Headlong

by Michael Frayn

  ‘Most of the holes in these carpets were there before cigarettes were invented,’ says Laura. ‘So you’re some great art whizz, are you?’

  I realize that she’s looking at me through the smoke screen she’s laying down, belatedly demonstrating a little polite interest in her guests. I nod at Kate. ‘Not me. Her.’

  Laura switches her gaze to Kate. ‘Oh, wonderful,’ she says. Kate, of course, says nothing; merely looks as if she’s been caught out in some slightly disreputable piece of behaviour.

  ‘She’s at the Hamlish,’ I explain, God knows why, except that I feel some obscure need to validate our lives in these alien surroundings. ‘In the Ecclesiology Department. Comparative Christian iconography.’

  ‘Wow,’ says Laura. ‘Do you know the little man round here?’

  Kate looks startled. So, I imagine, do I. There’s a local iconographer? A little man who pops round to decipher your mysterious griddles, keys and lions?

  ‘He’s rather a sweetie,’ says Laura. I deduce from this, as obscurely as Laura was prompted to think of it, that she means not the local iconographer but the local Christian – the little man in the rectory. She’s given up on Kate, though, and turned back to me. ‘So what are you, then?’

  ‘He’s a philosopher,’ says Kate.

  ‘My God,’ says Laura. ‘I’ve never met a philosopher before.’

  You see? It’s all starting to happen. Though somehow I hadn’t imagined the conversation taking place through a haze of cigarette smoke. Or my end of it being conducted for me by my wife.

  ‘But he’s moving into art,’ Kate tells Laura, amazingly loquacious now the subject is me instead of her. ‘He’s writing a book about the impact of nominalism on Netherlandish art in the fifteenth century.’

  Laura gazes at me, immensely impressed. ‘Where’s everyone’s glass?’ says Tony impatiently, holding out the decanter. But she’s not to be distracted. ‘The impact of …?’

  ‘Nominalism,’ I repeat, and even as I say the word the meaning seems to drain out of it. I make an effort to stop the leak, if only to reassure myself. ‘Nominalism’s the view that there are no universals.’

  I have her full attention. Nominalism is what she’s been waiting all these years to know about. There seems no choice but to give her a complete tutorial.

  ‘The view that the individuals making up a class do so merely because they have the same name, not because they share some common essence. That class membership’s established by particular resemblances between members. That things are what they are because that’s how we see them, because that’s what we decide they are. It’s essentially a rejection of scholasticism … Of Platonism. It’s historically important because it’s a step in Europe’s emergence from the mediaeval world. It originated with William of Occam. In the fourteenth century.’

  She releases the smoke she’s been raptly retaining. ‘Wow,’ she says. I’m not sure, though, that dawning adoration is quite what I read in her eyes. I hadn’t envisaged her unfulfilled longing for philosophical enlightenment taking us into technicalities quite so soon.

  ‘Don’t waste your breath,’ says Tony. ‘She doesn’t understand a word you’re saying.’

  ‘Of course I do,’ says Laura. ‘I’m fascinated. And it had a tremendous impact, did it? All this …’

  ‘Nominalism. Yes – it had a remarkably large impact, all over Europe. Including on Netherlandish art. Or so I believe.’ And am ceasing to believe moment by moment as I expound it and she gazes at me. ‘If you look at Rogier van der Weyden, for instance, or Hugo van der Goes, you see this tremendous concentration upon individual, ungener-alized objects, on things that offer themselves not as indications of abstract ideas, but as themselves, as nothing more nor less than what they are …’

  I’m not certain, from the expression on her face, that she’s heard of Hugo van der Goes. Perhaps not even of Rogier van der Weyden.

  ‘Or look at Jan van Eyck,’ I try. ‘The famous mirror. The lamp, the clogs … In the Arnolfini Double Portrait … In the National Gallery …’

  I’m not absolutely certain she’s heard of the National Gallery.

  ‘But he hadn’t got very far with the book’, pursues Kate, quite unnecessarily, ‘when he was slightly side-tracked by the Master of the Embroidered Foliage.’

  Laura looks first at Kate, and then at me.

