All That Follows Page 8

  This time there’s nothing horticultural on offer, nothing lesser, marsh, or edible, nor are there any restaurants listed or yachts for sale in Falmouth or Bath. In fact, in the opening pages at least, his target word is offered only in capital letters, most popularly an acronym for the Christian Ecology Link and then for various Centers (for Educational Leadership, or European Law, or Excellence in Learning, or Equine Leasing) and Campaigns (everything from Economic Liberalism to Ethical Lawncare). Leonard scans and skips the pages, twenty-five selections at a time, but hardly finds a single twin-cased Cel and certainly none quoted as a woman’s name. He Narrows Search, selecting Blogs & Journals, and this time finds a less impersonal list, including, finally, a man who has signed himself as Cel and runs—he is no Celandine; a Celwyn, then—an appreciation thread for all things Welsh.

  For no sound reason other than his current optimistic mood, Leonard already feels a little less distant from his stepdaughter and thereby closer to his wife. Simply hunting for her helps, even if he’s only hunting on the Internet. He’s enticed by the prospect that someday soon when Francine lets herself into the house, defeated by a day at school, he will be able to provide her daughter’s phone number or her address or even say that he has been in touch with Celandine. And everything is well with her. And everything is well because of him. So Leonard perseveres. He tries to Narrow Search again by adding more “exact coordinates,” like “Francine,” “Lessing,” even “Unk,” but narrowing is widening. The matches that he finds expand the possibilities, even throwing up a family in Ohio who for a moment seem to be a mirror of his own except that in their case their Unk’s a springer spaniel. There is a Web page and a file of photographs.

  Leonard tries another list. This time, prompted by the Ohio dog, he includes “Frazzle,” the pipe-smoking terrier. A loved and doting dog’s a sedative. She used to hang her tail and growl with such sorrow when Francine and her daughter rowed. They hated that. The guilt of it. The dog could sometimes end the argument when even Cyrus couldn’t put a stop to it.

  Unusually, the engine takes its time, then clogs on failure for a while before declaring “No Results.” The screen’s clear, for once. The header asks, “Did you mean, frizzle dog celandine francine?” He tries again, removing “Francine” from the list. Just six results, and none is promising. But still it feels like progress, to have his options reduced to manageable numbers. His final try is “Frazzle Terrier.” Four choices now: a pet-food company in Spalding, Lincolnshire; two student blogs, one of which thinks “frazzle-dazzle” is a term denoting razzmatazz; and a link to a profile page on a networking site. He opens the last of these, a mess of graphics and shouting fonts, almost too colorful and busy to read. He left-clicks for the Go To option, types in “Frazzle Terrier” again, and ends up on the closing entries of a completed “Personal Data Questionnaire.” What is your favorite meal? (Pasta with seafood.) What is your favorite drink? (Boulevard Liqueur. No rocks.) What is your favorite animal? (Frazzle, my old terrier. She died.)

  Leonard is anticipating disappointment now. This questionnaire is teasing him by striking chords. Yes, Celandine was that rare teenager, one with an appetite for fish. And yes, she was always fond—even when she should have been too young to know the difference—of sweet and sticky spirits. But such preferences could easily apply to thousands of young networkers. Even Frazzle cannot be a unique name for a pet. He scrolls up, speed-reading answers, hoping for stronger evidence and more coincidences but not finding any, until his cursor hits the ceiling of the questionnaire and its opening Q&As. His eyes flood instantly. He feels hollow, weightless even. He has to gasp and cough at the same instant. He has to wait for his eyes to clear and for his coughing fit to stop before he is able to study the screen again and absorb what has been written. This fish-eating networker is female. She is twenty years old. Green eyes and chestnut hair. Her name, she says, is Swallow.

  It is with an agitated hand that Leonard finds the Friendship box and, limited to thirty words, completes the sentence “Dear Swallow, I want to be your online friend because …” He types: “i hope youre celandine. were missing you, your mum and me. its time to be in touch again. my birthday tomorrow. 50! come to the party please please PLEASE.” There’s one word unused. He puts in “Unkx,” erases it, both name and kiss, replaces it with “Cyrus.” Before he has a chance to lose his nerve, Francine’s daughter’s stepfather, the peacemaker, selects Submit. He falls back on the futon, weightless still, and offers up a nonbeliever’s prayer.

