Headlong

by Michael Frayn

  It’s the Amalienburg Palace all over again. Then I was mourning the demise of four days’ happiness. Now I’m weeping for the loss of everything I ever had. Of everything I ever hoped to have.

  Laura sits down on the wall beside me, very close but not touching. I can’t look at her, but she puts her hand on mine, and I can feel the patience and tenderness of her waiting. Surprising. I shouldn’t have expected it of her. I’m wrong about her, as about everything else.

  It’s getting dark; the sun has definitely set. Every few seconds a passing car lights us up, and gets a brief glimpse of two figures engaged in some inexplicable emotional scene at the edge of the spring evening, as marginal to their world as Icarus or Saul.

  ‘Sorry,’ I manage finally. I take several deep breaths. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘It was the other one?’ she says gently. ‘The one in the bedroom?’

  I say nothing. No point any longer in trying to conceal it. But then from her, as it’s turned out, there never was.

  ‘It’s back in the bedroom,’ she says. ‘Otherwise I might have brought it anyway. He fetched it in from the hatchery to have another go at washing the corner. If only you’d told me! I thought it wasn’t worth anything!’

  I withdraw my hand and put it on top of hers to console her in my turn. I feel almost as sorry for her and her mortification as I do for myself and my ruin.

  ‘And it really would have meant so much to you?’ she says.

  I translate my feelings about it into the simplest possible terms. ‘I think it’s worth a couple of million pounds or so.’

  With her free hand she strokes the hand of mine that’s holding hers.

  ‘Wow,’ she says finally.

  I manage another wobbly laugh. ‘You haven’t said that for a long time. Everything used to be “wow”. And once you called me a frightful little wet fish.’

  ‘Did I? Sorry.’

  ‘No, you said it very nicely. Anyway, it’s true.’

  I suppose Tony’s a pretty wet fish as well. So, by the sound of it, is the husband he pinched her off. I’m her third wet fish in a row. Perhaps we’re all really just the children she still hasn’t had.

  ‘A couple of million or so,’ she repeats. She likes the sound of the words. ‘He never suspected, you know. Not for a moment. Nor did I. What a sly little fish you are! A couple of million…! How much were you proposing to pay him for it?’

  ‘I thought a couple of thousand.’

  She laughs in sheer delight. ‘How wonderful! I see why you’re a philosopher.’

  She jumps to her feet. ‘Come on. It’s getting cold now the sun’s gone down.’

  In the light from the passing cars she collects the dog and the two Dutchmen from the darkness I consigned them to.

  ‘He keeps it hidden under the mattress,’ she says. ‘Killing two birds with one stone – he’s got a bad back.’

  We settle ourselves in the car again, and I start the engine to continue my now pointless odyssey.

  ‘We’ll never get it into this little car,’ she says. ‘We’ll have to take his Land-Rover.’

  I’ve turned my head to see if the road’s clear behind us. I turn it back to look at my passenger. What did she say?

  ‘I’ll go in and make him dinner,’ she says. ‘Then as soon as I’ve got him and the dogs safely shut away in the kitchen, I’ll open the front door for you. A couple of million? Maybe you could afford me.’

  We park the car in the shadows, by Private Property, Keep Out.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean about burglary,’ she says, because I haven’t ceased to express my uneasiness and reluctance all the way back here. ‘How can it be burglary? It’s my house! Anyway, I simply brought the wrong one! We’re taking it back and changing it. It’s just the same as taking a sweater back to Marks and Spencer if it doesn’t fit.’

  And already she’s out of the car and getting the dog picture out of the boot.

  ‘Wait, listen …’ I whisper desperately.

  ‘Leave the key in,’ she says quietly. ‘Then when we come back in the Land-Rover you can drop me, and I’ll take your car and follow you … Martin, he’d be pleased if he knew. He’d much rather have the dog one.’

  She vanishes into the darkness of the drive. I run after her, stumbling in and out of the potholes.

  ‘Stop!’ I whisper. ‘Wait! I don’t want it!’

  ‘Of course you want it.’

  ‘I don’t, I don’t! I just want to get out of here! I just want to go!’

