Headlong

by Michael Frayn

  I mustn’t so much as think – no, I must stop thinking, in case it shows on my face. I must just get out of the house and sort things out where no one’s looking at me. But Tony’s reluctant to let it go. He stands the picture up again and inspects it ruefully. ‘What, another dud?’

  ‘They’re none of them duds,’ I hear myself saying, in a voice which even manages a hint of impatience in its hypocrisy. ‘They’re all interesting pictures.’

  ‘Hasn’t even got a signature,’ says Tony. No, there’s no signature. If there were, he wouldn’t have his hand on the picture like that, because the alarms would have gone off and the security guards would have come running.

  Laura bends down to look at the back of it. ‘There’s a label,’ she says hopefully.

  I hadn’t even thought to look. I can scarcely bear to now; I don’t want to know what it says. I shrink from seeing this sacred object insulted by misattribution. I shrink even more sharply from the hideous possibility that my great flash of intuition has been anticipated. It’s not a possibility, of course. Not even these two clowns would be using it to stop the soot falling into the breakfast-room if they had the faintest inkling of what it was.

  But I suppose I have to know what the label’s telling the world.

  ‘Martin,’ says Kate, with the suggestion of an exclamation mark, as I squat concessively down to look. This is about as overtly reproachful as she ever gets; I realize how urgently she longs to be out of this terrible house.

  The label’s a piece of yellowing paper, almost as dirty as the picture itself. The only thing on it is a single typed line, followed by a handwritten parenthesis.

  ‘Vrancz: Pretmakers in een Berglandschap (um 1600 gemalt).’

  Wrong! Wonderfully wrong! Painter and date, certainly. Whether the title’s wrong as well it’s impossible to say, since no one knows what its title is.

  ‘Double Dutch to me,’ says Tony.

  Yes. Pretmakers in a mountain landscape … What are pretmakers?

  ‘1600,’ he says. ‘Bit closer to your period?’

  ‘Still about a century out.’

  ‘Very difficult to please you chaps. So you don’t know anything about Mr Vrancz?’

  ‘Not much.’

  ‘Though if it doesn’t say “Charlie Vrancz” …’

  ‘Sebastian, I think.’

  ‘… it’s not by him anyway.’

  ‘Unlikely, I agree,’ I say regretfully. But truthfully, because it is unlikely – the probability of its being by Sebastian Vrancz is about the same as for the green cheese theory of lunar geology. My truthful reply’s part of an outline policy that’s already begun to form in my head. I’m thinking: I’m not going to lie, but I’m not going to tell any unnecessary truths … Mustn’t think, though, mustn’t think! But I am thinking, of course. In another long instant – long enough for the dogs to have got to their feet, and for all of us to have followed Kate and Tilda out into the hall at last – I’ve replanned my entire life.

  I’m going to have the picture off him. This is my great project. I don’t know how I’m going to do it, but do it I shall. On that central point I’m already absolutely clear.

  ‘Another Rembrandt, perhaps,’ says Laura, as she fetches my coat.

  ‘Hope you didn’t mind us showing you the family snaps,’ says Tony, as he helps me into it.

  ‘Not at all. Most intriguing. I only wish we could have been more helpful.’

  ‘You can’t imagine what it’s like’, he says, ‘trying to sell something when you know bugger all about it. All you know is that every man’s hand’s against you. You’re the loneliest soul on earth.’

  He opens the great front door, and the dogs go bounding and barking away into the night. I look at him as we turn on the doorstep to make our farewells, and I suddenly feel sorry for him. There’s a note of defeat in his voice. The water’s still trickling softly from the broken gutter overhead, and the white paint on the door has been worn back to the bare oak over the years by the scratchings of the dogs. The wife beside him is in spirit away off into the night already, like the dogs. His world’s disintegrating around him, beyond recall or understanding.

  ‘He thought you might know someone,’ says Laura. ‘Some expert on Giordano. Or even someone who might want to buy it privately. He always goes about things in some ridiculous back-to-front way.’

