Headlong by Michael Frayn Read Free Book Online Page A

life among these friends of his. I’ve spent only whatever time I could manage over the last five years or so. And in any case, I’m still way out of my period with this one. All the same, I know. It’s a friend. No, it’s the long-lost brother of a friend. A long-mourned child walking back into our lives the way the dead do in our dreams.
    Here’s what I see through the grimy pane of time:
    I’m looking down from wooded hills into a valley. The valley runs diagonally from near the bottom left of the picture, with a river that meanders through it, past a village, past a castle crowning a bluff, to a distant town at the edge of the sea, close to the high horizon. Running along the left-hand side of the valley are mountains, with jagged crags sticking up like broken teeth, and snow still lying in the high side valleys. It’s spring. On the woods below the snowline, and tumbling away in front of me from where I’m standing, there’s the first shimmer of April green. The high valley air’s still cold, but as you move down into the valley the chill dies away. The colours change, from cool brilliant greens to deeper and deeper blues. The season seems to shift in front of you from April into May as you travel south into the eye of the sun.
    Among the trees just below me is a group of clumsy figures, some of them breaking branches of white blossom from the trees, some caught awkwardly in the middle of a heavy clumping dance. A bagpiper sits on a stump; you can almost hear the harsh, pentatonic drone. People are dancing because it’s spring again, and they’re alive to see it.
    Far away in the mountains a herd is being moved up the familiar muddy scars towards its summer pasture.
    Just in front of me again, half-hidden in the raw spring undergrowth, watched only by a bird on a tree, a little thickset man holding two small wild daffodils is expres-sionlessly touching his comically pouted lips to the comically pouted lips of a little thickset woman.
    And away the eye goes once more, and the heart with it, out into the vast atmospheric depths of the picture, into deeper and deeper blue, to the blue sea and the blue sky above it. The last clouds are just clearing in the warm westerly. A ship’s setting sail, bound for the hot south.
    But by now I can’t see the picture any more – I’m ceasing to take it in. My eye’s flickering back and forth too fast in its excitement, and my mind’s clouded with anguish. Because it’s all too obvious. It’s so blindingly evident what this picture is that it can’t be so, or someone else would have recognized it already. Yes, who else has seen it? How can even these two fools not know what it is?
    I daren’t think the name of its creator to myself, because it simply cannot be so.
    ‘Very nice,’ I say politely, laying it down on the table. ‘Most attractive. Now, I’ve got a coat somewhere …’
    Because now my mind’s moving over the situation as fast as my eye did over the picture. I mustn’t go on looking at it. I’ve grasped that first essential (and how long have I been looking at it already?). I mustn’t make any sudden movement with the muscles of my face, mustn’t let my voice shake – mustn’t speak any unnecessary words. How do I manage to maintain this iron self-control? Everything inside me is urging me to shout out in astonishment – to let everyone know the joyful news, to claim the credit for my discovery. But I can’t even wordlessly bring Kate across the room to look at it, because she’d recognize it even faster than I did, and in her guileless, straightforward way she’d simply announce it to the world.
    I mustn’t so much as think – no, I must stop thinking, in case it shows on my face. I must just get out of the house and sort things out where no one’s looking at me. But Tony’s reluctant to let it go. He stands the picture up again and inspects it ruefully. ‘What, another dud?’
    ‘They’re none of them duds,’ I hear myself saying,