Headlong

by Michael Frayn

  The front door stands welcomingly open. I step into the hall. ‘Hello,’ I shout humorously. ‘Anyone at home?’

  ‘Only me,’ says Laura, emerging from the kitchen. ‘How did you guess? Watching the house?’

  No words frame themselves.

  ‘Don’t take your boots off, though,’ she says. ‘You can help me carry all the stuff in first – I’ve just done my weekly stint at Kwik Save. Don’t I get a kiss?’

  A kiss, certainly, yes, of course. I make some kind of disjointed gesture in the direction of her cheek.

  She laughs. ‘Don’t worry,’ she says. ‘I dropped him off at the station. He’s going to be in London all day. Here – three dozen eggs. Watch what you’re doing.’

  ‘Chuck your boots in the hall,’ says Laura, when we’ve carried in substantial sections of several frozen animals.

  I come back into the kitchen in my socks and make the speech I prepared for Tony. ‘I gather he wants me to look at this patch of his.’

  She doesn’t reply. She hands me a huge ancestral carving knife and indicates one of the cardboard cases we’ve carried in. ‘Get that open. I’ll find a lemon.’

  Inside the case are a dozen bottles of gin. She takes one out and cracks the lid open. ‘Tony’s going to go ballistic when he sees what I’ve bought,’ she says, pouring two half-tumblers. ‘But I’m sick of pheasant and I’m sicker still of that brown muck he puts in the decanter.’ She hands me the tumbler. Gin is the drink I hate most in the world, and there’s more gin in this one glass than I’ve drunk in my entire life so far. ‘Don’t want tonic, do you? Don’t say yes, because I forgot to get any.’

  She lights a cigarette and leans back against the rail of the range, as she did before. She’s not wearing one of her amazing sweaters today but a man’s shirt, several sizes too big, with rather formal blue stripes and a tail that hangs outside her trousers. One of Tony’s, perhaps, and on him, I imagine, not very remarkable. On her, though … I look away into the depths of my gin.

  She raises her glass. ‘Well, here we go again,’ she says. ‘Perhaps we’ll get a bit further this time.’

  Oh, my God. This is even worse than I’d feared.

  ‘I gather’, I repeat pathetically, ‘that he wants me to look at the patch. Tony does. Kate said. This patch that he’s found. He wants me to look at it.’

  It sounds incoherent. It sounds desperate. Worse, it sounds suspiciously insistent. What’s happened to all my new-found skills as a hustler?

  ‘Patch?’ repeats Laura, baffled. ‘Which patch? This patch?’

  She’s gazing at a livid bulge on the ceiling where water seems to be coming through. ‘Look at any patches you like,’ she says. ‘The whole bloody house is patches. Brown patches, green patches. Dry rot, wet rot. Black fungus, blue fungus. Mushrooms, toadstools. Help yourself.’

  ‘No, no,’ I say stiffly, making myself more ridiculous by the second. ‘On the picture. In the corner of the picture.’

  She looks at me, and tilts her head disbelievingly.

  ‘You’re not trying to get us back in that breakfast-room?’ she says. ‘How about the game larder? Might be a bit warmer. Or the local morgue?’

  I realize that we’re at cross purposes.

  ‘Not Helen,’ I say. ‘The other one. Or is that back in the breakfast-room, too?’

  She frowns. I’ve been so successful in concealing my interest in it that she’s forgotten about it once again. The trouble is, I can’t think how to refer to it. I can’t call it ‘the Merrymakers’. Not in public. I want to say ‘the Bruegel’. No other way of describing it presents itself – it’s Bruegelness is the only quality I can bring to mind. What’s wrong with my tongue today? All its glib and flashing silver has turned to base metal. ‘The one he was going to clean,’ I manage finally.

  ‘Oh, right,’ she says. She laughs. ‘The one that was in the fireplace. That’s the one you want to see?’

  ‘I don’t want to see it,’ I say, ‘but there’s apparently a patch in the corner …’

  ‘Oh, the thing in the corner.’ She laughs again. ‘Well, that’s different. I’ll be delighted to show you that one. Bring your glass. And the bottle. You’re not going to believe this.’

