Headlong

by Michael Frayn

  But Kate’s sitting at the table working, and before I can sit down beside her, much less take her hand, she’s looked up and said with a quite uncharacteristic sour irony, ‘So how much are you going to give Tony Churt?’

  I’m so taken aback by her tone, when I had such unsuspecting tenderness in my heart, that I can’t understand what she’s talking about. I frown in incomprehension. Her lips tighten. I see at once that she’s misunderstood the signification of the frown. And up it all starts again.

  ‘You said you were going to give him a fair share of anything you made,’ she explains. Is this really what’s worrying her? If so, there’s a very simple answer that comes into my head even as I open my mouth to speak.

  ‘I’ll give him five and a half per cent.’ As I hoped, the bizarre idiosyncrasy of this formula stops her in her tracks. Now it’s her turn to frown in incomprehension.

  ‘Because that’s what he’s giving me.’ She can’t understand this, either. Nor can I, now I’ve said it. Five and a half per cent for buying something? ‘On the sale. On the sale of the Giordano.’

  Too late I remember that this is something I haven’t yet explained to her. She tries to look at me, but can’t. She tries to look at her work, but can’t. Faintly from upstairs comes the sound of Tilda beginning to stir and complain. I get up to investigate. ‘Wait,’ says Kate quietly. I sit down again, with terrible patience. What’s happening to us? This is worse than ever. ‘Martin, what’s going on? You’re selling the Giordano? How? What do you mean? Why didn’t you tell me? What else have you arranged with him?’

  I keep very calm. Suddenly the whole scenario, that appeared to me so complex and hazardous when I was worrying about it to myself, seems very simple and logical and easy to grasp.

  ‘I take both pictures off his hands. I sell the Giordano, I keep the other one. He only has to pay five and a half per cent, instead of ten, so we’re both happy. I was going to tell you, but I thought you’d just think I was getting distracted from the book again.’

  This explanation is so satisfactory that for a moment I can’t think why I need to find any money at all. The deal is practically self financing – my margin on the Giordano will almost pay for the other picture! I get up again to go, because at any moment Tilda’s grizzling is going to change into a full-scale howl.

  ‘Wait, wait. What about the other two pictures we saw? Does he want you to sell those as well?’

  ‘We talked about it.’

  ‘So you are?’

  ‘Am what?’

  ‘Selling them?’

  It’s absurd to be talking about these unimportant details when Tilda’s crying. I look at the stairs, longing to be up them and comforting her.

  ‘Are you or aren’t you?’ she demands.

  ‘We can’t talk about things in that tone of voice.’

  ‘Are you selling the other two pictures?’

  ‘I might. I’ll see.’

  Tilda’s distress is gathering force. Kate’s as aware of it as I am.

  ‘How are you going to sell these pictures?’ says Kate. ‘Who are you going to sell them to? You don’t know anyone!’

  I’m tempted to say that I do, that I know a wealthy and reclusive Belgian who’ll pay almost anything I like to ask. But somehow the fact of his being Belgian, that seemed so telling when I was explaining it to Tony Churt, now makes the words die away in embarrassment before I can utter them. Even the Belgian himself has become a little pale and ghostly. I say nothing, merely turn my head towards the stairs again, and the source of the increasingly urgent demands for our attention.

  ‘You mean you’ll take them to a dealer?’ demands Kate. ‘But then you’ll have to pay the dealer ten per cent! It’s stupid to tell me you’re going to be making money! You won’t be – you know you won’t! He’s tricking you! It’s just a way for him to get rid of those pictures without paying the full dealer’s commission! Martin, how much is all this going to cost? It won’t be two thousand pounds, will it – it will be more! How much, Martin? How much will it cost?’

