Headlong

by Michael Frayn

  I look at Kate. She has her head down over Tilda, and she’s shaking her loose hair back and forth over the baby’s face.

  I look back at the books. The stack’s slightly out of true. She’s read the words, in one spelling or the other, on all seven bindings. Never before, so far as I know, has she ever checked up on me behind my back. But then never before, so far as I can recall, have I ever kept anything from her. We’ve crossed some kind of watershed, and a new landscape’s opened in front of us. It’s not spring in this new valley. I realize that her absorption in Tilda is accusing me not just of neglecting my work, but of something worse. It implies a contrast with my failure to be absorbed in the wonderful little creature we’ve brought into the world together, and my cold-hearted absorption in something else. I don’t believe her failure to replace the folder on top of the books was accidental. I suddenly feel the sense of injustice that must be afflicting the Hunters in the Snow, as they come back from their great expedition to secure food for the village and find that no one will give them so much as a glance, because they shouldn’t have been out hunting at all – they should have been at home looking after the children and writing about nominalism. The injustice is even more marked in my case, since I’ve returned from my expedition not with one miserable, uneatable fox, but with enough meat to keep us, all three of us, for the rest of our lives. Or the prospect of it.

  She looks up and sees me looking at her. We both look away.

  ‘You didn’t see the picture,’ I say quietly. ‘I did.’

  I meant to begin quietly, it’s true; but not like this, on a note of accusation. She carefully puts her breast away and buttons up her shirt.

  ‘Bruegel,’ she says neutrally, carefully draining any suggestion of doubt or query from her voice.

  ‘I think it’s just possible,’ I reply, carefully draining any suggestion from mine of the conviction I feel, which has in any case begun to fade as soon as she uttered the name.

  ‘Unsigned?’ she inquires politely.

  ‘Yes, but so are quite a number of them.’

  Now I’ve moved from accusation to defensiveness. The conversation’s come off the rails before it’s even left the station. My idea, so far as I’d had one and can remember it, was to begin by simply describing to her what I’d seen, and letting her find her own way to the same conclusion to which it had led me. Too late for this now, and in any case Max Friedländer’s wise words have come back into my head, warning against the vanity of attempting to describe pictures in detail. The ‘strictest economy of words’ is what he enjoins, and recommends limiting oneself to ‘aphoristic remarks, put together unsystematically’. The shimmer on the leaves, the snow-capped peaks, the great diagonals, the feet stamping in the mud – they all flash through my mind and immediately fall victim to my drive for verbal economy. How can I condense it all into one unsystematic aphorism?

  ‘It’s the spring,’ I say, and yes, not bad – in fact, perfect – I’ve got it in one. How aphoristic can you get? In a single word, the spring is what it is.

  Whether it has the same full richness of meaning to her, I don’t know. She doesn’t give any evidence of the shock of delight that I felt when I saw the picture. Or any echo of my surprise. But then I suppose she remembers my questions about the iconography.

  She fetches a clean jump-suit for Tilda. ‘You don’t mean something from the Months?’ she asks, and of course at once I’m away. I’ve got my opening, like a salesman when the reluctant customer’s foolish enough to display some passing polite interest.

  ‘They’re not months!’ I say, just as the salesman might say, These are not brushes, madam, they’re eco-friendly, fuel-efficient cleansing tools. ‘That’s the point! They’re seasons!’

  ‘I thought there were five of them extant …’ she begins, as she eases Tilda’s arms out of the old suit.

  And now my spirits have really revived, my conviction’s returned in full. It’s plain that she doesn’t know anything about the series. And I do. She’s off her home ground. And on mine. Very calmly and coherently, I run through the history of the debate: the unpaid tax, the missing ‘and’, the misplaced mit, the old division of the year, the early spring and the late spring. I lay particular stress, of course, on her own decisive contribution in recognizing the iconography. Her hands stop working as I speak. Tilda lies half into her clean suit and half out of it. Kate’s looking straight at me.

  ‘And you seriously think …?’ she begins carefully.

  ‘No,’ I say, ‘I don’t. I don’t seriously think at all. I seriously know.’

  She resumes work on Tilda.

  ‘I thought you said before …’ she begins again.

