Headlong (3 page)

I’m not certain, from the expression on her face, that she’s heard of Hugo van der Goes. Perhaps not even of Rogier van der Weyden.

‘Or look at Jan van Eyck,’ I try. ‘The famous mirror. The lamp, the clogs … In the Arnolfini Double Portrait … In the National Gallery …’

I’m not
absolutely
certain she’s heard of the National Gallery.

‘But he hadn’t got very far with the book’, pursues Kate, quite unnecessarily, ‘when he was slightly side-tracked by the Master of the Embroidered Foliage.’

Laura looks first at Kate, and then at me.

‘Because Friedländer is so ridiculously dismissive of him,’ I insanely feel obliged to explain.

Laura turns from me to Kate and back to me.

‘Max Friedländer,’ I have to tell her. ‘The great authority on all the early Netherlandish stuff.’

‘But then’, says Kate, ‘he decided Friedländer was right after all.’

Laura turns back to Kate. ‘So nice, your husband taking up your line of work.’

‘Well …’ says Kate, glancing at me. This is all a very
delicate area. I move quickly to head Laura off.

‘Kate’s strictly concerned with the iconography of art,’ I explain.

‘Whereas Martin’s only interested in the iconology.’

Laura’s head twists back and forth as she follows this rally, her eyebrows higher and higher.

‘She doesn’t think iconology’s a real discipline.’

‘He thinks mere iconography’s beneath him.’

Laura glances at Tony, the way I glance at Kate, to see if he’s savouring the conversation to the full. But he’s gazing into his aperitif, lost in his own thoughts. ‘Are we ready to eat?’ he says.

I wonder whether to attempt to explain to Laura the difference between iconography and iconology. Iconography, I could tell her, informs us that a worn sofa and a vehicle held together with twine represent poverty. Iconology teaches us that the plain iconography has to be read in conjunction with a wider conception of style and artistic intention – that its real meaning is the opposite of what it appears to be. Iconography, I might go on, tells us that the look she’s wearing on her face is one conventionally adopted to represent the expression of interest. Iconology, on the other hand, involves understanding that in this particular context what this conventional expression of interest actually conveys is mockery.

But all I say is: ‘It’s a distinction drawn by Panofsky.’

There’s something about the helpless look she gives me that moves me to offer a little more assistance.

‘Erwin Panofsky,’ I tell her.

But with this I’ve gone two syllables too far. Her display of polite interest collapses like a soap bubble. ‘Excuse me,’ she says, and hurries out of the room, coughing on her smoke.

‘Oh, my God,’ says Tony, ‘you’ve driven her back to the kitchen again.’

We settle down to another wait, another look at the racehorses. Wow, as Laura would say. This is going to be one of the great evenings. I make the mistake of catching Kate’s eye, and at that moment I feel the hysterical laughter rising irresistibly out of the depths of me. I jump up as hurriedly as someone with the runs.

‘I’ll check Tilda,’ I mumble.

‘
I’ll
do it,’ says Kate, jumping to her feet as well, galvanized no doubt by the same agonising spasm, but a fraction of a second too late, because I’m already half-way out of the door and merciless in my need. I rush for some room, any room, that will serve as a hospice for a man dying of laughter. But before I can find one I’m stopped by a sound from behind the half-open kitchen door.

Sobbing.

My laughter dies instantly. My iconology was totally wrong, I realize; I’ve completely misread the iconography. Laura’s a lonely young woman shut up in this remote pile with her brutally insensitive husband. She turns to one of their rare visitors for a moment of human contact, a passing glimpse of the great sunlit world outside, and what happens? The visitor talks about things that he knows she in her simplicity won’t understand. He rebuffs and scorns her. This is why she ran out of the room so abruptly. She was in tears.

I suppose I should pretend not to have heard. But tact is overcome by ordinary human sympathy. I raise my hand to tap on the door and announce my presence when the sobbing bursts out with a new and uncontrollable wildness.

I stay my hand just in time. Because it’s not sobbing, I realize, now that I hear the paroxysm from the start.

