Headlong (31 page)

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.

‘You’re very quiet,’ says Laura.

‘Thinking.’

What I’m thinking is:
Multa pinxit, hic Brugelius, quae pingi
non possunt
. What we have here is one of those many things that can’t be painted – the invisible execution in the darkness, the judicial murder hidden from the eyes of men. Here it is, exposed to the light of day, and to the eye of every Netherlander who might suffer the same fate, of every Spaniard who might inflict it. Here once again is the more that’s always understood, the more than is painted.
The thunder and the thunderbolt. The whole brutal regime, indicted and mocked in one sustained flight of irony. No wonder he was frightened. No wonder my precious burden was removed from the conqueror’s baggage.

‘Something nice?’ asks Laura. ‘That you’re thinking about? The couple of million? Me? Us? All three together?’

I put my hand on hers. But what I’m thinking is: I have to stop for a moment and check. I have to see whether the man’s head is indeed bound between his knees. If it is, then I’ve done what I said I’d do. I’ve fulfilled my pledge. I’ve found the detail that identifies the picture. That locks into place my reading of
all
the pictures. Who owns that piece of oak in law may take some sorting out. I’ll have established my moral right, though, to be its temporal guardian. If the binding is there. I look in the mirror to see if it’s all right to stop. No, not yet – there’s a car coming up fast behind me.

The headlights come rapidly closer and closer, undipped and dazzling, lighting up the picture as if the driver were trying to see inside my tailgate and check the detail himself. I move my head out of line with the mirror, and catch sight of Laura’s face shining as she turns round to look at the source of all this sudden light.

‘Your car!’ she cries. ‘We forgot to collect your car!’

The implications dawn on me rather slowly. Not possible! Is it? I look in the mirror again, my eyes screwed up against the dazzle. Unnecessarily, though, because the headlights are now so insanely close that they’ve vanished below the bottom of the tailgate window.

‘Quick!’ screams Laura. ‘He’s going to ram us!’

The story’s not over, after all.

I speed up, feeling nothing but despair. The headlights briefly reappear, then disappear as the car behind comes bounding forward to within touching distance again. I
slow down, terrified. The Land-Rover lurches as the car behind actually nudges it.

‘Get away from him!’ screams Laura. ‘He’s hopelessly drunk!’

I try speeding up again. But now the headlights have adopted a different policy. They go swinging wildly out into the centre of the road.

‘No, no – don’t let him overtake!’

I put my foot down harder, and now we’re running side by side in mad parallel.

‘Faster!’ cries Laura. ‘Faster! Faster!’

Characteristic advice, I realize even in the midst of my terror, and almost certain to be characteristically wrong, but I can’t think of any better policy. The whole accelerating, headlong rush of events has been focused into this one final insane fugue, which will only be ended by a vehicle coming in the opposite direction.

But no vehicle does. We’re on the emptiest road in England. For second after second, for year after year, we race on together. Come on! Someone! Please! End it, end it! Kill him!

We soar, almost airborne, over the crest of a hill – and there at last it is. A pair of headlights closing us at a combined speed which must be at least 150 miles an hour.

It’s not Tony who gives way – it’s me. I flinch at the last, characteristically, from delivering him to his death – my foot’s down on the brake before I can even consider the question. What Tony does, even more characteristically, is simply to pull back into the left-hand lane, across the front of me, as if I weren’t there at all. I think the first colossal bang, and the first colossal jolt, comes as he catches the front wing of the Land-Rover, and sets the wheel spinning uselessly through my hands. A whole fusillade of bangs and
jolts follows as we mount the grass verge and take off once again across the great unpathed lands. There’s another noise filling the car, too – someone screaming, either Laura or me, or both of us, because there in front of us, inexplicably, in the middle of the trackless waste, is the abandoned hulk of a broken-down ice-cream van.

I jam my foot down on the brake even harder, but it has no very decisive effect on events; they continue to unroll with the same kind of leisurely inevitability. The approach of windscreen and stationary van to my face. The escalation of the noise. The sudden darkness as the headlights shatter. The surprisingly long distance that we and the no longer stationary van travel together until everything stops happening. The silence. The strange new lack of space inside the car. The weary familiarity of its old-car smell. The oddity of Laura’s voice as she explains about some problem with her arm. The difficulty of getting the door open. The oddity of
my
voice as I explain that I’m going to see if the picture’s all right. The shakiness of my hands as I try to undo the twine in the dark. The sudden burst of flickering but helpful illumination from somewhere at the front of the car. The repetitiveness with which Laura asks me to get her out.