  The loneliest soul on earth is what he is. And he’s just about to watch another of his possessions slip out of his grasp. If I can possibly contrive it. Because the second loneliest soul on earth at this moment is me. We’re alone together in the arena, the two of us, and I’m going to take him.

  I feel a flash of pure savagery. I’m going to have his property off him. He can’t make good his claim to it. It’s written in a language he can’t read, because the only language he can read in his necessity is money. If he knew what it was, he’d hold the world to ransom. And if the ransom wasn’t forthcoming he’d sell it to any money that presented itself – to a Swiss bank, an American investment trust, a Japanese gangster. It would vanish even deeper into the darkness, even further from the light of common day.

  If fuel prices rose high enough, he’d sell it for firewood.

  In any case, he owns it no more than I do. No one can own a work of art. You can own the oak, you can own the paint. You can’t own the shimmer of the green, the comicality of the pouted lips, the departure of the ship.

  So I’m going to have it off him. I’m not going to do it by deceit. I’m not going to stoop to the kind of methods he might use himself. I’m going to do it by boldness and skill, in full accordance with the rules of war.

  I know how he despises me, and all the skills and connections of mine that he was hoping to make use of. I’m going to play the hand in what he regards as his strongest suit. I’m going to give him a lesson in the gentlemanly attributes of ruthlessness and style.

  Change, as he so sententiously informed us, is the law of life. That, he’s going to discover, includes change of ownership. It includes the fall of one class, and the rise of another.

  And immediately I’m terrified at the prospect of what I’ve committed myself to. I know I’m out of my depth. I can feel the waters closing above me.

  I’m even more terrified, though, by his parting politeness, as he begins to shut the great door.

  ‘I’ll take your advice about the old girl,’ he says humbly. ‘I’ll give Sotheby’s a buzz.’

  I’d forgotten my appallingly sensible suggestion. In another lightning cascade of thought I see the man from Sotheby’s as he concludes his inspection of Helen and turns away – then turns back as his eye falls on the boarded-up fireplace beneath it … And I find I’ve the first glimmerings of a plan of action in my mind, and on my tongue.

  ‘Hang on for a couple of days first,’ I say, with a little smile. ‘You’re right – you’ll be in a stronger position if you find out what the alternatives are. I might just possibly know someone who’d take a look at it for you.’

  We pick our way through the puddles to our car. The rain has stopped, and the first true night of spring has hung the thinly clad branches of the trees with brilliant silver stars.

  In a few seconds from now I’m at last going to be able to speak to Kate. Like a lover first breathing the name of his beloved, I’m going to release the secret burning with such sweet fire inside me.

  But I don’t. I don’t say anything. We sit in silence as the car lurches and splashes down the drive.

  The fact is that I’m still thinking fast. And what I’m thinking now is that I can’t simply burst out with the amazing news. Not even to Kate. Least of all to her. She won’t believe it. No one would. Not the most credulous of art lovers, not the most trusting of wives. And Kate’s not the most credulous of art lovers or the most trusting of wives. As a specialist in the subject, she’s committed to caution; as a wife, she’s already sceptical of what she sees as my propensity to sudden wild enthusiasms. Her first thought will be that this
is merely another of my fugues, another of my excuses for postponing work on the book. I’m going to have to be almost as circumspect with her as I was with Tony Churt. At the moment I’m relying on memory, on a fortuitous interest in something well outside the tiny smallholding of knowledge that I’ve begun to cultivate. Before I say a word to her I’m going to have to do some careful research. I’m going to have to prepare a very fully documented case.

  But why is she so silent? Is it just the awfulness of the evening we’ve sat through, transformed now for me in retrospect, but not of course for her? Is she irritated at my slowness in leaving? Wary of my embarrassingly excessive forthcomingness to Laura? Hurt that the Churts and I were exchanging fatuities over yet another second-rate painting instead of tweedling appreciatively over the extraordinary and beautiful child she was rocking on the other side of the room?

  Or has she sensed something suspiciously noisy about my silence? I make haste to bring it to an end.

  ‘Wow,’ I remark. ‘As our gracious hostess might say.’