It’s hysterical laughter, just like mine.

I don’t know what the problem in the kitchen could have been. There’s nothing wrong with the pheasant casserole, or nothing that won’t be right by the time they have it again tomorrow, reheated, after they’ve got Mr Skelton to fix the stove. And although the dining-room’s large enough to accommodate all the Churts there ever were since there were Churts at Upwood, the temperature’s by no means unbearable, if you edge your chair a little towards one of the fan heaters and get your feet under one of the dogs. And I suppose the cigarettes that Laura lights between courses must warm the air a little.

She’s long since recovered her composure. So have Kate and I. In fact, we two have ceased to make much contribution to the evening; our conversational resources seem to have been exhausted by our exposition of nominalism and Panofsky. Not that this matters greatly, because now that they’ve got the initial polite interrogation of the guests out of the way the Churts seem perfectly happy to do all the talking themselves. After a few glasses of wine they’ve both become more expansive, in their different ways. The only thing they remain unforthcoming about is why they invited us. It can scarcely be anything to do with the pictures in the dining-room, which by now we’ve had considerable opportunity to assess, and which are mostly flyblown cross-sections of ancient square-rigged sailing ships.

They may simply have had the kind intention of disabus
ing us of any naïvely romantic view of the countryside. They distribute snippets of bad news alternately to Kate and me on opposite sides of the table, moving in and out of agreement with each other like two motors going in and out of phase, while Kate and I, in the stands now like Laura before dinner, revolve more or less mutely back and forth to follow the game.

‘You two come cruising down from town’, says Tony, ‘and you think you’ve arrived in some kind of Shangri-La.’

‘In fact you’ve walked into the middle of a battlefield!’ cries Laura.

‘Put your head outside that door – somebody’ll blow it off!’

‘The people round here! They’re all lunatics!’

‘Preservation-mad!’ says Tony. ‘That’s the problem.’

‘Yes, because you drive them to it!’ shouts Laura. ‘You’re the biggest lunatic of the lot!’

‘Not at all. No one could be keener on preservation than me. But what people round here do not understand, what they cannot get through their thick skulls, is that to preserve you have to change. You can’t go backwards – you can’t stand still. You must go forwards. Forwards, forwards! That is the law of life! The remorseless law of life! But this my good neighbours cannot begin to grasp!’

‘They’re trying to stop him building a scramble track.’

‘A scramble track?’ says Kate, surprised at last into breaking the rhythm of the conversation. ‘You mean …?’

‘Yes!’ cries Laura. ‘Yobs on motor bikes roaring about in the mud on Sunday afternoon!’

‘Two thousand pounds a quarter for the lease, my pet!’

‘Money, money! It’s all he thinks about!’

‘
Someone’s
got to think about it!’

‘He’s already got the whole estate crawling with pheas
ants! You can’t walk down the drive without them flapping out under your feet and squawking at you! Roast pheasant, boiled pheasant, fried pheasant, frozen pheasant – we’ll be flapping around and squawking ourselves soon!’

‘What do you
want
to eat? Barbecued sparrow?’

‘I think it’s absolutely disgusting, breeding creatures just so that you can kill them.’

‘It’s not for
my
benefit, poppet!’

‘No – jeeploads of Japanese businessmen banging away all over the place! We might as well live in the middle of a firework display!’

‘Two hundred pounds per gun per day! Say ten guns, when we really get going. Say a hundred bird-days per year …’

‘Why don’t you just sell the whole estate, and have done with it?’ shouts Laura.

At this Tony becomes suddenly silent.

‘This scramble track …’ begins Kate. But Tony is moving towards a major statement of his beliefs.

‘I happen to own this estate,’ he says slowly. ‘I didn’t ask to own it. I just found myself with it, in exactly the same way as people find themselves landed with a big brain, or a weak heart, or nice tits. All right,
I’ve
got the estate –
she’s
got the tits –
you
two have got the brains. As it happens. But it could just as well be Laura with the brain, and you two with the estate, and me with the tits. Since it’s not, though, I’m the one who has to do something about it. Because I propose to go on owning it. Owning this estate is what I was put into the world to do. Nothing wrong in that. Everything has to be owned. That’s what gives it life, that’s what makes it mean something, having a human face attached to it. If we’ve learnt nothing else from the Communists we’ve surely learnt
that
.’