  She leads the way out into the hall, glass and cigarette in hand. I follow, with glass and bottle, already apprehensively beginning to believe what she tells me I’m not going to. And, yes, up the great staircase we go, the stripes on the striped shirt-tail swaying vertiginously left and right in front of my eyes at each step. I tear my eyes away as we reach the landing, and stop to inspect the picture I’d noticed before from below, too small to be made out, hanging in the place of honour occupied when Tony was a boy by the great Helen. It’s not that I find it more interesting than the shirt-tail. I’m simply trying to demonstrate my lack of any overmastering sense of urgency in regard to the picture we’re going to see. Or its whereabouts.

  My interest contracts even further as I look. English, eighteenth century, a dog of some sort. Of some brown sort, about the same colour as the two now lying in the hall below and most of their master’s clothes and furnishings. It’s standing in a brown landscape, with various dead brown birds on the brown ground in front of it. I get the impression that everything was even browner in the eighteenth century than it is now.

  ‘That’s the one picture he’ll never sell,’ says Laura, coming back to see what’s holding me up. ‘I think it actually does belong to him. Apparently it reminds him of the first dog he ever owned. If the house burned down this is what he’d grab. This and his Purdey.’

  I offer up a brief prayer that the wiring in the house is in better condition than the crumbling fabric that encloses it, then turn and follow the shifting stripes of the shirt-tail up the last few stairs.

  And there it is.

  Propped up, in a good natural light from the window, amid a confusion of socks, bills and sporting cartridges on top of the dressing table, facing the unmade bed.

  Shimmering spring leaves – dancing peasants – broken-toothed crags – distant sea … My first glimpse of them since the evening when the whole spiralling madness began. At last!

  What am I thinking? I don’t know. Nothing much, this time. Disappointment, then? Not really. I stand in front of it, glass of gin in hand, running my eye over it this way, that way, unable to take in more than I did before, and feeling …

  Feeling Laura’s arm, linked through mine as she stands gazing at the picture herself.

  ‘God knows why he’s brought it up here,’ she says. ‘I think he’s rather taken with it. Like the dog. Reminds him of looking out over his precious estate.’

  She puts the cigarette back to her lips with her free hand, then stops.

  ‘You don’t like me smoking, do you?’ she says.

  I make the resigned gesture that non-smokers usually make when smokers ask if they mind, that’s always taken to mean they don’t but privately means they do.

  ‘I know you hate it. So does Tony. That’s probably why I do it. I’ll put it out.’ She looks round the room. ‘Only no ashtray, of course. He won’t have ashtrays in the bedroom.’

  She suddenly darts towards the dressing table. The insane idea flashes into my head that she’s going to stub the cigarette out on the picture. I hurl myself convulsively after her, with a kind of little groan, and fling out my arm to prevent her. My hand still has the glass of gin in it. It catches her on the elbow. She looks down at the silver splash of gin leaping out of the glass at her like a flying fish, then looks straight up into my eyes, startled.

  ‘Wow!’ she says, and laughs, amused and gratified by my cack-handed eagerness. She puts down her glass, and stubs out her cigarette in a saucer full of cufflinks and collar studs.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say, ‘I thought …’

  But she’s put her finger to my lips.

  ‘No more thinking for today,’ she says.

  She becomes serious. She takes her finger away from my lips, inspects them intently
, then stands on tiptoe and gently presses her own lips against them.

  She tastes of gin and cigarette smoke and … I don’t know … something intolerably soft and sweet. What do I taste of to her? Gin and fear, I imagine, and … perhaps just a little of that same sweetness.

  I look into her eyes an inch away from mine, as they look into mine an inch away from hers. It’s her being on tiptoe that melts me more than anything else.

