Free Headlong by Michael Frayn Page B

her; and the happy morning that followed two months, one week and three days later, when she used her fountain pen once again, and let me use it as well because I’d forgotten to bring anything to write with, in a room embowered in plastic flowers at Camden Town Hall.
    In fact it will kill two birds with one stone, because her involvement in solving the iconography might also help to solve the problem I have of breaking the news to her, which seems to be more difficult the more I think about it. Any sudden dramatic announcement, I realize, even when I’ve fully mastered my accompanying brief, is going to risk her resistance. Much better to let her guide me through the undergrowth with no knowledge of where we’re heading, so that she’s led gently, step by step, to discover my discovery for herself.
    Difficult, though, to find the right moment to broach the matter. Not, obviously, when I came out of the station and found her walking up and down trying to quiet Tilda. Not while she was driving me back to the cottage; not while we were eating dinner (which she, of course, had already made, in spite of my repeated assurances); not while she was telling me about exactly when Tilda had slept and woken, and how much she’d taken at her feed, and what Mr Skelton had said about the septic tank; not while she was being so careful not to ask me what I’d been doing inLondon, or what the arm-breaking contents of my two plastic carrier bags were.
    So now the following morning Kate’s working at one end of the kitchen table and I’ve got all my books concealed as best I can behind my open laptop at the other end, stacked almost as awkwardly as they were on my lap on the train, because I’m trying not to let her see their titles, or any telltale illustrations. And what she’s doing is trying not to look, because she has a pretty good idea that whatever I’m working on, it’s not nominalism or its impact on Netherlandish art, and she doesn’t want to know for sure and confirm her disappointment in me.
    Am I frightened that she might not share my opinion? Not frightened, exactly – anxious to avoid the reciprocal disappointment in her that I should feel if she didn’t. I’m as reluctant to lose the remembered brightness of the sky beyond her head in the window of seat 25A on flight LH4565 as she is to lose the remembered boldness of my smile as I offered her my accumulated airline tissues.
    No, I’m frightened. I’m going to need her moral support in the next few weeks, including her agreement to let me back my judgement by borrowing rather a lot of money from the bank, and if she doesn’t accept my identification when the moment comes I don’t know how I’m going to manage.
    I certainly wish I had her practical help right now. Because it’s not iconology that’s at issue here – it’s straightforward iconography. The range of possible interpretations, and the various permutations of them, are bewildering. On the table in front of me I have Friedländer (of course), Glück, Grossmann, Tolnay, Stechow, Genaille and Bianconi. They quote each other freely, together with various other authors not available in the London Library – Hulin de Loo, Michel, Romdahl, Stridbeck and Dvořák – and they refer tothe often mutually contradictory iconography used in two breviaries illuminated by Simon Bening of Bruges in the second and third decades of the sixteenth century, the Hours of Hennessy and the Hours of Costa; in the Grimani Breviary, also done, a little earlier, by Simon Bening and his father Alexander Bening, although the calendar itself is attributed to Gerard Horenbout; and in our own dear Calendrier flamand , as I think of it, in the Bavarian State Library.
    Which month, for a start, does The Hunters in the Snow represent? According to Hulin de Loo, a snowy landscape is characteristic for February. Tolnay dissents; in the Da Costa Hours the snowy landscape illustrates December, and in Hennessy it goes with January,