  I should have told her the worst straight out. I see that now. I’ve completely mishandled this. I carefully recalculate the figure; this time it has to be the best and most honest estimate I can make. So, £10,000 for the Giordano – £2,000 each for the skaters and the cavalrymen – £14,000. Of which I have to find four and a half per cent. It’s less than £700, for heaven’s sake! Plus the £20,000 for my own picture, but I’ll put that down for the moment at £2,000, because if it would make it easier for Kate to accept I can always drop the quixotic trimmings.

  ‘Kate,’ I say, ‘we’re talking about a total outlay of less than £3,000! A new sofa would cost us more than that! I told you, I’m not doing this for money – and I think you know me well enough to accept that – but have you any idea what kind of price a copy of a major Bruegel goes for these days? A copy?’

  She’s not listening, though. She’s already on the stairs. All she can hear is Tilda, and the coming collapse of the world we’ve brought her into. ‘You don’t seem to realize!’ she says, and all her unshakeable calm has changed into agitation. ‘Things are different now we’ve got Tilda! We can’t go on just doing as we like! We’ve got to think about her! We’ve got to think about the future!’

  She disappears into the bedroom. When she says ‘we’ she of course means me. I can’t go on doing just as I like. She makes it sound as if I’ve spent my days gambling and drinking, but what she means is that she’s lost patience with my laborious struggles to find my way in life. Once again I’m choked by the sheer injustice of it. Just when by some miracle I’ve at last found the path that leads out of the maze, she wants to close it off! And all for the price of a sofa! I’m too angry to sit down. I walk up and down the room, unable to believe that she could behave so unfairly, with such small-mindedness.

  This is the worst thing that’s ever happened to us. The first real crisis, and we’ve failed.

  Tilda gradually quietens, until all that can be heard from overhead is the creak of floorboards, and I realize that Kate’s walking up and down the room, as if she were parodying me below. She’s carrying Tilda in her arms, as intent upon her as I am upon the grievance I’m nursing down here. The fact that she now has our living, breathing child to hold, while I have nothing but my barren ache of injustice, seems an injustice in itself, as if I rather than she were the mere parodist. I stop and stand still, gazing sightlessly out of the grimy window at the three sleeping-suits hanging on the line. A moment or two later Kate stops as well. One way or another, even in separate rooms, we’re locked into the absurd rituals of a row.

  The house becomes absolutely silent. My anger slowly settles into sadness, much as Tilda has settled into sleep. I think of Lufthansa, and those first few days in Munich. I can see, not Tilda’s washing, but the little café terrace where Kate and I drank Gespritzten one sweltering evening in the blessed shade of the Frauenkirche, and she smiled at me. Smiled and smiled, and everything in the world seemed easy. And when I think of that smile and remember that deep sense of ease, I know that something infinitely precious and good has slipped away from us for ever.

  The silence goes on. But still Kate doesn’t come down. I should go up, of course, but I’m too sad to. I sit down at the table, and go on gazing out of the window. She sits on the bed upstairs; by now, no doubt, as sad as I am – too sad to come down. Everything, it seems to me, is over. I have given up all thought of the picture. What worries me now is how we’re going to manage. What are we going to do about Tilda? About lunch, even?

  I look at my watch. Yes, somehow, unbelievably, it’s long after lunchtime. I heat some soup, without the appetite even to cut bread to go with it. As I watch the sluggish brown liquid stir slowly into life I hear steps on the stairs behind me. It’s Kate who’s had to make the first move to rescue us from our impasse. Of course. Why couldn’t I have done that, at least? I can’t even turn round to look at her, though.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she s
ays, very quietly. I can hear from her voice that she’s been crying.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I echo her gracelessly. ‘Do you want some soup?’

  At least I’ve managed that much of a gesture. But there’s no reply. Is she crying again? I turn round at last to look at her. She’s sitting at the table, crumpling a handkerchief in her hands, but she’s not crying.

  ‘I’ve got some money my father gave me once,’ she says. ‘I’m not sure how much there is left. But it’s probably enough. I’ll pay it into our joint account.’