  She sinks back on to her heels, and puts her arms around me. I put my arms around her. I can’t think quite what else to do. She looks up at me seriously, then tucks her face into the hollow of my neck. Which brings the picture into my eyeline. I have my tape measure in my pocket, but I don’t think I can produce it just at the moment and attempt to use it behind her back. I try to make some kind of systematic examination, though – try to focus on each detail in turn, and think whether it could have any religious or political significance. I can’t make out any little walker, I have to admit, but yes, I was right, there is a tiny splash of reflected azurite sky which I think must be a millpool in the midst of the spring verdigris, with a little party of people beside it, one of them defiantly taking an unseasonable plunge … She’s so distractingly soft against me, I find it extremely difficult to take in what I’m looking at … Or the raised foot of the dancing peasant – could that suggest some kind of rebelliousness? The yearning lips of the kissing couple…? I can feel my heart beating; I can feel hers … Oh yes, and there’s the dark patch in the corner …

  ‘I had a feeling you’d come today,’ she says. I can feel her voice buzzing against my throat.

  Foot. Patch. Swimmer …

  I realize that she’s taken her face out of my neck, and is smiling up at me.

  ‘Or do you want to look at the thing on the picture first?’ she asks, as mockingly as ever, though now I know she doesn’t mean it.

  ‘Of course not.’ What else can I say?

  She tightens her arms around me. I tighten mine around her. She winces, and gives a little cry.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Bruise.’

  And at the thought of that dark cloud of pain beneath her left breast I feel an aching tenderness for her. She suddenly seems like a lost child in a fairy story, shut away here with that terrible man in this terrible house, but also brave in her refusal to give up and go under, in her desperate clinging to whoever she can find to cling to.

  I gently detach myself from her, and smile at her. Sadly, I think. Mostly sadly. She kicks off her shoes, and takes me by the hand. We pad across to the bed in our stockinged feet.

  ‘Listen,’ I say. ‘Wait. Sit down.’

  She waits, puzzled but obedient. I take her hands in mine, and we sit down side by side on the edge of the crumpled bed. Now I can see the picture only out of the corner of my eye, and too far away to make out anything but the most general outlines.

  She waits for me to say whatever it is I’m going to say. I wish I knew what it was. In the end she has to say it herself.

  ‘You mean you don’t want to?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I can’t. I wish I could, but I can’t.’

  She looks away, at the sky outside the window. Silence. We sit, her hands still in mine. I suppose what she’s thinking is, ‘He’s thinking about her.’ Is that what I’m thinking about? Yes, I suppose it is, now I’ve thought about her thinking about me thinking about it. Yes, certainly. Kate. And Tildy. And everything.

  She looks at our four hands for a bit. I look at them as well. Then she looks out of the window again. I look at her face, in profile to me, and the distant mountain landscape beyond her. I can’t think quite where we go from here, or how we’re going to get out of this.

  She gives a little chastened laugh. ‘Well, it must be different among your sort of people in London,’ she says absurdly. ‘It’s not like that round here.’

  ‘Look,’ I say, ‘it’s not just … you know, things. It’s you.’

  Another laugh.

  ‘No, seriously.’ And now I’ve said it I do mean it seriously. ‘I don’t want to start something we can’t finish. I don’t want you hurt. I don’t want it all to end in tears and desperate phone calls.’

  She takes her hands away. ‘Why did you keep coming here, then?’ she says sharply. ‘You just wanted to talk about …’ She moves her head from side to side, casting around for some suitably ludicrous subject of conversation to impute to me. I can’t think what she’s going to hit on. The plasticity of Giordano’s forms? The chiaroscuro? ‘… about normalism or something?’

  Oh, normalism. I don’t even think of correcting her and Erwinning the Panofsky. I’ve got beyond that stage, at any rate. And yes, I think wistfully, I shouldn’t mind a bit of a chat about normalism, or even nominalism, for that matter. I suddenly feel a great nostalgia for it.

  I can’t help noticing, though, that she’s remembered the term, or half-remembered it, from that very first conversation of ours. I made an impression on her from the first moment. I knew I had. Her mockery was a sign of interest. I knew it was.

