Headlong

by Michael Frayn

  Long before I’ve travailed the length of the book I feel I could name all the topographical features in the series, as if I were standing in front of the pictures with a gazetteer in my hands. The one of these Castels is named The-power-of-the-devils-assaulting, the second The-forsaking-of-hope, the third is named Feare-of-death … These Hils are named, Taken-on-witt-or-prudence, Riches-of-the spirit, Learned-knowledge, Taken-on-freedom, Goodthinking-prophecie, Zeale-after-chosen-holynes, Counterfeit-righteousness, New Invented-humilitee, Pryde-in-ones-owne-spiritualnes, Unmyndful-of-any-better … And those unseasonably early swimmers in the Merrymakers must be plunging into A-delyte-in-the-pleasurs-of-the-flesh – the daungerous Ryver wherin so many Travaillers be drowned and choaked.

  Or am I wandering off into great unpathed Landes myself? Am I getting close to the edge of the dizzy precipice named You-can-fit-almost-anything-into-any-pattern-you-like-to-name? I remember all the hikes and other travails I’ve been on myself where I’ve stood looking from landscape to map and back, seeing the shape of the hills in front of me in six entirely different parts of the contour lines. If only I could see one single detail in the landscape that related unambiguously to one single sign on the map. One church spire. One lighthouse, one narrow-gauge railway.

  And here I have another of the unpaintable flashes of lightning that are guiding my steps forward on this vertiginous day.

  Maps! Yes! The maps in Theatrum orbis terrarum, the great atlas of 1570 by Abraham Ortelius! Perhaps they also contain some reference to the heretical symbols of the Family of Love! Something that’s reflected in some detail of the Merrymakers!

  I rush back to the catalogue. It lists various editions of the Theatrum. The first four were published by someone called Aegidius Commenius Diesth. But from 1579 onwards publication was taken over by … by Christophe Plantin of Antwerp, Ortelius’s brother Familist, the underground distributor of Terra pacis.

  I’m on my way to the Map Room.

  I work my way slowly through the first Plantin edition of the Theatrum. I don’t know exactly what I’m looking for. Some reference to the great unpathed Lande, to the Walking in the Spirit. I can’t imagine what it would be.

  What emerges page by page under the protective sheet of talc is a historical document: a view of the world seen from a particular place at a particular moment just as surely as the landscapes of the cycle are. What I’m looking at is the world of the late Renaissance as viewed from the Netherlands. In the foreground, like the dancing peasants on the hillside from which the Merrymakers was painted five years earlier, is the close-up detail of the Netherlands themselves; in the middle ground is the rest of Europe, stretching away like the valley in the picture to the new horizons opened up by the great navigators.

  ‘The wholl Earth’, says Niclaes in Terra pacis, ‘is unmeasurable great and large: and the Lands and People are many and divers.’ So are the scales and colours and cartographic styles of the various mapmakers whose work Ortelius has assembled in the Theatrum. And yet the world it shows is strangely static. It’s a place of rivers, mountains and forests, of kingdoms and duchies, of towns and cities. But there’s no sign of any communications connecting the isolated human settlements, any more than there is in Bruegel’s landscapes. No railways, obviously – but still no roads worth marking, either. It’s as trackless as the great unpathed Lande. Only on the seas, exactly as in Bruegel, do a few symbolic ships set sail for emblematic destinations.

  The map of Salzburg appears to curl back from the page to reveal the city itself behind it, seen as Bruegel might have seen it from the same high foreground. On the other side of the Alps, Lake Como curls back in the same way to reveal a scene even more like one in the cycle of the year, with a distant city and green mountains beyond … And there in the foreground is what I’m looking for. A little Travailler. A walker, striding along past what might be a wayside cross or a signpost, or both.

  He’s coming down out of the north, on his way from the Country of Darkness. He’s descending from the Alps, from the high passes through the deceptive hills, into the balmy air of Italy, the New Jerusalem, the promised land of the soul’s peace.

  No, of course he’s not. It’s just a casual thumb-nail sketch, a decorative flourish by the Italian cartographer.

