Headlong (28 page)

Since when, as relative stability has returned to the Western world, they’ve settled in their places, three in Vienna, one in Prague and one in New York, not to be disturbed again. Five happy pictures, hanging on the wall.

Until
I
came on the scene, and then there were six. Or very soon will be. As I believe. As I
know
. And am on the verge of proving, if only I could see what’s eluding me.

One way of proving my picture’s identity would be to trace it back to its hiding place since it disappeared from the late Archduke’s baggage.

Does it bear any evidence of its passage through the last 350 years of European history? Well, at some point it seems to have passed through the hands of someone who covered up the signature. It’s not the only time that something like this happened. Think of that neat three centimetre-wide strip missing from
Haymaking
. That didn’t come about by accident – you can’t knock a complete horizontal section off a solid oak panel half an inch thick by banging it against a doorpost. Someone deliberately and laboriously sawed it off. Why? Why should anyone want to conceal the signature that establishes the identity of a major work of art? Only one reason comes to my mind: because its owner didn’t want it to be recognized. Why might its owner not want it to be recognized? Again, only one reason comes to mind: because he was frightened that it would be stolen.

My picture has another clue, perhaps left by the same person who concealed the signature, perhaps not – the label on the back:

Vrancz: Pretmakers in een Berglandschap (um 1600 gemalt)
.

Who wrote that? Someone who knew Dutch or Flemish, plainly. And although the paper was yellowing, it was typed, so it was someone in this century. As I think about it now, though, I seem to recall that for some reason the date at the end
isn’t
typed. (
Um 1600 gemalt
) is handwritten, as if it were an afterthought, added after the label had already been stuck on. A little odd. And suddenly I’m struck by something much odder still about this postscript. Why hadn’t I noticed it before? (
Um 1600 gemalt
) isn’t Dutch or Flemish. It’s German.

A Dutchman, or a Fleming, frightened that the picture will be stolen if anyone realizes what it is, types a false label in his own language, then adds the date in someone else’s … No. It’s the someone else who adds the date, in his
own
language. A German, then. Why is the German writing on the Dutchman’s picture? Because what the Dutchman feared has come to pass. It’s been stolen. It’s been stolen by the German.

A scenario:

1940, and the Wehrmacht is requisitioning houses in Brussels. Or Antwerp, or Amsterdam. In some of them they find pictures on the walls. A lieutenant who knows approximately as much about art as Tony Churt looks at the labels on the back of them all, hoping to find a Rembrandt or a Vermeer. He’s never heard of Vrancz, but this one looks quite nice, so he takes it anyway, breaks it out of its frame to make it easier to carry, and looks up the name in the local library before he takes it home as a present for his girlfriend the next time he goes on leave. ‘Painted about 1600,’ he writes on the label, to impress her.

Possibly. But then how did it get into the Churts’ possession?

Another scenario:

1945, and the British army is requisitioning houses in
Hanover. Or Gütersloh, or Osnabrück. In some of them they find pictures on the walls. Major Churt, who knows approximately as much about art as the son he will beget when he returns home from the war, has no scruples about relieving the local Gauleiter’s family of
The Rape of Helen
, which will look impressive at the head of the stairs back home, but is most careful to press packs of Naafi cigarettes on various other, more modest citizens as recompense for two or three vaguely Dutch-looking paintings that have also taken his fancy.

Well, possibly. We can guess this much about my picture, though – that it’s been tumbled along in the great stream of history like the others. Tumbled and tumbled, all six of them, until they’ve reached the placid waters of our own times, and come to rest. Three in Vienna; one in Prague; one in New York; one in the Churts’ hatchery.

And, yes, there’s something about them that I haven’t put my finger on yet. Something that I’m just about to locate. Because even in that idyllic year of 1565
something
was worrying Bruegel; it was at some time in those same twelve busy months that he was also doing
The Calumny of
Apelles
and
Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery
, his two great appeals against denunciation, false and true.

The answer hovers at the edge of my mind, like an elusive word or a half-remembered face. I’ve a feeling that I’ve got what I’m looking for in front of my eyes already, if only I could see it.