  He would have slept. He is tired enough. This has been a day of peaks and troughs. But after only ten minutes of a shallow, dream-plagued nap, Leonard is roused by the spoken word. The music that has been playing loudly in the kitchen has ended finally and there is someone talking, not the cosmo DJ whose voice has been bluesy and unhurried but a spiky clock-watching American newsreader. There has been a fleeting mention of Maxim Lermontov, Leonard reckons. Yes, there it is again. On-screen, he selects a rolling news network and bloats the box so that he can both listen to the newscaster and read the headline straps that gust across the screen in colored bands: red for news, blue for trading reports, green for sports. He hangs the cursor on the red band and, with an agitated hand again—why’s that?—waits for a prompt. It comes as “Siege Enters Day Three.” He captures it, and once again he is live in Alderbeech and only meters from the hostage house.

  This channel’s reporter is an Australian stringer, speaking slowly and deliberately, as he is feeding stations in Europe, Asia, and America, where his viewers might not have English as their mother tongue. “Maxim Lermontov, a Canadian citizen, is not unknown in global security circles,” explains the journalist, as the familiar photographic still of Maxie’s face and hair replaces Alderbeech. “He has been linked in recent months to the faction called Final Warning. This group has carried out armed attacks on banks, financial institutions, and international corporate organizations. It was Final Warning which in July 2021 attacked the FU-MI Corporation headquarters in Seoul, when an employee and a female passerby were killed in an exchange of fire. Killed by police marksmen, I should say. It is not known if Lermontov was among that group of terrorists, but certainly his suspected connection with Final Warning and its associated American wing, Terminus, is causing considerable alarm among British security forces at this time.”

  The journalist turns his body sideways and the camera shifts from him and Maxie to the hostage house. “What is certain,” he adds, a little out of focus, “is that some sort of detonation—a pistol shot, perhaps, though this is disputed—has been heard from inside the house today and that the British police and British authorities are quickly losing patience. So now, this latest development, this secondary, related kidnapping, makes the securing of a speedy and nonviolent resolution all the more urgent and alarming.”

  Leonard drops onto his knees and kneels within a meter of the telescreen. His heart is beating far too fast. His throat is dry. But the Australian has gone, and the weather chart is scrolling wind and temperature values for Saturday.

  He tries another bank of channels but finds only the briefest summaries and not a mention yet of any secondary, related kidnapping. The home-based networks are still constrained by blackout filters, it would appear. He knows at once he has to phone, though what he’ll say when she picks up is not clear to him. I want to be your online friend because …

  Lucy’s number is stored in his handset’s memory from that morning’s conversation. He calls and, still on his knees before the now muted telescreen, counts the ringtones up to eight before the answer service picks up his call and Lucy herself says, “Hi, I’m out of reach right now. Do what you have to do …” Leonard shuts her off. He had better not record a message and reveal himself. But he cannot leave it there. He also has the number for the Emmerson house phone. He keys the number for a second time, and it has hardly rung at all, it has hardly made a sound, before his call is answered by a breathless older man. Leonard knows the voice but cann
ot place it immediately.

  “Is that the Emmersons’?”

  “Correct.”

  Now Leonard has it. It’s Lucy’s obliging grandfather, the one who provided him with information about the “stolen” bike. Grandpa Norman, wasn’t it? There are urgent voices in the background, distressed, Nadia possibly. Who is it? Is it her? “Shh. I’m listening. Hello, hello.” Leonard presses End and closes down the call.

  He is on-screen again. Heart drumming, he locates the same female reporter from the first day of the hostage-taking, togged out in a button-through work suit and with her hair clipped back but now standing outside the Home Security headquarters with “a newly released press statement.” In as motherly a tone as she can muster, she explains that “a seventeen-year-old girl who cannot be named for legal reasons” has been abducted by “a vigilante group” who are threatening what they call equivalence and parity, that is to say that any harm that befalls any of the hostage family will be visited on the abductee. “What my sources can reveal,” she says, stepping toward the camera to impart a confidentiality, “is that police are also keen to talk with Lucy Emmerson, the British daughter of the Canadian suspect who early Thursday identified her father to the security forces as Maxie Lemon.” A sidescreen offers yesterday’s material with yesterday’s relentless rain, a long shot of the security barricades, a group of men in uniform, a solid adolescent girl in a red beret and dark clothes, her back turned to the hostage house, either speaking closely to her cell phone or crying. “Given existing reporting restrictions, we can only suppose …” the reporter begins to add, but Leonard hears what he knows to be—how many times he’s longed to hear that sound—Francine’s little car, parking in the mews outside.