  ‘That it was possible,’ I agree at once, recalling with some surprise this now long-past stage in the conversation. ‘I did. I was lying. I was trying to break it gently. I was saying, “I’m afraid your great-aunt’s been taken ill,” when what I mean is that she’s dead.’

  Another pause. More work on Tilda.

  ‘There’s nothing impossible about a missing Bruegel turning up,’ I explain. ‘Nothing even particularly unlikely. The Flight into Egypt didn’t resurface until 1948. Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery, which is a particularly important picture, only turned up in the fifties. The Three Soldiers in the sixties.’

  She’s no more interested in my newly acquired scholarship about Bruegel, though, than she was in my findings about the Master of the Embroidered Foliage.

  ‘What did Tony Churt say when you told him?’ she asks.

  I’ve a long way still to go in explaining this thing to her, I realize.

  ‘I didn’t say anything to Tony Churt’, I explain, very gently, ‘because it would be a criminal offence. Yes! In effect! Aiding and abetting! It would be like giving a bank robber the key to the bank! Because that would be the last anyone would ever see of it! It would be out of the country and gone! Held as an investment in some millionaire’s vault.’

  Tilda’s head is turned to one side, and she’s watching me with unblinking seriousness and open mouth. She understands. She sees the dangers.

  ‘So what are you going to do?’ asks Kate.

  ‘Buy it.’

  Kate has been standing up to work on Tilda. She stops work and sits down. ‘Martin!’ she says.

  ‘Don’t start worrying about Tony Churt,’ I reassure her. ‘I’m not doing this to make money. I’m doing it to ensure that the picture goes to some place where everyone can see it. I’m doing it because it’s a kind of miracle that’s brought this picture and me face to face – because it’s an opportunity that’s not offered to many, and that will almost certainly never recur for me, to perform one truly worthy action before I die. There’s something in that picture that cries out to me. Though if by any chance I do happen to make a little money in the process, I shall of course accept it gratefully. On behalf of both of us. And I shall give everyone, including Tony Churt, their rightful share.’

  Tilda gives a sudden smile. She may not understand every nuance of this surprisingly eloquent speech, but she certainly senses and approves the passion that drives it. Kate, however, remains more resistant, and I was wrong – what’s at the forefront of her mind is not the possibility of injustice to Tony Churt.

  ‘How much will it cost?’ she asks.

  I make a rapid calculation. What I’m calculating is not exactly the answer to her question, but how much of my rather complex plans I should attempt to explain at this particular juncture. I can see that it’s not the moment to get involved in a long, tangled exposition, or to mention the quixotic generosity I have in mind to show Tony Churt. I need to get the basic principle accepted first.

  ‘I think something by a follower of Vrancz would probably be worth a couple of thousand,’ I say. Another good suggestio falsi for my Introduction course, if things don’t work out as well as I hope.

  But the suggestio is evidently not false enough. She’s appalled. ‘Two thousand pounds?’ she says in amazement. I w
as right to keep the ramifications of the scheme until later.

  ‘Or so,’ I say lightly, smiling back at Tilda, who’s delighted to discover how modest the outlay will be.

  ‘Where are you going to get two thousand pounds from?’ demands Kate, as sharply as she’s ever demanded anything. ‘We haven’t got two thousand pounds!’

  ‘Overdraft,’ I say. ‘I’ll tell the bank manager we’re doing some improvements to the cottage. New septic tank, perhaps.’

  I reach out to take Tilda. But Kate gets up without a word and carries her up to the bedroom for her nap.

  And now, without Tilda there to encourage me, I feel some slight misgivings creep into the pit of my stomach. While it was actually happening, the conversation seemed to me to be bouncing along on a reasonably cheerful note, but I realize in retrospect that this was purely unilateral. Really it was just about as disastrous as I could have feared. She doesn’t accept my attribution, this is the underlying trouble. She obviously wouldn’t begrudge my investing a few pounds if she did, against such a huge return. Does this shake my conviction a little? Not for a moment. I saw it. She didn’t.