  It takes me a moment to absorb the force of what she’s saying, and another moment for the shock of reciprocal surrender to pass through me. Then I go over to her and kneel in front of her. I put my arms round her and sink my head deep into her softness. She’s an inexhaustible and endlessly surprising treasure of goodness and love. She’s never mentioned the existence of any money from her father before – probably, I realize, because she intended to use it for some private benevolence, perhaps even one directed towards me. Even more probably because in her sweet unworldliness she’d forgotten that she had it.

  I lift my head and look up at her. She smiles down at me.

  ‘My love,’ I say, almost too choked to speak, ‘I’m not worthy of you … I’m so touched … You’ll never know … And of course I couldn’t accept …’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me before, though? That’s what I don’t understand.’

  Nor do I, now the question’s been raised. I think my way back through all the receding planes of silence and mistrust to the time when all this began. Why didn’t I tell her? Well … because I knew she wouldn’t believe me. And I was right – she didn’t. Still doesn’t, either. Not that it seems of much importance now. No picture in the world is worth losing this for.

  ‘Because I’m a fool,’ I tell her.

  ‘I was keeping it for emergencies,’ she says.

  ‘Good. Go on keeping it. I couldn’t take it, my love. Not in any circumstances whatsoever. Not if it was my last hope in the world.’

  She strokes my hair. Everything’s as it was. We’ve faced our first great crisis together and, thanks entirely to the goodness of her heart, in spite of the deviousness of mine, we’ve come out of it closer than ever.

  ‘The soup’s boiling over,’ she says softly.

  I go on holding her. Let it. So am I.

  A Hint of Thunder

  So here’s the fundamental principle that I’ve settled in my own mind:

  I shan’t risk any money on my great scheme unless I can find evidence, objective evidence, for my conviction that the Merrymakers is what I think it is. Kate says that she doesn’t have to be consulted – doesn’t want to be consulted. She entirely accepts my judgement. But I realize I can’t expect her to share my prima vista intuition sight unseen, or my feeling that the anomalies in the iconography count in favour of my attribution rather than against it. What I think I’ve tacitly agreed with her, and what I’ve certainly agreed quite explicitly with myself, is that I must be in a position to make out some kind of reasoned case to her.

  We’ve spent a happy weekend together, all three of us. We haven’t talked about my scheme. Or scarcely. I haven’t even thought about it. Not all the time, anyway. And first thing Monday morning I’m back on the London train again. I’ve rung our bank in Kentish Town and arranged to see our ‘personal banker’ – with the full agreement of Kate, I should explain, because she understands why I can’t accept her money if I do go ahead with the scheme, even though she’s still offering it. On the way to Kentish Town, though, at Kate’s excellent suggestion as she drove me to the station – where we kissed with a newly regained tenderness that takes us right back to those first few glowing months of our marriage – I’m going to the V & A to do what I should have done when I was looking up the saleroom records for Bruegel: to check the kind of prices that Giordano fetches, just in case my uninformed guesses are too wildly out. Such good, practical advice. And such a delight to be working on this together. Even though she’s doing it for love of me, not out of any real confidence in my attribution. Yet.

  The question is how to find objective evidence. What kind of thing am I looking for?

  Details of style and technique? Not a very plausible line of inquiry. I can’t ask to examine the picture again at the length that would be necessary without revealing too much interest, and I haven’t the specialist knowledge to know what I was looking for even if I did.

  The iconography? This is more hopeful, particularly with Kate’s help. But will the iconography differentiate Bruegel from his followers and imitators? More likely, it seems to me, is my own pet discipline – iconology. I might be able to show that Bruegel’s using the iconography of the picture in a way that relates it to his particular outlook and philosophy.

  At once a difficulty arises. What are Bruegel’s outlook and philosophy?