  Or is it? I order up the earlier editions of the Theatrum, published by Diesth. And in the first edition of 1570 … no little walker. He doesn’t appear until the second edition, in the following year. So he’s presumably been added, not in Italy by the cartographer, but in Antwerp by Ortelius himself. Why? I can think of only one good reason for such a small but strange editorial intrusion: it’s a secret sign to the initiated, like a masonic handshake. By setting that little walker on his travels and travails through the unpathed Lande of his roadless world, Ortelius was quietly signalling to his fellow adepts that the entire terrestrial theatre was the setting of life’s great journey. He was declaring it all to be the land named Many-maner-of-walkings.

  And this is the thought that comes to me as I sit there in the Map Room, at the end of this extraordinary day: if there were also a little walker in the Merrymakers it would identify the whole cycle of the year as a Familist document. It would explain why this particular picture was removed and hidden. If I could find a little walker coming down from the cold north lands of March I should have identified it beyond a doubt.

  I should be the man who’d finally solved the mystery of Bruegel. I should have lifted the veil, revealed the hidden figure behind the canvas. I should have found the thunder.

  Another thought strikes: there is a little walker in my picture. I can see him as clearly as if I were standing in front of it in the breakfast-room at Upwood now.

  Check, though! Yes? Somehow!

  And already I’m out on the street and heading for home. The season that my picture shows, it seems to me now, is the moral equinox, the uncertain days we live in, when light and dark in the world are equally balanced. Or perhaps, more accurately, the weeks just after it, at the start of the old New Year, when the long winter nights behind us are beginning to give place at last to the long summer days ahead. Outside the windows of the train the north-western suburbs, too, are full of sunshine, and everywhere there’s the same shimmer of green that’s spreading across the woods in the picture. There’s also a travailler here – me, coming down from the winter air in the high passes, heading for the soft lands of summer, where the ship’s waiting to weigh anchor and set sail for Jerusalem. And what a delight it is to have some great journey to undertake, some great enterprise under way, so that all one’s thoughts and efforts are guided by the onward momentum of it.

  Everything we do has bad as well as good in it, dark as well as light, and that includes the enterprise I’m embarked upon now. But the days are drawing out and the nights are drawing in, and I know now that the good is going to predominate.

  I open the Country Life I bought at St Pancras; not a journal I’ve ever bought before. As the train rolls north, and the land named Many-maner-of-commutings rolls south, I flick through the property ads looking at the price of country estates. For a million pounds, say, we could get something really rather impressive. Somewhere not entirely unlike Upwood, perhaps. Upwood itself, it occurs to me, may come on the market sooner or later, in spite of all my efforts to help Tony out.

  I remember I still haven’t looked up the Giordano. But by this time the exact figures involved in the stupendous deal I’m about to do seem to me of remarkably little importance.

  The Little Walker

  ‘He’s just gone out,’ says Laura. She’s only half-opened the great front door to announce this, but even so it’s a warmer welcome than I’m used to at Upwood. At least she seems to have some idea of who I am. Also, there are no dogs barking and thrusting themselves at me.

  I look at my watch, and make what I hope is a wry face. Kate’s waiting for the results of this little expedition almost as eagerly as I am. I told her all about the Lande named Many-maner-of-wal
kings, and the great question of whether there was a little walker in my picture, as soon as she collected me at the station last night. ‘You’d better take my magnifier with you,’ she said.

  ‘I’ve got to fax off some details about Helen to this friend of mine,’ I explain to Laura. ‘You know he’s found someone who’s interested in it? I just need to have another quiet look at it, and write a few notes.’

  Actually, I knew Tony was out. I knew there’d be no dogs. I saw them all in the Land-Rover as I drove up Taken-on-witt-or-prudence Hill, on my way here to The-power-of-the-devils-assaulting Castle. I could have stopped him and made an appointment to come back later, but even as I put my hand on the hooter it occurred to me that it might be easier with him out of the way. I don’t think Laura will have the patience to wait in the breakfast-room with me as I peer wearisomely at the detail of Helen’s déshabillé through Kate’s magnifier. I’ve also got her tape measure in my pocket, because the very first thing I’m going to do as soon as Laura’s out of the room, even before I turn the magnifier on to the middle distance of the Merrymakers, is the simplest test of all – checking that the panel measures three foot nine by five foot three, like all the others in the cycle.

