Headlong (8 page)

‘Am I driving you to the station again?’ asks Kate neutrally over breakfast next morning, not looking at me.

‘No, no,’ I reassure her. Not that she gives any sign of being reassured, which is perhaps just as well, because my plans for today still don’t involve doing what she thinks I should be doing. ‘I thought I might go out for a walk. If that’s all right?’

She doesn’t comment. Doesn’t ask where I’m going, or offer to come with me. Never mind – all will be made clear soon enough. When I get back from my walk, even, if all goes well.

In any case, she probably knows where I’m going. I thought I’d walk there over the fields, rather than drive, to make it seem more offhand. It’s like the difficulty of contriving an accidental meeting with the woman one’s pursuing. In so far as I remember that phase of my life. Rushing over to the Churts in the car and crashing all the way up their drive to announce that I’ve found someone who’s interested in their
Helen
might suggest a suspiciously eager interest. Everything in this business, I imagine, depends upon all those little details of behaviour and manner that suggest dull, unsurprising normality. Everything in
what
business? Confidence trickery, I suppose, if one has to name it. No, that’s ridiculous. What I’m doing is what a painter does – what Bruegel’s doing in the cycle of the year; I’m constructing a plausible scenario. The scene will simply look easier
and more natural if I start it by happening to drop in when I’m passing on one of my walks. I’ll appear out of the woods round the back somewhere. There’ll be mud on my boots – a sympathetic touch. And that means I’ll have to take them off at the door, and talk to him in my socks. An amusing little genre scene. I might even bump into him, countryman to countryman, as I wander absent-mindedly along brooding on nominalism, and he strolls about his estate with a gun in the crook of his arm, cogitating upon the life expectancy of pheasants and how to lower it.

I trudge up from the valley bottom, through the great field where Laura wants to put her New Age festival. Where have we got to in the cycle of the present year? The first raw, blustering advances of Early Spring have exhausted themselves in a rather spectacular sequence of rainstorms, cold snaps, thunder and sudden snow showers, and we’ve not yet reached the great transformation scene in the next picture. We’re in an unillustrated no man’s land between the two, a raggedy come-and-go weather of patchy blue and white over patchy green and brown. The iconography’s not much help, either – it’s even more difficult to make sense of than Bruegel’s. In fact, I find it difficult to locate any iconography at all. There are no peasants to be seen at their labours, no gentry at their pleasures. The only visible creatures of any sort are cows, who lift their heads mournfully as I pass, mumbling dull, soundless monologues about the bovine condition, then carry on with the one traditional labour that characterizes this and every other month of the year – the production of cowpat.

It’s real country all right, our valley, and I’ve grown rather fond of it in the two years we’ve been coming down here. But it’s a dull place compared with the kind of valleys they have in the Netherlands. Almost every valley there, if
Bruegel’s to be believed, is overlooked by soaring crags, and has a river that winds past a village and a high-perched castle, with a distant view of the sea. Their springs are more springlike than ours. But of course Bruegel isn’t to be believed, not literally. He’s doing what I’m doing in my dealings with Tony Churt: constructing a fiction. Grossmann agrees with Novotny that the pictures in the cycle of the year are what he calls
Mischlandschaften
, composite landscapes, built up from elements either invented or observed separately in different places. All those crags are the souvenirs of Bruegel’s great trip to Italy. ‘When he travelled through the Alps,’ says van Mander, ‘he swallowed all the mountains and rocks, and spat them out again, after his return, on to his canvases and panels …’

I stop as I reach the high ground at the edge of the woods, and turn back to look at the undramatic landscape I’m living in. No castles, no crags. Just gently sloping woods and fields. All the same, a landscape is what I see it as. It’s given form and identity by all the painted landscapes I’ve seen over the years. Which painter first saw landscape as landscape, and painted it for its own sake? Bruegel, according to Novotny, in the great cycle of the year, where for the first time in Western art landscape is given the rank of an independent subject.

It had begun as the background to religious events. You can see two distant valleys, with crags and castles, and a river winding towards the sea, framing the
Scenes from the
Life of the Virgin and of Christ
that Hans Memling painted in 1480. In the early part of the sixteenth century Joachim Patinir brought the landscape closer, and shrank the saints he showed living in it. It was Patinir who first established the characteristics of this wonderful land, with its dreamlike combination of Alpine crags and Flemish settlement, its
valleys seen from the high ground, winding up through receding planes of blue to the sea and a horizon near the top of the canvas. What Bruegel did was to leave out the saints.

Before Patinir and Bruegel this valley I’m standing in would have had no artistic
use
, even less than it now has economic use. Rough pasturage for a few cows now, it would then have been merely the low-rent location for a miracle or martyrdom, perhaps with Tony Churt as proprietor kneeling importantly in the foreground.

I Patinirize it as I look at it, I Bruegelize it. A little practice for my project. I ennoble it with a line of crags. A river, a village, a castle. I paint in figures engaged in the appropriate labours. In the middle distance two boys got cheap from the local comprehensive on work experience are filling hoppers with pheasant feed. In the foreground a couple of investment bankers and the chairman of the local planning committee are shooting the pheasants the boys have raised. Through the window of the castle you can just see Tony Churt, putting in his application to the planning committee for a scramble track.

