All That Follows (13 page)

“Well, Birthday Boy, my undeserving Birthday Boy,” Francine says, rising to switch off the screen, then standing at the window to glare at the retreating frost, “what are you going to do?”

“For my birthday?” Leonard sees too late that her eyes are glistening.

“No, you idiot. You selfish bloody idiot. What are you going to do about that?” She throws a cushion at the darkened screen. “What are you going to do for that woman, that mother? Did you hear her at all? Did you look at her? Who gives a damn about your birthday now?”

“What am I supposed to do? You tell me.”

“You might at least pretend to care. That’d be a start.”

“I care. Of course I care.”

“Well, care enough for once to get up off your arse and act on it. What’s happening?” Leonard spreads his hands and shrugs. “My God, to think I found you brave and dangerous when I first saw you in Brighton, at that concert.”

“Please, Frankie, cut it out.”

“What, it’s too painful to hear the truth? You were playing like a madman on that night, like a demon, even. Live. I might not have wanted the recording, but I sure wanted the man. That’s the truth. What I couldn’t guess back then was that the jazz was the only thing about you that wasn’t”—she hesitates—“decaf.”

“Well, that was then,” he says feebly. Her truth has wounded him.

“What’s weird is that you don’t seem to give a damn what people think when you’re playing, at a gig. But when you’re not onstage, that’s all you care about, all that English blush and stutter that you do. Don’t cause a fuss, don’t give offense, don’t make a noise, don’t show it when you’re angry or upset—”

“I’m getting upset now.”

“Well, good.”

“I have to be a demon onstage, no choice,” he says finally, doing his best to miss her point. Decaf? It is a dreadful word. “That’s what a jazzman has to do, to survive the gig.” Jazz is a refuge from a hazardous world, he wants to say. It’s not a hazard in itself. He is not courageous when he’s playing, not mad and not demonic, just
less
frightened. He’s Lennie Less Frightened, mapping out a landscape of his own making where it is not truly risky to take risks. “It isn’t me. It’s just an act. The music makes me brave.”

“Let’s have some music, then, Captain Braveheart.”

 T
HEY’LL TAKE THE BUZZ 900
, Francine’s hybrid runabout. They dare not use the roomier and faster van. They have, she says, quick to enjoy the subterfuge, to keep below the radar. It’s probable that Leonard is still being monitored—his phone, his Internet use and e-mail account, his vehicle, at the very least. Perhaps that’s why he’s not been taken in for questioning despite the flimsy and unsatisfactory explanations he offered for his phone calls to Lucy. The police and NADA might hope he’ll lead them to the girl, the place where she is being kept. It’s possible their house is bugged. It’s possible the van is tagged. But the Buzz is a community pool car, not registered in either of their names. “Let’s go,” she says, “before you duck out of it.” He finishes dressing, though he hasn’t showered yet, or shaved, or even found time to locate his spectacles in the clutter of their bedroom.

They leave their house by the back garden, like burglars, and walk unnoticed through their neighbor’s garden and side gate. There’s no one outside watching them. They walk once round the block, as dawdling as dog walkers, checking for unwanted company, before returning to the car. No stalkers at their backs, so far as they can tell. Still, they have to be discreet and take the country route again, where license-recognition pillars are thinner on the ground and there are no Routeway chargers to register their highway fees and distances. Leonard checks the wing mirrors obsessively at first, but as soon as they have cleared the suburbs and estates there is too much empty road behind them to suggest a shadow. Quite what they’ll do when they reach Lucy’s house—Leonard has retrieved the scrap of card from the Florentine box on which he noted the number and address on Thursday night—and how they’ll get to talk with Nadia Emmerson without being noticed, they are not sure. They’ve not discussed it, actually. They’ll extemporize—one note and one step at a time.

At first, with her husband at the wheel, Francine travels in silence. She is both burdened and elated. Undecided still. Once they have reached the country roads and there is spasmodic scenery—a nagging, undulating screen of protected hedgerows with vaults and cupolas of more distant woods and hills—she brightens up, sits straighter in her seat, breathes less reprovingly. “I’d better use
my
cell,” she says, and busies herself calling the eight guests for that evening’s birthday dinner party.

“Tell them you’re not well,” mutters Leonard, instantly regretting it. And, then, “Say that I’m not well.”