  ‘Don’t be too much of a wet fish, darling. We’ll manage it between us. He may not even be there.’

  No, quite – he may have gone rushing down the hill to call on Kate for some mutual consolation.

  Apparently not, though. When we emerge from the trees, there’s the Land-Rover, dimly silhouetted against the muted light from some of the downstairs windows. I stop. So does Laura.

  ‘I thought I’d never have to see him again,’ she says in a different voice. ‘I can’t tell you what it’s been like these last few weeks …’

  Now her courage has gone. I’m shamefully relieved. I pluck at the sleeve of her sweater. I just want to be away from here before the dogs find us.

  She takes my hand and squeezes it. ‘Keep watching the front door,’ she says. ‘The moment it opens – in you go. He won’t come out of the kitchen. We’ll almost certainly be in the middle of a row by then.’

  She gives my hand another squeeze, painfully hard this time, and moves forward into the darkness. I grab at her sleeve again. ‘Laura! Please, please, please!’

  She stops.

  ‘Please, Laura,’ I whisper abjectly. ‘For my sake! Please!’

  ‘A couple of million?’ she whispers.

  ‘I don’t know! I’m not sure! I think I’m wrong!’

  But she’s gone, swallowed up into the night. A moment later a pale rectangle of light shows in the porch, and she’s briefly a dark shape against it. Then the rectangle’s wiped away again.

  I find a place at the edge of the woods to wait. I think it’s roughly where I waited to watch the door one damp morning all those weeks ago … No, one week – less than a week – five days ago. It seems like a lifetime. A second lifetime, because I remember I felt then that I’d already spent my entire life waiting outside that same front door.

  I try to imagine what’s going on inside, then on second thoughts try not to. This little charade is somehow the worst yet. Perhaps he’ll talk her round, as he did before when she was married to the first of her three wet fishes. Perhaps she’ll feel sorry for him, as she did for me, and go back to him. Perhaps I’m going to spend a third lifetime where I’ve spent the first two, waiting outside their great oak door.

  The whole enterprise has now become completely insane in any case, I understand that perfectly clearly. Even if we manage to lay our hands on it now, the picture and I are very shortly going to be going our separate ways, the picture into a bank vault, me into a prison cell.

  In the meanwhile the year goes slowly by. My anxiety subsides; I surrender to my destiny. Through the young leaves of the trees above me I can see the Plough on one side of the Pole Star and Cassiopeia on the other, revolving around each other as they’ve always revolved. It’s a rather idyllic scene, it occurs to me. A solid country house beneath the stars on a serene spring evening. Yet unseen in the shadows outside waits the intruder. The Manichaeans are right: the darkness balances out the light, the evil balances out the good. The light shines on the happy year in Bruegel’s panels; around them the darkness gathers.

  How would Bruegel, who painted so much that can’t be painted, paint the evil in the darkness, Death lurking in Arcadia?

  I focus my eyes once again on the darkness of the front door. There’s something strange about it. There is no front door. Where the front door was, the pale rectangle of light has returned. Laura’s opened it again.

  And in I go. It’s like diving from a high board, or going into hospital for an operation. Whe
n the moment comes, you do it. How do you do it? You just do.

  In the hall – silence. And only a dim, oblique light coming from somewhere in the heart of the house. I creep towards the great staircase, then stop. I begin to make out faint sounds, presumably from the kitchen – a muffled thud, a barely audible skein of voices. One of the voices, the higher one, is briefly raised, then the lower one raised to overwhelm it. The words are still indistinguishable, but the sense is plain enough – Tony and Laura are occupied with the row that she predicted. The voices fall away again, but I force myself to move forwards. As I start up the stairs I stumble over something hard. It’s the dog picture, returned from its little outing. I pick it up and hang it on its hook on the landing as I pass. Yes, I’m just making a simple exchange, the size 34 for the size 32.

