Headlong by Michael Frayn

Author:Michael Frayn [Michael Frayn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571249190
Publisher: Faber and Faber Ltd
Published: 2000-03-04T05:00:00+00:00

The spring sunshine comes and goes as I drive down the hill, lighting our quiet valley with hope and plunging it into despair as bewilderingly often as my own moods change in the shifting circumstances of my quest. It fades as I make the turn into our track, and I bump along in gloom and anguish. But then, as I make the second turn beyond the elders, a flood of sunshine blesses our cottage with the glowing colours of a Book of Hours. The front door’s as green as the new season, the daffodils we planted around it last autumn as yellow as the sun, the blossom fallen from the crab-apple trees as white as the sun’s innocent light, Tilda’s carry-cot on the stump of the old maple tree as blue as a distant sea. And in the foreground – my own fat peasant, legs planted wide in the freshly turned brown soil, bending to her emblematic planting and sowing, the traditional April labours. She straightens up at the sight of the car, arching her back against the ache of standing upright, and brushing a loose strand of hair out of her eyes with the back of her muddy hand, as all the generations of toiling women have done since first they bent to labour, then smiles as only Kate can.

‘Well,’ I begin as I jump out of the car, ‘an eventful morning!’ There’s so much to tell her that I don’t know what to say first. All I know, at the sight of her smiling there, is that the anxiety and uncertainty will fade from the story as I tell it, and that all will once again be well. We lean towards each other, touching our extended lips together like the couple in my picture, in our own simple, earthy echo of the gentry’s pleasures.

The first thing that comes into my head to tell her is the last one that happened – my belated discovery that Tony Churt’s using me to cheat Inland Revenue. But even as I open my mouth, it occurs to me that this may merely evoke Kate’s alarm, and introduce yet another element of uncertainty into the situation, since I haven’t yet worked out quite what I’m going to do about it. I go back to the event that immediately preceded this one – my managing to reduce Laura once again to helpless laughter. Then I remember the ridiculous misunderstanding of my intentions that evoked it … and my own laughter … and I realize I can’t now recall exactly how the misunderstanding arose, or easily explain why I was laughing as well.

Kate goes straight to the point, though, as usual. ‘So do you think you saw anything?’ she asks.

‘I didn’t see anything at all!’ I cry, finding immediate relief, once again, in being able to share everything with her. ‘I couldn’t! It wasn’t there! He’d taken it away to show it to someone! Some art expert! But who? And what did they tell him?

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