Headlong (23 page)

New blue Tony goes straight to the foot of the stairs and gazes up at the landing, where
Helen
once hung. Old brown Tony watches him. So do Laura and I and the dogs.

‘No, of course not,’ he says. ‘You wouldn’t have the nerve. You knew I’d be coming sooner or later.’

‘If I’d ever got my hands on the bloody thing,’ says brown Tony, ‘it wouldn’t be here. I’d have sold it.’

‘No, you wouldn’t. You wouldn’t have the nerve for that, either. I assume it’s not in the sitting-room …’

He marches on into the depths of the house. ‘I know you’ve got it here somewhere,’ he calls back over his shoulder. ‘Mummy got rid of it!’ calls brown Tony, following him. ‘Ages ago! I thought she’d told you …’

The soap escapes from him as he departs, and goes skating away across the flagstones.

‘What happens when he tries the breakfast-room and finds it’s locked?’ says Laura quietly to me. ‘I
told
Tony it was hopeless. He’ll just break the door down … Oh, my God, you
do
look sick.’

I imagine I do. Because what about
my
picture? He’s going to find
that
! And seize it as well! It’s going to walk out of the house in front of my eyes!

‘I’m so sorry,’ says Laura. ‘I’ve never been absolutely sure what you’re up to, but I realize it all depends on getting rid of
Helen
for him.’

I open my mouth to deny it, too panic-stricken even to be
taken aback by her percipience. But all I manage to babble is: ‘The other one, the other one!’

Laura frowns. ‘What other one? Which other one?’

‘The one upstairs!’ And there we are – I’ve told her. She knows the whole story now. I’ve made her my accomplice. Or else delivered myself into her hands.

I see from the look on her face that she’d guessed it all, anyway. But the procession of brothers and dogs is coming back.

‘I told you!’ says brown brother. ‘She sold it! Five, ten years ago!’

‘Of course she didn’t.’

‘How do
you
know? You weren’t there!’

‘Nor were you.’

‘Look, matey, I nursed her when she was dying!’

‘No, you didn’t. You looked in once for half an hour.’

‘You don’t know what I did!’

‘I know more about you than you know about yourself.’

‘
You
didn’t even look in! You sat on your fat arse in Cape Province guzzling Piesporter, and you couldn’t even be bothered to step on to a plane.’

They stand facing each other across the hall like two contrasting images lingering in a pair of funhouse mirrors after the customer’s laughed and moved on. I look from one to the other with helpless anguish, unable to think of any way to save the situation. Neither image gives any sign of noticing my presence. I’ve become entirely irrelevant to the affairs of the Churt family. I turn to Laura, to see if by some miracle she might have come up with an idea, now that I’ve enrolled her in the enterprise, but she’s vanished.

‘I’m not leaving till I’ve got it,’ says Blue.

‘It’s not here!’ says Brown.

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘Search the house if you want to.’

Another pause for thought. ‘Listen …’ I say, though I’ve not the slightestidea what I’m going to ask them to listen to.

‘You’re a fool to play poker with me, Tony,’ says Blue. ‘You’re not good enough. See you.’

‘You want to search the house?’

‘From cellar to attics. From gun-room to pigsties. And I know more nooks and crannies here than you’ve got unpaid bills to put in them.’

‘Help yourself. Go where you like.’

‘Listen …’ I begin once again.

This time, for some reason, old brown Tony does. He glances round at me. ‘I’ll just show poor Mr Clay out before we go any further,’ he says. ‘You’re embarrassing him.’ And before I can say anything else, he’s ushered me through the front door and pulled it to behind us. ‘Quick,’ he says. ‘This way.’

He sets off past the unused wing of the house, half walking and half running, following the same devious route I took myself when I left the day before. I struggle to keep up. It seems that poor, dim Tony, unlike me, has some kind of plan in mind.

We turn the corner, and hurry along the side of the house, snatched at by bare branches and sucked at by sodden earth. Tony’s in worse case than me; he’s still in his carpet slippers. We turn another corner to the muddled back parts of the house. He fumbles desperately for his keys, and unlocks a warped and blistering door. ‘What’s happening?’ I ask, as we trail mud along a stone-flagged corridor, though I’m pretty sure I know the answer. Tony says nothing – simply waves at me to keep my voice down, unlocks another door, and pushes me inside.

