Jim Crace - All That Follows

“Show me.”

“Not me. You’re going on your own. This is something you must do.”

“Where is she, then?”

“In Maven’s, treating herself to a pair of pants.”

“Not underpants?” Leonard puts his hand to his brow. He can’t be expected to approach her on his own while she’s buying underclothes. He wants to say, “I can’t do that.”

“No, trouser pants. You idiot.” Francine shakes her head dramatically. She adds, “Are you afraid of everything, including clothes? Just go.” She pushes him. She’s pushed her husband quite a lot today.

This Maven’s department store is just like every other Maven’s in the country: cluttered, cheerful, cheap, and understaffed, with an overriding smell of cardboard and cloth and an unbroken sound track of music, offers, and announcements. As usual, Male Box is to the right of the doors, close enough to the entrance for men to find easily and be tempted to buy before they are tempted to bolt. Women shoppers are expected to be more focused and even to prefer to go beyond the menswear, kitchenware, bedding, and electronics sections to the more private carousels and racks of women’s clothes at the back end of the store. The deeper Leonard ventures, trying to look purposeful, the less purposeful he feels. He’s not rehearsed. He’s not decided what to say. But when he reaches the far end and quickly prowls all corners of the section, there is no sign of Nadia. He’s looking for her coat. She might be carrying it by now or might have hung it up somewhere. So now he prowls again, looking for a face to recognize.

She comes out of the changing rooms just ahead of him, wearing her coat and carrying two pairs of trousers over her forearm and another pair on a hanger. It’s easy, then. He’s walked straight into her. Now that he sees her in the flesh, even from behind, he can recognize Lucy in her: that boxy build and pale, scrubbed skin. Her height. Her walk, even. It seems just hours ago, rather than days, that he has been clipping this woman’s daughter’s heels with just the same uncertainty, plucking up courage in his yellow beach cap to blurt out, “I knew your father” at her back. This time he just says, “Nadia.” She is either too deep in thought to hear him or she has simply buried Leonard’s greeting in the noisy mayhem of the store. He tries again, closer but more lightly: “Hi, Nadia.” It’s as if he is a familiar neighbor. No big deal. Certainly that is what she takes him for. “Oh, hi,” she says. “How’s it going?”

“You don’t recognize me, do you?”

“I know the voice.”

“We spoke the other night. On Thursday night.”

“Where did we speak?” She looks about her, uneasy now, but reassured by the nearness of a pair of women in the next aisle and a shop assistant at the till.

“On the phone.”

She shakes her head and tucks her chin. She’s doesn’t know what he means.

“I phoned about the bike. Your daughter’s bike.”

She’s thinking now and making fast connections. She looks at him again, steps back a pace, looks round to check that she can get away if need be, glances at his hair, then looks down at his hands. “Leon … Lessing?”

“That’s me.”

“I’ve told the police.”

“I know you’ve told the police. I’ve spoken to the police.”

“I have a policeman with me now.”

“He’s on the roof, watching the match. He won’t trouble us.”

She backs away a further step. One more step and she’ll be out of reach. He stretches out to hold her arm or sleeve. But she’s too quick, and getting angry now.

“Jesus, Lennie. Is that what you call yourself these days? What is going on? What do you want?” She edges round behind a display of skirts.

“I want you to know that Lucy is all right. She’s safe. She’s not been kidnapped. Not at all.”

Nadia has dropped the trousers and has her cell out before he notices. He has no choice but to dart forward and take hold of her wrist, making her let go of the phone. It clatters to the floor. She calls, angry and alarmed, but nobody comes to help. The two women shoppers look up and exchange grimaces. A man and wife are arguing, that’s all. Husbands are a pain, especially in shops. Men are bullies, all of them.

“You have to trust me, Nadia.” His mouth is a centimeter from her ear. He can smell her hair and perfume. He’s tugged his damaged shoulder far too hard in seizing her, and it is hurting considerably. “Don’t phone the police, not now. Stay quiet, stay still, and I’ll explain it all.” For reasons he can’t understand, except to normalize this encounter and to flatter her, he adds, “You haven’t changed a bit. It’s eighteen years. I’d recognize you anywhere.” He waits for her to say the same to him, to say that he appears much less than fifty years of age, to say that she’s followed his jazz career for years and it’s “brave stuff.” But her look is hostile still, and fearful. She seems in pain. He lets go of her wrist, realizing far too late that he is gripping it too tightly. What must she think of him? He’s shocked and trembling. He’s never frightened anyone before. He steps away, well out of reach. “Sorry, Nadia.” She rubs her wrist, shakes her head at him contemptuously, then rescues her cell, picks up the trousers, and drapes them over the end of a rack.

“Let me say one thing. It’s going to make you feel okay,” he says.

“So talk. So make me feel okay. You better had. Where’s my Lucy? Tell me that.” She retreats a little further into the racks of clothes. Leonard can see she is ready to make a dash for it.

“Let’s find a safer place,” he says.

Leonard explains almost everything in the cafeteria on the first floor above Maven’s. He tells Nadia Emmerson that he does not know where her Lucy is, but he’s certain what she’s done and why. She listens as he lists it all: the yellow cap, the red beret, the beer, the wine, the cigarettes, the promises he made, the rendezvous, the phone calls and the stolen bike, that morning’s raid on his house.

“How old are you?”

“I’m fifty. Today.”

“And Lucy? Remind me. How old is she?”

“She’s seventeen,” he says, almost inaudibly.

“Exactly so. Just seventeen. So which of you, do you suppose, should have put an end to this before it happened? You should have called the police at once. You should have found me. Shouldn’t you? She’s just a girl who wants to be a heroine. What were you thinking of?”

“I thought I’d be a heroine as well.”

She looks at him and shakes her head. Her mood has softened now. Lennie Less, the heroine. “Well, she’s headstrong, that’s for sure.”

“You were once.”

“We all were once. But we grow up.”

“Maxie hasn’t grown up. Evidently.”

“Maxie is just a pot of bile. That’s all there is to him. He never really meant to make the world a better place. He only ever wanted to throw punches. Well, you saw that yourself.”

“He never hit me, actually.”

“Aren’t you the lucky one? Indeedy-doo-wa, Comrade Leon walks away unscathed. Remember that?”

Leonard cannot pretend he is not startled. That exact and shaming phrase has not been heard for eighteen years; nor, evidently, has it been forgotten or forgiven. “You weren’t the lucky one, I take it?” he asks, attempting to disguise the cause of his surprise.

“You never knew? You could have guessed. He hit me plenty of times. Oh, well—”

“That’s Politics and History.”

“That’s love, I guess. The only trouble was, he and I both loved the same person. And now he’s back in town.”

“And armed.”

“This is a nightmare, isn’t it? I knew it would be the moment I saw him and his hair standing on my step in August. Maxie doesn’t make social calls. There’s always, you know, some upheaval planned. Lucy wouldn’t listen to me, of course. Big mess she’s made of it.”