Headlong

by Michael Frayn

  ‘Poor Tony,’ she says. ‘He’s such a fool. He gets everything wrong. His sons won’t speak to him. And he always ends up cheating himself. All this ridiculous business with you just to avoid inheritance tax.’

  Inheritance tax? I gaze at her, even more obviously disconcerted than I was by the bruise.

  ‘Well, of course,’ she says. ‘She only gave it to him when she was on her deathbed. It’s got to be at least three years before you die. Otherwise you pay forty per cent. He says it was three years before – she just didn’t write anything down. Of course she didn’t – no one in that family ever did anything as simple and obvious as writing things down. She told him she wanted him to have it. He says. But she didn’t, she can’t have done, because they didn’t speak to each other for thirty years, they didn’t see each other. No one speaks to anyone in that family! He only went when she was dying. First time in thirty years. His own mother!’

  Of course. Obviously. It’s not just four and half per cent commission he’s trying to save; it’s forty per cent tax. I should have thought of it. It seems ridiculous in these surroundings, where everything’s been inherited in one way or another, but I didn’t think of it because inheritance isn’t part of my world. Never in my life have I either bequeathed or inherited anything except my genes. Never in my life, for that matter, have I attempted to avoid paying tax.

  I plainly look as stupid as I feel. ‘He didn’t tell you?’ she says. ‘No, of course he didn’t. Which is wonderfully clever, because if you don’t know what’s going on and you make a mess of it, he’ll end up with some whacking great fine and be worse off than ever.’

  So will I, of course. So will I.

  I snatch at a faint shred of hope. ‘The other three pictures, though …?’ I suggest.

  ‘Forty per cent. They all came back in the Land-Rover. Though what he means about her giving them to him I don’t know. She couldn’t speak to anyone by that time – she couldn’t move! Anyway, he hitched up the trailer when he went to see her, so he must have been clairvoyant.’

  I feel panic closing over me. I just want to get out of the house, away from these terrible people and a way of life in which I’m completely out of my depth. I move blindly towards the door.

  ‘Oh,’ says Laura in surprise. ‘Have you finished? You’ve found out everything you wanted to know?’

  ‘I think so, thank you.’

  She stubs out her cigarette. Rather reluctantly, it seems to me. But half in and half out of the door I take a hold of myself and make one last attempt at the real business of the day.

  ‘I’m supposed to be selling the other three for him as well,’ I say, with an attempt at ruefulness which is now beginning to demand heroic efforts. ‘But I can only see two of them.’

  ‘Yes, what happened to that one in the fireplace …?’ she says. She looks vaguely around the room. ‘Oh, I think he took it out to his workshop. Something about cleaning it up a bit.’

  I get into my car and start the engine, still in shock, unable to think because my mind’s totally occupied by a huge and shapeless mass of panic, through which all I can see is the agonizing image of the picture, left propped up on some workbench while the paint stripper takes effect.

  I look back at the house. The front door has closed. I turn off the engine again and get out of the car. What am I going to do? I’ve no idea. I find that my feet are taking me round the side of the house, past the rusting remains of the cannibalized tractor, into the yard. I suppose I’m going to look for the workshop. And do what? I can’t imagine. Wash the paint stripper off. Put my arms around the picture. Protect it. It’s the irony that cuts at me. All he has to do, for heaven’s sake, is nothing! If he just keeps his hands off it, I’ll get him £20,000 for it!

  I stand still for a moment and control my panic.

  He won’t have put paint stripper on it. Or oven cleaner or sheep dip or anything else. I understand that perfectly well. Whatever he means by cleaning it up, he’s not a fool, he’s perfectly used to handling pictures, and his weakness is for entrusting them to others, not for meddling with them himself. What I’m going to do is simply to seize the chance to look at it again before he puts the rust remover on …

  Never mind the rust remover. But I am going to measure it and look at it. This is what I came for, after all. Check the size and find the little walker, before a flying splash of Nitromors expunges him and the answer to the problem for ever … No, no. No panic.