  Now he is truly flustered. He’ll be discovered again. His wife has recently developed a heavily tolerant expression whenever she returns from work to catch her husband on the futon, his face lit up by the telescreen. “And so the world goes by,” she’s said on one occasion. “You live in two dimensions, Leonard. Nowadays.” And when he’s argued that “two dimensions are better than the one that most people exist in—they’ve no idea or interest in what’s going on around the world,” her reply has been accurate and devastating, despite the lightness of her voice. That’s when she’s named him a sofa socialist, a television activist, an Internet poodle, a vassal of the silver screen. She’s said, “You’ve no idea what’s going on off-screen, in fact. You’ve no idea what’s going on in your own house.”

  “Oh, yes. What’s going on? In your considered view?”

  “Nothing, nothing, nothing. Not a thing. The weeks go by and everything’s the same. In my considered view.”

  She is right to say these things, of course, to fear what they’ve become—since Celandine. Yes, he’s addicted to the broadcast world and to the great and flat expanses of the Web, no doubt of that. Look how he spends so much of his time compulsively jumping from channel to channel, hopping from Web site to Web site, skipping from station to station, swapping from phone to phone, as if the richness of his life depends on a blizzard of media snow. Look how unnerved he was earlier today at Pepper’s Holt watching the frequency scanner on his van radio shuffle through the stations but unable to locate a signal. How briefly isolated he has felt, and panicky, to find himself with No network provision on his cell phone. He shakes his head, shakes it at himself, in disapproving disbelief. This is a form of slavery. He’s sacrificed the daylight for the screen, and see, the afternoon has disappeared without his noticing. The window glass has flattened with the dusk. If he doesn’t turn the screen off now, he will be caught, red-eyed, red-faced. He will be shamed again.

  He’s just in time. Here is Francine’s door key in the lock, and the chirrup greeting of the house alarm, the clatter of her shoes and bags, her work-worn Friday sigh that says, Thank God, I’m home, the squeaking hinges on the toilet door, another sigh. Leonard’s on his feet at once. Not quite caught out. Caught out at what? He hurries to the kitchen, but there’s no time to gather foliage from the patio or find that vase. Francine’s standing at the kitchen door already, removing her grip and pushing her fingers through her hair. Leonard’s blushing, unaccountably.

  “What have you done today?” she asks.

  “Played a bit of saxophone. Wrote half a song. Went round the park.” He will not mention Swallow / Celandine just yet. Francine must think he’s spent a screen-free day. Besides, in the hour since he discovered the Frazzle-loving girl on the networking site, his confidence that she is almost certainly his stepdaughter has waned. Coincidence is all it is. A dog, a bird, but nothing definite.

  “Jog round the park, did you?” Francine indicates his sweatpants and raises an eyebrow.

  “Got wet, got changed,” he says.

  “I tried to phone, but you were dead.”

  Leonard blushes more deeply now. What can he say? That the park has no network provision. She’ll know that isn’t likely. That he’s been out to Pepper’s Holt. “Again?” she’ll ask. “That’s twice this week.”

  “I left my cell here, turned off,” he says. “I was only going to the shops. For these.” He hands the autumn mix to her, still wrapped. She smiles. She kisses him. She says, “They’re beautiful.” But there is something missing in her face and in her voice. She sees his gift is incomplete; perhaps, she sees her husband has not given it his usual loving touch.

