Headlong

by Michael Frayn

  ‘Watch out!’ cries Laura, as I back away through the remains of the puddle outside the front door. ‘Mind the …’

  Land-Rover. Parked right in front of the door. The pain in my elbow is blinding, and made no less easy to bear by the sound of Laura’s laughter starting up again behind the closing door, but I wait to massage it until I’m safely concealed inside my own car.

  The only thing that makes the burden of anxieties and indignities swirling round inside my head bearable is the anticipation of sharing them with Kate. I’m in such a hurry to get back to her that I’m out of the drive of The-power-of-the-devils-assaulting Castle and halfway down Taken-on-witt-or-prudence Hill before it occurs to me that the picture was probably still there inside the Land-Rover when I walked into it. One glance through the window and I might have seen the little walker.

  The spring sunshine comes and goes as I drive down the hill, lighting our quiet valley with hope and plunging it into despair as bewilderingly often as my own moods change in the shifting circumstances of my quest. It fades as I make the turn into our track, and I bump along in gloom and anguish. But then, as I make the second turn beyond the elders, a flood of sunshine blesses our cottage with the glowing colours of a Book of Hours. The front door’s as green as the new season, the daffodils we planted around it last autumn as yellow as the sun, the blossom fallen from the crab-apple trees as white as the sun’s innocent light, Tilda’s carry-cot on the stump of the old maple tree as blue as a distant sea. And in the foreground – my own fat peasant, legs planted wide in the freshly turned brown soil, bending to her emblematic planting and sowing, the traditional April labours. She straightens up at the sight of the car, arching her back against the ache of standing upright, and brushing a loose strand of hair out of her eyes with the back of her muddy hand, as all the generations of toiling women have done since first they bent to labour, then smiles as only Kate can.

  ‘Well,’ I begin as I jump out of the car, ‘an eventful morning!’ There’s so much to tell her that I don’t know what to say first. All I know, at the sight of her smiling there, is that the anxiety and uncertainty will fade from the story as I tell it, and that all will once again be well. We lean towards each other, touching our extended lips together like the couple in my picture, in our own simple, earthy echo of the gentry’s pleasures.

  The first thing that comes into my head to tell her is the last one that happened – my belated discovery that Tony Churt’s using me to cheat Inland Revenue. But even as I open my mouth, it occurs to me that this may merely evoke Kate’s alarm, and introduce yet another element of uncertainty into the situation, since I haven’t yet worked out quite what I’m going to do about it. I go back to the event that immediately preceded this one – my managing to reduce Laura once again to helpless laughter. Then I remember the ridiculous misunderstanding of my intentions that evoked it … and my own laughter … and I realize I can’t now recall exactly how the misunderstanding arose, or easily explain why I was laughing as well.

  Kate goes straight to the point, though, as usual. ‘So do you think you saw anything?’ she asks.

  ‘I didn’t see anything at all!’ I cry, finding immediate relief, once again, in being able to share everything with her. ‘I couldn’t! It wasn’t there! He’d taken it away to show it to someone! Some art expert! But who? And what did they tell him? What did they think? Who could it have been? He wouldn’t say! Perhaps he was lying … I don’t know what he’s up to … What art experts are there living round here?’

  She laughs. Which is of course what he did, and at once my heart contracts, because what she means is what he meant – that there is someone. Someone obvious. Someone so eminent that I should know about him.

  ‘What?’ I say. ‘Who? You mean someone like us? Someone with a cottage? Someone you know?’

  And now it comes back to me. There’s some colleague of hers at the Hamlish who has a place somewhere near here. She’s always threatening to invite him over.

  ‘Your friend!’ I say. ‘Over at wherever it is! What’s his speciality? What’s his period?’

  Kate frowns. ‘You mean John Quiss? Oh, I see. Well, French eighteenth century …’

  But he writes about European art in general – I remember now – he’s one of those tiresome people who are famous for knowing everything, and who even more tiresomely probably do. My heart contracts still further. There’s no possibility that John Quiss can have seen that picture and failed to recognize it.

  ‘It’s the middle of the week,’ says Kate. ‘He’ll be in town. Anyway, I didn’t mean him.’

  ‘Someone else? Round here?’

  ‘Of course. You.’

  Me? What’s she talking about?

  ‘He brought it here,’ she says.