He turns to me. ‘You’re the philosopher. Isn’t that so?’

‘Well,’ I begin, ‘there’s certainly something of interest at issue here …’

I’ve lost him already. ‘Anyway,’ he says, ‘whether it’s so or whether it isn’t, I’m certainly not going to sit on my backside and watch it all go down the Swanee.’

‘But down the Swanee is exactly where it all goes!’ cries Laura. She turns to me. ‘He has a spectacular ability for finding crack-brained schemes to invest his money in.’

‘What do you mean? I’m one of the few people we know who survived Lloyds!’

‘You weren’t
in
Lloyds! They chucked you out of the syndicate!’

‘I walked out on my own two feet, thank you very much.’

‘What about that offshore thing?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. Remember the Arab thing, though. That came up.’

‘No, it didn’t – it went down, like everything else. They all ended up in jail!’

‘I was out of it by then.’

It’s beginning to occur to me that my iconology really
is
wrong. Totally wrong. I’ve entirely misread all the symbolism of the estate, from the baler twine to the holes in the carpet. Really no ology’s needed – a little of Kate’s straightforward ography’s all that’s required. The symbolism isn’t ironic. It’s literal. The Churts have no money. All they own is a bottomless, money-eating swamp and an equally bottomless incompetence.

Laura has schemes of her own, it turns out. ‘I think he should try to get some pop promoter involved,’ she says. ‘Have some great festival thing here. Some New Age thing. Make a few crop circles. Ten thousand people – ten quid a
head. All you need is a sound system and Portaloos. They’d bring their own sleeping-bags.’

‘So where’s all this happening?’ says Tony. ‘On the lawn?’

‘No, away from the house. In that great empty bit.’

‘Which great empty bit?’

‘The other side of the woods. Where the barn fell down. There’s no one round there.’

‘You mean the field at the back of us?’ asks Kate.

‘Oh yes,’ says Laura. ‘Well, you could stay up in London that weekend.’

I can see that Kate’s quietly resolving to join the local Preservation Society. But I can’t say I feel too much alarm. I think the field will remain in its present charmingly neglected state for a long time yet. The whole estate will. Pop festivals, scramble tracks – none of their great ideas is ever going to materialize.

Actually, I feel a slight twinge of sympathy for them, even gratitude. It’s their straitened circumstances, their fecklessness, which are preserving the reality of this little pocket of real country for us. Still, there’s nothing we can do about it. I look at my watch, and begin to make the usual ritual regretful noises.

‘Well, that was delightful,’ I say. ‘But Tilda’s going to be waking up any moment. Also, we were up half the night last night. And we’ve got an early day tomorrow …’

Why does one always have one excuse too many? Still, by now Kate and I are on our feet.

‘Has he shown you the picture yet?’ says Laura.

Ah. Here we go.

At least we haven’t sat through all this delightfulness for nothing.

It’s in the breakfast-room. No, this scarcely does justice to its majestic presence. It entirely fills the breakfast-room.

This, at any rate, is my first impression, because the breakfast-room’s relatively modest, designed to accommodate no more than a handful of Churts at any one time as they straggle down in the morning to their cornflakes and devilled kidneys, while the picture’s entirely immodest. It lours down enormously from its elaborate gilt frame over the screened-off fireplace in the freezing room, occupying most of the wall between mantle and ceiling. Inside the frame … well … The four of us and the dogs, who have accompanied us to the viewing, all gaze at it respectfully but with difficulty, because we’re far too close to it. It’s leaning out from the wall, as if it expected to be at the head of a great sweep of stairs, with us approaching it from below. In its present position it seems to be angled for the benefit of the dogs. I lean back and sag at the knees, trying to get close to their eyeline.

