Jim Crace - All That Follows

Leonard puts his horn down on the futon and stands at the window looking out across the Friday rooftops to a line of shedding trees. It’s windy and the sky is pocked by autumn leaves, black against the gray. Loose notes on plain paper. He has settled something, something he has feared. Jazz has not deserted him. It’s there. He hasn’t lost a trick that practice won’t bring back. His hearing’s good — the top end’s as crisp and clear as ever. He even smiles. No matter what the virgins and the innocents might say — our cat could make a better sound; why won’t he leave the blessed tune alone; devil music; entertainment for the deaf and dead; God’s revenge on single men — he knows there’s more to being a jazzman than sporting yellow socks and wearing shades. There’s more to being a jazzman than just having a good-enough instrument and not too much supper. Good hands, good pipes, good chops are called for, yes, but a jazzman must be valiant too. A jazzman has to hold his nerve.

Enough. He boxes up and puts his saxophone away. Come Monday, when he’s older, he’ll reintroduce his old routines and practice every day. This brief workout hasn’t done his shoulder any harm. In fact, while playing, he has forgotten all the pain. He has forgotten almost everything: the hostage house and Maxim Lermontov, Lucy and her genius idea, that morning’s shaming conversation on the phone, Francine, Celandine. Even his fiftieth birthday, looming now (only fourteen hours left — of what? Being young?), promises advantage rather than loss. Unexpectedly, he’s feeling bright. The weight has tumbled off him. That foolish escapade of yesterday, that skylarking, has left him virtually unmarked. A sore throat, possibly. An ego bruised. He wishes he had never taken the trip, of course, never promised anything to anyone, never thought that he could be the comrade of an almost-orphan teenager, never smoked her hand-rolled cigarettes, not told lies. But still, he’s feeling happier than he has for weeks.

Leonard checks his watch. Francine will not finish work till late today — a staff meeting. He wants her home. Her unexpected — undeserved, in fact — kisses of last night, her fingers wrapped in his, her saying, “Carry me upstairs,” have filled him with hope and expectation for this evening, despite her closing “Too late now” and the enduring “But that was then” of yesterday. As soon as she walks through that door, he thinks, before she has a chance to put her bags down in the hall, kick off her shoes, disappear into the loo, he’ll make rapprochements of his own, he’ll put an arm round her waist and press his embouchures on her to improvise his love. He’ll carry her. He’s energized. Can hardly wait. All he needs to do is survive the day without too much crushing introspection, and for that he needs to escape the news. He must not waste the day couch-surfing for bulletins from the hostage house. He has to step away from all of that.

It’s raining resolutely, but nevertheless Leonard finds a raincoat and his wet-weather shoes and, setting the house to Alarm/Standby, steps into the leaf litter of the mews. The Celandines are still piled up across the screen.

THE PARK IS ALL BUT EMPTY. Only dog walkers and garden rangers labor through the rain and wind. A fast sky keeps on promising a break of light, but breaks its word. It hints at blue. It pulls its drapes aside to let a distant, better day grin through, but closes them again.

Leonard follows paved and surfaced paths, through copses of mazzard and mountain ash, skirting mud but not avoiding puddles. He’s been this way many times before, though not recently. It used to be their regular stretch, especially when their terrier, Frazzle, was still alive and Celandine was young and biddable enough to tolerate and even like a walk with her parents and her pet. Now such family days are beyond reach, and would be even if Celandine were still at home, Leonard thinks, not unhappily. Kids grow up. You want them to. He’s grateful, though, for the many satisfying afternoons they’ve spent together in this place, the three of them spread out across the path, hands linked, amused, bothered, and unified by their dog forever chasing geese and cyclists.

Leonard’s smiling to himself as he recalls the afternoon when Frazzle, still an undisciplined and yapping puppy, came out of the undergrowth with a piece of wood like a sailor’s corncob pipe in her mouth, and Celandine — she would have been about twelve — had the foresight and good luck, in the few seconds before the wood was crunched and dropped, to capture a hilarious, cartoonish photograph with her new Multifone.

“Popeye!” Francine said. “All she needs is the hat.”

A passerby made almost exactly the same observation: “It’s Popeye the sailor dog.”

Celandine started chuckling, amused more by the unlikely repetition than by the joke. The man went off believing he was quite the wit. “All she needs is the hat,” she called out after him, and then was lost to giggles.

“Show the photo to these people coming up,” said Leonard, pointing at an elderly couple walking their own red setter farther down the path. “If you can make anybody else mention Popeye between here and the shops, I’ll double your pocket money. I bet you can’t.” Celandine looked excited and determined, already plucking up courage to offer her photograph to strangers and wondering how she might prompt the winning and profitable words. But soon she and her mother were pressed against each other in a shaking hug, too drenched in laughter even to look at the approaching couple, let alone speak to them. The dog, the pipe, the photograph, the joke, the “Bet you can’t,” seemed then and still seem like a gift, a charm, a formula for happiness. He hears their laughter now. The park is hanging on to it, and so must he.

Leonard’s feeling spirited again and boyishly adventurous. He takes the direct route out of the copses, striding off his stiffness and smiling to himself, until he reaches the bracelet of artificial lakes in the more formal part of the park, a few hundred meters from the shops where he has planned to treat himself to an early birthday indulgence — coffee and a pastry — and then book a bistro table for this evening. The ducks and geese draw in to him, like model boats on strings. Leonard shows them empty hands, a childish mime: no bread. They comprehend at once and drift away again, an aimless arc of coddled birds, as finally a more determined arc, of light, curves across the water, at the venting of the clouds, and resuscitates the day.

It’s midday now. Leonard should be waiting at the Zone. His face is wet, as are his trouser legs, but now that the sun is strengthening he is no longer tempted by a coffee and a cake. He’s bound to meet acquaintances or neighbors or some of Francine’s many friends and have to answer queries. How’s the shoulder? Any news of Celandine? How’s Francine bearing up? Yet it’s too promising — the weather, that is, and his mood — to spend the afternoon at home. Besides, this park has not provided the safe adventure he was hoping for. Too limited and tame, despite the vestiges of happy times among his family. Thirty minutes’ walk is not enough. He wants to truly stretch and tire himself in grander and more vitalizing landscapes than a park.

Leonard drives the gigmobile along the ever-busy city loop and heads northward on the payroad. He travels in silence, not risking any radio and its invasive twitter for the moment. Not requiring any jazz. But he does instruct and activate the satnav and wait for its directive: Take the next junction for the National Forest and Pepper’s Holt . This is not a bad idea, this little trip, this secret trip, he thinks. It will make good the lie. He’ll do the walk he’s claimed to have already done. Maybe in making good the lie he will also be making good the other embarrassments of yesterday, from hostage house to cigarettes. It will be like hitting the Restore button on a computer. By taking to the woods, he’ll turn the clocks back to an Earlier Selected Date. He can imagine sitting opposite Francine this evening in whatever restaurant they end up in and being able to describe to her with brazen confidence his visit to Pepper’s Holt. Thursday, Friday? What’s the difference? And if she asks him what he did today, he’ll say he played his saxophone, composed a tune called “Davey, Joan, and Lavender,” then walked round the park but didn’t feed the ducks. No actual fibbing there. He shakes his head, exasperated with himself. Why does he have to straighten out his life by complicating everything, by piling up, not lie on lie exactly, but secrecy on secrecy?