  ‘Brought it here?’ I repeat stupidly, gazing round even more stupidly, as if some last confirming trace of it might be lingering in the air.

  ‘He wanted you to look at it.’

  ‘But …’ I can’t find words to express my multiple bafflement, and my outrage at the exquisite unfairness of events. All the adventures I’ve undertaken to get a sight of it were in vain – because the idiot had taken it away to show to me!

  ‘But I wasn’t here!’ I manage finally. ‘I was there!’

  ‘I told him. Didn’t he catch you? There’s what looks like a patch of something on the surface. He’d got it into his head that there might be a signature underneath it. You mean – you haven’t seen it?’

  I sit down on the broken kitchen chair that’s waiting in the garden until we have a bonfire. I put my head in my hands and groan. And I still can’t make sense of what’s happened!

  ‘But he said he had showed it to someone!’ I cry. ‘He said he’d got advice from an expert!’

  ‘I suppose he meant me.’

  I take my head out of my hands.

  ‘You?’

  ‘Well, you weren’t here. Don’t worry. I told him not to touch it.’

  ‘He showed it to you? You’ve seen it?’

  ‘It was a rather cursory glance. I didn’t like to demonstrate too much interest.’

  The first thing I feel, I have to confess, is a stab of jealousy. Up to now I was the sole interpreter of the picture, the only priest admitted to its mysteries. Now a second priest has arrived in the sanctuary. Not an acolyte, introduced and initiated by myself, but one of equal or superior standing, who’s found her own way in independently of me.

  Now she has seen it, though, I want to ask her a thousand questions. The only one that emerges is: ‘He brought it into the house?’ Ridiculous, I know – but I was the one who was going to carry it in triumph into our cottage!

  ‘No, I was working out here. He just untied the back of his Land-Rover and slid it out a bit.’

  Jealousy gives way to curiosity. What did she see? What did she think? And instantly curiosity gives way in its turn to uneasiness. The great advantage that I had over her in the debate, the circumstance that disqualified all her doubts about the picture’s authenticity, was that I’d seen it and she hadn’t. This advantage has abruptly vanished. Her opinion’s now at least as good a mine. And no, I don’t want to know what she saw, I don’t what to know what she thought! I already know what it was: nothing that I’d have liked her to see, not what I need her to have thought.

  I have to know, though, whether I want to or not. I wait. I can see she’s going to take her time.

  ‘I had a look at the patch in the corner,’ she says. ‘I don’t know what it is – it could be anything. Dirt. Ink, even. I think he’s right, though – it’s on top of the varnish. He could probably take a damp rag to it without doing any harm. I thought you might not want the signature on display, though.’

  Good God! I hadn’t even thought that he might have been just about to reveal the word ‘Bruegel’ to the world!

  She goes over and takes a look at Tilda. I wait.

  ‘I couldn’t really see any little walker,’ she says when she comes back. �
��Though the varnish is considerably darkened and there’s quite a lot of cracking and paint loss, so some of the detail is rather difficult to make out.’

  And of course at once I’m irritated. She should have seen a little walker. She didn’t see a little walker because she was looking in the wrong places, in the wrong spirit. And she thought I might be frightened to have a signature revealed, I realize, not because it would be Bruegel’s but because it wouldn’t be. I now absolutely do not wish to hear anything else she has to say about the picture.

  ‘I can’t really read the iconography as religious at all,’ she says nonetheless. ‘It’s pretty much in the standard pastoral convention, isn’t it?’ The very slightly patronizing, reductive tone of this judgement puts my back up even further. I know what prompts it. Her territory’s threatened. She’s the expert on religious iconography; she’s not going to have a bold new extension of the vocabulary foisted upon her by some amateur like myself.

  ‘There’s something a bit worrying about that swimming party, too,’ she says. ‘I’ve checked – there really are no examples in the calendars of swimming as an activity for any of the spring months.’

  I listen politely. What I’m thinking, though, is that there is now an example of swimming in spring, and that I’m just about to announce it to the world. It’s a further hint, like the courting peasants, that the picture’s the work of a painter who was great enough to bend the conventions rather than bend beneath them.