But those six pictures of Bruegel’s aren’t simply an image of the revolving wheel of the here and now to which we’re bound; they’re offers of an escape from it. They’re travelogues,
invitations au voyage
, that lead us out of the flat lands of the north, out of the cold and wet, out of the mud, out of the dull daily round, to distant shores where the sun shines and things are different. So is the picture that I’m painting. I arrange the great diagonals that lead the eye out and up into the distance. I indicate the last bare branches of winter with the bitumen and carbonized walrus ivory that Netherlandish painters used for browns and blacks, then clothe them in the distilled verdigris and malachite with which they captured the elusive green tones, and touch in the sunstruck highlights
with whitelead. I set the spring flowers blossoming with complex combinations of red mercuric sulphide and Zealand red madder, of poisonous yellow arsenic sulphide and the sweet yellow juices of broom, saffron, weld, aloes and dyer’s oak. I grind the crystals of copper carbonate, the azurite or verditer, the famous mountain blue for the receding planes of aerial perspective, and paint my way, blue by blue, up to the distant sea, where my ship lies waiting.

I follow my own leisurely progress plane by plane up into the sunlit lands that lie before me, as I carry my picture off to hand over to the fictitious collector I’ve found to buy it, then, as I artlessly explain to Tony Churt, hang it on my own wall to enjoy it myself for a few days in transit; find myself falling in love with it; humbly raise several thousand pounds I can’t afford to buy my purchaser out and keep it for myself; become curious enough about it to take it to be examined by experts; am stunned to find that I’ve made one of the most important artistic discoveries of the century; behave with characteristic modesty as I receive public and professional recognition in equal measure; look with innocent amazement and heroic equanimity at the huge sums of money dangled in front of me; regretfully decide that I must let the picture go out of my possession to some institution where it can be properly looked after and seen by a wider public; nobly insist that it must remain in the country, even though this means accepting a considerable financial sacrifice; contribute a remarkably generous proportion of the proceeds to help good causes in the arts; perhaps even make a small but entirely uncalled-for donation to Tony Churt himself …

Blue after blue. Grinding the azurite coarse for the deep blues, grinding it fine and mixing it with whitelead for the paler tones near the horizon …

Back to the foreground, though. What I have to concentrate on first is disposing of the Giordano. In any case, the true Jerusalem to which my ship’s sailing is not the money or the fame, or any of the other ports at which it may touch en route – it’s the chance to repay my share of the debt we all have to the world that gave us birth by restoring to it one of its lost wonders …

No! Put the azurite back on the palette! First a few murky brown shadows for
Helen
to disappear into.

I don’t bump into Tony Churt as I climb through the woods below his house. One or two of his hand-raised cock pheasants, yes, to our considerable mutual surprise; but not their proprietor. The carefully crafted scenario of my walk goes wrong, in any case, when I discover that the path has been closed by rusty barbed wire and another Keep Out sign. I happen to know it’s a public right of way, and in the ordinary course of events I should make a point of climbing over the wire and continuing, but in the circumstances it seems more politic to divert to the road, and walk up the drive. Which means that by the time I reach the front door I might just as well have arrived by car.

The house is even less welcoming in the daylight than it is by night. The cataract of rainwater from the gutters has ceased, but the pool it created is still half-blocking the approach to the door, and there are streaks of green slime down the walls in several places marking the site of other leaks and blockages. In the yard at the side I glimpse traces of enterprises in various states of incompletion or disintegration – a collapsed woodpile, a half-dismantled tractor, a pigeon loft with no pigeons, tangles of mud-splashed black plastic sheeting. A huge barking begins even before I’ve negotiated the protective moat in front of the door, and a great weight of thrashing dogflesh has come thundering out of the yard and hurled itself upon me once again, so that by the time Laura’s opened the front door, in scarlet rubber
gloves this time instead of a scarlet sweater, and pushed the draggled hair back out of her eyes, the painstaking patina of mud on my boots has vanished into a more general coating of filth. ‘Is Tony in, by any chance?’ I shout over the noise. ‘I just happened to be passing, and …’

She holds the door open for me – rather reluctantly, I can’t help feeling – and flails ineffectually at the dogs. I’m not absolutely sure she recognizes me, even after all the rich amusement I provided her with the other night. But when Tony emerges from some back corridor in the depths of the house and re-establishes control over the dogs, he’s disconcertingly clear about who I am and why I’ve come.

‘I just happened to be passing …’ I explain hopelessly once again.

‘Found me a customer?’ he asks at once.

I commend my soul to heaven ‘Well …’ I begin cautiously, to ease myself into my new career of fiction as gently as I can.