I’m buoyed up by one clear conviction: that I’m in control of the situation. I’ve been in worse situations than this in the past few weeks and I’ve triumphed. I know there’ll be time to do everything I have to do before the flames take hold. Time to get the twine untied, and the picture out. Time to get the nearside door open, and Laura free. The only thing that’s holding me up is the shake in my hands, and the difficulty I still have in seeing how the knot works. Laura begins to scream. ‘Martin! Martin! Martin! Martin!’ It’s as if the crash has set off an alarm. It’s a logical idea, though, I
realize: Laura first, twine afterwards, when my hands are steadier and there’s more light from the fire. No rush.

But the complications of jammed door and stuck seat belt and the angle of Laura’s left forearm and her screaming and the heat seem insurmountable. I find someone alongside me, fortunately, shoving me out of the way and dragging Laura’s broken arm through the tangle of seat belt regardless. I move aside and let him get on with it, frightened that the stinking haze of alcohol on his breath will catch fire. Which gives me the opportunity to return to my original task with the twine.

My order of doing things, I find, has been more than justified by events. The plastic strands of the twine suddenly melt and shrivel away in front of my eyes, and the tailgate swings open.

I start to pull the picture out. It’s difficult because of the heat, but I’m still thinking very clearly. My first priority is obviously to do what I was intending to do before all this trouble started – to see whether there is in fact some binding between the man’s head and his knees. In the bright, unsteady orange light I can make out the snowy crags clearly enough, and the shimmer of the new leaves on the trees. But as my eyes find their way to the party by the millpond the whole valley begins to darken and blister. A yellow veil’s drawn smoothly down from the top of the picture, over the mountain blue and the tender green. The yellow veil’s closely followed by a brown one, and then a black one.

My eyes reach the man just as the blackness does.

And he’s gone.

I suddenly become aware of the pain in my hands, and drop the charring wood.

Man, trees, mountains, sky – they’ve all vanished into the blackness for ever.

The year rolls round. Late spring gives way to early summer, early summer to high summer, autumn to winter, winter to the first muddy brown signs of another spring. The trees grow green, the sun grows warm, the peasants dance. My burns have long since healed.

Tilda’s walking and beginning to talk. She pulls Kate’s books off the kitchen table and sits down on the floor with them, turning over the pictures and making little critical noises. So maybe she’s another art historian in the making. Another specialist in Christian iconography, even – Kate’s just had her baptized, to set her on the road, and started taking her to mass each Sunday. I don’t approve, of course, but I say nothing.

It’s just after Easter, and we’re back in the cottage again for the beginning of the old Julian year. Kate’s started doing a little more work on her book, though no progress is visible to the outside eye, but then it’s almost certainly going to take her entire working life to finish; it’s that kind of book. She got very gaunt and bony last summer – it didn’t look right at all. Now she’s fattening up again, and we’re beginning to think about another baby.

‘Ever’ didn’t, in this case, in the end mean ever. First she came back to London to feed and bath me while my hands were bandaged, and then, I suspect, her confessor got at her. Because of course she has to go to confession before she receives communion. It’s a little humiliating, I suppose, to
be taken back as a Christian duty, to find oneself used as the instrument of her uplifting self-sacrifice. But I didn’t have much choice until I could feed myself. And it could be worse – he might have suggested that it was also her Christian duty to tie my heretical head between my knees while she was washing my back and hold it under the bath water.

I look up now from my writing, and see her watching me from the other end of the kitchen table. She smiles at me. What her smile means is that whatever I’m writing when I write, whatever I’m going to say the next time I open my mouth, whatever I’m thinking now that I’ve looked up and smiled back at her, she doesn’t believe a word of it. Not a syllable of it.

What my smile means is that I’m not sure I do, either.

We’re normalizing.

What I’m thinking at the moment, as a matter of fact, is that one of these days I might try to write something about normalism. I believe it’s a rather important concept, and I seem to have given up on nominalism; my sabbatical ended without another word on the subject uttering itself. I tried to explain my ideas to Laura, since normalism was her invention, but she said, ‘You’re Irving again.’ It took me a moment or two to translate this into some generally recognized language. ‘Oh,
Erwin
,’ I couldn’t stop myself saying, when I finally got there. She was delighted. ‘Every time you do it,’ she said, ‘you have this same funny solemn look on your face.’

Her father rallied round, as soon as he heard she was in hospital and out of Upwood, and so did the family trust. While she was recuperating on someone’s estate in the West Indies, she met Roland Kofos, an apparently much-admired figure in the London financial world, and began a discreet relationship with him, which seemed like a sensi
ble arrangement, until his wife shopped him to the Serious Fraud Office, and he was rather dramatically remanded in custody. So I’m trying to be supportive, which means mostly lunch when she’s at a loose end, paid for I’m afraid by either the absent Kofos or the family trust. We’re friends, just as she said we should be. Each time I smile at her I’m remembering that it could be the picture instead of her that I’m looking at. Each time she smiles back at me she’s remembering that I could have exchanged her for a figure seven digits long in my bank account. She feels sorry for me. She’s long since forgiven me for the brief moment of uncertainty I suffered in my state of shock about which of them I was rescuing from the flames first. Whether I’ve forgiven myself I’m not sure.