  The bedroom’s in darkness, and I don’t turn the light on. The bed itself is as tumbled as it was five days ago. I have to put my face right down into the rank confusion, as I did with such delight on our bed in Oswald Road, to locate the panel. I have a great struggle to work the heavy oak free of the bedding, doing heaven knows what to the painted surface in the process, then bash it on the door handle as I get it out of the bedroom, and scrape it yet again at the turn on the landing. Half-way down the stairs, in the first reasonable glimmer of light, I stop and rest it against the banisters while I edge round to the front and examine it. Yes, no mistake this time. Shimmer – dance – ship – crags. The whole panorama of late spring; it’s all there. I feel a sudden wild surge of terrified joy. The fucker’s mine!

  And then the silence of the house cracks apart. There’s the crash of a door being flung violently open, and a lava of sound comes flowing out of the back corridors into the hall beneath me: Tony shouting, Laura shouting after him, the dogs barking and frolicking in delight at this sudden eruption of fun. I freeze, balancing the picture against the banisters, not daring to turn my head to look for fear of the faint light catching my face. The dogs don’t need light to find me, of course, and already I’m waist-deep in smelly dog breath, wet tongues and joyously thrashing tails. Still I keep my face averted. Tony seems to have come to a halt in the middle of the hall, with Laura somewhere beyond him. I can feel his gaze on the back of my neck. I can feel hers.

  I wait for him to cry out. But he doesn’t. ‘I’m sick of it!’ he’s still repeating, with a blind mechanical fury.

  ‘Raspberry sponge,’ she repeats pleadingly in her turn. ‘In the kitchen. Raspberry sponge.’

  ‘Sick of it!’ he insists, and not just of the raspberry sponge, by the sound of it. ‘Sick of it! Sick of it! Sick of it!’

  He’s very drunk, I realize. I can sense behind my back the difficulty he has in keeping his balance. Or in focusing his eyes on the still and silent intruder among the jostling dogs.

  And then suddenly the dogs have gone. They’ve followed their drunken master out of the hall and on into the depths of the house. At last I dare to turn my head. Laura’s running across the hall towards me.

  ‘Get out!’ she whispers, and now there’s real fear in her voice.

  I bend to lift the picture again, only too eager to obey.

  ‘Leave it!’ she says. ‘Quick! Just get out!’

  Leave it? Now?

  ‘He’s in the gun-room!’

  And before I can make up my mind whether to drop the picture or not, he’s back, escorted by an exultation of wild anticipatory barking. He shouts at the dogs to be quiet, and as they fall silent I hear behind my motionless back the reason for their excitement: he’s going shooting – he’s breaking open his gun and cramming in the cartridges.

  ‘Give that thing to me,’ commands Laura.

  ‘You’ll never forget the sight,’ he says. ‘I’ll tell you that.’

  ‘I said give it to me.’

  ‘I found my uncle. When I was a boy. I still dream about it.’

  The gun clicks softly closed. I remain half-stooped, the picture half up and half down, as I wait for the terrible noise that will end his side of the story for good and all. I should move to stop him – of course I should. But I know that if I give the slightest indication of my presence, the gun will jump of its own accord from him to me, and it will be my story that ends.

  ‘Please,’ says Laura. ‘Please, Tony.’

  Nothing. Even the dogs have become still. The stream of time has frozen motionless.

  And then the phone rings.

  Still none of us moves. It goes on ringing, on the great oak sideboard just below me, an event at last in the great eventlessness. We all ignore it, just as Kate and I did the earlier phone call this evening. It won’t let itself be ignored, though, any more than the earlier one would. Slowly time resumes its flow. Tony makes a little sound like a sigh.

  ‘Answer it,’ he says softly. ‘It’ll be your friend again.’

  ‘Give me that thing first.’

  ‘Answer it!’ he shouts, and the gun cracks wildly against the edge of the table as he swings it towards her. She moves to obey. Before she can reach it, though, he evidently changes his mind. I hear him barge in front of her and fumble with the receiver himself.

  ‘Listen, you cunt …’ he begins, and then stops, because whoever in this world it is at the other end of the line, I realize with a brief spasm of relief, at least it’s not me. A pause while the caller presumably makes this clear. A worse possibility occurs to me: it’s Kate, looking for me, wanting to convey some painful message of reproach or appeal.

