Headlong

by Michael Frayn

  ‘Thanks,’ I say, getting to my feet, and picking up my Salisbury’s bag, with the three thousand pounds or so left of my hard-won money in it. ‘I don’t think I can really walk it carrying those three pictures.’

  He remains sitting, though, gazing into the black depths of the cold fireplace. ‘I just struggle to keep the old place going,’ he says mournfully. ‘All I can think of. Waste of time, even if I manage to hang on to it. Sons don’t give a monkey’s about it. Anyway it’s breaking up around my ears already, however hard I try.’

  I attempt to murmur something appropriate, but all I can think of is getting the next three bits of it away from him. ‘Perhaps we’d better hustle those Dutchmen out of here’, I say, ‘befere anything else happens.’

  The dogs lift their heads and look at the door. One of them utters a brief bark. There’s the sound of the front door opening. It’s Georgie – he’s here.

  Footsteps come down the corridor outside, and Laura puts her head round the door. Oh, yes. I’d forgotten about her.

  ‘What are you two up to?’ she says. ‘Not boozing already?’

  ‘We’re celebrating,’ I tell her. ‘I’ve sold Helen.’

  ‘Oh, great,’ she says vaguely. ‘I was out for a walk. How much did you get for her?’

  I open my mouth to tell her, then glance at Tony. He’s still gazing into the fireplace, apparently unaware of Laura’s question or even her presence. I turn back to Laura, uncertain how much he tells her about his business arrangements. She glances at him in her turn, then makes me a little private funny face.

  ‘Hundreds or thousands, though?’ she enquires. My caution was right. ‘Thousands,’ I confess boldly. ‘Unbelievable,’ she murmurs, and disappears.

  ‘Yes,’ says Tony ‘and then there’s her.’

  Long pause. I sit down on the arm of the sofa. I force myself. I can’t do otherwise.

  ‘Out for a walk!’ he says. He gives a short laugh. ‘She’s never walked as far as the end of the drive!’

  I could reassure him that he’s wrong about this, at any rate, but I don’t.

  ‘She’s stopped smoking,’ he says.

  ‘Has she?’ Again, I could offer informed comment – I could tell him that I share his forebodings about the significance of this. Again, I don’t. ‘Good,’ I say.

  Another long pause. I get the impression that the room’s growing darker. We’re getting visibly a little nearer to sunset.

  ‘I admit that I haven’t kept absolutely to the straight and narrow myself,’ he says. ‘Neither of us has. But I am actually rather fond of her. Rather devoted to her. Rather dependent on her, though you might not think it. I don’t know what she’s up to, but I do know it’s something serious this time. I may be a fool, but I’m not that big a fool. And, Martin, if she left me …’

  He looks up at me. There are tears in his eyes once more. I suppose these ones I’ve helped to put there. I’m past caring about his tears, though. Or about any responsibility I may have. Past caring about anything except pictures and go.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I say fatuously, then advance from fatuity to simple lying. ‘She loves you. I’ve seen the way she looks at you.’ I get to my feet again, repeat the performance with my watch, and shift from simple lying to brutal practicality. ‘Now, if you’re going to give me a lift …’

  Laura comes back, carrying a bottle of the gin she bought. ‘I’m going to have a glass of this,’ she says. ‘Anyone want to switch?’

  Tony at last gets to his feet, and walks out of the room. ‘Come on,’ he snaps at me. ‘Let’s go if we’re going.’

  ‘No?’ says Laura to me, holding up the bottle.

  ‘Tony’s giving me a lift home,’ I explain.

  She mimes a silent kiss to me. ‘Love to Kate,’ she calls aloud, as I vanish through the door and follow Tony and the dogs up the corridor.

  ‘If I ever get my hands on the gentleman concerned,’ he says, as soon as the front door’s shut behind us, ‘I’ll run a harrow over him.’

  ‘Don’t forget the pictures,’ I say.

  He uncouples the trailer from the Land-Rover, then opens the door for me. The dogs jump in ahead of me as he walks round to the driver’s side.

  ‘I’ll put him through the combine,’ he says.

  ‘Pictures.’

  ‘Get in. What pictures?’