  They do make love before they go out to the restaurant. Francine has decided that they will, they must. She caught him watching her reflection in the mirror this morning, watching her pull on her clothes, put back her hair, apply her lipstick, and she has seen the worry in his face and recognized his steadfast love for her. She knows they have drifted and she blames herself for that. She blames herself for being sharp with him, for parting from him in the morning and at night with dismissive quips like “That was then” and “Too late now” and “You need more exercise.” He brings her breakfast in the morning, doesn’t he? He brings her Florentines. He buys her flowers. She wants to be kinder to him, more giving and more generous, more physical, no matter that she feels as hollow as a shell. She phoned him this afternoon without success to say just this: Tomorrow you’ll be fifty years of age. Let’s make your birthday memorable.

  Francine rests her face against her husband’s shoulder. “Is that the poorly one?” she asks. Her voice is husky and a little strained, as it often is by Friday evening, at the end of a week of speaking loudly and firmly to a nursery class. “Let me rub your poorly shoulder. Let me rub it better.” She’s talking to a four-year-old.

  Leonard has not recognized what she intends for him, not yet. He thinks, She’s acting tired, she looks and sounds exhausted. Perhaps she won’t be pleased that he has presumed to book a table at Wilbury’s and would rather take it easy at home, read, have an early night. Perhaps he ought to phone and cancel, then she can rest and he can waste another evening chasing bulletins, up till late, alone with the telescreen and his anxieties, enslaved, while Francine sleeps upstairs with hers.

  Today’s events have panicked him. He’s trembling. But Francine thinks his trembling is caused by her. She nuzzles him. She turns her mouth to his. Soon their different troubles have been largely set aside for a short while, while she unbuckles him and he unfastens her and, fused at the chin and nose, they negotiate a stumbling way into the darkened living room and fall onto the futon, where finally—it’s been too many weeks—they satisfy a less-than-childish fantasy that does not require a passion for the Spanish Civil War. They imagine making love while they are doing it. They cast themselves as lovers in a film, a hero and a heroine. And no, she’s not too tired when it is over to shower quickly, blow-dry her hair, and apply—while Leonard, who has fixed their tonic aperitifs, watches from the bedroom chair—more lively makeup than that morning’s and a splash of scent. She selects an outfit that she knows pleases him, a boxy emerald jacket and a straight black skirt. At once she looks less businesslike and less child-resistant than she did on her re
turn from work. She finds a flattering silk scarf and tries out jewelry, turning to her husband and then the mirror for approval.

  “Well?” she asks, giving a twirl, like a teenager.

  “You always look beautiful,” he says.

  “Oh, yes? That’s the tonic talking.”

  “I’ve only had a sip.”

  “It only takes a sip at our age. Come on, then, you—let’s stagger down to dinner. I’m starving. I could eat a plate of wood.”

  “Would that be medium or bleu, madam?”

  They walk the kilometer to Wilbury’s arm in arm. A decent autumn night, with stars. They’ll do their best when they are seated at their corner table in the restaurant, intimate and slightly drunk, waiting for their vegetarian options to be plated and brought out, to put a brave face on their worlds, their private, inner, hidden worlds, not to express or share how anxious they are still, or why. So this Friday finishes, and Leonard’s decade finishes, at peace, an anxious, loving, troubled, transitory peace.

  8

  LEONARD LESSING IS FIFTY YEARS OLD AT LAST. As usual on a Saturday, he is the first to wake, but even he has slept much later than usual. It is a minute or two before nine. His stomach at once feels bloated with worry, but that is not unusual lately; this waking anxiety from dreams he cannot quite recall can last all day. He’s used to it. The first heavy thought that burdens him consciously is that he has not yet discovered any details of Lucy’s “kidnapping.” The second, troubling in its own way, is that today is his birthday and that he will be obliged to socialize. There will be plans for him. Plans and traps. A dinner party, probably. He’ll be too unsettled to entertain or be entertaining unless he tidies up his life a bit. If he’s quick he can be downstairs in time to watch the news headlines and also check his mailbox for any reply from the girl he dare not think of as anyone but Swallow. He will need to be careful not to disturb Francine. If he is heavy on the mattress or tugs the duvet too carelessly, she will wake, and then she will want him to stay where he is so that she, for once, can prepare breakfast for him in bed. She can be the waitress. He can be the guest. And then she’ll want to sit with him while he drinks his tea and opens the presents and cards she will have wrapped for him. Possibly they will make love again. High days and holidays, and anniversaries.