  But I can’t help feeling the sadness of it all. Kate used to like what she thought of as my boldness and impulsiveness. She was dismayed by my swerve into the nominalist project, it’s true, and a lot more dismayed still by my little fling with the Master of the Embroidered Foliage. But she liked it well enough on Lufthansa. Not just in my speed to proffer help with the ink, but in my almost equal speed to adapt all my plans in life to fit hers. She was on her way to monasteries to look at manuscripts, but I was on my way to somewhere no less important. I was going to visit Neuschwanstein, to research a book I was thinking of writing on Nietzsche and late romanticism – my first attempt to escape from the shackles of academic philosophy. She could have given up the monasteries and come to Neuschwanstein with me. But she didn’t – the possibility was never even discussed. I gave up Neuschwanstein and went to the monasteries with her. She smiled and frowned when I announced my change of plan to her, as we came into land, and said I was being ridiculous. She frowned and smiled, and by the time the plane had reached the gate, had more or less agreed. This, incidentally, is how I first saw the South German and Danubian paintings that led me back from the nineteenth century to the fifteenth, and northwards from Bavaria to the Netherlands, then on again to my apotheosis in the late spring of 1565, in a rich valley beneath the snow-capped peaks of the Flemish Alps. This is how it all fitted together.

  Our marriage – this was another sudden and amazing project of mine that turned out well.

  The bedroom door softly closes, and Kate comes softly down the stairs again.

  ‘Just promise me one thing,’ she says concessively, and of course at once I’m ready to concede anything she likes in return. Or almost anything. ‘You will let someone else see it first?’

  This is so idiotic, so plainly impossible, so obviously at odds with the whole tenor of the delicate negotiations I’m involved in, that all thought of concession vanishes at once.

  ‘Let who see it?’ I ask, reasonably enough.

  ‘Someone who knows something about Bruegel.’

  She wants me to get it authenticated as the missing Bruegel – and then buy it for two thousand pounds? What do they do all day up there at the Hamlish? What do they dream about in the Ecclesiology Department? I love her strange, dreamy detachment from all worldly knowledge and values – I always have. It’s written deep into the beauty of her face. But this is even more preposterous than my imaginary faith in Tony Churt’s honesty. Then again, what’s happened all of a sudden to her saintly disregard for money? Also, what does she mean – someone who knows something about Bruegel? I’m someone who knows something about Bruegel! Already I know almost as much as there is to know. By the time I hand over any money I shall know things that other Bruegel scholars never even knew there were to know.

  But all I say is: ‘I assure you I shan’t go ahead if there’s the slightest doubt.’

  ‘In whose mind?’

  In mine, obviously. But I don’t reply. I’m going to let her do the talking for a change, while I borrow her technique of silence.

  She tries another tack. ‘Why do you object to its going out of the country? I’ve never heard you complain about the others being in Vienna and wherever it is. If this really is one of the series, it probably ought to be with them.’

  I can’t let this go by in silence. ‘It won’t be in Vienna! It certainly won’t be in the Kunsthistorisches. Not if it’s bought by some shady Belgian businessman.’

  ‘Why should it be bought by a shady Belgian businessman?’

  I revert to my previous policy. A slight confusion here, I realize; the mysterious Belgian comes into another chapter of the story altogether. A chapter which it’s certainly not the moment to open now. In any case, she’s already off on a fresh scent.

  ‘Suppose Tony Churt simply asks you?’

  ‘Asks me what?’

  ‘If it’s a Bruegel.’

  ‘He won’t. Why should he? I don’t suppose he’s ever heard of Bruegel.’

  ‘But if he does? If he says, “Is this a Bruegel?”’

  ‘I’ll tell him the truth.’

  ‘That it’s a Bruegel?’

  I say nothing again. I could say that it’s disingenuous of her to suggest this is the truth, when she herself thinks it’s not. But then she’d reply that what’s at issue is not what she thinks … etcetera etcetera. To which I should be forced to reply that the truth of a proposition is logically independent of what either of us believes … etcetera etcetera. Then it occurs to me, with a terrible sinking of the heart, that we’re having the kind of conversation that other couples have, the kind that we’ve never had before, the kind that goes dully round and round in circles, with each of us scoring points that remain entirely obscure to the other. We’re on the road to becoming Tony and Laura.

  ‘What will you tell him?’ she persists.

  ‘That I don’t know.’

  ‘I thought you said you did know?’