And when I wake in the morning, alone in the double bed at Oswald Road, I have it: baler twine. Everything fits together! The pink baler twine that you can see in my picture when you look closely is binding it to a whole series of other pictures scattered around the world. These pictures make a terrifying historical pattern that ties them in with
the Churts’ estate, and clearly connects them to the peasants who go squawking up into the air from under your feet at every step, only to be shot dead and roasted alive by faceless figures cowled in black plastic sheeting – the brutal henchmen of the German Inquisition.

Even after I’m on my feet and cleaning my teeth, my mind keeps slipping back to this vision. And later still, long after I’ve thought my way out of everything else in the tangle, long after I’ve got
Helen
loaded up for the last time, and set out with her for south London, one element of it somehow ridiculously persists at the back of my consciousness:

Baler twine.

But what this unlikely detail might conceivably signify I can’t imagine.

Almost over now. By the end of the day I’ll have my picture in my hands.

I’ve got the baler twine out of my mind by this time. It’s ‘almost over’ and its variants that are filling my head now. I’m standing outside the NatWest in Lavenage holding a Sainsbury’s plastic carrier bag. In the bag are not groceries but neat bundles of banknotes: 1,920 fifties in seventy-eight fat packets of twenty-five, and an assortment of loose notes. Sixty-two of the packets are from Mr Koenig’s unsavoury-looking associate on the Tidewater Industrial Estate in Rotherhithe, sixteen from the bank, filled with the mortgage extension and the money from Kate. Now I’m waiting while Laura collects the final seven thousand pounds. I’m waiting on the pavement outside because I feel that curious glances might be directed at me by employees and customers who know her if I stand next to her while the clerk counts out the fifties, and she drops them into my carrier bag.

I’m not only waiting for Laura – I’m also waiting to be mugged. It seems unlikely that people are attacked for a bag of groceries in the middle of the afternoon in Lavenage, but rural crime’s on the increase, and then again I may have been followed from Rotherhithe by some of Mr Koenig’s associate’s even less savoury friends. In any case I’m also waiting for the police, for court officials, for private security staff hired by brother Georgie. I’m waiting for Tony to spring out of nowhere, just as Laura comes out of the bank
waving her money at me, though how he can get into Lavenage when we’ve got his Land-Rover I’m not sure. I’m waiting for Kate to appear, in town for a little implausible last-minute shopping.

But mostly I’m waiting for it all to be over. Which it will be very soon. Half an hour or so. Say an hour or two, to be on the safe side. By the time the sun goes down this evening, everything will be beginning to get back to normal.

Out of all the eventualities I’m braced for, some likely, some unlikely, the one that actually materializes is Kate. Of course. I knew it would happen. I knew it as surely as I know who painted the
Merrymakers
. Tilda’s dangling in the sling in front of her, and she’s carrying a plastic carrier bag like mine. I realise without surprise that she’s crossing the road towards me, and the very first thing that goes through my head, in spite of all my fears, is a flash of tenderness and delight. It takes her a moment or two longer to realize that it’s me, since she’s not expecting me as I am her – and then the first thing that crosses her face is that same brief flash of happiness. In the next instant, though, she’s remembered how things stand, and the light’s gone again, almost as soon it appeared.

‘Hello,’ she says, as cautiously as if she were answering the phone.

‘Shopping?’ I ask fatuously.

‘One or two things.’ She doesn’t enquire what I’m doing there, in the middle of the afternoon, on my way from London to the cottage. I lift my carrier bag an inch or two, as a self-evident explanation, though whether I’m suggesting I’ve money or groceries in it I’m not sure. I don’t need to ask her what she’s got in hers. It’s some small treat to offer me for dinner later, as a wordless gesture to mark my homecoming.

‘I take it you don’t want a lift home?’ she says.

‘No, thanks,’ I say, and start to explain that I’ve got to drop the Land-Rover off at Upwood. But a more graphic explanation has already materialized beside me.

‘Seven thou,’ says Laura, dropping five more fat packets and another handful of loose fifties into my bag. ‘Though frankly I think we should blow it all on a weekend in the Bahamas … Oh, hello!’