  She hesitates, then reluctantly opens the door a little wider. I hesitate in my turn, uncertain whether I’m supposed to give her a kiss or not. Almost certainly yes, since I’m now assumed to be on social terms with her. There’s something about the remoteness of her cheek, though, and the emptiness of the house, that makes the kiss die on my lips.

  ‘I’ll have to leave you to get on it with on your own,’ she says. ‘I’ve got things to do.’

  ‘Of course. Just head me in the right direction.’

  ‘I’ll get my keys. He keeps the breakfast-room locked.’

  While she fetches her handbag I look round the hall with a different eye. Yes – a little fresh paint and a lot of fresh money and this house could make a very suitable country retreat for a couple of serious-minded art historians and their growing family … But already she’s back and leading the way through the maze of discreetly shabby, unimproved glooms. She’s wearing not apron and rubber gloves this time, but another of her oversize sweaters, an abundance of emerald that contrasts strikingly with the worn browns all around, and shifts disconcertingly all over, I can’t help noticing, with the lateral movement of her hips as she walks.

  ‘Some mysterious Belgian, I gather,’ she says over her shoulder, as she turns the key in the lock. ‘Which of course Tony thinks is hysterical. I just wonder if he’s for real.’

  She’s holding the door open for me, and for the first time, I realize, she’s looking straight at me. There’s something speculative about her gaze, and it occurs to me that she’s a good deal shrewder than her husband. I have a nasty feeling that she’s on to me. I keep entirely calm, though. Amazingly calm. My tongue simply takes over, as it did when I first discovered my Belgian for Tony.

  ‘What, Mr Jongelinck?’ I say. ‘I think he’s real. Rather splendid house just outside Antwerp, by all accounts.’

  I almost laugh at my own ingenuity. I’ve just discovered something else, too – why Mr Jongelinck keeps such a low profile. It’s nothing as banal as drugs or arms dealing. It’s because his family made their money during the Occupation, just as the original Mr Jongelinck must have done. There were unpleasant hints of slave labour this time round, I think, of Resistance workers betrayed to the Gestapo. I keep this shameful little secret to myself, though. As I should, of course, have done with Mr Jongelinck’s identity.

  ‘Actually,’ I say, even more plausibly, ‘you’d better forget his name. I don’t think I’m supposed to know it.’

  I go over to the fireplace. I can’t help noticing that it’s open; the soot guard has gone. But of course I’m looking at Helen, and she’s still where she was, sagging hugely down at me from above the mantel. It’s still cold in the room, too; I’m rather pleased I wasn’t invited to take my coat off. I get out my pen, and an old V & A requisition form to write on, and peer learnedly through the magnifier at Helen’s left foot. ‘Paint apparently applied with lavatory brush,’ I note down judiciously.

  I glance over my shoulder to see where my picture’s got to, and find that Laura’s still standing there, in spite of her natural impatience and all the things she has to do.

  ‘Thanks,’ I say. ‘I won’t be long. I’ll come and find you as soon as I’ve finished.’

  I turn back to my scholarly labours. Behind my back I hear the sounds of a cigarette being lit.

  ‘I mean,’ she says, ‘is he for real about wanting to buy it?’

  I see. My little flourish of plausible detail was unnecessary.

  ‘Oh, I think so,’ I say. ‘Why shouldn’t he be?’

  ‘I just can’t see why anyone would want to buy that thing. What’s so marvellous about it?’

  What? I’ve not only got to look at it – not only find some fool to buy it – I’ve got to give a tutorial on it? ‘I’m afraid I’m not an expert on Giordano,’ I say. ‘I’m just an intermediary. It’s not my period at all.’

  ‘Please. I’m asking a serious question. I’d really like to know.’

  I step away from it and look at it. We both look at it. Come on, tongue!

  ‘Well,’ says tongue, ‘the composition’s well organized. No? The figures have a certain … plasticity and strength. Rather bold chiaroscuro.’

  Not a bad effort by tongue, in the circumstances. Also, this new interest in art appreciation offers me an opportunity. ‘Where are the other three?’ I ask. I can see the skaters and the cavalrymen where they were before, one propped up against the serving hatch, the other lying beside it. ‘They’re a bit closer to my period. Would you like a brief introductory lecture?’