  ‘The Dutchmen. The other three pictures I’m selling for you.’ I fight to keep the panic out of my voice.

  ‘Oh, them,’ he says. He gets in and starts the engine. ‘You don’t have to bother. Got someone else to take them off my hands.’

  I get in beside him and close the door, too stunned to think. We bump down the drive. Something about the huge silence that’s fallen over the world, perhaps, makes him glance at me, and what he sees on my face suggests that something more needs to be said.

  ‘Thanks for offering, though. Sorry. Should have said that before.’

  Half-way down the hill we have to pull into a passing place to make room for a car on its way up. The driver winds down his window to speak to us, and a smiling pair of ears emerge. It takes me a moment to recognize them – the last time I saw them they were departing on a bicycle.

  Tony winds down his window as well. ‘I’ll be back up there in a moment,’ he calls. ‘Tell Laura to give you a drink.’

  ‘I feel so guilty!’ cries John Quiss. ‘Roaring around like Mr Toad in a hired car, poisoning a fine spring evening. But I don’t think I can ride all the way back to London with them tied on my handlebars.’

  We continue on our way.

  ‘He thinks one of those buggers could be worth quite a bit,’ explains Tony.

  Faster and faster flows the river. The uneasiness, the terror, the wrath culminate to a crisis. Then all at once the current dies away in the flat calm of the millpool. We enter a land where history has ceased.

  So it’s over before sunset, just as I said, with an hour or so still to go.

  I move about the cottage kitchen like a ghost, putting books down and picking them up, saying nothing to Kate, unable to speak. Our paths cross and recross, as she moves silently about preparing a bottle for Tilda. We step aside to let each other pass, shifting in and out of the low golden rays of the declining sun from the window, now gilded and blinking, now dark and blinded. It’s like a very complex formal dance, but one conducted in total silence.

  I suppose this is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me. It’s certainly the worst that’s ever happened to us. I don’t know how to begin to explain to her. I still can’t take in the scale and suddenness of the catastrophe, the total alteration of the world around me.

  Perhaps I could start like this: I could tell her that in the end I kept my word. That I didn’t find the objective evidence I was looking for, and that I consequently didn’t go through with my scheme. Or I could try leaving out ‘consequently’. But I didn’t go through with it! That’s the important part. Not all the way.

  I could tell her quite straightforwardly that all I have left, out of the £15,000 I borrowed from the bank, and the £6,000 I borrowed from her, is the £3,150 in the carrier bag. That I will repay her, and the bank, I don’t know how, but somehow, even if I have to do nights at the local petrol station to raise the money. That I pledge myself to this utterly. As utterly as I pledged myself to my earlier undertaking.

  I could tell her that at any rate I will never again have to take part in shabby schemes to evade tax, never again have to handle stolen goods or be caught out in apparently clandestine meetings.

  I could tell her how ludicrous her misreading of the situation with Laura is, and how hurtful to me.

  I could tell her that really I succeeded as a confidence trickster – succeeded only too well, because Tony had no idea at all that I was after those other three pictures. I’m like the Netherlandish rulers getting their man on to the throne of Spain. I outsmarted everyone, even myself.

  I could tell her that it was she who finished it all, for
better or worse, with just two words to Tony. That it was she who brought down the whole cloud-capped Tower of Babel I’d constructed for him with her passing mention of John Quiss.

  I could point out that as a result of our joint efforts it is at least a respectable academic who’s getting his hands on the picture, so it will presumably find a proper home.

  I could tell her how bitter I feel that she betrayed me in this way.

  I could tell her that I’ve gone down into the pit, and will not return.

  I could tell her that in some secret part of me I’m relieved to be spared the terrible burdens that victory would undoubtedly have brought.

  But I tell her nothing. I sit down at one end of the table, gazing sightlessly at the Sainsbury’s carrier bag. She sits down at the other end of the table, holding the bottle she’s made for Tilda. And in the end it’s she’s who speaks. Of course. Once again.

  ‘Martin,’ she says quietly, ‘I love you, and I think in your own way you love me. So can I ask you to do something for me? For both of us, in fact. For all three of us, because I know you love Tilda as well.’

  I wait, my hands still, my head bowed.

