Headlong

by Michael Frayn

  Oh, I see – Tony’s in the room. So now I’ve become the man who cleans the septic tank. Fair enough; I feel as if I’ve cleaned a few septic tanks in the last few days and hours. I wonder how much practice at lying I shall need, though, before I’m as quick at it as Laura?

  ‘Sorry,’ she says in a completely different voice when she calls back a few minutes later. ‘I can’t go near the phone at the moment without his popping out from somewhere. I don’t know why he’s quite so suspicious all of a sudden – I think maybe he’s only just noticed I’ve stopped smoking. So what’s this frightfully embarrassing question? Shall I be shocked? Will it make me blush and giggle?’

  ‘No, Laura, listen, it’s serious.’ I close my eyes again. ‘You very sweetly and generously offered to lend me some money …’

  ‘Oh, money,’ she says, disappointed. ‘I thought you meant something quite different.’

  I struggle on, eyes still closed. ‘And I said …’

  ‘And you said, “No, no, no! Never, never, never!” So how much do you need?’

  ‘Laura, I’m sorry about this …’

  ‘Martin, my sweet, just tell me how much! He’ll be coming into the kitchen any moment to see if it’s Skelton I’m carrying on with.’

  How much? The question is how much can I reasonably ask for. How much was she thinking of? How much has she got?

  ‘Well …’ I say.

  ‘My honey, I’m not clairvoyant! Five pounds?’

  She’s joking, of course. I think. ‘Actually …’ I say.

  ‘Five hundred pounds? Five thousand?’

  ‘Could you?’ I say quickly. ‘Could you really?’

  ‘Which – five thousand?’

  ‘Only if you could spare it.’

  ‘Exactly five thousand? I’ve guessed exactly right?’

  A bit implausible, I agree. Particularly since I need about six. I pluck another figure out of the petrol-laden air. ‘Five thousand eight hundred’ has a solid ring to it. I close my eyes again. ‘You couldn’t manage seven, could you?’ I hear myself ask.

  She laughs. ‘Cash? Used fivers?’

  ‘I’d prefer fifties,’ I say frankly.

  ‘Fifties. All right. Fine. This means you’ve got rid of Helen?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But not for as much as you thought.’

  ‘No, well, let me explain …’

  ‘Never mind explaining. As long as we’re giving Tony a poke in the eye. Just let me know when you want it.’

  ‘Well … tomorrow.’

  ‘Tomorrow?’ She laughs again. ‘If only you were as quick off the mark in other ways, my sweet!’

  ‘Yes, I’m sorry. It’s just that something’s come up rather suddenly.’

  More ribald laughter. ‘Martin, you’re such a sweet, funny boy! Don’t worry, I’ll call the bank at once. Only you’ve got our car, so here’s what you’ll have to do … When are you getting back?’

  ‘Tomorrow afternoon.’

  ‘You’ll have to pick me up and drive me into town before the bank shuts.’

  ‘Laura, this is so kind of you! I don’t know how to begin to thank you. I’ll explain it all tomorrow.’

  ‘Explain about normalism instead. There’s only one condition – that you don’t let him know I’ve got any money left.’

  ‘Of course not. Where shall we meet?’

  ‘Somewhere secret,’ she says. She starts to laugh again. The only salve to my conscience is that she’s possibly getting seven thousand pounds worth of entertainment out of it all. ‘The end of the drive. Four o’clock. I’ll be hiding behind the sign.’

  ‘What sign?’

  ‘His sign,’ she says, still laughing. ‘Private Property. Hands Off.’

  Once again I fumble helplessly for words of gratitude, and once again I’m spared the effort, as she hurriedly breaks off the call and puts the phone down. I assume Tony’s appeared in the kitchen. I’ll give them a bit of time to sort themselves out, then I’ll try ringing him. I now have £109,000 to juggle with, so perhaps it would be money well spent if I surprised him by giving him a bit more than I said. After I’ve deducted my commission I’m going to need how much to cover the balance on the other three pictures? Can I get away with, say, five thousand pounds?