‘Come into the office,’ he says. He’s as brownly dressed and greyly faced as before, and he’s plainly had more trouble with his razor, but he has a pair of reading glasses perched on the end of his nose, which suggests some unsuspected scholarly depths. Perhaps he, too, is hurriedly reading up on art history. Laura’s vanished without a word. I kick my boots off to follow Tony as he pads in his carpet slippers back down the corridor to a little room as brown as all the others, filled with a confusion of open box-files spilling papers, and bundles of brown envelopes and folders, some of them done up with pink baler twine. The dogs walk footprints over the papers covering the floor, and settle themselves in a nest of draft accounts. Tony moves a sheaf of what look like bills to reveal a scuffed leather armchair, and dusts it for me to sit down.

‘Nerve centre of the whole estate,’ he says. ‘Where all the business gets done. Got to be businesslike about this thing, too. If you’re going to be my art agent then we need to put our heads together and work out a proper deal that’s fair to both of us.’

He perches on the edge of the desk, and a small glissade of dislodged documents slides smoothly away into the waste-paper basket. He puts his reading glasses in his pocket; he’s moving into negotiating mode.

‘So you’ve had a nibble?’

‘Well,’ I say once again, and once again I hesitate. I’ve spent my entire life up to this point hugging the shores of fact, paddling in the safe shallows of honesty. Now the moment has come when I have to launch out into the open sea of fiction. I have to cut free from the literal and start painting the picture, just as Bruegel did.

And I can’t do it. The words won’t come to my mouth. Creating a fiction isn’t lying, I understand that. But suddenly it seems remarkably like lying, and remarkably unlike anything I’ve ever attempted in my life before.

I look out of the window. My imagination seems to be frozen. The only words that come to mind to end my now bizarrely long silence are a frank confession that I haven’t found him a customer and never will, because I haven’t the faintest idea where to look for one.

And then I remember that he’s gone before me. He’s written his own fiction – he’s done a little painting of his own.

My work on Bruegel wasn’t the only research I did in London yesterday. I also took the trouble to find out a few things about Giordano, since he stands guarding the route to my prize.

He came from Naples, apparently, like multi-coloured ice-cream. His first name was Luca, and he was known in the business as Luca
Fa Presto
, because that’s what his father told him (‘Get a move on, Luca!’) and that’s what he did. He could paint a large altarpiece in a day, and in his seventy-three years upon this earth he covered large tracts of southern Italy and Spain with Judgements of Paris and Solomon, Adorations of Shepherds and Magi, and Apotheoses of Jove. His favourite subject, though, was sexual intercourse, or rather the final approaches to it, particularly as occurring between females betraying various degrees of reluctance or resistance and males using various amounts of persuasion or coercion.

To find any trace of the great Upwood Giordano I had to move on from the V & A to the Witt Library, in the vaults of Somerset House, where all the visual art of the Western world over the last eight centuries is being assembled in the form of reproductions from sources such as museum and sale catalogues. File upon file, I discovered, is devoted to the industrious Neapolitan. They look like something out of Forensic. Here, from different angles and viewpoints, is Lucretia being raped by Tarquin, and Europa by the bull;
Proserpine being carried off by Pluto, and the Sabine women by the Romans; various gang rapes of nymphs by assorted gods and centaurs; and a number of last-minute rescues.

But what there’s more of than anything is Helen being carried off by Paris. The Witt categorizes pictures as upright or horizontal and by the number of figures involved, but if you add up the totals in all the different categories Speedy Luca seems to have painted the scene no fewer than nine times. There are Helens being abducted left to right, Helens departing right to left, Helens being carried towards us, Helens being carried away from us, Helens with dresses riding up above their knees, and Helens with dresses slipping off their breasts. The model for the Helen being abducted in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Caen, I couldn’t help noticing, survives her trials in Greek mythology only to be raped by Tarquin at Christie’s.

Among them all, in pre-war brown monochrome, I found Helen as I’ve come to know her and believe she really was, leaving Sparta left to right, landward knee and seaward breast out in the wind, and a definite touch of anxiety on her face about the possibility of a chill. The reproduction, however, came not from some work about the ancestral treasures of the Churts of Upwood, but from the catalogue of a sale to be held by Koch und Söhne, Kunsthändler, Berlin Charlottenburg, in 1937.

So the famous Churt Giordano, which has been in their family for so many generations, was only acquired in 1937. In Berlin, at a gallery almost certainly expropriated from its original Jewish proprietors, in a sale of paintings very probably acquired in much the same way.

It’s no business of mine what the Churts were doing in Berlin in 1937 – it’s evidently nothing that they wish to boast about. Or perhaps they acquired it later still. Maybe it was
some local citizen who bought it at the sale in 1937. I can imagine it appealing to one of the new Gauleiters with a palatial home to furnish. In which case Tony’s father presumably arrived with the invading Allies in 1945 and simply looted it, or purchased it from a starving war widow for cigarettes and instant coffee.

In other words I don’t need to have any qualms. If the Churts can liberate
Helen
from the Germans I can liberate the
Merrymakers
from the Churts. Biff baff. Moral equilibrium.

And if Tony Churt can fictionalize a history for a picture I can surely fictionalize a future for it. This is what gives me strength and gets me going at last. I’m damned if I’m going to be outdone by Tony Churt!

And I launch boldly out into the deep waters.