Headlong

by Michael Frayn

  Door. Silence from below.

  And I do a bunk. I could get out my magnifier and study the details while Laura gets rid of the clergy, then put it away and try to resume where we left off. I could at least get out my tape measure and measure the thing. But I don’t even do that. I just want to get out of the house.

  Look, the picture’s a Bruegel, there’s not a shadow of a doubt in my mind now I’ve seen it again, if ever there was. Kate’s wrong; I’m right. I haven’t forgotten that I’m going to make out some kind of objective case for its identification before I go ahead – but I have to balance that against the chance to extract myself while I still can from the nightmare of dishonour and misery that I was just about to plunge into with Laura.

  I’m not going to emerge from this story with any great credit, I can see that. But I am going to emerge a great deal richer and more famous. Even if I do have to pay gains tax, which I must admit I hadn’t known about until Tony mentioned it. Gains tax? I’ll be glad to pay it! The more gains tax I pay the less bad I shall feel. As soon as I’ve some gains to pay it on.

  So, I take one last look at my prize, then pad softly down the stairs. Laura’s presumably taken the rector into the kitchen for a glass of gin. What I’m going to say if he suddenly emerges I haven’t really worked out. Nothing, probably. Firm handshake, a clear, straight look into his eyes – no explanation called for or offered. In any case he doesn’t emerge. I slip my feet quietly back into my muddy boots, and disappear quietly through the still open front door.

  Normalism, at last. It seems a little excessively normalis-tic, though, to walk straight down the drive; I’m not quite sure what you can see from the kitchen window. More agreeable, anyway, to go home through the woods, the way I came. I set out, keeping close to the unused wing of the house. As I pass the last mullioned window a little spurt of flame on the other side of the glass makes me jump out of my wits. There’s some mysterious presence haunting the house!

  Laura, I realize as I turn to look, lighting a cigarette. And beyond her, on the other side of the breakfast-room, the gleaming backs of two projecting ears. It’s the little rector man, sunk in a reverent genuflection in front of The Rape of Helen.

  Tilda’s lying on the picnic rug in front of the cottage, waving her little woollen arms and legs about in the soft spring air with uncoordinated delight, bubbling merrily at the mouth like a newly poured glass of champagne. I snatch her up and keep the effervescence going by running her three times round the outside of the cottage. Kate, sitting with her book on the broken kitchen chair by the maple stump, looks up thoughtfully each time I pass but makes no comment.

  I’m propelled and energized by the sheer joy of being with my little bubbling daughter. I’ve often felt a spontaneous surge of delight at coming home and seeing her, but I’ve never thought of running wildly around with her in my arms before, and it occurs to me that I’m perhaps behaving just a touch normalistically. Normalism, I realize, now that the term’s been introduced into the discourse, is an important concept. It’s the art and science of behaving normally. A difficult thing to do, perhaps, at any time, and particularly difficult – and particularly important – if your life’s become in some way abnormal, as for instance in the midst of a complex commercial transaction where different forms of confidence have to be maintained simultaneously with parties whose interests are mutually antagonistic. It involves skill not only in performance, but in observing and remembering what normal behaviour’s actually like.

  My glimpses of the expression on Kate’s face as I pass suggest that I may have misremembered slightly. I may be over-normalizing. Though why I should be normalizing at all just at the moment I’ve no idea, since I’ve actually resisted all the temptations to abnormality that were put in my way by other parties to this particular deal. I stop running round, and plump down breathlessly on the rug. Tilda gazes at the sky over my shoulder. To her the sky is evidently at least as surprising as her father’s behaviour.

  ‘So did you see it?’ asks Kate.

  ‘Yes! I did!’ A triumphant tone. Reasonable enough; I set out to see the picture – I saw it. If she asks me where I saw it I’ll of course tell her. And since Tony’s in London he wasn’t here, so there’s no reason for Kate to jump to the conclusion that he wasn’t at Upwood. All the same, if she asks me who was there … I’ll tell her that as well. Probably.