  As I sit in the Land-Rover gazing at Oswald Road, juggling all the imponderables once again, I can’t help brooding once again about how relative poverty is. Six thousand pounds is Kate’s complete life savings. Seven thousand pounds isn’t a sum that seems to trouble Laura at all. I could probably have borrowed the entire amount off her. I assume, from what she said, that she realizes I’m going to be paying it all straight over to her husband.

  I dial their number once again. This time it’s Tony who answers. ‘I just thought you might like to know’, I say, ‘that I got him up to a hundred and seven in the end.’ I decide not to mention my commission for the moment. Let him enjoy the thought of a hundred and seven for another day. I hope I might hear some signs of satisfaction, perhaps even a word of commendation for my efforts. But all that comes is a pause, then a sigh.

  ‘Well,’ he says gracelessly, ‘if that’s the best you could do. You’re not much of a businessman, Martin, I’ll tell you that. You have got cash?’

  I swallow down my irritation.

  ‘Fifties. In your hands tomorrow afternoon.’

  ‘And the other three pictures?’ he demands querulously. ‘I know that little tosser’s coming back. I can’t have them trailing about the place indefinitely.’

  ‘Tomorrow afternoon,’ I assure him. ‘I’ll put the money in your hands. You put the pictures in mine.’

  I switch off the phone. Tomorrow afternoon, yes. And the whole nightmare of shame and duplicity will be as good as over.

  ‘The uneasiness, the terror, the wrath of the people seemed rapidly culminating to a crisis,’ says Motley.

  We’re moving into the spring and summer at the beginning of 1565 – the old 1565, equinox to equinox – the year that Bruegel fixed for the centuries to come in his great cycle, and I’m sitting at the kitchen table in Oswald Road making one last great effort to redeem my pledges to myself and Kate before the die’s finally cast in the morning, when I bundle Helen off to Unit 47 on the Tidewater Industrial Estate in Rotherhithe, and who knows what shameful destination thereafter. Every now and then I look up from my books and catch her eye as she watches me with her usual faint disquiet. Our last night together. I feel a slight pang of guilt, I have to admit, even about Helen. And I’ll miss her company. My evenings aren’t going to be as peaceful again for a long time.

  I turn back to my books. The 1560s were a harsh decade for the Netherlanders in every way, with bad harvests raising the price of bread and the depression of trade bringing unemployment and low wages. But by 1565 the economic misery had been overtaken by the political crisis. ‘Nothing was talked of but the edicts and the inquisition,’ says Motley. ‘Nothing else entered into the minds of men. In the streets, in the shops, in the taverns, in the fields; at market, at church, at funerals, at weddings; in the noble’s castle, at the farmer’s fireside, in the mechanic’s garret, upon the merchantsʼ exchange, there was but one perpetual subject of shuddering conversation.’

  Nothing else entered into the minds of men. Except, apparently, into Bruegel’s. Bruegel, who’d painted so many things that couldn’t be painted, who’d shown his fellow citizens what they, in their unscholarly way, must have thought were the security troops and the engines of execution that surrounded them, the despair to which they were reduced, the depredations of the Regent, and the downfall of King and Cardinal – this Bruegel, who’d painted so much and so much, suddenly closed his mind to the events that obsessed everyone else, and began to create a happier Netherlands of his own invention.

  Well, why not? We all need a break from reality at times, and the reality of 1565 grew steadily more savage and departed further and further from Bruegel’s alternative version as the months went by.


  You can’t precisely compare the chronological progress of the year as Bruegel experienced it and as he painted it, because no one knows in which order he did the panels. All we know is that he can’t have completed any of them (with the possible exception of the trimmed and undated Haymaking) before 25 March, when the year began, and that he’d finished them all, and delivered them, at the very latest by the following 21 February, the date on which Jongelinck listed all De Twelff maenden among his securities for the Wine Excise.

  Nothing else entered into the minds of men. Whatever order he painted the scenes in, though, the year they represent has its own chronology. What’s happening month by month in the Netherlands outside the studio door while the fictitious months unroll in the Never-Neverlands within? In my months, for a start, 25 March to 25 May?