‘Hello,’ says Kate.

A pause. Almost over, though. Almost there. Soon, soon, soon be there.

‘Why’s there always someone just in front of you in the queue who seems to be paying in their life savings in five pees?’ Laura asks Kate in a tone of humorous complaint.

Kate says nothing. For a moment she simply stands there, not knowing what to do. Then she walks away. I run after her. ‘Listen,’ I say, ‘I’ll be back very shortly … I’ve just got to …’ I gesture with the bag, but she can’t see it, because she’s walking away from me and she doesn’t turn round.

1565. The uneasiness, the terror, the wrath … Yes, rapidly culminating to a crisis.

‘Sorry,’ says Laura humbly when I get back to her. ‘I should have looked first.’

‘No, no,’ I say gallantly. ‘My responsibility. Don’t worry.’

‘You hadn’t told her about the money?’

‘No.’

‘Oh dear.’

Oh dear indeed. But then I haven’t told Laura about Kate’s money. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.

‘And that was a joke,’ says Laura.

‘What was a joke?’

‘About the Bahamas.’

‘I realize.’

‘She wouldn’t have thought …?’

‘Probably. We’ve been going through a bit of a rough patch.’

We walk towards the car park.

‘
My
fault?’ she asks quietly.

‘You come into it.’

‘But that’s crazy!’

‘Yes.’

‘Nothing happened!’

‘No.’

We get awkwardly into the Land-Rover.

‘Just take me back and drop me off where you found me,’ she says. ‘Then you won’t ever have to see me again.’

‘Thank you,’ I say. She laughs, wounded.

‘I mean for the money,’ I explain.

‘Unless you
want
to see me.’

‘Yes, yes. And I’ll pay you back as soon as I can.’

‘Of course,’ she says, but she doesn’t ask when that will be.

We sit in silence as I drive her towards Upwood. When
will
I be able to pay her back, in fact? As soon as I’ve completed my gradual discovery of the real identity of my picture. I adjust the time scale for this as we drive; I can’t keep Kate and Laura waiting for their money just so that I can observe the kind of niceties I originally had in mind. ‘I should think I’ll be able to let you have the money in a month or two,’ I tell her. ‘Will that be all right?’

‘Don’t worry. I’m not going to start ringing you up. I’m not going to go bombarding you with letters.’

‘Thank you,’ I say again. I can’t think of anything else. She glances at me.

‘I do realize how bloody it was for you,’ she says gently,
‘running into Kate like that. I’m sorry. I can see how sick you are about it.’

‘Yes.
You
don’t have to think about it, though. I’ll be all right. Thank you.’

‘I wish you wouldn’t keep saying thank you.’

I stop just short of the drive. ‘You’d better leave it twenty minutes or so before you put in an appearance,’ I tell her. ‘Just in case he starts putting two and two together. I’ll probably be more or less through with him by then, anyway.’

‘I’ll give you ten minutes,’ she says, as she gets out. ‘I can’t hang around for ever. Even for you.’

‘Fifteen,’ I counter-offer. All my old aspirations to the transcendental truth of the universe have crumbled into a life of endless chaffering.

‘I’ll smoke a cigarette, then,’ she says defiantly, closing the door. Then she pulls it open again, fumbles in her bag, and throws a crumpled pack of cigarettes into the car. ‘No, I won’t,’ she says. But she looks as bleak as I imagine I do.

I drive on, past the Keep Out sign, prudently remembering to conceal the cigarettes in my pocket. Almost over. By the time the sun goes down I shall be there.

Yes, the sun’s still shining. We’re coming to the end of a warm spring day, well down the green hillsides towards that happy blue town beside the sea, where the ship’s just spreading its sails.

By sunset I shall be there.

As I knock on the great front door, and start the dogs barking, my spirits revive. What I feel now is that I’ve been through some kind of initiation rite to test my fitness to handle high art. I’ve passed through stage after stage of humiliation and hardening. I’ve rolled my trouser leg up, I’ve drunk my yard of ale down. I’ve had my head shaved and my skin slashed and I’ve watched all night in the Chapel Perilous. Now I’m hammering on the temple doors to claim my reward.