  There are a number of stables and outhouses in the yard, but I find the workshop quite easily; it’s the only door that hasn’t collapsed on its hinges, or started disappearing behind the first growth of spring grass. There’s a security fastening – a length of pink baler twine, of course – but it’s dangling idly. The door gives slightly under my knuckles when I tap on it, and judders open as soon as I push. Inside is a bench with a muddle of tools on it and the guts of various pieces of household equipment – a tangle of pipes and wires, of heavy electric armatures, and miniature cityscapes of electronic components out of television sets or computers, all of them looking unlikely to have water or electricity flowing through them ever again. A breath of warm paraffin fumes hangs in the air; he was obviously working in here before he went out this morning.

  In the gap beside the bench are jammed various offcuts of wood and synthetic boarding, collapsed cardboard boxes and empty picture-frames. Picture frames? Curious … And mixed in with the paraffin fumes, it occurs to me, is another familiar smell. I can’t quite place it. It has agreeable associations, but in here, for some reason, it makes me feel uneasy …

  And then, with a sudden sense of foreboding, of the ground disappearing under my feet, I realize what it is. Linseed oil.

  Beyond the workbench is another door. I push it open. The smell of linseed oil becomes stronger. I’m in another little room with another workbench. But on this one is a different sort of confusion. I’m looking at a chaotic battlefield of muddy colours – splashes and solidified lumps of paint, with scrubby thickets of brushes in pots, filthy rags and the broken corpses of old tubes of paint …

  He painted it. The picture – the Merrymakers. He forged it. The Giordano isn’t the bait that I’m using to make a fool of him; it’s the bait that he’s using to make a fool of me.

  Who whom? The fundamental question, as Lenin said. I thought it was I him. It wasn’t. It was he me.

  The whole thing was a charade from first to last. The implausible appeal for my help, the pantomime of artistic innocence and financial dishonesty, the trail of pictures leading me into the trap. It’s a classic sting! It was using my own dishonesty to lure me on, my own vanity to blind me.

  The whole world has become the negative of itself. All the shining whites have become black, all the blacks transparent white. The picture itself has turned inside out. Everything that I thought was good about it now seems a manifest weakness, all the signs of its authenticity proof of its falsity. All my secret cleverness has turned into public foolishness, my absolute conviction into universal distrust. Yes, when I think of that flash of certainty in the moment that I first saw it, when I think how I’ve run from library to library, from step to step in the identification, following the false clues that my supposed victim has left for me, winding myself deeper and deeper into self-deception at every turn, I feel the hot burn of shame in my flesh.

  Against the back of the bench several pieces of board are propped, with still-lifes and landscapes on them in various stages of completion. My eye darts from one to another, searching for the Merrymakers. None of them is it. None of them is even remotely similar. They’re all far too small, for a start. And far, far too … what? What’s the word I want?

  Far too clumsy. Far too amateurish. Far too inept. The man can’t paint at all!

  Slowly I take a hold on reality and come to my senses. I was having an attack of moral panic. Tony Churt couldn’t forge his own signature, let alone a sixteenth-century panel painting. He can’t maintain the landscape God
gave him, let alone create a completely new one. He could no more execute a confidence trick upon someone else than he can shave without cutting himself.

  The colours of the world gradually return to something more like normal, the whites to dark greys, the blacks to lighter ones.

  There’s something familiar about the paintings, I realize. I remember the pictures I saw in the living-room that first evening. Yes; their provenance wasn’t the local Women’s Institute, as I’d supposed. They were painted by the master of the house himself. This is what he’s up to – not forging Bruegels but replacing the family’s Guardis and Tiepolos with authentic new Churts.