  This is when the Count of Egmont (to be beheaded by Alva along with the Count of Horn on the Grand Place in Brussels three years later) is returning from Spain confident that he’s persuaded Philip to moderate the repression. In reality, though, he’s being shadowed (characteristically) by simultaneous dispatches from the King with a completely contrary message: Philip is writing to say that he’s determined to suppress heresy at whatever cost, and would prefer to die a thousand times rather than to allow a single change in matters of religion. As a result, the terrible edicts are republished in Brussels. In spite of his ringing declaration, though, the King is instituting a change. One single change. To avoid giving heretics the opportunity of public martyrdom they’re henceforth to be executed at midnight in their dungeons, by binding their heads between their knees, and then slowly suffocating them in tubs of water. Who says Philip’s inflexible?

  Summer comes. The Regent reports to the King that the popular frenzy is becoming more and more intense. The people are crying aloud, she says, that the Spanish Inquisition, or something even worse, has been established there.

  In Bruegel’s studio the girls go singing to the hayfields, the harvesters doze in the midday shade.

  Autumn, and in the streets of Brussels the violent debate among the Netherlandish leaders bursts out into the open. The excitement, says Motley, spreads at once to the people. Inflammatory handbills are circulated. Placards are posted up every night outside the palaces of Orange, Egmont and Horn, calling upon them to champion the people and their liberty.

  Far, far away, in another Netherlands altogether, the herds amble placidly down from their summer pasture, past the golden vineyards, to the rich meadows of the valley.

  Now it’s winter, and the whole nation’s in shock as the government in Brussels releases the King’s letter ‘from the wood of Segovia,’ in which he declares that all hopes of compromise are at an end, and that the Inquisition will continue as ordained by the laws of God and man. There’s a mass exodus of refugees. Inflammatory broadsheets appear in the towns. Prisoners of the Inquisition are freed by the mob. Petitions to the Regent are nailed on the doors of Egmont’s and Orange’s palaces. There are rumours that a general massacre of Protestants is planned.

  And away in that other, better land, the hunters are returning to the still valley we know so well, where every sound is muffled by the snow.

  The year winds on to its close. In February and March, as the carnival revellers eat their waffles in that muddy little village above the stormy estuary, and the peasants prepare for the coming of another spring, the conditions of life in the rest of the country grow worse and worse. This is the beginning of the Year of Hunger, when shortages deepen into famine, and the economic desuetude is exacerbated by the flight of skilled craftsmen from the terror. By summer, clandestine ‘hedge preaching’ will be spreading through the land, from the Walloon provinces northwards, with twenty thousand assembling at Tournai to sing the Psalms in French, and tens of thousands more outside Harlem to sing them in Dutch. By August, the image breaking will sweep across the country from south to north, devastating the ecclesiastical treasures of Poperinghe, Oudenaarde and St Omer. It reaches Antwerp, where the whores hold up wax tapers from the cathedral altars to light the work of the men as they put on the priests’ vestments, burn the missals and manuscripts, smear their shoes with sacred oil and drink the sacramental wine. Then on the fury goes, to Ghent, Valenciennes, Tournai, Amsterdam, Utrecht, Leyden, Delft, Friesland, Groningen.

  And to replace the old images burnt, our amazingly detached artist in Brussels has produced those six new images of his own. Six pictures of a historyless land in a historyless year. The hunters haven’t caught much on the winter hills, it’s true, but the village they’re returning to seems prosperous enough. In the whole cycle there’s not the slightest shadow of hunger or economic misery, of repression or political ferment.

  It’s breathtaking. Particularly since, as soon as he’d finished the cycle, he emerged from that other happy Netherlands and returned to the wretched one around him. In 1566, as the wave of hedge preaching passed across the land, he painted a Sermon of St John the Baptist. Who knows, any more than with the earlier pictures, what his intentions were? Who, though, in that particular year, looking at a picture of John preaching the bright beginnings of Christianity to a crowd of Netherlanders under the trees in the open air, can have failed for one instant to see a parallel with the potential martyrs who’d turned their backs on the churches to preach the new reformed religion in the fields outside the towns?