She looks almost as unsettling as she did before. A slight limp, which I feel in my own bones at every step, but the plastic surgery’s been a total success. And she’s still not smoking, which may be the most positive result to come out of the whole enterprise.

The dog that I hit, I’m sad to say, had to be put down. It was this that exacerbated my negotiations with Tony most of all. My departure with his car, picture and wife always figured below it in the list of grievances he presented to the police. His first idea was to have me charged not only with burglary, motor theft and enticement, but with causing unnecessary suffering to a domestic animal. Laura’s very tough and efficient lawyers at once threatened to bring a counter-charge of attempted murder, however, and in the end we came to a reasonable arrangement. I was driving the Land-Rover with his consent; he contented himself with recovering the two Dutch pictures that we’d left in my car, and agreed to forget about the third; and no gun came into the story at all. It wasn’t as good as the deal I thought
I’d done with him, but it could have been a lot worse, like everything else.

One minor mystery is what happened to the Sainsbury’s carrier bag, and the £3,150 inside it. Was it stolen out of my abandoned car at some point? I have a feeling that I may have taken it with me in my confusion, either for safety or with some vague idea of paying Tony spot cash. If I did, I presumably dropped it somewhere in the darkness, or left it in the house, or took it into the Land-Rover with me and incinerated it, because no one’s seen it since. Well, fairly small change, in the scale of things, though it would have helped. Kate and Laura both insist that they’ve written off their loans, but I haven’t. Kate will get her six thousand, Laura her seven, even if I have to take that job in the petrol station to do it. I’ll repay them in the end just as surely as we’re already month by month repaying the bank its fifteen thousand and its interest – mainly so far, I have to admit, by Kate’s finding extra work lecturing American cultural tours, which of course is one of the things delaying progress on her book.

Tony’s legal battles continue with Laura over the divorce settlement, and with his brother over everything else. He can afford them, fortunately, even though his pheasants are dying of every unnatural cause except gunshot wounds, because when the admirably percipient and unnervingly straightforward Mr Quiss took those two Dutch paintings to Christie’s for him, the cavalrymen turned out to be a genuine Philips Wouwerman after all, and fetched £162,000. The chocolate-box skaters they identified as an Aert van der Neer. Not someone I’ve ever heard of, but other people in the world must have done, because it went for almost one and a half million.

Well, I was plainly not put into this world to be an art dealer.

So the year’s rolled round, and the one question that remains is what it was that I discovered.

My view on this has changed with the passing seasons. In early summer I began to believe that the picture hadn’t been what I thought it was at all – the entire trail of confusion and destruction had been over nothing. In high summer I was certain of it, and almost serene in the knowledge that nothing of any great value had been lost to anyone except myself.

In the autumn, though, as I returned to work from the summer pastures, my feelings began to change. Now it seemed to me just possible that it
had
been what I thought it was. By deep midwinter I knew it for certain – knew that I should have to live with the consequences of my action until the end of my life – and that the world would have to live with them until the end of time.

Then in the gloomy days of early spring my feelings changed again – changed back and forth between one view and the other with each shift in the weather. And I realized that what I and the world would have to live with was something worse than the certainty that the picture was lost for ever. It was the uncertainty. It was the anguish of the doubt that could never be resolved, of an endless shifting back and forth between light and darkness.

And now, in late spring, as the trees grow green and I pick daffodils to give my nice fat wife, as Tilda and I dance round the broken kitchen chair that’s still waiting for the bonfire we still haven’t had, and the old New Year begins again, I’m wondering what else has slipped through my fingers since that unremarkable day at the beginning of last spring. What else since I was born, for that matter. Do I know for sure the identity or value of any of it?

Round and round the wheel rolls, and I come back to
where I started out. I’ve done what I said I would, in this instance at any rate. I’ve reported my findings to the world. I’ve set out my claim to any credit that may be going, and taken upon myself whatever shame and opprobrium may seem proper. I’ve made my deposition, as fully and honestly as I can, mentioning every possible circumstance that might assist the court in its deliberations.

And now I shall rest from my labours, and sit as quietly as I can for whatever of my life remains, doing nothing further of any note at all, I imagine, as the years roll by.

Except await judgement. A judgement that can in the nature of things almost certainly never be delivered.