Francine’s not the sort to tell a lie. Nor is she the sort to break a confidence. “Something problematic has come up we’ve got to fix at once. We’re driving out of town,” she explains, managing to disguise the tension in her voice. “Don’t ask. It’s too embarrassing.”

“That’ll set their tongues wagging,” Leonard says, but does not add what he’s thinking, that sometimes fibs are best. More considerate, for sure.

Francine, convincingly warm and regretful on the phone, is clipped with him again. “Let them wag. So what?” But at least they’re talking now.

“I’m truly sorry about the dinner party,” Leonard says, a touch too stiffly, after he has spent some minutes planning how best to broker peace with his wife now that he has sulked for long enough.

“It’s not important, is it, now?”

“No, but it was kind of you. As usual.”

“A total waste.”

“It was a thoughtful … thought.”

“There’s presents too. And cards,” she says flatly. “You haven’t even opened them.”

“Who gives a damn about my birthday now, you selfish bloody idiot?” he says, risking the mimicry at her expense. “I’ve got another one next year. In fact, I’ve got one booked every year until I’m a hundred and one.”

“You hope. Not if it’s up to me, you haven’t.”

“Is that a threat?”

“I could’ve throttled you this morning.” At last Francine smiles at him.

“Still want to throttle me?”

“No question, yes, but not while you’re driving. Not while you’re driving my car. Not while I’m in it, anyway.”

“It’s ages since we’ve driven out of town together.”

“More fun than a dinner party, isn’t it? Less work! Less fattening!”

“It is more fun, if me and you are getting on.”

“We’re talking, aren’t we?” She runs her tongue along her bottom lip and looks at him. “And have you told me everything?” Leonard pulls a face. “Deep breaths are called for, don’t you think, Mr. Lessing? Actually, Lessing is the perfect name for you. Lessening. Keeping it moderate and—”

“Yes, yes, I’ve heard ’em all before. From you.”

“Well, have you?”

“What?”

“Told me absolutely everything?”

Leonard laughs. “Show me the man who will tell his wife everything. What is it that you think I ought to tell?”

“The truth might be interesting. The backstory. We’ve got all day.”

“None of it’s
interesting
, exactly. Let’s put some music on.”

Francine punches him softly in the arm. “I don’t want music now. No, absolutely not. Do what you’re asked for once.”

They sit in silence for some moments more, until they turn off the lorry route and reach open, quieter stretches of road. It isn’t quite the satiated, loving silence they enjoyed at Wilbury’s, but at least they have agreed to a working truce. Leonard reaches out with his good arm and takes his wife’s cool hand. His birthday’s saved, so long as he will talk.

“Now we are sitting comfortably,” Francine says, adopting her schoolteacher voice, “let’s begin at the beginning.”

“All that lousy David Copperfield kinda crap?” Leonard says evasively. He can see where this is heading.

“No, Austin, Texas, Maxie, all that meat.”

“It’ll be embarrassing.” But only if he tells the truth.

“Embarrassing for whom?”

“Well, not for you.”

“So what’s stopping you? Go ahead, embarrass yourself. But no embellishments. This isn’t jazz.”

9

WHENEVER LEONARD REMEMBERS AUSTIN
and all that follows, as he must now for Francine, it is not long before the evening at Gruber’s Old Time BBQ intrudes itself, insists on being dwelled on once again. It seems, and is, an age ago, a time—the end of October 2006—when he is barely thirty-two years old, and as the single surviving heir unseasonably wealthy from the sale of his mother’s house. For the first time in his life, he is able to please himself—free of family ties, unexpectedly sprung from debt, his music training completed, his reputation as (yes, he boasts about himself) both adventurous and reliable onstage, “all styles,” growing. “That’s when we all met up,” he says. “When I was still political.”

Leonard has campaigned with Lucy’s mother, Nadia Emmerson. She is a spirited, tough-minded woman. He dates her once or twice, nothing more romantic than a campaign rally or the cinema. Nevertheless, because she is both lively and provocative, and like-minded too, he cultivates high hopes that eventually—if only he can dare to ask—they might become more than comrades. Their romance thrives in his imagination. When Nadia is there, he doubles his political exertions in order to impress her, phrasemaking excitably at meetings and leafleting with such speed or picketing with such fiery commitment that Perkiss would be proud of him. He even writes a strident piece for brass with Nadia in mind and fantasizes playing it at the head of some great march. But she has already accepted a visiting lectureship in politics at the University of Texas, commencing at the end of August, so their affair is brief and unresolved. “Come out and see me,” she has said more than once, a casual, noncommittal invitation that seems, in her absence, more promising the more he thinks about it. So, with his mother buried, the house finally off his hands, and half promises of session and recording work in New York, he e-mails her—[email protected]—explaining his misfortune and good luck, and presumes to say that he is missing her and plans on visiting, as she’s suggested.