  And now she looks so mortified! I lean forwards and gently kiss her mouth. She doesn’t look at me, just gives a little rueful laugh. I give her another gentle kiss, then sit back and inspect the result. She manages only a bit of a smile this time, and goes on looking down. I kiss her again, then sit back and look at her again. Give her another kiss, take another look.

  I do it about nine times, I think.

  Gradually she lifts her eyes to mine, and a smile spreads all the way across her face.

  ‘You are a frightful little wet fish, you know,’ she says tenderly.

  ‘Am I?’ I say, and kiss her again.

  I kiss her at some length, and it comes to me that if I simply let events take their course, in half an hour or so from now I could be examining the picture on the dressing table at my leisure, with a cup of coffee in my hand and a serene mind, and that if I still hadn’t looked my fill I could come back and examine it again more or less as often as I wanted. And, really, now that the first shock has passed, now that we’ve both had time to recover from our mutual surprise and confusion, and to make clear to each other, even if only by silent implication, exactly where we stand and how we view the matter, wouldn’t it simply be the easiest and most natural and least hurtful way out of the situation? The quickest way back to normalism and nominalism alike?

  It plainly would, because already she’s sinking back beneath me into the tangled duvet, and pulling a cold hot water bottle out from behind her. And I’m somehow following her down, and starting to unbutton Tony Churt’s spare shirt … then becoming aware that some other foreign body – like a cold hot water bottle, only disconcertingly moister – is becoming improbably wedged in my crotch. I reach behind me to get rid of it, and it sneezes and licks my fingers.

  ‘Wait,’ I say.

  ‘Now what?’

  I get up and escort the dogs out of the room. I take them all the way to the head of the stairs, and put a friendly boot up their backsides by way of returning the compliment. They go thundering and tumbling away down the stairs at gratifying speed, barking with insane indignation.

  ‘Yes, well, that’ll teach you to go shoving your snout into places uninvited,’ I shout after them.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ one of them shouts back over the noise.

  My heart stops. The world stops. What?

  ‘The door was open …’ it shouts. ‘Down, boy, down …! I’m sorry, I thought … Get down, get away from me …! Mr Churt? Is that you …? Would you, could you …? Mr Churt!’

  The voice is becoming as desperate as the barking. I take a hold of myself and go back to the bedroom. Laura’s standing looking out of the window. She’s put her shoes on again.

  ‘We left the front door open,’ I explain.

  ‘Not the little rector man?’ she asks. ‘There’s a bicycle outside.’

  ‘Oh dear. I’m afraid I told him to shove his snout elsewhere. I’m sorry.’

&n
bsp; She glances at herself in the mirror, then goes quickly out of the room without looking at me.

  I listen through the crack of the door as Laura shouts at the dogs, and the barking gradually subsides. Then I close the door and go and look at the picture. At last I’m completely on my own with it. But I can take in even less of it than I could before. All I can think is the rector? My embarrassing amours have been nipped in the bud by the local clergyman? This is the most shameful touch yet.

  I go back to the door. There’s a murmur of voices from below. I go back to the picture. All I can see is the absurdity of the couple who have been caught for all eternity on the point of that glutinous kiss. I yearn to be more like the man diving so cleanly into the chill waters of the millpool …

  I listen at the door. Silence. I go back to the picture, and look at the bottom right-hand corner, where it ought to say, in neat Roman capitals, BRVEGEL MDLXV … Yes, there’s an ill-defined, somehow anomalous black patch, that perhaps doesn’t look quite part of the landscape, and perhaps doesn’t have quite the same surface texture as the varnish. I rub my thumb over it. It doesn’t affect the patch, but it leaves a slight grubbiness on my thumb. Dirt, then? Possibly. Ink, as Kate suggested?

  Door. Voices again.

  Picture. The swimming party, I see, isn’t a swimming party. The man who’s diving into the millpool is fully dressed. In fact I don’t think he’s diving at all – he’s simply tumbling in head first, presumably drunk, while the people around him reach out to save him. My healthy sporting citizen has been caught in as embarrassing a posture as all the rest of us. Well, at least it solves the iconographic problem of swimming in spring.