  She stoops and resumes her planting. I watch her in amazement. Is that the end of her assessment? This is breathtaking. I thought we were in this together now! She knows, she must know, that what I really want to hear – yes, still, in spite of all my reservations about her judgementis what she thought of the picture. Does she accept that I’m right, does she support me? I suppose her silence makes her assessment clear enough. I respect her unbudgeable honesty. Of course I do. But her way of expressing it I find intolerable. This performance of delicacy, of tiptoeing around my idiotic, amateurish enthusiasms, is even more hurtful than open dismissal. It suggests that she’s dealing with a child.

  It also makes it very difficult to know where we go from here. Do I humbly have to ask her to be explicit? Or do we simply drop the subject and never refer to it again?

  We’re back to where we were before the great row. The compromise we patched up then, that she’d pretend to trust my judgement because she’d had no opportunity to exercise her own, has come unravelled.

  What suddenly blinds me with irritation now, for some reason, is how much longer she had than I did to study the picture, and what poor use she made of the time.

  ‘So you’ve been gazing at the thing all morning?’ I say. She glances up at me, hearing the displeasure in my tone.

  ‘No, for a few minutes.’

  For a few minutes? But I passed Tony Churt heading in this direction while I was on my way to Upwood …

  ‘What?’ says Kate, straightening up completely again, knowing there’s trouble in the air. She arches her back again, and brushes the hair away from her brow. This time, though, I feel I’ve seen the performance once too often.

  ‘You really don’t have to worry,’ she says. ‘I was very offhand about it. Most of the time we were simply chatting.’

  Chatting? Kate doesn’t chat. She can’t chat. And with Tony Churt? For two hours?

  ‘He says that as far as he’s concerned we’re all countrymen together.’ She laughs. ‘He really is the most awful person!’

  In that case, why’s she laughing? Perhaps this is his approach to all the women Laura says he knocks off their feet. He’s so awful he makes them laugh. The famous aphrodisiac.

  ‘Long chat,’ I say ridiculously, looking at my watch.

  ‘No, he wouldn’t stay. He said he was going back to catch you.’

  ‘Fitting in another little rendezvous on the way, evidently,’ I suggest, even more ridiculously. ‘Laura says he’s a great womanizer.’

  Kate frowns, puzzled, still pretending to be uncertain what her offence is. ‘Are you warning me?’ she says. ‘Or trying to make me jealous?’

  I let this pass. She knows perfectly well what I’m upset about.

  ‘Quite a character, your new pal,’ I say sourly. ‘He beats his wife. With the refrigerator.’

  The expression on Kate’s face suggests that she find this no more convincing than my attribution of the picture.

  ‘Or else he beats the refrigerator with his wife,’ I concede. ‘If so, she’s not really quite up to the work. She showed me the bruises.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Where?’ It occurs to me that Kate is jumping to conclusions – that she thinks we retired to Laura’s bedroom to view the evidence. ‘In the breakfast-room,’ I explain patiently. ‘While I was looking at the Giordano.’

  ‘I mean, where were the bruises?’

  Oh, where were the bruises. With lightning discretion, I shift them to Laura’s neck … to her upper arm … and back to their rightful place, since there’s no earthly reason for them not to be there.

  ‘On her ribs,’ I say flatly.

  But perhaps I hesitated a few microseconds too many, because for another microsecond or two Kate looks at me. If I thought her chat with Tony went on for a disturbingly long time, I realize, then she must presumably think the same about my examination of Laura’s ribs. All she says, though, is, ‘Poor woman,’ and goes back to work.

  It’s Kate, as always, who makes the first move towards reconciliation. ‘John Quiss,’ she says, as we get the lunch together. ‘That’s rather a good idea. If you could tell Tony Churt that you wanted to examine the mark in the corner, and get the picture down here for the day, I could invite John over, and he could have a look at it without knowing where it came from.’

  She’s demonstrating that she’s still on my side, still trying to help me. She’s showing that she’s prepared to descend to a certain amount of deception for my sake. She’s even giving me all the credit for the idea. Unfortunately, what she’s also making absolutely clear once again is that she doesn’t believe me. The possibility that her colleague might agree with me has not for one second crossed her mind. If it had, her imagination would presumably have moved on to the later stages of the conversation, after he’s said: ‘Yes, I’m pretty sure that this is one of the most famous missing masterpieces in the world that you’ve got propped up on the draining board in your kitchen’ – and then wanders off without any inquiry about how it happened to get there, and without mentioning this odd little detail of our domestic arrangements to anyone else.