  But she doesn’t. She doesn’t ask any more questions at all. There’s something a little unnatural about this restraint. Should I disingenuously burst out with my renewed certainty about the attribution? Would that be normal? Or would it be over-normal? It might be safer to stick to aspects where I’ve come to agree with her assessment.

  ‘You’re right about the patch in the corner,’ I say. ‘Some of it came off on my thumb. It might just possibly be covering up a signature.’

  No comment. Some kind of trouble’s brewing, certainly. But what? I wonder whether to try to amuse her with my bizarre last glimpse of the rector bowing the knee to Helen, but I realize that it would involve explaining a lot of circumstantial detail. As would any attempt to communicate the even more comic image that keeps coming into my mind of the rector being taken upstairs to admire the rest of the art collection …

  I decide to persist with stressing the convergence of our observations.

  ‘I also agree about the absence of any religious symbolism. Not a trace, so far as I could see. Though of course I only had time for a fairly cursory examination.’

  No comment on this, either. Though I suppose the lack of comment is comment enough. What I believe she may be ironically remarking upon, when I think about it, is the exacting scholarly standards I must have set myself if I regard an examination lasting the entire morning as only fairly cursory. I should perhaps explain that I spent a large part of the time concealed behind a tree, waiting for Tony to return, and then another longish period carrying bulk supplies of groceries into the house. And that most of what little time still remained went on tactfully coping with the Churts’ personal problems, not to mention dealing with their dogs. So that out of the entire time I was away I doubt if I managed to spend more than two or three minutes in front of the picture.

  But on second thoughts I say nothing. I feel a growing indignation, though, at the unfairness of Kate’s unspoken suspicions, and of the tangled circumstantiality of the truth that makes them so impossible to answer. For several long minutes we sit in silence, apart from various little gurglings and burblings from Tilda as I jig her up and down on my shoulder.

  ‘What I suspect’, says Kate suddenly, and at once I freeze, ‘is that you think Bruegel was some kind of Netherlandish freedom fighter.’

  I still can’t speak. But now it’s because I’m too astonished. Is this what all that silence was about?

  ‘No?’ she says. ‘You were asking me about the Latin in the Calumny. You think that’s supposed to be Bruegel himself being hauled in front of the Inquisition? A lot of people have tried to read some kind of political content into thepictures. The Massacre of the Innocents is about Spanish atrocities, etcetera. Actually there weren’t any Spanish troops in the Netherlands at the time. They were all withdrawn in 1561 – they didn’t come back until 1567.’

  I’m still too taken aback by this outburst to offer any reply. Also, I’m beginning to realize that this is how she’s spent the morning – looking through my books and files.

  ‘I’ve been rereading your Motley,’ she says. ‘I haven’t looked at it since I was about nineteen. I’d forgotten what a blatantly one-sided account it was. There were plenty of horrors committed by the Protestants, you know. Particularly the Calvinists. Not even Motley can gloss over the image breaking in 1566. In the cathedral in Antwerp the mob destroyed everything. All the pictures, all the statues.’

  I know, I know. But on she sweeps, becoming more and more agitated. It’s worse than her great spasm of anxiety about the money. Now all her banked-down resentment has been transferred to a cause in which
she can feel the most selfless indignation. Her voice hurries and shakes.

  ‘Every beautiful thing that had been so lovingly and painstakingly made over the centuries. And not just in Antwerp – in hundreds of churches across the Netherlands. No one knows how much was lost. Whole lifetimes of devotion thrown away in two days and nights of barbarism.’

  Yes – all that raw material for iconographic studies! Also, she was brought up as a Catholic. In her anger and distress she’s reverting to a long-forgotten tribal loyalty.

  ‘I know,’ I say, ‘it was loathsome. Though of course the Catholics did a lot of image breaking of their own. When Alva’s troops sacked Malines, for example. They systematically desecrated all the churches. And that wasn’t the mob – it was sanctioned by Alva. He didn’t even have any ideological pretext. It was the Catholic commander unleashingCatholic troops on what Catholics held sacred, simply to make up their arrears of pay.’