  I sat on the train with my pile of books, now mercifully lodged not in plastic bags but in Kate’s holdall for Tilda’s things, and went through them all once more. I was even more struck this time by Bruegel’s extraordinary elusiveness and ambiguity. It’s not just the biographical detail. It’s everything about him – the whole sense and intention of his pictures. Every scholar reads them differently.

  Here’s Grossmann’s catalogue of the possibilities: ‘The man has been thought to have been a peasant and a townsman, an orthodox catholic and a Libertine, a humanist, a laughing and a pessimist philosopher; the artist appeared as a follower of Bosch and a continuator of the Flemish tradition, the last of the Primitives, a Mannerist in contact with Italian art, an illustrator, a genre painter, a landscape artist, a realist, a painter consciously transforming reality and adapting it to his formal ideal – to sum up just a few opinions expressed by various observers in the course of four hundred years.’

  Or Gibson on ‘the amazing number of different interpretations by scholars of Bruegel’s attitude to the peasants: descriptive, moralising, mocking, good-humoured, sympathetic.’

  Friedländer stresses the humour. Stechow dismisses all such readings as out of date, and presents what he calls a ‘darker’ Bruegel, for whom nature is the ‘one realm in which Bruegel sought and expressed relief from human folly, selfishness, and hypocrisy.’ Tolnay, however, insists that his works are philosophical comments upon ‘the essence and necessary evolution of human life,’ though he agrees that Bruegel sees this life as ‘the kingdom of the mad’. Bruegel’s later years, says Tolnay at one point, are ‘an attempt to syn-thesise the rational reign of nature and the insensate reign of man;’ at another, ‘the stoical contemplation of a human life fatally subject to the eternal laws of the universe.’

  Friedländer thinks that paintings of this later period are attempting to be ‘ethically neutral’. Cuttler, too, dismisses the moralistic view of ‘some modern scholars’ that Bruegel was concerned with man’s duty to overcome his foolishness and sinfulness. He doesn’t see man represented in Bruegel as insane or as helplessly subject to forces beyond his control. Human actions are not ‘manifesting a rootless existence’ on the surface of the world, but participating in its underlying order. Harbison takes a similar view. The cycle of the year in particular, he says, demonstrates the human ‘response’ to the passage of time and the rhythms of nature.

  Bruegel, in other words, is an absence, a ghost, which scholars characterize more or less however they choose. So instead of trying to relate his iconography to Bruegel himself, perhaps I could relate it to what was going on around him at the time. If I can’t see Bruegel, perhaps I could try to put myself into the space he occupied at the centre of his world, and see what he saw.

  So I’m not yet in the V & A – I’m back in the Reading Room of the London Library, doing a little historical research. I know something about the Netherlands in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries from my nominalist studies. But the late sixteenth is terra incognita. My plan is to start with the more familiar territory, and then explore gently forwards.


  Before I can make out a case to Kate, it seems to me, I have to be able to make out a case to myself. Now let me be absolutely honest with myself. If I can’t make out a case to myself, will it change my feelings? Not in the slightest. Supposing, though, that the objective evidence I turn up destroys my case instead of proving it; supposing that it proves the picture isn’t what I think it is … This is one of those ridiculous hypothetical tests like, ‘If the house was on fire, would I save Kate or Tilda first?’ Supposing, though? Would I still want the picture? Of course! It wouldn’t change the picture itself one iota, even if it turned out to have been painted by Tony Churt.

  Would I want it as much? – Yes!

  Really? Enough to go through with all the financial and moral complications of the deal? – Certainly! All it would mean is that the picture was valuable for itself alone, and not for what it told us about Bruegel and his works. And that it was worth a few thousand pounds instead of a few million. Not that this is what I’m thinking about. Though of course I’d have to reconsider the finances rather radically …

  Odd, though, all these dealings of mine with myself. First I’ve agreed a principle with myself, now I’m making out a case to myself, and debating my own feelings and intentions with myself. Who is this self, this phantom internal partner, with whom I’m entering into all these arrangements? (I ask myself.)