Headlong (4 page)

I recognize it instantly.

I say I recognize it. I’ve never seen it before. I’ve never seen even a description of it. No description of it, so far as I know, has ever been given. No one knows for sure who, if anyone – apart from the artist himself – has ever seen it.

And I say instantly. The picture’s uncleaned, and for a few seconds all I can see, until my eye adjusts to the gloom, is the pall of dirt and discoloured varnish. Then again, how long is an instant? The human eye sees very little at any one moment. All it can distinguish with any clarity is what falls on the fovea, the pit no bigger than a pinhead in the centre of the retina where the packed receptors are closest to the surface. If I’m holding it at arm’s length, as I am, to keep it upright, what I’m seeing at any one moment, really seeing, is a patch of paint about an inch in diameter. I’m seeing one tiny detail.

What is that detail? The first one I see? I don’t know. Perhaps the highlights on the new green leaves where they lie in the track of the sun. Perhaps the figure caught for all eternity just off-balance, with his foot ridiculously raised to stamp the ground. Perhaps just the foot itself. But already my eye’s doing what the human eye always has to do to take in the world in front of it. It’s flickering and jumping in indescribably complex patterns, back and forth, up and down, round and round, moving over and over again each second, assembling patch after patch into a first approximation of a
whole; amending the approximation; amending it again. For a picture this size, some four feet high by five feet long, even the most cursory scan must take a matter of seconds.

Already, even as I look at it in those first few instants, what I’m contemplating is not the picture but my accumulated recollection of it.

And already, somewhere in those first few instants, something has begun to stir inside me. In my head, in the pit of my stomach. It’s as if the sun’s emerging from the clouds, and the world’s changing in front of my eyes, from grey to golden. I can feel the warmth of the sunlight spreading over my skin, passing like a wave of beneficence through my entire body.

How do I know what it is that I’m seeing? As with the orange of oranges once again, as with the loveliness of Tilda, I just do. Friedländer, the great Max Friedländer, is very good on this. ‘Correct attributions’, he says, ‘generally appear spontaneously and “prima vista”. We recognize a friend without ever having determined wherein his particular qualities lie and that with a certainty that not even the most detailed description can give.’ Friedländer, of course, had spent his life among these friends of his. I’ve spent only whatever time I could manage over the last five years or so. And in any case, I’m still way out of my period with this one. All the same, I know. It’s a friend. No, it’s the long-lost brother of a friend. A long-mourned child walking back into our lives the way the dead do in our dreams.

Here’s what I see through the grimy pane of time:

I’m looking down from wooded hills into a valley. The valley runs diagonally from near the bottom left of the picture, with a river that meanders through it, past a village, past a castle crowning a bluff, to a distant town at the edge of the sea, close to the high horizon. Running along the left-
hand side of the valley are mountains, with jagged crags sticking up like broken teeth, and snow still lying in the high side valleys. It’s spring. On the woods below the snowline, and tumbling away in front of me from where I’m standing, there’s the first shimmer of April green. The high valley air’s still cold, but as you move down into the valley the chill dies away. The colours change, from cool brilliant greens to deeper and deeper blues. The season seems to shift in front of you from April into May as you travel south into the eye of the sun.

Among the trees just below me is a group of clumsy figures, some of them breaking branches of white blossom from the trees, some caught awkwardly in the middle of a heavy clumping dance. A bagpiper sits on a stump; you can almost hear the harsh, pentatonic drone. People are dancing because it’s spring again, and they’re alive to see it.

Far away in the mountains a herd is being moved up the familiar muddy scars towards its summer pasture.

Just in front of me again, half-hidden in the raw spring undergrowth, watched only by a bird on a tree, a little thickset man holding two small wild daffodils is expres-sionlessly touching his comically pouted lips to the comically pouted lips of a little thickset woman.

And away the eye goes once more, and the heart with it, out into the vast atmospheric depths of the picture, into deeper and deeper blue, to the blue sea and the blue sky above it. The last clouds are just clearing in the warm westerly. A ship’s setting sail, bound for the hot south.

But by now I can’t see the picture any more – I’m ceasing to take it in. My eye’s flickering back and forth too fast in its excitement, and my mind’s clouded with anguish. Because it’s all too obvious. It’s so blindingly evident what this picture is that it can’t be so, or someone else would have rec
ognized it already. Yes, who else has seen it? How can even these two fools not know what it is?

I daren’t think the name of its creator to myself, because it simply cannot be so.

‘Very nice,’ I say politely, laying it down on the table. ‘Most attractive. Now, I’ve got a coat somewhere …’

Because now my mind’s moving over the situation as fast as my eye did over the picture. I mustn’t go on looking at it. I’ve grasped that first essential (and how long have I been looking at it already?). I mustn’t make any sudden movement with the muscles of my face, mustn’t let my voice shake – mustn’t speak any unnecessary words. How do I manage to maintain this iron self-control? Everything inside me is urging me to shout out in astonishment – to let everyone know the joyful news, to claim the credit for my discovery. But I can’t even wordlessly bring Kate across the room to look at it, because she’d recognize it even faster than I did, and in her guileless, straightforward way she’d simply announce it to the world.

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 beauti
ful 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 conces
sively, 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.