  ‘Not in the boot?’ cries Tony. ‘What do you mean, they’re not in the boot? Is this some sort of stunt …?’

  Quiss. Of course.

  ‘It was you,’ says Tony suddenly, in a terrible voice, and at last I turn to look at him, because he’s not talking to Quiss now. ‘You took them.’

  But it’s not me, either. He’s dropped the phone, and he’s advancing on Laura, still holding the gun.

  ‘You and that little rat in the cottage,’ he says, with a sudden flash of drunken perception. ‘That filthy little teacher. Of course! He’s the one you’re fucking!’

  Laura snatches the gun out of his hands, and hurls it away across the hall. Whether it’s because of her supposed infidelity or the sight of his precious Purdey skating across the flagstones, he finally loses all control. He puts his hands round her throat, and begins to slam her against the banister. She tries to say something to me, but no words emerge. I let go of the Merrymakers and put my hands out to do something, I’m not sure what, and the picture goes tumbling end over end down the stairs. Tony turns at the noise and at last sees me. He gazes at me with his mouth hanging stupidly open, still holding Laura by the neck.

  For a moment we all stand there, frozen once again. Then he throws Laura down and whirls around, presumably to see where his gun went, though I don’t wait to be certain. I come down the rest of the stairs almost as fast as the picture did, then grab hold of Laura with one hand and the picture with the other. Somehow the three of us, picture, Laura and I, are through the front door and out into the night, and I’m unpicking the knot in the baler twine on the tailgate of the Land-Rover. Laura makes some sort of warning noise, her voice still choked from his fingers. And there he is again, gun in both hands, stumbling over the dogs on the threshold, which may be what both fills the night with explosion and sends this first barrel wide. I throw the picture into the car and slam the tailgate across, then bend down to scramble some kind of knot in the twine to hold it. Out of the corner of my eye I can see Tony getting to his feet and steadying himself. I flinch away blindly as he fires again, and a searing hot whip passes across the back of my head.

  ‘Quick!’ croaks Laura. ‘He’s reloading!’

  By the time he fires again, though, we’re in and away. The window beside me crazes over, but we’re bounding down the drive, our heads cracking against the roof, safe in the familiar reek of dirt and petrol, and the wildly barking escort on either side. There’s one last tremendous thump as we turn out on to the road, and I see one of the
dogs go rolling away like a circus tumbler into the darkness. But I’m too busy feeling the tender wetness at the back of my head to pay much attention.

  ‘A couple of inches to the left …’ I say, looking at the blood on my hand.

  ‘A couple more seconds …’ whispers Laura, feeling her throat.

  We seem to be alive, though. We seem to have the picture. For the second time tonight we seem to be driving very fast down the hill to happiness.

  Tramp wood … Lavenage road … Busy Bee …

  Laura’s voice begins to return.

  ‘I should never have left that gin out,’ she croaks.

  She feels her neck, then pulls up her sweater to inspect her ribs. But I can’t really look, because I’m at last beginning to put two and two together.

  What I’m putting together is baler twine and suffocation. To avoid giving heretics the opportunity of public martyrdom, decreed Philip II in that idyllic, shimmering late spring of 1565, they were henceforth to be executed at midnight in their dungeons. They were to have their heads bound between their knees, and then they were to be slowly suffocated in tubs of water.

  ‘Never mind,’ she says. ‘We’ve won. We’ve got it.’

  But I’m not thinking about our triumph. I’m looking in the mirror at the heavy panel wedged across the back of the Land-Rover in the darkness. Not a single detail of it can I see from here, of course. But I think I know what I shall see when I examine it again.

  I shall see that the little man tumbling into the millpool has his head bound between his knees.

  That they’re not ducking him. Not saving him. They’re drowning him.

  Way off in the middle distance, unnoticed by anyone around, remarked only by an eye outside the world of the picture, a secular martyrdom is taking place. The small event at the edge of things that gives the scene its significance, just like the fall of Icarus and the blinding of Saul and the unnoticed arrival of that pregnant woman among the crowds in Bethlehem. The busy year revolves, but before the first season’s out the small concealed murder has occurred that turns the whole idyll into an irony.