  But she’s still gazing at Helen. She slowly lets out a mouthful of smoke, absorbed and reflective. Her attitude’s changed. Good God, what did I say? Was it the plasticity or was it the chiaroscuro?

  ‘At least I’m not as fat as her,’ she says.

  Oh, I see. ‘I don’t think she can offer you much competition in any way,’ I reassure her politely. She gives no sign of taking in this little gallantry. Though as it happens it’s perfectly true. She goes on gazing, lost in thought. ‘Which one’s Paris?’ she asks.

  I indicate a muscular figure in a helmet. She gives a little dry laugh.

  ‘He never looked much like that, even when I first met him,’ she says. Tony, presumably. This time I remain diplomatically silent. ‘He’d already got a paunch. He already looked like someone’s uncle. Pretty much what happened, all the same. Suddenly, out of nowhere – wham! Phone calls at all hours. Flowers. Weekends on someone’s yacht. Christopher went mad, of course, but Tony just ignored him, just shoved him out of the way. We’d only been married for a couple of years, too. I felt absolutely sick about it, but I was hypnotized, I was helpless, I didn’t know what had hit me. And all these stories about Upwood! He made it sound like Chats worth or somewhere. Showed it me through the trees one moonlit summer’s night. Couldn’t actually bring me here, of course, till he’d got shot of Margaret. But then – I couldn’t believe it! – she made some kind of muddle with her pills, and there we were.’

  I gaze at Laura, trying to take in the implications of this, which seem to be that Tony either drove his previous wife to suicide or else murdered her. Laura, meanwhile, gazes at the great abduction – wistfully, it seems to me now, seeing her own life in that preposterous scene. The power of art! ‘I suppose what a woman always finds irresistible is feeling that a man’s really determined to have her,’ she says.

  Silence. I should say something, obviously, but I’m so taken aback by this sudden shift into confessional mode that I can’t think what. I’m not sure she notices the lacuna, though. She seems completely absorbed in her own thoughts, and after a while she simply continues where she left off.

  ‘My God, though, what a shock when I did get inside the house! Rain coming through the roof, mouse dr
oppings everywhere. And of course by this time he’d realized – I didn’t have any money! He’d looked at Christopher and me – house in Chelsea, place in Barbados – and Christopher earning practically nothing, of course, poor sweet – and he’d thought all that was me, but it wasn’t, it was a trust. I took Tony down to Somerset to meet Daddy and it was a total disaster. As soon as he heard we’d got married he simply switched off the money.

  ‘I’m not saying the money was the only thing Tony liked about me. He gets a kick out of knocking women off their feet quite regardless, but it’s always over pretty fast, and I just think that if I had got a bit of money, if I had been able to get the estate straightened out for him, then I might have lasted a tiny bit longer. God knows, I’ve tried to adapt, I’ve tried let him go his own way. Where he is at this very moment, for instance, I have not the faintest idea, though I can guess … He’s got this workshop place in the yard, and he says he’s going to be working on things all day, and then when I go to look he’s vanished. He’s working on things all right. But not broken pheasant feeders. He’s always telling me to get a life of my own, and I’ve done my best, believe me, though when I do of course he doesn’t like it.’

  She pulls up her emerald sweater. We’re looking at her rib cage, and the soft, silken underswell of her left breast. Across the bottom of her heart stretches a large, irregular indigo storm cloud surrounded by a greenish nimbus.

  ‘It’s where the handle is,’ she explains. ‘On the fridge.’

  I try to go on looking at it. I try to stop looking at it. I try to do both at once. She goes on gazing at it herself for a long time, either too absorbed in the sight to remember my presence, or else waiting for me to respond to this new advance in our sudden intimacy. I’m still not sure whether I’m merely the inert catalyst for this explosion, or whether I’m by any chance part of the life of her own that she’s attempting to make. If I’m honest with myself, I do feel a slightly sick excitement, a kind of sympathetic creeping in my own flesh. Her left breast, even inside its silk covering, certainly has more effect on me than the naked right breast waving in the wind above our heads. I have another of my sudden convictions – that I should kneel down in front of her and gently kiss the bruise. I don’t act on all my impulses, though, whatever Kate thinks, and I allow this one to die away. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say instead, and the moment passes. She lets the sweater tumble back into place.