  ‘Because Friedländer is so ridiculously dismissive of him,’ I insanely feel obliged to explain.

  Laura turns from me to Kate and back to me.

  ‘Max Friedländer,’ I have to tell her. ‘The great authority on all the early Netherlandish stuff.’

  ‘But then’, says Kate, ‘he decided Friedländer was right after all.’

  Laura turns back to Kate. ‘So nice, your husband taking up your line of work.’

  ‘Well …’ says Kate, glancing at me. This is all a very delicate area. I move quickly to head Laura off.

  ‘Kate’s strictly concerned with the iconography of art,’ I explain.

  ‘Whereas Martin’s only interested in the iconology.’

  Laura’s head twists back and forth as she follows this rally, her eyebrows higher and higher.

  ‘She doesn’t think iconology’s a real discipline.’

  ‘He thinks mere iconography’s beneath him.’

  Laura glances at Tony, the way I glance at Kate, to see if he’s savouring the conversation to the full. But he’s gazing into his aperitif, lost in his own thoughts. ‘Are we ready to eat?’ he says.

  I wonder whether to attempt to explain to Laura the difference between iconography and iconology. Iconography, I could tell her, informs us that a worn sofa and a vehicle held together with twine represent poverty. Iconology teaches us that the plain iconography has to be read in conjunction with a wider conception of style and artistic intention – that its real meaning is the opposite of what it appears to be. Iconography, I might go on, tells us that the look she’s wearing on her face is one conventionally adopted to represent the expression of interest. Iconology, on the other hand, involves understanding that in this particular context what this conventional expression of interest actually conveys is mockery.

  But all I say is: ‘It’s a distinction drawn by Panofsky.’

  There’s something about the helpless look she gives me that moves me to offer a little more assistance.

  ‘Erwin Panofsky,’ I tell her.

  But with this I’ve gone two syllables too far. Her display of polite interest collapses like a soap bubble. ‘Excuse me,’ she says, and hurries out of the room, coughing on her smoke.

  ‘Oh, my God,’ says Tony, ‘you’ve driven her back to the kitchen again.’

  We settle down to another wait, another look at the racehorses. Wow, as Laura would say. This is going to be one of the great evenings. I make the mistake of catching Kate’s eye, and at that moment I feel the hysterical laughter rising irresistibly out of the depths of me. I jump up as hurriedly as someone with the runs.

  ‘I’ll check Tilda,’ I mumble.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ says Kate, jumping to her feet as well, galvanized no doubt by the same agonising spasm, but a fraction of a second too late, because I’m already half-way out of the door and merciless in my need. I rush for some room, any room, that will serve as a hospice for a man dying of laughter. But before I can find one I’m stopped by a sound from behind the half-open kitchen door.

  Sobbing.

  My laughter dies instantly. My iconology was totally wrong, I realize; I’ve completely misread the iconography. Laura’s a lonely young woman shut up in this remote pile with her brutally insensitive husband. She turns to one of their rare visitors for a moment of human contact, a passing glimpse of the great sunlit world outside, and what happens? The visitor talks about things that he knows she in her simplicity won’t understand. He rebuffs and scorns her. This is why she ran out of the room so abruptly. She was in tears.

  I suppose I should pretend not to have heard. But tact is ove
rcome by ordinary human sympathy. I raise my hand to tap on the door and announce my presence when the sobbing bursts out with a new and uncontrollable wildness.

  I stay my hand just in time. Because it’s not sobbing, I realize, now that I hear the paroxysm from the start.

  It’s hysterical laughter, just like mine.

  I don’t know what the problem in the kitchen could have been. There’s nothing wrong with the pheasant casserole, or nothing that won’t be right by the time they have it again tomorrow, reheated, after they’ve got Mr Skelton to fix the stove. And although the dining-room’s large enough to accommodate all the Churts there ever were since there were Churts at Upwood, the temperature’s by no means unbearable, if you edge your chair a little towards one of the fan heaters and get your feet under one of the dogs. And I suppose the cigarettes that Laura lights between courses must warm the air a little.