We’re in the breakfast-room, of course. And there’s my pic
ture, not upstairs in the bedroom at all, but balanced on two chairs, waiting for the Crabtree & Evelyn. Shimmering leaves – dancers – crags – sea … No time to look at it, though, because he’s propelling me across to the fireplace, and dragging two more chairs over for us to climb on. Arms straining and chairs wobbling, we release
Helen
from her sagging torment and lower her to the ground. She’s at least as heavy as she looks. I wonder once again about the physical plausibility of all those
Depositions
.

He heaves the seaward end towards the door. But what on earth is he intending to do with her? ‘Come on!’ he says. ‘Your end! Up! Lift! What are you waiting for?’

‘The other ones!’ I cry. ‘What about the other ones?’

‘Never mind about them. Little tit’s forgotten about them.’

‘He’ll remember them when he sees them!’

Tony hesitates.

‘Several thousand pounds going begging there!’ I urge.

He flings the window up, and hurls the two small Dutch paintings out of it. They break their way through the twigs of the shrubs outside and vanish. ‘Get them later,’ he says. He grabs a corner of the
Merrymakers
, and drags it towards the window in its turn. I grab another corner, and try to stop him.

‘What?’ he demands.

‘Damage it,’ I say, trying to keep the desperation out of my voice. ‘Scratch it.’

‘Got to prioritize,’ he says.

We struggle awkwardly. It’s twenty or thirty pounds of solid oak, with no handholds.

‘Too big,’ I gasp. And, yes, it must indeed be something like three foot nine high by five foot three long, though once again it’s not quite the moment to get my tape measure out of my pocket and check.

‘Try it,’ he gasps back, heaving it out of my hands. And he’s right – it just goes, on the diagonal, scraping paint off the window frame, and vanishing in a confusion of snapping twigs and tearing thorns.

He slams the window down; I try to close my mind.

There’s no question of
Helen
leaving the same way – in her frame she stands nearly seven feet off the floor. Tony hoists her seaward end again, I take her landward end. It’s an intolerable load – I sympathize even more warmly with Paris’s men. The strange equanimity she’s preserved for all these years in the face of her abductors’ huge efforts to load her on to the boat remains equally undisturbed as she watches us struggle to ease her through the door.

‘Don’t crash it around like that,’ whispers Tony. ‘He can’t be far away.’

He relocks the breakfast-room. ‘Get the little shit’s hopes up for a moment,’ he says.

What’s all this
little
shit and
little
tit? He’s vast! I suppose he’s the younger brother.

We stumble back along the corridor, and out to the rear of the house, arms racked and backs breaking in the service of art. One of Tony’s slippers has vanished, I notice, and the sock’s beginning to follow it. We manoeuvre round sheds and outhouses, then Tony dumps his end of
Helen
while he rips open the gate of a muddy trailer. He hurls sacks of pheasant feed out of it. ‘In here!’ he grunts.

‘Won’t go!’ I grunt back.

‘Will go. Done it before.’

‘He’ll see it.’

‘This over it.’

He drags a tangle of black plastic sheeting out of a stinking puddle and pushes it nauseatingly into my hands. I shake off the unidentifiable liquids pocketed in it, cover
Helen’s
nakedness as best I can, and tie her up in various lengths of pink baler twine I find lying around. When I turn to Tony for help, I find only a single sock of him remaining. At once an engine roars, and the aged Land-Rover reverses in a series of wild zigzags back to the trailer.

‘Too big!’ I report. ‘Gate won’t shut!’

‘Tie it!’

He finds yet another piece of baler twine in a heap of ordure and throws it to me. I tie the gate half-closed as best I can while he slams the towbar on to the coupling. God knows how far he’s intending to drive with it like this.

‘Brakes,’ he says. ‘Bit worn. Give them plenty of welly.’

And I realize he’s holding the driver’s door open for me. I look at it stupidly. I look at him. ‘Buck up!’ he says. ‘You want him chasing you down the drive?’

‘But …’ I say. ‘But … where am I going?’

‘Where?’ he repeats, baffled by my incomprehension. ‘How should I know? Wherever he is!’

‘Wherever
who
is?’

‘Your bloody Belgian!’

