Headlong by Michael Frayn Page A

sun.
    It’s too late in the year for March, too early for June. So, yes, it must be either April or May. And once again I feel the uncontainable tide of excitement rising inside me, the insupportable anguish.
    I have either April or May; it all fits. The only question is which.
    Well, does it matter? One would be as good as the other, and to have found either is a miracle.
    But there’s one possibility that would be more miraculous still, so miraculous that for the moment I daren’t even think about it. I need to know one simple thing first: April? Or May?
    I cast my mind back to the weather in the picture. It’s ambiguous. It feels like April where we’re standing; it looks like May that we’re heading towards.
    What can we glean from the iconography?
    ‘In the calendar,’ I suddenly find I’ve said. Kate looks up.‘The calendar in a Book of Hours. What are the signs for April and May?’
    She frowns. Is she going to ask me why I want to know? If she does I’ll tell her. The same principle applies, I decide in that instant, with her as with Tony Churt: no lies, no unnecessary truths. But she’s maintaining her policy, too: no questions that might provoke either.
    How do we get into these ridiculous situations with the people we love?
    ‘I don’t know much about the calendar,’ she says warily. ‘I’ve only really looked at the devotional sections.’
    I wait for the cautionary academic smoke screen of disclaimers to clear.
    ‘The signs for April and May?’ she repeats finally. ‘You mean Taurus? Gemini?’
    ‘Not the zodiacal signs … Why, do they have zodiacal signs?’
    ‘In some calendars.’
    I’m trying to remember, now she’s suggested it: are there any bulls or twins lurking in the depths of the Merrymakers ?
    ‘I mean, what are the traditional labours?’
    She frowns again. I don’t think she needs to frown for very long to remember something that must be almost as rudimentary to her as the letters of the alphabet. I think she’s trying to work out, without asking me, what I’m up to. She’s guessed that it’s something to do with that last picture at the Churts, the one she didn’t see. Like me, she’s trying to identify it – but at one further remove, with nothing to go on but what I let fall about it. She may manage it, too – may have managed it already, I think in a moment of mixed panic and relief.
    ‘Well,’ she says, ‘for April you sometimes get planting and sowing.’
    I can’t recall any planting or sowing. ‘What about May?’
    ‘Sheep going to pasture. Cows being milked.’
    ‘How about cows going to pasture?’ I’m thinking of that tiny herd in the distance, that will come down again past us in the foreground in October or November.
    ‘Possibly, though I can’t think of an example offhand.’
    But now she’s warming to the work. I recognise the old awkward, diffident eagerness in the way she moves her head as she talks.
    ‘Actually April and May tend to be rather a special case, because they’re often illustrated not by labours but by pastimes. It’s quite striking. All year round the peasants toil – and then when it gets to be spring the gentry suddenly put in an appearance. They own the entire countryside, of course, and now the weather’s more agreeable they come outdoors and start enjoying it for a bit.’
    ‘Like us,’ I say, warming to her warmth.
    ‘Yes, though I can’t immediately think of a calendar where they get the septic tank repaired.’
    ‘Poor souls. So what else is there for them to do?’
    ‘In April they go hawking.’
    ‘ Not like us.’
    ‘No, but then they also pick flowers.’
    ‘We’ve picked the odd flower in our time.’
    She looks away. ‘The other thing they quite often do is flirt.’
    ‘I seem to recall something of that sort,’ I say softly, but what I’m actually remembering is the comic couple in my picture, with their two gallant little daffodils and their expectantly protruded lips. ‘All this is in