  ‘Can I ask you to go away until all this is over?’ she says.

  So now at last I know what to say. It’s very simple.

  ‘It is over,’ I tell her.

  She watches me. I go on looking at the carrier bag. I can hear Tilda beginning to stir upstairs.

  ‘You mean you’ve got the picture?’ she asks.

  ‘I mean I haven’t got it. I’m not going to get it. I’ve lost. You’ve won.’

  I get up and put the carrier bag on the table in front of her. ‘There’s a bit of the money left. I’ll get the rest of it somehow.’

  She looks at the bag sadly. She doesn’t even react to the news that I’ve managed to lose most of the money in the process of achieving nothing.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she says.

  I’m not quite sure what’s supposed to happen now. I have a feeling I should kiss her. Awkwardly I take hold of her arms, to indicate that she should stand up. Awkwardly she does so. Awkwardly we stand facing each other. She’s still holding Tilda’s bottle.

  The phone rings.

  I make a wry face, and go on standing there, waiting to kiss her. She goes on standing there, waiting to be kissed. We seem to have become frozen in time, like my lost couple in the bushes. But that flatly insistent demand for our attention, like the grizzling of a baby, makes it somehow even more awkward to proceed to the next stage of our reconciliation. She turns to look at the phone. ‘Leave it,’ I say. She goes across and picks up the receiver. For a moment she listens in silence, and then silently passes it to me.

  ‘Sorry,’ says Laura, as soon as she hears my voice. ‘I know I said I wouldn’t. But I’ve got them! You’ll have to jump in the car and get up here immediately!’

  She puts the phone down. I put the phone down. I look at the table. The inside of my head’s completely anaesthetized.

  ‘Listen …’ I say to Kate.

  I see her hand, still holding Tilda’s bottle, as it pushes the carrier bag back towards me.

  ‘You’d better keep the rest of the money,’ she says. ‘Because it’s not over, is it? It’s never going to be over. So, Martin, will you just go now? And please don’t ever come back.’

  The river lies motionless in the millpool. Then on it plunges again, into the race. History ceases for a year. Then on it surges again, into the Eighty Years War.

  As soon as I turn into the drive at Upwood, Laura comes running over from where she was waiting before, behind Private Property, Keep Out, tremendously excited and pleased with herself.

  ‘They put them in the boot of his car and then they went back into the house for a drink!’ she cries. ‘So I simply took them out again!’

  I jump out of the car. She’s already running back to the sign to fetch them.

  ‘You took them?’ I query despairingly. ‘You just … took them?’

  ‘I couldn’t believe it when I realized he’d cheated you out of them!’ She opens my boot and flings the pictures in.

  ‘But if you took them,’ I say, ‘then that’s …’ Something. Some sort of crime. Isn’t it? What sort of crime, though? I don’t know.

  ‘Not stealing!’ cries Laura. ‘Certainly not stealing! Not if you send him the money!’

  No, all right, not stealing, exactly. But …

  ‘He made some kind of arrangement with you, didn’t he?’ she says, slamming the boot down. ‘We’re just sticking to the arrangement!’

  Yes. Possibly. I’m not sure quite how definite the arrangement was, but morally, I suppose … perhaps …

  ‘You have still got some of the money left?’ she asks. She picks up the Sainsbury’s carrier bag on the front seat and looks inside. ‘Swads and swads! Just send him a few thousand – he’s not going to complain! He can’t! One word and his brother’ll have writs out for these as well!’

  I get uneasily into the car. But she’s running back to the sign and dragging something else out … It’s a suitcase. What’s this?

  ‘I’ll ring him tomorrow,’ she says, as she heaves it on to the back seat. ‘It’s usually safer to be at the other end of a phone before you tell him things he doesn’t want to hear.’

  She’s leaving him? A sound move, certainly, and high time. But where do I come into all this exactly?

  She gets in beside me. ‘Come on!’ she says. ‘That horrible little art person’s going to stop somewhere and look in his boot, and then he’s going to come screaming back up the hill again!’

  Yes. We’ll have to discuss all this as we go along. I turn the car, and we start back down the hill. She starts to laugh. ‘It’s like Tony’s mother, taking off with Dicky and Helen.’