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ I say. I smile. She smiles.

  I’m not sure I didn’t prefer open warfare.

  As the day wears on, and Kate and I sit working in silence at opposite ends of the kitchen table, I feel the balance of power in this uneasy alliance of ours begin to shift. I’ve lost the one advantage I had, my exclusive acquaintance with the picture. It’s as if the table were a seesaw, and Kate were rising above me, right and victorious, and I were sinking, defeated and wrong.

  My first thought is to go straight back up the hill and look at the picture again for myself. I’m sure I’ll find my little walker in it somewhere. I can perfectly well go back yet again without seeming to be too interested. All I have to say to Tony is: ‘Kate said you wanted me to look at this patch you’ve found …’ But then supposing it’s not Tony I’m saying this to? Supposing he’s out, and it’s Laura? I can see the little mocking smile starting on her face again …

  I feel the terrible exhaustion that comes with having some great enterprise under way, of being on some great journey through unpathed lands, across unbridged rivers. I’m overwhelmed by the perpetual preoccupation, the perpetual anxiety, the perpetual load of decisions and judgements to be made, swaying and teetering like the piled chairs and china on the tightrope walker’s head.

  And when I look at Kate, bent over her books at the other end of the table, absorbed and professional, my defian
t conviction fades. Her observation’s scrupulous, her objectivity unshakeable. I don’t need to see the picture again. If Kate says there’s no little walker, then there’s no little walker.

  I bend over my own books. And now I reread my photocopy of Stein-Schneider’s article, and my transcriptions from Terra pacis, all the supposed links between Bruegel’s pictures and the Familist ideas begin to fall to pieces in front of my eyes. The narrow mountain defile in The Conversion of Saul, says Stein-Schneider, is the Strait Gate of Righteousness through which the soul must pass. Yet out of all the great army of people in the picture, almost the only one who’s not going through the Strait Gate of Righteousness is Saul himself, since he’s been struck down by divine illumination just short of it. Everyone in the Tower of Babel, according to the pastor, is ‘the prisoner of a strange light.’ But there’s nothing strange, so far as I can see, about the light in either of Bruegel’s pictures of it.

  The ‘deceptive hills’ in Haymaking aren’t deceptive in any way that I can detect. The ‘treasure hid in a field’ of Matthew 13:44, which represents the Kingdom of Heaven, and which is supposed to be illustrated in The Corn Harvest, remains as hidden from me as Matthew said it was. The ‘lack of food’ shown in The Hunters in the Snow is evidently not preventing the villagers enjoying winter sports, or roasting a pig or whatever it is in front of the inn.

  All the drunken and lubricious peasants in Bruegel’s pictures, says Stein-Schneider, are caricatures of the sexual life so frowned upon by Niclaes. But Bruegel and his wife managed to produce children by one means or another – and in Antwerp earlier, if we’re to believe van Mander, during the years when Bruegel was in contact with the Familists, he was living in sin with a servant girl. Presumably his peasants are the people the Travailler through the wildernessed lands sees besett with greevous laboure, and are named Striken-in-Heart, Cumbered-in-Mynde, Wofulnes, Sorow-fulnes, Anguish, Fear, Dismayednes, Perplexetee, Uncomfortablnes, Undelytfulnes, Heavymyndednes, Many-maner-of-thoughts, Discourage … I turn back to the cycle of the year. If those three girls striding along with the hay-rakes in June are poor Striken-in-Heart and Cumbered-in-Mynde and Wofulnes, then I can only say that they’re putting a pretty good face on it; and if that’s Mrs Sorow-fulnes and her friends picnicking in the July shade of the cornfield, then the sunshine and the prospect of lunch must have distracted them for a moment from their troubles. And what about my Merrymakers? In the spring sunshine, as I recall it, Dismayednes and Perplexetee are dancing to the music of Uncomfortablnes with surprising abandon. And if the young woman kissing Undelytfulnes in the bushes is by any chance Many-maner-of-thoughts, then I suspect that she has – well, yes – many manner of thoughts in her head, not all of them totally despairing, and that for a moment, at any rate, she finds poor old Undelytfulness somwhat delytfull, like the wicked hills around them.