  I almost laugh aloud. But then I feel a little embarrassed to have discovered this secret weakness of his. In all our discussions of paintings and painters he never mentioned being a painter himself. Not the slightest interest in looking at the efforts of others in the field, and yet he has some ridiculous yearning to produce the stuff himself. How soft people are inside their hard shells! I think about him sitting out here with the oil heater going and his reading glasses on the end of his nose, cack-handedly daubing his heart out, trying to paint his way out of all his personal and financial problems, and I feel … yes, embarrassed, as if I’d seen him on the lavatory.

  Slightly ashamed of myself now, I quietly close the inner and outer doors and go back to the car. I start the engine once again. Then once again I turn it off. So where is the picture? What is he doing with it? I can’t get the smell of the linseed oil out of my nostrils. He’s not … I don’t know … retouching it somehow?

  I get out of the car again, go back to the great front door, and crash the heavy knocker up and down, though what I’m going to say I’m still not sure. It occurs to me as I wait that if Laura’s been looking out of the window during the past twenty minutes and following my various changes of direction, she’ll have a strange impression of my state of mind.

  I don’t think she can have been watching, though; she seems surprised to see me.

  ‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘I’ve just been reflecting on your parting remark.’

  She waits. Or perhaps it’s not exactly surprise that her manner suggests. Thoughtfulness might be closer to it.

  ‘About cleaning the picture. I suddenly started to get a bit worried.’

  ‘How far did you get?’ she says.

  ‘How far did I …? Oh – not far. Nowhere, in fact. I’ve been sitting in the car thinking about it.’

  She gives a very slight smile. Her eyes flick briefly past me to see if there’s anyone coming up the drive. Then she holds the door open for me. I walk in, a little baffled.

  ‘I just wanted to ask you to give him a message …’

  ‘We’ll find something to write on,’ she says. She closes the door behind me and leads the way into the kitchen.

  ‘Just tell him I don’t think it would be a good idea …’

  ‘Sit down. I’ll make us some coffee.’

  I sit down at the bare wooden table, not knowing quite what else to do. It seems a bit late in the day to be offering me coffee. In any case, she’s apparently already forgotten about it again. As also about the writing materials. She’s lighting another cigarette and leaning back against the rail in front of the Aga, watching me through the smoke.

  ‘Pictures are very easily damaged,’ I say. ‘It doesn’t matter about dirty varnish. A buyer might even find it gave the picture an added authenticity.’

  Her eyebrows have risen by a millimetre or two. I remember when I’ve seen that look on her face before – when I told her about nominalism, about iconography and iconology. What she’s doing is struggling not to laugh.

  ‘And that’s what you’ve been thinking about out there in the car for the past twenty minutes?’ she says. ‘Wow.’

  At this, of course, I see what’s got into her head. And yes, now I think about it, I realize that my reappearance must seem a little suggestive. The message I’ve come back to deliver, so desperately cogent to me, must sound to her like the lamest excuse ever invented by a timid seducer. I realize yet again how easy it is to misread everything in front of one’s eyes. At once I’m paralysed. I can’t think how to correct her misapprehension without discourtesy. I suppose I should simply get to my feet and go. But this will look even more absurd. I stay sitting, unable to formulate any words. This, evidently, is the absurdest option of all, because suddenly she loses her battle to control the head of laughter building up inside her. It comes fountaining out like oil from a blown well.

  I’ve piled Erwin on Panofsky again.

  ‘Sorry,’ she manages. ‘It’s just … everything …’

  She turns her head aside so as not to go on seeing me and reinfecting herself. It doesn’t seem to help, though. She puts a hand in front of her face to conceal her agony.

  And somehow I start laughing, too. She stands leaning against the Aga and laughing. I sit at the table laughing. God knows what I’m laughing at. Everything, too, I suppose. Myself. Her. Life. Nothing at all.

  Where we go from here I can’t begin to imagine. Joint suffocation, possibly. Two corpses without a mark on them. Forensic experts baffled. But help’s at hand. Her laughter dies away, and she turns her head towards the door, listening. There’s the sound of heavy bodies thumping against woodwork, and paws scrabbling on stone. The door crashes open, and in bursts the familiar boiling, smelly mudslide of dog. My own laughter, too, departs.