Tony and Laura turn to look at me. My respectful cringe has established me as the authority.

‘What do you reckon?’ says Tony.

What do I reckon? Nothing, really. No thought comes into my head. ‘Seventeenth century?’ I venture cautiously.

‘Right,’ says Tony. ‘1691.’

‘Italian, presumably.’

‘Giordano. It’s the Upwood Giordano.’

‘Ah, yes,’ I say wisely, as if I’d been about to say it myself. I’m not trying to claim false credit for my own percipience – I’m politely giving false credit to the fame of the painter and the picture. And actually I think I
have
heard of Giordano, if not the Upwood Giordano, in some context or other.

‘What do you think, though?’ says Tony.

I look at Kate, to pass the question on to her, but without much hope. She shrugs. ‘Not my period,’ she says.

Not mine either, of course. One of the dogs yawns and settles to sleep; not
his
, apparently. The other one sneezes thoughtfully. I privately agree with this assessment. But the scholarly fastidiousness of Kate and our two critical friends on the floor leaves me with the task of offering some more extended appreciation.

So, all right, what do I think? Well … Let’s look at this systematically, in the way that an art historian would, since an art historian I am in my own small way trying to become. What do we have here?

We have some kind of mythological scene. There are many figures. It’s taking place at night. The period, to judge by the costumes, is classical.

What’s the subject? A number of armed men are hurling instructions and imprecations over their shoulders, some to the left, some to the right, none of them apparently listening to what anyone else is saying. They’re supporting what seems, from the strain on their muscles, to be a substantial burden – a stoutish lady whose clothes have been disarranged to reveal her left knee and her right breast. There are flames in the darkness, and the night sky is full of chimeras. Waves are breaking around the men’s legs, oarsmen are straining at oars. Yes, what the armed men are struggling to do is to place the stout party in a boat. She’s the wife of a Greek shipowner, off on a Mediterranean
cruise. No – concentrate on the iconography. The figure hovering in the air above their heads, pointing out to sea, is Cupid. There’s plainly some love interest involved. I believe Cupid is pointing in the direction of Troy.

‘The abduction of Helen?’ I hazard.

‘The rape of Helen,’ corrects Tony.

‘Rape?’ says Laura. ‘It doesn’t look much like rape to me.’

‘
Ratto di Elena
,’ says Tony firmly. ‘Written on the back. Rape of Helen.’

‘She’s not exactly pressing her little alarm thing,’ says Laura. ‘She’s not exactly squirting her little gas thing in their eyes.’

‘Rape,’ says Tony. ‘That’s what we’ve always called it.’

I don’t think the Giordano shifting dimly about in the depths of my memory is a painter. Didn’t he write operas? Perhaps it’s the same one, though. Perhaps the picture’s a kind of solidified opera. They’re not shouting at each other – they’re singing. This would explain why they’re not listening to each other. People can’t listen to each other if they’re all singing in counterpoint together. Now we know what’s going on we can guess, even without surtitles, that there’s some dispute among the tenors about the correct bearing for Troy, perhaps a cautious suggestion from the baritone about going back to pick up some life-jackets.

‘Rather splendid piece,’ says Tony. He sounds not boastful, but humble at finding himself called by fate to serve as its guardian.

‘Wonderful,’ I murmur, continuing to gaze respectfully at the great work so as not to see the expression on Kate’s face. Sometimes, I have to say, she carries honesty to unacceptable extremes.

‘They really knew how to do it in those days,’ says Tony.
‘Real drama. Real feeling. They weren’t afraid to let rip.’

Rip Signor Giordano has certainly let. But I’m not sure about the feeling, in the case of the soprano at any rate. Helen’s not singing. Laura’s right; she’s remaining remarkably cool and collected. She seems to be neither pleased nor displeased by the turn of events – not even surprised. You can’t help feeling that strange chaps are always carting her off in the middle of the night and starting major wars over her. Her right hand’s upraised, it’s true, which suggests she’s mildly concerned about
something
. Perhaps she has a delicate chest. One more breast exposed to the freezing air of the Churts’ breakfast-room, she thinks, and she may be spending her first night of illicit passion under the Trojan stars with a hacking cough and a streaming nose.