I get into the car. My own intentions have overtaken me. They’ve assumed a life of their own – merged with a faster and faster flowing current of events in which I’m being swept along with less and less control over even the actions of my own limbs. My foot’s already pushing the clutch down, I notice. My hand’s grinding the gear in.

‘But your brother,’ I say, as Tony slams the door. ‘If he goes to court …?’

‘He won’t,’ says Tony. ‘He can’t. Nothing in writing. It was my father’s. It’s mine.’

‘And what about the other ones?’ I cry. ‘Mr Jongelinck wants
all
of them! I’ve got to take
all
of them!’

‘Later, later! Let’s just get
this
bugger off the premises!
He’ll be round that corner any second!’

I make one last stand against the floodwaters. My foot remains down on the clutch – the car stays where it is. ‘The other ones!’ I insist.

‘Martin!’ says Tony, his eyes suddenly filling with tears. ‘I’m begging you! He’s always had everything! I’ve always been cheated out of it all! That little toad has sat on my chest from the moment he was born! It’s not just
Helen
! It’s the estate! That’s what he wants! I have three years tax to pay! I’m going to lose the
estate
! He wants the
estate
!’

I’m aware that this summing up of the case begs a few questions, but what can I do? The tears add the last few cubic centimetres to the torrent snatching at me. I sigh. My hands sketch a gesture of helplessness. My foot thumps up off the clutch. The car thumps forward.

Tony appears hobbling frantically beside the window, banging on the glass, as I struggle to change up into second. ‘Tell me what he’s offering before you do anything, though …! Ring me …! And Martin, Martin – cash, remember, cash!’

I thump off the clutch into second, and Tony disappears astern. The unfamiliar tank of a car, with me in nominal command, and
Helen
bouncing madly in the trailer, goes howling out of the yard, past its sleek blue waiting counterpart, and into the cratered moonscape of the drive, pursued so far only by an insanely barking escort desperate for martyrdom beneath its wheels.

What I’m going to do at the end of the drive, whether for instance I’m going to turn left or right, I’ve no idea. I put my foot on the brake to stop while I consider things, but the car’s in no mood for reflection. It continues across the road at a steady twenty miles an hour, and up the muddy green bank opposite, into the great unpathed lands.

What happens in the next few seconds, while the steering wheel spins through my hands and the universe bounces wildly around me, I’m not absolutely sure. I see the advantages of four-wheel drive for off-road motoring, though, because eventually, to my surprise, the world settles down, and there’s asphalt beneath us again. It seems that the car’s chosen to turn right, possibly because it thinks downhill’s the easier option. I try to take stock of the situation. Tony was evidently right about the brakes. Also, the steering wheel and the steering seem to share some of the same difficulties that their master has in forming close relationships. My head and the mirror have come into confusing conflict while we were off in the open countryside, so I can’t see what’s behind me, but judging by the crashing and clunking
Helen’s
still in the trailer and the trailer’s still attached to the car.

Where are we all going, though? The car has a plan, I believe, to shake off any possible pursuit by plunging down the hill at great speed. And after that? If there
is
an after that. I get the impression, from the way we’re heading, that we’re making for London. Sell
Helen
, the car’s thinking, then come back with sackloads of cash, and Tony will be only too pleased to get the other three pictures off the premises as well. It may have forgotten that it’s Saturday, and that the weekend’s probably not a good time to start selling major works of art. Perhaps its plan is that we should lie up in Oswald Road, all four of us, car, trailer,
Helen and me, until the dealers and banks are open on Monday. It’s suggesting that I could do with a short break while the great river of time emerges from its headlong plunge through the rapids, and settles back into its more usual placid meanders. It’s telling me to normalize a little, to regain control over my destiny.

Fair enough. What it doesn’t realize, though, (and how could it?) is that I’ve undertaken to Kate not to do what I’m now doing until I’ve made finally certain of the identity of the
Merrymakers
. I’ve forgotten this myself, I have to admit, until I see the turning into the track up to our cottage fast approaching. I struggle with brakes and steering to get it into the car’s thick head that we have to make a brief detour, so that I can explain to her about the changed circumstances and assure her that I’ll complete my studies over the weekend. The car concedes the point only at the last moment, and between us we just manage the turn, up the bank again beyond the track and through the dustbins that I filled that morning.