  ‘What?’ says Kate. Yes, something’s eating at her; choosing not to understand is a bad sign.

  ‘Them,’ I explain, though it’s entirely unnecessary. ‘The house. The evening.’

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘Wow. No?’

  Silence again. Heartbreaking, at a moment when we should be more united than ever in our identical reaction to the common enemy. Maddening, when I’m feeling so full of myself. Then, suddenly:

  ‘What’s all this about knowing someone who might look at the Giordano?’

  Ah. So that’s the problem.

  ‘Nothing. Just trying to be neighbourly.’

  ‘But you don’t know anyone who knows about Giordano!’

  ‘Don’t I?’

  ‘You’d never even heard of him before tonight.’

  I thought I had, of course. But then I also thought he was the composer of Andrea Chénier, so I hold my peace.

  ‘Then how’s that being neighbourly?’ she persists. ‘Telling them you know someone when you don’t?’

  ‘I might look around a bit. See if I can find them someone.’

  ‘Look around where?’

  ‘The woodshed?’ I suggest. ‘Behind the cooker?’

  But she’s not to be jollied out of her dissatisfaction. She knows there’s something up. I might be able to conceal it from the Churts, but not from her. In any case, I can’t keep down the rising tide of excitement inside myself. I have to provoke her curiosity with further maddening hints and feints. The mystery of the missing Giordano specialist serves as a metaphor of the real mystery.

  ‘Actually,’ I say, ‘I think I may be on the right track. I might find a possible candidate knocking around the cottage somewhere.’

  I mean, of course – as I understand but she doesn’t – that I shall be in the cottage, that I’m thinking of constituting myself as the helpful authority. This is the plan that I began to formulate on the Churts’ doorstep. I haven’t the slightest idea how I’m going to do it. An hour or two with a standard work of reference, obviously. But then? False beard? Dark glasses and foreign accent? Or could I somehow take the picture away for my supposed contact to examine in private? I explain that he’s someone who doesn’t want his identity known. It’s true – he doesn’t! But why not? What reason do I give Tony Churt?

  Because he’s a mystery purchaser. Yes. Everyone’s heard of mystery purchasers. A purchaser is after all what Tony Churt had been hoping I might supply, and he won’t be surprised if I find one who’s a little shy of publicity. With good reason, perhaps. He’s a king of the underworld, a capo with a taste for the corrupt grandiosities of the seicento. Something at any rate dodgy, even if not downright crooked. That should appeal to Tony Churt’s fatal weakness for the devious. Particularly if this shady figure’s offering top whack, cash down.

  Kate refuses to investigate the mystery I’ve dangled in front of her. When we get home she feeds Tilda in a marked manner, mother and daughter cocooned together in a silent physical communion to which I can never be admitted. The subject hangs in the air until Tilda’s asleep again and we’re getting undressed in front of the fan heater.

  ‘I know you like to be nice to everyone,’ she says concessively, hushed and perhaps softened by the presence of Tilda in her box beside the bed, ‘even if it doesn’t always mean very much in practice. But if you’re not careful they’ll invite us again.’

  Exactly. But all I say is: ‘I’ve put both hot water bottles on your side of the bed.’

  An even more disagreeable interpretation strikes her, even so. ‘You’re not suggesting that we have to invite them back?’

  ‘Good God, no,’ I say. This will be quite unnecessary. I hope. I want to be in and out of their house, not ours, the trusted local expert who deals with unwanted works of art in much the same way that Skelton deals with the septic tank and the aperitifs, or the wonderful little man at the rectory with beating the bounds and comfort for the dying. Yes, I shall become another of their local little men. ‘I think I can get my drug baron to go a shade higher on Helen,’ I hear myself saying confidentially, not too many weeks from now. ‘You want him to take a look at your Double Dutchmen as well while I’m about it …?’

  But there’s a lot of work to be done before we reach that stage. Pretmakers first of all. This is easy, because I keep a Dutch dictionary in the kitchen with my other Flemish reference books … Pretmaker, pretmakerij: Merrymaker, merrymaking. So that’s what those solemn clumping figures on the hillside are up to! I can’t help doing a little merrymaking myself at the thought.