‘So,’ says Tony, ‘what do you think?’

‘Wonderful,’ I say. ‘Very … very …’ Very something, certainly. But exactly what eludes me. Very unlike the Master of the Embroidered Foliage, at least. And very funny. In fact the more I struggle to think very what it is precisely, the funnier it seems. In every sense. Everything about it, starting with the way it’s hung, with its elbows resting on the mantelpiece as if it were a bartender in a slack period leaning across the counter for a chat. It plainly doesn’t belong here – the proudest possession of the Churts of Upwood is hanging on hooks put up for a picture at least a foot shorter. Don’t they have a staircase here to hang it on? What’s it doing in the breakfast-room of all places? It’s not the kind of thing you’d want to come face to face with after a heavy night on some of Mr Skelton’s by-products.

‘It’s certainly a very striking backdrop to cornflakes and boiled eggs,’ I venture at last.

Tony gazes at me, baffled, out of his depth in the critical vocabulary.

‘Breakfast,’ I explain. ‘I thought you said this was the breakfast-room?’

‘We have breakfast in the kitchen,’ says Laura. The idea of using a breakfast-room to eat breakfast in is obviously a naïve solecism. ‘This is one of the rooms we keep shut up.’ She shivers. Kate shivers. I shiver. The room’s damp as well as cold. So they sit in the living-room looking at sporting prints, and keep the mighty Upwood Giordano shut away in the damp and dark to collect mildew unseen? What a lovable pair of eccentrics they are.

But apparently a critical assessment isn’t what Tony was after.

‘I mean,’ he says, ‘how much? What would it fetch? Current state of the market?’

‘I’ve not the slightest idea. Why, are you selling it?’

‘Might. If I could get the right price. Breaks my heart to see it go out of the family after all these years, but one has to make hard choices.’

‘Not doing much good in here,’ says Laura.

‘So what do you reckon?’

I glance at Kate. ‘I’ll go and fetch Tilda,’ she says, and leaves me to struggle on alone.

‘Why don’t you ring up Sotheby’s or Christie’s?’ I say. ‘Get them to come down and take a look?’

‘Because he doesn’t trust them,’ says Laura.

‘Of course I trust them! I trust them to take ten per cent off me, and another ten per off the poor mutt who buys it, and VAT off both of us! Don’t tell me Sotheby’s. I sold the Strozzi at Sotheby’s. Christie’s? Gave them the Tiepolo.’

Tiepolo? They had a
Tiepolo
? Good God.

‘And don’t say go to a dealer.’

‘He certainly doesn’t trust
dealers
!’ says Laura.

‘Been had once too often.’

‘What, with that Guardi? Yes, because you went to some crook in a back street!’

And a Guardi! What else has run through their fingers?

Tony turns back to me. ‘Anyway, off the top of your head. Ball-park figure.’

No wonder he gets ripped off, if he goes round asking for valuations from people like me. Let’s make a guess, all the same. Start from first principles. I imagine that pictures of this sort have a value as interior decorators’ properties. They’ll be sold by acreage, like so much arable or grazing. How much per square foot for basic period oil on canvas? It can scarcely be less than £100. So what are we looking at here? It’s about as tall as I am, and a foot or so longer. Say six foot by seven foot. Forty-two square feet. What’s that? Over £4,000! This is ridiculous.

All right, knock off a thousand for plausibility. But then the frame must be worth a few hundred. And probably the bare breast increases its saleability. Perhaps even the naked knee’s an attraction. Add a tenner for the inimitable expression on her face. Another couple of thousand out of politeness to my hosts. A thousand off again as a sop to honesty … Where have we got to?

‘No idea,’ I finally conclude. ‘Fifteenth-century Netherlandish I might just conceivably be able to help you with. Seventeenth-century Italian – you might as well ask me about pheasant breeding.’

‘Netherlandish?’ says Laura. ‘You mean Dutch?’