Kate comes out of the cottage at the sight of the Land-Rover. There’s something slightly odd about her manner. She has a polite smile on her face. She’s tucked her hands self-deprecatingly into the pockets of her cardigan, and her shoulders are defensively braced. It’s her social manner; she’s politely ready to be amused, because she thinks I’m Tony Churt. When she sees it’s me getting out, her shoulders settle and her smile vanishes. She turns to look at the car instead. Then at the trailer, and the huge black parcel bursting out of it.

‘It’s
Helen
,’ I explain frankly. Her manner’s now far from social. ‘I know, I know,’ I say. ‘I can’t
tell
you what’s been going on up there!’

And as soon as I’ve said it I realize I’m right – I
can’t
tell
her what’s been going on up there. She’s discovered from John Quiss’s visit that the sale of
Helen
is a tax-avoidance scheme. What I haven’t told her, though, because I didn’t know myself, is that the whole enterprise is even more dubious still – that Tony wants me to get rid of her for him because her rightful ownership’s in dispute. My new lady friend may very possibly be about to start a second Trojan War. This is why she’s outside our cottage, modestly wrapped in black plastic – because she’s hot. I don’t believe the release of this information at the present moment would be helpful.

‘Great ructions!’ I sum it all up briefly. ‘I can’t explain, but I just sensed that it was now or never.’

She says nothing. She simply turns and walks back into the cottage. I follow her.

‘I haven’t forgotten what I said about being absolutely certain,’ I assure the back of her neck. ‘I’m almost there, as it happens. Just one or two more things I want to look up – and I can do that between now and Monday.’

Silence. I collect up all my books and files to take with me, so that she can see I’m serious. Then I realize that as I take things off one end of the table she’s laying things out at the other. Lunch things. For two.

I obviously haven’t made completely clear to her the plans that the Land-Rover developed on the way down here. Difficult to do, because I can’t give a proper account of the reasoning behind them – that at any moment another four-wheel-drive is somehow going to sniff out our hiding place and come screaming up the track after us.

Not easy, either, to explain that if I’m going to eat the rest of the weekend meals in silence, I’d rather do it on my own. After Monday it’ll be different. After I’ve got back and collected the other pictures. After I’ve taken the skaters and
the cavalrymen to London. After I’ve got my share of the spoils propped up against the wall there. Then we can start to normalize again.

I carry my things to the front door. She stops half-way between dresser and table, a dinner plate in each hand. ‘I’ll ring you.’ I say. ‘Kiss Tildy for me.’ She doesn’t reply. She simply puts one of the plates on the table, and the other back on the dresser.

This time I persuade the Land-Rover to let me share the driving. It agrees to stop at the end of the track, in the midst of the cans and bottles from the overturned dustbins, and check that there’s no avenging angel tearing down the hill before we turn out in an orderly manner in the direction of London. Soon we’re swooshing through the last dregs of the lake in the dip by the wood where Kate and I found the dead tramp … turning out on to the Lavenage road … passing Busy Bee Honey … moving on into the country that always seemed so suspiciously unreal to Kate and me before everything else got even more unreal. What we were missing, perhaps, was simply the authentic smell I’m now enjoying inside the car, of dirt and dog and oily rags and leaking petrol. And in the mirror, now I’ve adjusted it, no sign of pursuit – only
Helen
, in her new black chador, trotting submissively at my heels.

The one thing I’m missing to complete my satisfaction is some reassurance that my picture hasn’t been found and seized. I try to put it out of my mind, since there’s no way of knowing. Just as I’m joining the motorway, though, a sudden loud electronic burbling, somewhere around my left knee, makes me jerk the wheel wildly to the right, though fortunately the car stolidly ignores this ill-considered suggestion. I fumble under the dashboard, and locate a grimy mobile phone.

It’s Laura, of course.

‘He’s gone,’ she says. ‘And don’t worry – he didn’t find it. I kept moving it from room to room behind him.’

‘Brilliant,’ I say. ‘Wonderful. Thank you.’ Though what I’m trying to imagine now, of course, is how she managed to drag it around like that, and how much of the painted surface got knocked off in the process. Also, what the price of her co-operation is going to turn out to be.

‘That was Georgie, by the way,’ she says. ‘His younger brother. They don’t get on.’

‘You don’t say?’