‘Got the money?’ says Tony anxiously, even before the door’s open enough for the dogs to squeeze through. I hold up my carrier bag. He smiles. ‘Sainsbury’s! Excellent! Must be good stuff!’ The dogs slaver and prostrate themselves. We’re welcome guests, my carrier bag and I.

He leads the way into the dark room with the threadbare carpet and the deconstructed sofa where we went that first evening. I count out eighty-four packets of notes and seventeen loose fifties from the stock in the bag, and lay them on the long table behind the sofa, while he pours two glasses of his cut-price aperitif. We seem to have come full circle.

‘£112,000,’ I say crisply. ‘Minus five and a half per cent. I make that £105,840. Call it £105,850, because I haven’t got change.’

I’m braced for an outburst of fury at the mention of the commission, which I suspect he’s completely forgotten. Not a word, though. Now the deal’s done he behaves in the
most gentlemanly manner. He re-counts the packets, but trusts me for the number of notes in each of them and scarcely glances at the loose fifties, then normalizes most gracefully.

‘Sorry if I got a bit raw-arsed at times.’

‘Not at all,’ I say magnanimously. ‘Life’s a battle. We’ve all got to fight our corner.’

‘Also, things here were somewhat on my tits.’

‘I can imagine. Happier days ahead, though.’ I raise my glass. ‘Is Laura going to join us?’ I ask, with effortless disin-genuousness. All my newly learned skills in
suggestio falsi
have returned in the hour of victory.

‘She’s out somewhere,’ he says, ‘God knows where.’

He sits down in his old armchair, in front of the great empty fireplace, and gazes gloomily into his drink, suddenly overtaken by melancholy.

‘Meant quite a lot to me, you know,’ he says. ‘Your help in all this. Not just the money. I sometimes feel I’m fighting a pretty single-handed battle here. Government’s doing its level best to destroy me for a start. Neighbours aren’t much better. Two sons – total washout. One’s mucking out in a dogs’ home. Which I thought was a job for girls. The other’s a
social worker
. Another girl’s job, isn’t it? What do you make of that? According to Laura they’re trying to tell me something. God knows what. And now that charming brother of mine’s crawled out of the woodwork. I sometimes wonder what the point of it all is. Get you to tell me some time, perhaps.’

As a philosopher, presumably. ‘Well, one of these days,’ I say with a sympathetic sigh, though I’m absolutely determined that I’ll never set foot in this house again. ‘Except that I’m not sure I’ve much idea myself.’ The only idea I have in my head is impatience to take the pictures and get
out of here. I hadn’t foreseen grateful speeches and sudden confidences. I’m becoming consumed by an irrational fear that Georgie will return in the next few minutes with enforcers and sniffer dogs trained to nose out arsenic sulphide and copper carbonate, and just pip me to the post.

‘Well,’ I say regretfully, looking at my watch.

‘You’ve brought the Land-Rover back? I’ll drive you home.’

‘Thanks,’ I say, getting to my feet, and picking up my Salisbury’s bag, with the three thousand pounds or so left of my hard-won money in it. ‘I don’t think I can really walk it carrying those three pictures.’

He remains sitting, though, gazing into the black depths of the cold fireplace. ‘I just struggle to keep the old place going,’ he says mournfully. ‘All I can think of. Waste of time, even if I manage to hang on to it. Sons don’t give a monkey’s about it. Anyway it’s breaking up around my ears already, however hard I try.’

I attempt to murmur something appropriate, but all I can think of is getting the next three bits of it away from him. ‘Perhaps we’d better hustle those Dutchmen out of here’, I say, ‘befere anything else happens.’

The dogs lift their heads and look at the door. One of them utters a brief bark. There’s the sound of the front door opening. It’s Georgie – he’s here.

Footsteps come down the corridor outside, and Laura puts her head round the door. Oh, yes. I’d forgotten about her.

‘What are you two up to?’ she says. ‘Not boozing already?’

‘We’re celebrating,’ I tell her. ‘I’ve sold
Helen
.’