‘Well, the Netherlands in the fifteenth century included Flanders and Brabant.’ I can hear the pedantry in my voice again, the Erwin in the Erwin Panofsky. But this time it’s Tony who laughs.

‘What, Belgium?’ he says. ‘Chocolates and beer – that’s all that ever came out of Belgium.’

So much for my little fling with the Master of the Embroidered Foliage. So much, for that matter, for the Master of the St Lucy Legend. Also for van Eyck, van der Weyden, van der Goes, Memling, Massys, Gerard David, Dirck Bouts …

‘But
that’s
one of your Dutchmen,’ says Tony. ‘Skaters and whatnot?’

I turn round. Propped up against the serving hatch is a little winter landscape. It looks like the lid of a rather large box of chocolates, though it’s certainly not Belgian, and there’s an odd chocolatey tone to everything about it, from the frozen polder to the plangently sunshot winter clouds. It’s rather nice.

‘Dutch, yes, certainly,’ I assure him. ‘Very attractive. Way out of my period, though. Seventeenth-century again. Who’s the painter?’

He picks it up and turns it round. ‘Doesn’t say. So what do you think? Couple of thousand?’

‘Very possibly.’

‘Three? Four?’

‘Who knows?’ I say. Who knows, for that matter, why it’s propped against the serving hatch instead of hanging on the wall? The hanging policy in this house is certainly difficult to understand. Who knows why there’s another, rather smaller picture beside the skating scene lying flat on its back? Tents and flags in this one, with three men on horseback, and a girl pouring them drinks from a pitcher, with more horsemen dashing about in the smoke in the background. The name Philips Wouwerman comes to mind. Another seventeenth-century Dutchman. Good. Fine. Not my kind of thing, though.

‘Label on that one,’ says Tony. I turn it over. I was right – I should have spoken out and got the credit. ‘Wouwerman: Cavalrymen Taking Refreshment near a Battlefield.’

Tony waits expectantly.

‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘I still can’t help. Anyway, it depends what they mean by “Wouwerman”. Whether it’s School of, or Circle of, or Follower of, or Style of, or nothing much at all.’

‘Too much to hope that “Wouwerman” might mean Wouwerman?’

‘That’s the one thing it doesn’t mean,’ I explain. ‘This label was written long before the Description of Goods Act. If it just says “Wouwerman” and not “Philips Wouwerman”, the one person in the entire world you know they’re certain it’s
not
by is Wouwerman.’

‘Perhaps it’s a Rembrandt,’ says Laura.

‘Well, possibly. But if you really want my considered advice – ring Sotheby’s or Christie’s. Pay them their premiums. I think it would be worth it.’

Kate reappears with the carry-cot. ‘I thought we were going?’

‘Yes,’ says Laura, ‘let’s get out of here. We’re all going to have tuberculosis by tomorrow, like the sheep.’

I move thankfully towards the door.

‘Sorry we couldn’t be of any assistance,’ I say. ‘Delightful evening, though …’

But Tony’s stopped.

‘Just a moment,’ he says. ‘Where’s the other one?’

‘What other one?’ says Laura.

‘There were three of these Dutch buggers.’

‘Oh,’ says Laura. She goes over and reaches behind the fire screen that hides the empty hearth beneath the Giordano. ‘Sorry, but it just fitted. Those bloody birds in the chimney keep bringing the soot down.’

She struggles to shift a large, unframed wooden board.

‘It weighs a ton,’ she says. I move to help her. ‘Wait,’ she says, ‘you’ll get your hands filthy.’

She finds an old newspaper under the empty coal box and scrubs at the board as best she can. Then between us we hoist it out of the fireplace and balance it on the table.

So it’s there, in the freezing breakfast-room, among the indifferent chairs, with Laura still holding the filthy newspaper she’s just been scrubbing away with, and Tony looking over my shoulder, still hoping for a valuation, and Kate in the doorway, still patiently rocking the carry-cot back and forth, that I first set eyes on it. On my fate. On my triumph and torment and downfall.