  Perfectly true – but what am I saying it for? Am I reverting to old tribal loyalties? Our attempts to dress our obscure personal squabble up as a great historical debate are very silly. And there’s more to come.

  ‘In any case,’ I say, rocking Tilda tenderly back and forth, ‘however terrible it is to destroy works of art, it isn’t as terrible as torturing people to death.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’ she says coolly. ‘Though the Calvinists did plenty of that, too, in the areas they controlled.’

  I ignore the irrelevant provocation, and swoop like a hawk on those first two shocking words. ‘Are you suggesting that destroying pictures and statues might be worse than destroying people?’

  ‘Of course not,’ she should reply, if she had any sense. But she doesn’t. She allows herself to be manoeuvred into a position far more extreme than she intended, as people do when they’re angry. ‘Isn’t it?’ she repeats. ‘Isn’t what people do more important in the end than what they feel? Isn’t what they leave behind more important than what they were?’

  This is art history grown monstrous in its self-importance. I drive home the implications of what she’s said with complete ruthlessness. ‘You’re implying that a painting might be worth more than us? Than you and me?’

  She thinks. She’s become very quiet and still. It occurs to me that she’s perhaps not just allowing herself to be manoeuvred – that she really does think that she means what she’s saying. I have a glimpse into the depths of her, into the quiet darknesses that usually remain hidden. And yes, she has some kind of hard obstinacy lurking down there. Some element of fanaticism, even, that I lack completely. And without which, I realize with dismay, even in the midst of my merciless pursuit of her, human beings never leave anything much behind them anyway.

  ‘More than me, yes,’ she says finally. She does mean it, too. I should take her hands in mine, of course, and smile at her tenderly, and tell how much more she is to me, at any rate, than any painting in the world could ever be. But I don’t. I’ve not finished with her yet.

  ‘More than me?’ I ask her quietly.

  She thinks once more. ‘Possibly,’ she says slowly at last. OK. Fine. This is damage I can take, because she still hasn’t seen the ambush I’m leading her into. I don’t even say the words. I simply kiss the top of Tilda’s head, very gently, as she lies against my shoulder, and then look up at Kate with the question in my eyes.

  And again she thinks. She seems to change in front of my eyes. She looks away, and all that hardness in her is transmuted into a kind of terrible sadness.

  I break. I shouldn’t have done this to her. I repent unreservedly. I love her. I feel the most wrenching tenderness towards her.

  She gets up and gently takes Tilda from me. I as gently let her go. Kate carries her towards the front door, then comes back.

  ‘There seems to be at any rate one picture in the world’, she says quietly, ‘that you think is worth more than either me or Tilda.’

  She turns and disappears into the house. I remain sitting on the picnic rug, unable to move, like someone who’s been knocked down in the street. That happened to me once. The first difficulty afterwards is to discover whether you’re alive or dead. The second is to make some estimate of who you are, and how it feels to be that person. The third is to work out how it’s come about that you’re in this unusual situation, lying down in the middle of the road.

  The first coherent feeling that I manage to identify now is mortification, and the first coherent thought is this: Not I her – she me. It was she who was manoeuvring me into position for the kill. No, worse still: she who was letting me manoeuvre myself.

  I can remember having some very similar feeling, and thinking some very similar thought, in another context recently, though I can’t remember what the context was. I’m losing my sovereignty all round. I’m becoming a mere object.

  And then I’m overcome once again by the sheer unfairness of it. To pretend that she was holding some kind of serious discussion about religious rights and wrongs in the sixteenth-century Netherlands, when all the time she was simply waiting to air a supposed grievance, of crude vulgarity, about my faithfulness! And for me to find myself lying here in the road like this when I was obeying every law that a pedestrian should! To be half dead when what felled me wasn’t even some serious vehicle like a bus or a truck – when it was a bicycle, a skateboard, a child on a scooter – when it was a mere notion so completely false and frivolous!