Her reply is not discouraging. Yes, she has a loft apartment with a spare box room where he can “throw his coat.” And yes, she’ll be pleased to see him too, and catch up with his news. There is work to do in America, she says, ever the activist—wealth disparities need attending to, and then the war, the health-care crisis, the pirate corporations running everything, support for project families and victim neighborhoods. She’s joined Snipers Without Bullets, a local group of “Texan troublemakers.” “We’ve got something monster in the pipeline!!!” she writes. She knows that Leon, as he has taken to calling himself, will want to play his part. She can keep him busy, if he’s up for it. She’ll “welcome his political vitality.” It’s not exactly what he hopes to hear. She doesn’t mention Maxie or even that she isn’t living alone in Austin. She doesn’t mention that the loft is his. But he is there at the airport, on Nadia’s arm, the thickest head of hair in Texas, a handsome exclamation mark among the plumpers waiting at the foot of the exit escalator, and genuinely pleased, he says, to have another British visitor. Leonard tries not to let his disappointment show, but he cannot doubt that Maxie is at best a tiresome complication to his plans and preparations, and to the hopes—and contraceptives—he has packed.

They live in East Austin, between the looping railway track and Seventh Street, in what is a mostly black neighborhood of 1920s shingled bungalows and tarpaper shacks lately designated “cool” by landlords seeking higher white rents or undefended lots on which to build slab houses, McMansions, or “space-maximizing” apartments. Where there are still bungalows with porches, rocking chairs, loud dogs, and wide neglected yards, billboards are promising
NEW FUTURE HOMES
in “authentic Austin,” with every convenience from granite kitchen counters to poolside Wi-Fi access. “This quarter used to be
real
Austin,” says Maxie, sounding on early acquaintance to a British ear both hick and hip. High twang. “Now it’s just becomin’
real
estate,” though what he introduces disapprovingly as his “residential livin’ unit,” a dull square three-room condo sparsely furnished with thrift-shop bargains, is neither authentic nor cool. “We’re the problem, white folks bustlin’ in,” he adds, with what seems to be conviction. “They oughta kick us out and pull this buildin’ down. They oughta drag us from our beds and murder one of us. That’d scare the yuppies off. I’m recommendin’ it. Works every time. You kiddin’ me? White flight.”

Indeed, the neighborhood is already culturally bipolar. From Maxie’s box room’s narrow balcony are views across a new “zen garden”—hard landscaping, a single cherry tree, and litter that stays beyond the reach of winds or brooms—toward a complex of new galleries and jewelry stores. There is an expensive coffee shop, an arty bar called Scofflaws, another bar called the Four T’s. Yet twenty steps across the street are the unadorned front gates of a poultry supply depot that employs only Mexicans and that, once locked at night, becomes a crack corner. Just a half mile downtown, and downmarket too, is an art-free strip of single-story tinnies: the Roadrunner Cocktails Bar, the Big Shot Grocery, a couple of thrift stores, the Reno Hotel (“Rooms by the Hour”), and, painted black and yellow in tiger stripes, behind its daily pall of smoke, Gruber’s Old Time BBQ, with—for
almost
downtown Austin—its ironic promises “Hunters Are Welcome” and “Best Motorcycle Food.”

Leonard ventures to the store on his first evening in Texas, driven from the loft by Nadia and Maxie arguing and then not arguing. He has pretended to be watching CNN for almost an hour while his hosts whisper loudly at each other in their room. He hardly dares to overhear, as he fears they might be arguing about him, that he is less welcome in their home than they have pretended, even that Maxie has discerned Leonard’s amorous objectives. Finally he taps on their door—four beats to the bar—with his fingertips. “Off out,” he says, disturbing them as little as he can. When their door swings open in response, Maxie has her in his arms, laughing into her hair, as unrepentant as a boy. Her face is flushed and childlike. For the moment she is no longer mad at him, it seems, though clearly she’s been crying.