  ‘Dead cow in Long Meadow …’ Tony’s saying as he follows them, and then stops in the doorway at the sight of me. His glance flicks to Laura for an instant, and then back to me. Laura continues to lean against the Aga and smoke. I struggle to my feet, encumbered by the dogs – which have now, I notice, accepted me as so much a part of the household as not to need even a preliminary barking at before licking and trouser-exploration can begin.

  Tony comes on into the room and throws his cap down on the table. ‘I don’t know what that portends,’ he concludes.

  ‘Vet’s bills, I imagine,’ says Laura. ‘Martin says you’re not to try cleaning that picture.’

  ‘What picture?’

  ‘The one in the fireplace. The one you took away.’

  He turns to me in surprise.

  ‘Cleaning it?’ he says. ‘What’s all this?’

  ‘I just looked in to get my Belgian some details of Helen,’ I explain, ‘and Laura said …’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake! Don’t take any notice of her. She doesn’t know what she’s talking about.’

  ‘But you told me …’ begins Laura.

  ‘I said I was going to get some advice about it. I did. I got some advice. That’s what I’ve been doing this morning.’

  He looks at me and makes a face that seems intended to express amusement at knowing something that I don’t, perhaps also at the alarm I’m failing to conceal. He’s been out getting advice about the Merrymakers? From whom?

  ‘You look worried,’ he says.

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘I don’t know why you should be losing sleep over the bloody thing. You said it was another dud.’

  That is of course not what I said, but I let it pass, because any attempt at an explanation might suggest more interest still.

  ‘All I was going to do was to get a bit of gunge off the corner. Thought there might be a signature hiding away there.’

  Gunge? Signature? What’s all this?

  ‘Anyway, set your mind at rest,’ he says. ‘I took it to an expert. Expert says leave the gunge on. So on the gunge stays. The caustic soda goes back in the cupboard. Joking, joking.’

  But I’m no longer worrying about the cleaning arrangements. I haven’t time to – my mind’s moved on to the expert who gave him the good advice. He took it to him? Showed it to him? Is that’s where it’s been this morning – out in the Land-Rover with Tony and the dogs? Being examined by an expert? Being examined by what expert?

  I manage to raise an eyebrow, so far as I can tell, in passing surprise. ‘I didn’t know there w
ere any art experts round here,’ I say, with passing interest.

  He laughs. ‘Certainly there are.’

  ‘Anyone I’d know?’

  He laughs again. Art’s providing us all with a great deal of life-enhancing mirth this morning. ‘You’ll find out,’ he says.

  I get to my feet, and start making my second stunned exit of the day from Upwood.

  ‘Poor Martin didn’t realize you were trying to avoid paying tax on Helen,’ says Laura, as she follows Tony and me to the front door.

  ‘Avoid paying tax?’ says Tony. ‘What do you mean? What nonsense have you been feeding him now? There’s no question of tax! Because (a) my mother told me donkey’s years ago that she wanted me to have it, and (b) it didn’t matter whether she told me or not, because it wasn’t hers, it was mine anyway. Not to mention (c), that you’re getting cash for it, so no one’s ever going to hear about it. At least I assume you’re getting cash for it. Good God – you weren’t thinking of putting this through your books, were you? You’d have to pay gains tax on it yourself!’

  I don’t think I can manage any reply to this. I just smile and wave my hand in a way that means – I don’t know what. I’m past knowing what I mean by anything.

  ‘Just don’t stir the buggers up!’ he says. ‘I certainly don’t want to start paying the government for the privilege of keeping my own possessions! Look – serious word. I know all you lot are socialists, and that’s fine by me. No business of mine. Keep it for London, though. All right? We’re in the country here, and what we are in the country is countrymen. Simple countrymen. Neighbours. We all try to give each other a helping hand.’