Headlong by Michael Frayn Page B

April? I don’t like to think what they’ve moved on to by May.’
    ‘Riding. Maying. Hawking again sometimes. And courting still. Making music.’
    ‘Which reminds me – the mice have eaten through one ofthe speaker leads,’ I say, but what I’m hearing is the drone of the bagpipes and the heavy pounding of the dancing feet, and what I’m smelling is the choking scent of the mayflowers that the people beyond the dancers are pulling down.
    ‘There’s a lovely one for May by Simon Bening, in the Da Costa Hours,’ she says. Two couples boating on the Bruges canals. One of the men rowing, one playing a pipe, and one of the women accompanying him on the lute. They’re bringing home the branches of may they’ve picked, and they’ve a bottle of wine hung over the side of the boat to cool.’
    Yes, now I think about it there was water somewhere in the middle distance. A millpool, I think, with more merrymakers beside it engaged in some kind of rural sports. I’m still not clear, though, whether the iconography indicates April or May. It seems to be as ambiguous as the iconography in all the others. But then my clumping pretmakers aren’t gentry.
    ‘What about the peasants?’ I ask. ‘Are they playing lutes and floating about in boats? Or are they doing their courting in more peasant-like ways?’
    ‘The peasants?’ She frowns again. ‘I don’t think any of the calendars show peasants courting. It would be against the whole social ethos. Peasants don’t have fun – it’s the gentry who have fun. Peasants labour.’
    We retire into our respective piles of books again. This slight anomaly doesn’t seem to me of any great significance. But as I read on I realize that something’s changed. The pages in front of me have lost their urgency. The bright light of conviction inside my head has begun to fade a little. I have to read each paragraph twice, because what my mind keeps coming back to is these two jarring propositions: all the pictures in the series, as every authority agrees, are based upon the iconography of the Book of Hours – my picture shows activities that have no place in that iconography.
    It’s a trivial point. There could be a dozen explanations. I put it out of my mind.
    It comes back. I begin to feel an old familiar feeling, of a stone growing heavy in my heart. Could it be that I’ve allowed myself to be carried away once again? One of the possible explanations for the discrepancy, it occurs to me, is a painfully simple one: that my picture isn’t part of a series by Bruegel based on the Book of Hours. It’s a scene of Merrymakers in a Mountainous Landscape, just as the label says, and it’s by a follower of Sebastian Vrancz.
    The fact that this explanation is simple doesn’t for a moment mean it’s true. But the balance of probabilities has shifted. I can’t think now why I ever jumped to the conclusion that it was a Bruegel. Not a single objective reason comes to mind. It was just another sudden rush of blood to the head.
    And I say my picture. But it’s not. It’s Tony Churt’s picture.
    Yes, at least sobriety has returned before any irretrievable damage was done. Kate’s given me the chance to think again while there’s still time. She’s offering me a way out from the vertiginous enterprise I’ve got myself into; perhaps all the time I’ve been unconsciously looking for one. I bless Lufthansa yet again. Or at any rate I should . But somehow, totally unjustifiably, I find I’m feeling a little sour about Lufthansa. Next time I go to Munich I’ll fly on some other airline.
    I realize that she’s watching me with another of her little frowns. ‘What’s the matter?’ she says.
    ‘What do you mean?’ I reply shortly. ‘Nothing’s the matter. Why should anything be the matter?’
    But I know from the way she’s looking at me that she’s still trying to work out, with the help of the extra evidence provided by my sudden change of manner, what I couldhave seen when I