Headlong (11 page)

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 changed 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 bor
rowed 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.

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?