  I shouldn’t have offered her even that small response to work on, because now I shall have to give a little lecture about the criteria for knowledge, in any strict epistemological sense, that I should certainly be obliged to adhere to if my professional opinion were being sought; to which she will respond with … oh, who knows, who cares? How have we managed to avoid all this before for six long years? Because we’ve always conducted our disputes in silence. Or at any rate Kate has. I’ve always known what she was thinking, but since she’s never uttered the objection aloud I’ve had no occasion or excuse for a counter-objection. It’s her sudden abandonment of this policy, her complete reversal of it, that’s landed us in this swamp.

  ‘Martin,’ she says quietly, ‘listen to me. That picture isn’t a Bruegel. I’m sorry – I know how much you want it to be. But it’s not. It’s truly not.’

  ‘You didn’t see it.’

  ‘Martin, please! I know it’s not! Please listen to what I’m saying! It’s not a Bruegel, Martin! It’s not, it’s not! Of course it’s not! How can you be so stupid?’

  It’s unsettling, I have to confess, to see someone as calm and rational as Kate give way to blind panic. I feel her terror creeping into my veins like an infection. But I resist it. I quietly repeat my unanswerable argument. ‘You didn’t see it. I did.’

  I’m as isolated as Saul, in the great Conversion on the left-hand wall of the Kunsthistorisches. I’m lying at the side of the Damascus road, felled and blinded by the narrow laser beam from heaven that has sought out me and no one else. All around me the great army flows on, upwards and onwards into the mountains. That river of men is Kate and the rest of mankind, going about the settled business of their lives. I’m the small, unnoticed anomaly, the prostrate drunk, the collapsed down and out, the minor embarrassment at the periphery of their vision. What none of them knows is that I shall arise as Paul, and my awkward little fit will have chan
ged the world.

  Tilda cries. I’m on my way upstairs before Kate can move. Tilda’s my one supporter, and I need a little support at the moment. I pick her up and walk her back and forth, and jiggle her gently up and down, until she settles again. It would be better to jiggle her box, because she’ll probably wake again when I put her down. But I love holding her, and looking at her sleeping face. Particularly now. But the look and feel of her there in my arms, so real and solid, so present, undermines my faith instead of reinforcing it. My picture isn’t in my arms, warm and breathing. My picture’s absent. One glimpse is all I had of it, and even the memory of that glimpse has become indistinct. Once again my courage fails me, because now I suddenly see what the real worst-case scenario would be.

  It’s this: I’ve borrowed my £26,000, in the teeth of Kate’s terrified unbelief, or perhaps without her knowledge at all, I’ve waited my decent interval, and I’ve shown the picture to the specialist I’ve found. He takes one look at it … and he doesn’t shout out. He examines it for a long time, and then he says, ‘I suppose you were hoping that this was an original Vrancz, but I’m afraid it’s just something in his general style …’ I sell it to a dealer, and I get £2,000 for it. So now I have to go back to Kate and tell her, ‘I’ve borrowed £26,000, and I’ve lost over £20,000 of it, with no hope of ever recovering it …’

  Nor any hope of repaying it. And whoever it was I borrowed it from, whether it was the bank, waiting to foreclose on the second mortgage I’ve taken out, or some firm I’ve found in the Yellow Pages, readier still to come round with dogs and iron bars, the real loser in the deal is right here, lying in my arms. I shall have borrowed the money against our daughter’s future.

  I’m not Saul but Icarus, in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, who has flown too near the sun, and who has fallen, as unnoticed by the world as Saul, and as irrelevant; but fallen not to rise again in glory – to disappear ignominiously beneath the waves for ever.

  With infinite care I settle my mortgaged child back into her box, and creep out of the bedroom. I’m going to sit down beside Kate at the kitchen table and take her hand, and kiss it. I’m going to confess that I’ve behaved wrongly, and ask her forgiveness. Then I shall tell her everything – the whole plan, with nothing kept back. Perhaps, when she sees how contrite I am, and realizes how much it must have meant to me ever to think of going behind her back as I did, she’ll make a huge leap of faith and trust me to do as I think best. Then we’ll be in it together, as we’ve been with every other venture since we first met. Perhaps she’ll still say, lovingly, that she thinks it’s wrong. And if she does I’ll bow to her judgement. Without demur. I’ll write to Caryl Hind, my friend at the National Gallery, to whom I should in happier circumstances have taken my picture for authentication, and suggest his spending the weekend with us. We’ll take him to visit some of our neighbours. Then at least the NG will be on the case before anyone else is.