  And finally: how in heaven’s name did this accident ever happen? Why has she jumped, as I must assume she has, to the grotesque conclusion that I was alone with Laura all morning, when I wasn’t? So far as she knows! When I was with Laura and Tony together? Not even that – with Tony on his own? When I didn’t so much as set eyes on Laura? For all that I or anyone else has said! Why should Laura come into the story at all? Why should Kate think she did? It’s a pure, blind leap in the dark, made on no rational basis whatsoever, that betrays a lack of confidence in me which nothing I’ve ever done can justify.

  Eventually I pick myself up, as I did after I was knocked down by that car in Kentish Town High Street, and go on my way as best I can. I walk into the kitchen, where Kate’s washing a bowlful of Tilda’s clothes. I’m going to normalize once again, since I can’t think of anything better. My plan, in so far as I have one, is to make no reference to the conversation we’ve just had, or to the reckless insinuation it culminated in, but to let fall in passing one or two remarks which suggest, without any actual misstatement, how ridiculous is her idea that I wasn’t talking to Tony this morning.

  ‘I’d better saw some more firewood,’ I say, as if nothing had happened.

  ‘Don’t you want any lunch?’ she says, likewise. She’s normalizing, too. I think. ‘We’ve had ours.’

  Overtones there still, of course, but I ignore them. ‘I’ll make myself a sandwich later.’ I look in the cupboard under the sink at her feet for the saw. ‘Tony’s still on about that scramble track, by the way.’

  Not bad. Pretty casual, pretty off the back of the hand. And probably true. Also, the indignation that Kate and I share on the subject makes it a powerful bond between us to appeal to.

  But it’s not the scramble track that catches Kate’s attention. ‘Oh, yes, I meant to tell you,’ she says. ‘He phoned this morning. He’s up in London.’

  She does it perfectly, I have to say. Much better than me. With exactly the right suggestion of apology for not remembering earlier. I’ve underestimated her.

  I pick myself up from the roadway once again as best I can. I don’t attempt to explain anything. I simply ask, with passing curiosity in my voice – even if I have to keep my head in the cupboard under the sink to hide my face – ‘What did he want?’

  ‘He couldn’t remember the name on the label,’ she says.

  For a moment I go on trying to pull the saw out from the muddle of old string and wire it’s become entangled in. Then I slowly take my head out of the cupboard and gaze at her.

  ‘Vrancz,’ she says. ‘He was on his way to a libr
ary to look something up.’

  On his way to a library? To look something up? About Vrancz? About my picture? In London?

  I think my mouth’s open, but no more words emerge from it. She glances up at me.

  ‘He’s obviously starting to take a personal interest,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry.’

  I take the saw and escape into the garden. To be run over once may be regarded as a misfortune; to be run over twice in the same day looks like carelessness. To be run over three times, as I’ve been, suggests an attempt at murder.

  I gaze unseeingly at the scavenged fragments of tree waiting to be sawn. I haven’t the faintest idea what to do next. Not that it matters. The next thing happens of its own accord, like everything else today, without any assistance from me.

  A man on a bicycle teeters round the bend in the track. He has a red face and ears like jug handles. The face is new to me; the ears are familiar. He’s not wearing his dog collar, but the ears are the ones I saw from behind, lowered reverentially before Helen.

  He sets one foot to the ground and stops. ‘You’re Martin,’ he says.

  The rector’s never appeared in our lives before. I can only assume that Laura’s confessed everything to him, and that he’s come round to remind me of my duties as a husband and father. I could deny my identity, I suppose, but I merely nod, and wait helplessly for the pastoral care to commence.

  Confidential counselling, however, is evidently not what he has in mind; it’s family therapy – shock treatment – the full and frank confrontation. ‘Is your wife in?’ he says.

  Again I could say no. But I’ve given up the fight. I simply indicate the cottage. Let him tell her the whole story in every unfortunate detail, exactly as Laura’s confessed it to him.

  He gets off his bicycle and shakes my hand. ‘I’m John Quiss,’ he says. ‘One of Kate’s colleagues at the Hamlish.’