  She’s long since recovered her composure. So have Kate and I. In fact, we two have ceased to make much contribution to the evening; our conversational resources seem to have been exhausted by our exposition of nominalism and Panofsky. Not that this matters greatly, because now that they’ve got the initial polite interrogation of the guests out of the way the Churts seem perfectly happy to do all the talking themselves. After a few glasses of wine they’ve both become more expansive, in their different ways. The only thing they remain unforthcoming about is why they invited us. It can scarcely be anything to do with the pictures in the dining-room, which by now we’ve had considerable opportunity to assess, and which are mostly flyblown cross-sections of ancient square-rigged sailing ships.

  They may simply have had the kind intention of disabusing us of any naïvely romantic view of the countryside. They distribute snippets of bad news alternately to Kate and me on opposite sides of the table, moving in and out of agreement with each other like two motors going in and out of phase, while Kate and I, in the stands now like Laura before dinner, revolve more or less mutely back and forth to follow the game.

  ‘You two come cruising down from town’, says Tony, ‘and you think you’ve arrived in some kind of Shangri-La.’

  ‘In fact you’ve walked into the middle of a battlefield!’ cries Laura.

  ‘Put your head outside that door – somebody’ll blow it off!’

  ‘The people round here! They’re all lunatics!’

  ‘Preservation-mad!’ says Tony. ‘That’s the problem.’

  ‘Yes, because you drive them to it!’ shouts Laura. ‘You’re the biggest lunatic of the lot!’

  ‘Not at all. No one could be keener on preservation than me. But what people round here do not understand, what they cannot get through their thick skulls, is that to preserve you have to change. You can’t go backwards – you can’t stand still. You must go forwards. Forwards, forwards! That is the law of life! The remorseless law of life! But this my good neighbours cannot begin to grasp!’

  ‘They’re trying to stop him building a scramble track.’

  ‘A scramble track?’ says Kate, surprised at last into breaking the rhythm of the conversation. ‘You mean …?’

  ‘Yes!’ cries Laura. ‘Yobs on motor bikes roaring about in the mud on Sunday afternoon!’

  ‘Two thousand pounds a quarter for the lease, my pet!’

  ‘Money, money! It’s all he thinks about!’

  ‘Someone’s got to think about it!’

  ‘He’s already got the whole estate crawling with pheasants! You can’t walk down the drive without them flapping out under your feet and squawking at you! Roast pheasant, boiled pheasant, fried pheasant, frozen pheasant – we’ll be flapping around and squawking ourselves soon!’

  ‘What do you want to eat? Barbecued sparrow?’

  ‘I think it’s absolutely disgusting, breeding creatures just so that you can kill them.’

  ‘It’s not for my benefit, poppet!’

  ‘No – jeeploads of Japanese businessmen banging away all over the place! We might as well live in the middle of a firework display!’

  ‘Two hundred pounds per gun per day! Say ten guns, when we really get going. Say a hundred bird-days per year …’

  ‘Why don’t you just sell the whole estate, and have done with it?’ shouts Laura.

  At this Tony becomes suddenly silent.

  ‘This scramble track …’ begins Kate. But Tony is moving towards a major statement of his beliefs.

  ‘I happen to own this estate,’ he says slowly. ‘I didn’t ask to own it. I just found myself with it, in exactly the same way as people find themselves landed with a big brain, or a weak heart, or nice tits. All right, I’ve got the estate – she’s got the tits – you two have got the brains. As it happens. But it could just as well be Laura with the brain, and you two with the estate, and me with the tits. Since it’s not, though, I’m the one who has to do something about it. Because I propose to go on owning it. Owning this estate is what I was put into the world to do. Nothing wrong in that. Everything has to be owned. That’s what gives it life, that’s what makes it mean something, having a human face attached to it. If we’ve learnt nothing else from the Communists we’ve surely learnt that.’

  He turns to me. ‘You’re the philosopher. Isn’t that so?’

  ‘Well,’ I begin, ‘there’s certainly something of interest at issue here …’

  I’ve lost him already. ‘Anyway,’ he says, ‘whether it’s so or whether it isn’t, I’m certainly not going to sit on my backside and watch it all go down the Swanee.’