  ‘Now, Laura,’ I say firmly. ‘It’s very kind of you to get the pictures for me, and I’m very amazed and very touched and very grateful. But perhaps we should just get one or two things absolutely straight …’

  She stops laughing. ‘We’ve got everything absolutely straight. Don’t worry. You couldn’t afford me, anyway. You’re just giving me a lift. Drop me off in London somewhere – I’ll stay with my sister. I assume you’re taking the pictures to London?’

  Am I? I suppose I am. The whole thing’s got way beyond me once again. I plainly can’t go back to the cottage. Not for some time yet. Though Kate doesn’t mean ever, of course. No one means absolutely literally what they say. Not even Kate.

  I can feel Laura looking at me. ‘Or are you worrying about Kate again?’ she says. ‘It’s all right – she’s not going to spring out of the bushes between here and London!’

  She might, actually, as we drive past the track to the cottage. But she doesn’t.

  ‘I don’t suppose he’ll notice I’m not there till he wonders why there’s no sign of dinner,’ she says. ‘I guessed what had happened when you went and you hadn’t got the other pictures with you. Then when that awful grinning little man came through the door looking so pleased with himself I thought, “Right! Enough’s enough!”’

  The lake by the wood where the dead tramp was has dried to a scattering of dust. We turn out on to the Lavenage road … Pass Busy Bee Honey … Strike south into the unreal country …

  I suppose I’ve won after all. Not that I feel the slightest sense of it. The only thing I actually feel is that I’ve nothing more to lose. It’s gone already … It hasn’t, though, it hasn’t! She doesn’t mean ever. No one means ever.

  And Laura’s right. We’re not committing any crime. We’re not stealing Menelaus’s treasure. I’ll send him the money. Every penny I was going to give him anyway. Though since he owns those three pictures no more than I do … Since no one owns them … Since no one’s in control of anything any longer … Yes, what I feel like isn’t Paris or Dicky – it’s the man in my picture in the boot who’s falling helpless into the water. Falling, falling, into the depths, where the waters will close above him for ever.

>   I stop the car with clumsy suddenness in the middle of nowhere, and crash over a kerbstone on to the verge. A terrible thought has just come to me. Not a thought – a certainty, as icy and final as the waters in the millpool.

  I slowly turn to look at Laura. She’s already looking at me, smiling. ‘Don’t look so grim about it, then,’ she says. ‘You don’t have to go through the motions. I know you really don’t want to …’

  I just go on gazing at her, unable to take in what she’s saying, frozen by the freezing certainty that’s come to me.

  ‘Well,’ she says, ‘one kiss, then.’

  She stops smiling. She brings her face slowly and seriously closer to mine. I get out of the car and open the boot.

  The picture on top is the cavalrymen. The next one’s the skaters. I throw them aside and pull out the bottom one.

  But I know already. It’s not mine – it can’t be mine, because mine’s solid oak – it weighs twenty or thirty pounds – she couldn’t have carried it to the end of the drive with her suitcase and the other two pictures – it’s three foot nine by five foot three – there’s no way it could be got into the car …

  The one I’ve got in my hands now is in a frame, for a start. It’s on canvas. It’s about one foot by two foot. It’s the dog.

  ‘That is the one you really wanted, isn’t it?’ asks Laura. I look up from the picture. She’s got out of the car, and she’s watching me anxiously. ‘It was supposed to be a surprise. I just suddenly thought of the way you looked at it, and I crept back in and took it off the wall.’

  I look at her. I look at the dog. I look at her again. I thought there was nothing more to lose. But of course there was, there was. There always is.

  I’d forgotten – I managed to deceive her about my intentions as well. As a deceiver I’ve been a success beyond all reasonable expectations.

  ‘He’s going to go into orbit when he notices,’ she says. ‘It’s the only picture he really cares about … It is the one you’ve had your eye on?’

  Well, at this point all the springs and shock absorbers inside me finally give way. They’ve carried me on a long journey over a very rough road, and now suddenly they’ve gone. I hurl the dog away into the darkness, sit down on a low ornamental wall in front of somebody’s ornamental hedge, and burst into tears.