  Tolnay and others believe that one of the faces in the crowd is Bruegel himself, and there’s been speculation about a much more prominent figure, a swarthy, black-bearded gentleman who sits with his back turned dismissively towards John, and who seems to be having his hand read by gypsies. I can tell you what Helen and I think he is: a Spaniard who’s turning his back on John’s revolutionary message, and instead consulting the divinations of priests. His back’s also turned upon another member of the congregation, and an iconographically much more surprising one: Christ himself, who stands listening to the great hedge preacher with every sign of attention and respect.

  Then in the following year Bruegel painted The Conversion of Saul, with its amazingly coincidental likeness to the Duke of Alva on his march through the Alps from Italy. By now the terror was beginning to spiral out of all control. Within a few months of Alva’s arrival, says Motley, ‘the scaffolds, the gallows, the funeral piles, which had been sufficient in ordinary times, furnished now an entirely inadequate machinery for the incessant executions. Columns and stakes in every street, the door posts of private houses, the fences in the fields, were laden with human carcasses, strangled, burned, beheaded. The orchards in the country bore on many a tree the hideous fruit of human bodies.’ In the following year, 1568, the Holy Office condemned the entire population of the Netherlands to death as heretics, and the King ordered the sentence to be carried out at once, without regard to age, sex or condition.

  This, however, seems to have been beyond even Alva, and that same year the Prince of Orange was provoked into armed revolt. The consequences of 1565, the year when Bruegel was apparently otherwise engaged, spread outwards across Europe and onwards through the centuries. The war of Dutch independence that grew out of Orange’s revolt continued on and off for another eighty years. Malines was sacked, and Granvelle’s palace with it; Antwerp, and Jongelinck’s hopeful suburban villa. In 1598 the Duke of Parma reconquered the south from the rebels, but only at the cost of destroying its economy and reducing its farms to ruin. By then, in any case, the rebels were firmly established in the north. Antwerp itself, enriched by the civil war of the 1480s that had driven the entrepôt trade away from Bruges, was ruined in its turn, cut off from the sea by the rebel forts downstream. Its trade passed to Amsterdam. The wealthy provinces of Flanders and Brabant remained Catholic and were reduced to wasteland; the wasteland of Holland became Protestant and grew rich.

  Outwards and onwards the ripples spread. To destroy support for the rebellious provinces in the north, Philip had to invade England. To cover Parma’s crossing of the Channel in defenceless flat-bottomed barges, he h
ad to send a naval task force. To restore Spain’s failing position after the destruction of this Armada, he had to intervene against the Protestants in France. To stem the haemorrhage of wealth after his failure in France, he had to declare bankruptcy … Down went the old empire of Spain. Up came the new empires of the north.

  And what happened to the pictures themselves, those six historyless panels painted as the torrents of history swept round the studio door in 1565? They were swept along in the current like everything else, and tumbled in the world’s changing politics. First they were taken back to Vienna, and so passed away from the failing Spanish empire into the second Habsburg empire that Charles V had separated from Spain when he abdicated. But one of them vanished in transit, so then there were five.

  Five little pictures, hanging in a row. Five largish pictures, and not hanging in a row at all, because Haymaking went off on its travels again, no one knows when or how, but probably one of the Habsburgs gave it away to someone as a present; Grossmann thinks Maria Theresa to her favourite, Count Grassalkovich. So then there were four.

  Four oil-paintings, hanging on the wall. On the wall of the Belvedere, to be precise, one of the imperial palaces in Vienna, where in 1781 they were arranged under the title of The Four Seasons. A simple solution to all the problems that have beset later scholars, but one even less related to reality than it appears, because spring and winter in this group were represented by two pictures that weren’t part of the cycle at all, Children’s Games and The Massacre of the Innocents. The genuine pair, The Gloomy Day and The Hunters in the Snow, had gone into store, unrecognized and unregarded. So then there were two.

  Two lonely pictures, remaining from the six: The Corn Harvest and The Return of the Herd. Then in 1805 Napoleon entered Vienna, and secured his position by defeating the Austrians and their allies at Austerlitz. Four years later the French took away a number of the Habsburg Bruegels amongst their booty, and though they later returned the others, The Corn Harvest remained behind in the possession of Count Andreossy, who’d been the French commander in the city. So then there was one.