little world, I come up behind her, lean over her, take two fat handfuls of face and tilt it up to kiss, obscurely pleased that there’s so much of her to love. Nor am I absolutely displeased that there’s a little more of me now to love her.