  ‘But down the Swanee is exactly where it all goes!’ cries Laura. She turns to me. ‘He has a spectacular ability for finding crack-brained schemes to invest his money in.’

  ‘What do you mean? I’m one of the few people we know who survived Lloyds!’

  ‘You weren’t in Lloyds! They chucked you out of the syndicate!’

  ‘I walked out on my own two feet, thank you very much.’

  ‘What about that offshore thing?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. Remember the Arab thing, though. That came up.’

  ‘No, it didn’t – it went down, like everything else. They all ended up in jail!’

  ‘I was out of it by then.’

  It’s beginning to occur to me that my iconology really is wrong. Totally wrong. I’ve entirely misread all the symbolism of the estate, from the baler twine to the holes in the carpet. Really no ology’s needed – a little of Kate’s straightforward ography’s all that’s required. The symbolism isn’t ironic. It’s literal. The Churts have no money. All they own is a bottomless, money-eating swamp and an equally bottomless incompetence.

  Laura has schemes of her own, it turns out. ‘I think he should try to get some pop promoter involved,’ she says. ‘Have some great festival thing here. Some New Age thing. Make a few crop circles. Ten thousand people – ten quid ahead. All you need is a sound system and Portaloos. They’d bring their own sleeping-bags.’

  ‘So where’s all this happening?’ says Tony. ‘On the lawn?’

  ‘No, away from the house. In that great empty bit.’

  ‘Which great empty bit?’

  ‘The other side of the woods. Where the barn fell down. There’s no one round there.’

  ‘You mean the field at the back of us?’ asks Kate.

  ‘Oh yes,’ says Laura. ‘Well, you could stay up in London that weekend.’

  I can see that Kate’s quietly resolving to join the local Preservation Society. But I can’t say I feel too much alarm. I think the field will remain in its present charmingly neglected state for a long time yet. The whole estate will. Pop festivals, scramble tracks – none of their great ideas is ever going to materialize.

  Actually, I feel a slight twinge of sympathy for them, even gratitude. It’s their straitened circumstances, their fecklessness, which are preserving the reality of this little pocket of real country for us. Still, there’s nothing we can do about it. I look at my watch, and begin to make the usual ritual regretful noises.
>
  ‘Well, that was delightful,’ I say. ‘But Tilda’s going to be waking up any moment. Also, we were up half the night last night. And we’ve got an early day tomorrow …’

  Why does one always have one excuse too many? Still, by now Kate and I are on our feet.

  ‘Has he shown you the picture yet?’ says Laura.

  Ah. Here we go.

  At least we haven’t sat through all this delightfulness for nothing.

  It’s in the breakfast-room. No, this scarcely does justice to its majestic presence. It entirely fills the breakfast-room.

  This, at any rate, is my first impression, because the breakfast-room’s relatively modest, designed to accommodate no more than a handful of Churts at any one time as they straggle down in the morning to their cornflakes and devilled kidneys, while the picture’s entirely immodest. It lours down enormously from its elaborate gilt frame over the screened-off fireplace in the freezing room, occupying most of the wall between mantle and ceiling. Inside the frame … well … The four of us and the dogs, who have accompanied us to the viewing, all gaze at it respectfully but with difficulty, because we’re far too close to it. It’s leaning out from the wall, as if it expected to be at the head of a great sweep of stairs, with us approaching it from below. In its present position it seems to be angled for the benefit of the dogs. I lean back and sag at the knees, trying to get close to their eyeline.

  Tony and Laura turn to look at me. My respectful cringe has established me as the authority.

  ‘What do you reckon?’ says Tony.

  What do I reckon? Nothing, really. No thought comes into my head. ‘Seventeenth century?’ I venture cautiously.

  ‘Right,’ says Tony. ‘1691.’

  ‘Italian, presumably.’

  ‘Giordano. It’s the Upwood Giordano.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ I say wisely, as if I’d been about to say it myself. I’m not trying to claim false credit for my own percipience – I’m politely giving false credit to the fame of the painter and the picture. And actually I think I have heard of Giordano, if not the Upwood Giordano, in some context or other.