All That Follows

2

LEONARD LESSING DOES NOT DREAM of Gruber’s BBQ or Maxim Lermontov. His dreams belong to Francine yet again — not her in person exactly, not as far as he can recall, but her in mood. His has been an apprehensive night, and when he wakes too early, disturbed by the muted, active telescreen, its erratic light hoisting and flattening into the tightly blinded room, and by the closed community of garden birds crying off a jay without success, he knows that if he does not rise at once, get on, attend to Francine’s current and persistent misery, do what he needs to do, then he will steep like unattended tea, growing darker by the moment. Leonard has been a morning man for many years. It is not difficult, once he is standing, to feel genuinely … well, not elated. Optimistically agitated, perhaps. Every dawn renews his hope and courage, briefly, he has found. This is the day, is what he always thinks. He will not disappoint himself today. He will not fail again today.

For once he does his morning exercises, not just the stretches to improve what elasticity remains in his right shoulder, but also the routine of bends and sit-ups that he observed fairly regularly before his illness or injury or accident or whatever it was that caused his rotator cuff to lock and hurt in the first place. He has been lazy recently. Pain is his excuse, and boredom. He ca

He washes at the downstairs sink and, naked in their long, wedge-shaped kitchen (or the trapezium, as the architect has called it), turns on the panel television and lays a tray for Francine’s breakfast. An autumn-term weekday, with an early start for her, and so it’s coffee, muesli, yogurt, fruit. He makes a thermos for himself — green tea, lime juice, and honey. He’s trying to stay young and fit through diet. Nevertheless, he has put on weight; he has a drummer’s paunch. His muscles are becoming spongy.

The Rise-Time television show on the little kitchen screen has no new angle on the hostage house. The same reporter as last evening, this time wrapped in a green shawl, her hair tied back, says that she has nothing fresh to say. The night was quiet and uneventful. The police are happy to be patient. The hostages have been identified by relatives and neighbors: an u

Francine is not sleeping. Her reading light is on. Leonard hesitates outside, holding her tray unsteadily in his good hand. He can’t settle on what lie to tell. He’ll keep it simple, he decides: tell her that he’s going walking. She won’t be pleased to hear that. She’ll be working, after all, plagued by toddlers and curriculums, while she imagines he is having fun on what promises — incorrectly, as it turns out — to be a dry and pretty day. October at its best.

“I wish you wouldn’t do that,” she says, when finally he backs open the door and steps round the bed to place the breakfast tray across her lap.

“Do what?”

“Walk about with nothing on. Before breakfast.”

“You used to like it once. More than once, even.”

“Well, that was then.” She’s smiling, though.

“Curtains?”

“Please.”

He has his back to her as he pulls aside the heavy Spanish prints until the sunlight slants and corrugates across the bed. “I might go up into the forests today. See some trees. Some autumn color. I need the exercise. I’m getting portly.” He pinches the flesh at his waist and stretches it out a few centimeters. She ca

“Yes, go,” she says. “Enjoy yourself”—not meaning it but wanting to.

HE DRIVES THE GIGMOBILE, his aged liquid-fuel camper van, taking his time. He has all day. He is not even sure if he will complete the journey. He does not take the motorway after all. Making it circuitous and slow, on minor routes, not only saves him Routeway points but allows him greater opportunity to change his mind and flee back home. At first he does his best to concentrate on Maxie Lermon, listening to rolling news on the radio, playing out the conversation he might have with the police officers, and even rehearsing an interview on television with the woman in the shawl: “Yes, we were friends.” But Francine’s odd remark troubles him. “Well, that was then.” What does she mean by then? Before what? Before he became the tortoise with the paunch? He shakes his head. He’s worrying too much, as usual. But certainly he felt foolish and disappointed when she said, “Well, that was then.” He hoped to be attractive to her, naked, one-armed, with the tray. Once, many years ago, when they first met, she called him “Waiter” as he walked round the room with nothing on, and the breakfast he brought her went cold while they made love.

So music, then. To cheer himself, he will listen to himself. Most of his own recordings as well as cover versions of his compositions are stored on the van’s system. He does not like to play them at home. He is by nature both modest and secretive. But when he is alone and driving, who is there to care? He scrolls through the menu and selects Live at the Factory. This session, which was broadcast on the radio to hardly anyone as part of the “Approaching Midnight” series of new work, was judged too obdurate and odd at the time (a raging winter evening, almost ten years ago) to be issued by his recording company. This is Leonard’s own download. It is not perfect. But he is fond of it. He truly stretched himself that night — and was rewarded for the stretching in life-changing ways. “In an unexpected adjustment to this evening’s jazz recital,” the a