‘Oh, great,’ she says vaguely. ‘I was out for a walk. How much did you get for her?’

I open my mouth to tell her, then glance at Tony. He’s still gazing into the fireplace, apparently unaware of Laura’s question or even her presence. I turn back to Laura, uncertain how much he tells her about his business arrangements. She glances at him in her turn, then makes me a little private funny face.

‘Hundreds or thousands, though?’ she enquires. My caution was right. ‘Thousands,’ I confess boldly. ‘Unbelievable,’ she murmurs, and disappears.

‘Yes,’ says Tony ‘and then there’s her.’

Long pause. I sit down on the arm of the sofa. I force myself. I can’t do otherwise.

‘Out for a walk!’ he says. He gives a short laugh. ‘She’s never walked as far as the end of the drive!’

I could reassure him that he’s wrong about this, at any rate, but I don’t.

‘She’s stopped smoking,’ he says.

‘Has she?’ Again, I could offer informed comment – I could tell him that I share his forebodings about the significance of this. Again, I don’t. ‘Good,’ I say.

Another long pause. I get the impression that the room’s growing darker. We’re getting visibly a little nearer to sunset.

‘I admit that I haven’t kept absolutely to the straight and narrow myself,’ he says. ‘Neither of us has. But I am actually rather fond of her. Rather devoted to her. Rather dependent on her, though you might not think it. I don’t know what she’s up to, but I do know it’s something serious this time. I may be a fool, but I’m not
that
big a fool. And, Martin, if she left me …’

He looks up at me. There are tears in his eyes once more. I suppose these ones I’ve helped to put there. I’m past caring about his tears, though. Or about any responsibility I may have. Past caring about anything except pictures and go.

‘Don’t worry,’ I say fatuously, then advance from fatuity to simple lying. ‘She loves you. I’ve seen the way she looks at you.’ I get to my feet again, repeat the performance with my watch, and shift from simple lying to brutal practicality. ‘Now, if you’re going to give me a lift …’

Laura comes back, carrying a bottle of the gin she bought. ‘I’m going to have a glass of this,’ she says. ‘Anyone want to switch?’

Tony at last gets to his feet, and walks out of the room. ‘Come on,’ he snaps at me. ‘Let’s go if we’re going.’

‘No?’ says Laura to me, holding up the bottle.

‘Tony’s giving me a lift home,’ I explain.

She mimes a silent kiss to me. ‘Love to Kate,’ she calls aloud, as I vanish through the door and follow Tony and the dogs up the corridor.

‘If I ever get my hands on the gentleman concerned,’ he says, as soon as the front door’s shut behind us, ‘I’ll run a harrow over him.’

‘Don’t forget the pictures,’ I say.

He uncouples the trailer from the Land-Rover, then opens the door for me. The dogs jump in ahead of me as he walks round to the driver’s side.

‘I’ll put him through the combine,’ he says.

‘Pictures.’

‘Get in. What pictures?’

‘The Dutchmen. The other three pictures I’m selling for you.’ I fight to keep the panic out of my voice.

‘Oh,
them
,’ he says. He gets in and starts the engine. ‘You don’t have to bother. Got someone else to take them off my hands.’

I get in beside him and close the door, too stunned to think. We bump down the drive. Something about the huge silence that’s fallen over the world, perhaps, makes him
glance at me, and what he sees on my face suggests that something more needs to be said.

‘Thanks for offering, though. Sorry. Should have said that before.’

Half-way down the hill we have to pull into a passing place to make room for a car on its way up. The driver winds down his window to speak to us, and a smiling pair of ears emerge. It takes me a moment to recognize them – the last time I saw them they were departing on a bicycle.

Tony winds down his window as well. ‘I’ll be back up there in a moment,’ he calls. ‘Tell Laura to give you a drink.’

‘I feel so guilty!’ cries John Quiss. ‘Roaring around like Mr Toad in a hired car, poisoning a fine spring evening. But I don’t think I can ride all the way back to London with them tied on my
handlebars
.’

We continue on our way.

‘He thinks one of those buggers could be worth quite a bit,’ explains Tony.