  The next stage is going to be more difficult, though. I have to find out everything there is to be found out about my merry folk and their creator. I have to be able to make an objective case that will convince Kate. We’ve brought with us all the research materials that either of us thought we could possibly need, but neither of us foresaw our work taking in this particular artist or this particular period. I have to get to libraries and bookshops. There are no libraries and bookshops in the middle of these muddy fields and dank woods. I have to return to the city that we’ve just abandoned for three months. I nerve myself. Things have got to get worse between us before they can get better.

  I wait until my hand is on the switch of the bedside light.

  ‘Will you drive me to the station in the morning?’ I say. ‘A few odds and ends I’ve got to check. I’ll be back in time to make dinner.’

  I wait just long enough for her to see the innocent straightforwardness in my expression. Then click – blackness – before the answering disappointment appears in hers. Silence. She turns away from me. She knows I’ve another bee in my bonnet, another excuse for backsliding.

  It suddenly occurs to me for the first time that she perhaps thinks my new love is Helen. I laugh silently to myself in the darkness. Then I start to think of pretmakers, and the four of us this evening performing our own ponderous merrymaking on the local hillsides. I laugh again. But not even the unexplained shaking of the bed provokes her to investigate further.

  I lie for half the night listening to the faint sounds from Tilda’s cot, as she rises restlessly close to the surface of sleep, then sinks away into the depths again. I rise and sink myself, moving back and forth between nightmarishly confused excitement and horribly clear-headed second thoughts. By the time Tilda’s fully awake and demanding her three o’clock feed, I’m not quite as certain as I was about my identification. I’m not certain about anything.

  One dark and uninterpreted formulation recurs: the prologue is finished. The prologue to what? I don’t know. To my new venture. To our marriage. To life itself. The pretmakerij is over. Now comes the serious part.

  What Are We Looking At?

  There are some paintings in the history of art that break free, just as some human beings do, from the confines of the particular little world into which they were born. They leave home – they escape from the tradition in which they were formed, and
which seemed at first to give them significance. They step out of their own time and place, and find some kind of universal and enduring fame. They become part of the common currency of names and images and stories that a whole culture takes for granted.

  It happens for good reason and for bad, and for no discernible reason at all. It’s always happened, even before the age of the rotary press and colour photography. It happened with one faintly smiling Tuscan woman, one greatly amused Dutchman. It happened with a vase of Provençal sunflowers and a couple tenderly embraced in a marble kiss. It was happening already in classical antiquity, with a statue by Praxiteles of the Aphrodite of Cnidus. But now that images can be reproduced so easily and so accurately, now that mass tourism and universal education have filled the great galleries of the world with holidaymakers and schoolchildren, now that you can buy a painting and send your greetings home on the back of it for the price of the stamp you stick on it, some of these images have become even more pervasive.

  One of the most familiar of all is a landscape by Bruegel, sometimes known as The Return of the Hunters, more usually as The Hunters in the Snow. There they go again, those weary men with their gaunt dogs, on the walls of hospital waiting-rooms and students’ lodgings, on your mantelpiece Christmas after Christmas, trudging away from us off the winter hills behind our backs, down into the snowbound valley beneath. Their heads are lowered, their spoils are meagre. Three hunters, with thirteen dogs to feed and nothing but a single fox to show for their labours. There’s no great rejoicing at their return; the women making a fire, outside the inn with the sign that’s hanging half off its hooks, don’t give them a glance, any more than the ploughman looks up to see Icarus vanishing into the sea in that earlier painting of Bruegel’s that Auden made almost as famous as the Hunters. What takes the eye is the landscape that opens away at the foot of the hill we are on: the village turned in upon itself by the cold, the tiny figures on the unfamiliar ice, the sky leaden above the white flood plain around the frozen river, a planing magpie black against the whiteness, leading the eye on to the broken teeth of the mountains on the other side of the valley, and the distant town at the end of it beside the winter sea.