‘Things got much worse after you’d gone – he went off in a tremendous rage. He took a great piece out of his hand with the crowbar getting the breakfast-room open. He’s coming back with writs and things … Listen, I’ve got to be quick – Tony keeps coming in and shouting about all the burdens he has to bear. I just wanted to let you know that the dog’s safe and sound … Hold on … Sorry, I’ll call you back.’

The
dog’s
safe and sound? It’s the
dog
picture she’s hidden for me? My skill at deceit seems to be taking over – I’ve even deceived my own accomplice. Not to mention myself – because what’s happened to
my
picture while Laura was busy hiding the wrong one? He’s found it, obviously! He’s taken it! An exit to somewhere’s coming up. I turn off and pull up on the edge of the ramp, gazing at the phone, waiting for it to ring again, ready to … I don’t know … turn round and go back, pursue brother Georgie across England …

I’ve snatched it up even before it’s completed the first note of its burble.

‘Sorry about that,’ says Laura. ‘This brother’s going bananas, too. Martin, listen …’

‘What about the other three?’ I interrupt with insane casualness. ‘Did his brother find them?’

‘He’d given up looking by then. He was just trying to stop the bleeding.’

My anxiety subsides a little. But if he didn’t find them…

‘They’re still out in the shrubbery?’

‘I think Tony’s hidden them away with the pheasant chicks.’

Oh, my God. How are pheasant chicks housed? In the warm and the dry, presumably. How warm? How dry? Is there any check on the humidity …?

‘Now, Martin, listen to me,’ says Laura. I listen. ‘You’re going to need money, aren’t you?’

‘Money?’

‘For whatever you’re doing with the pictures. I just wanted to say that I’ve got a bit, not much, but he doesn’t know about it, and if you wanted it …’

First Kate, now her. My anxiety’s overtaken by shame.

‘That’s very sweet of you,’ I say, ‘but it’s all taken care of.’

‘Well, don’t forget, if you get any surprises. Where are you now?’

‘On the motorway.’

‘I wish it was me with you instead of
Helen
,’ she says wistfully.

I try to work out a judicious reply, but the task seems to be beyond me.

‘Shall I tell you when I first knew what my fate in life was going to be?’ she says. She sounds serious. ‘When you explained that it was
Erwin
someone.’

Not true, of course. She didn’t foresee for a moment what was going to happen. I feel a pang, though. It all seems a very long time ago now, part of some lost prelapsarian world.

‘Erwin Panofsky,’ I remind her.

She laughs. ‘You’ve done it again,’ she says.

So I have. ‘I’ll be back at the beginning of next week,’ I tell her.

‘Martin!’ she cries, as I try to switch off the phone. ‘Martin!’

I wait. She’s serious again. What now?

‘I’ve given up smoking,’ she says shyly.

I drive on towards London, full of uneasy foreboding. I thought
friends
is what we were going to be – innocent, uncomplicated
friends
. Or at any rate accomplices – innocent, uncomplicated accomplices. Now suddenly she’s offering me her life savings and giving up smoking. The same question as before comes back to me: I her or she me? I her, by the look of it, after all. But now it’s beginning to seem even more alarming than the converse.

And what about the competition? I’ve a head start on my rivals, but how long’s it going to last? How long before brother Georgie comes back with his writs? How long before Quiss cycles over for another look around? I don’t think he’s seen the
Merrymakers
yet. But he’s seen
something
that’s caught his interest. I can’t do anything until the bank gets clearance for the mortgage increase, which is supposed to be on Monday. But then there’s nothing that brother Georgie can do until he can get his lawyers into action, and even the omniscient Quiss will want to check current prices while he’s in London during the week before he makes any offers. If I can get
Helen
valued at Sotheby’s on Monday … If I can find a dealer to pay spot cash … If I can get the rest of the cash from the bank … If I can arrive back at Upwood with my hands full of crackling banknotes on Monday night …

I come round the great bend above Edgware, and London opens out in front of me. Slowly my fears begin to recede, and my hopes once again get the upper hand. Everything’s
possible! Laura’s miles away behind me. So’s Kate, so are my enemies, so’s normal responsible life. And here’s me, hitting town with the most beautiful woman in the world.

Yes, after all the preparation and delay, after all the anguish and study, the great abduction’s finally occurred. The lady’s loaded into the boat. The die is cast, the mighty enterprise is under way. Sparta’s falling astern. Ahead lie Troy and immortality.