Текст книги "All That Follows"

Автор книги: Jim Crace

Соавторы: Jim Crace,Jim Crace,Jim Crace
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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 15 страниц)

“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.”

“Disastrous, I know.”

“Great help you’ve been. Some ally. So what’s new?” She’s prompting him to say something about that final day in Austin, Leonard realizes. She said then, before he set off for the Capitol, “You have the right, a duty even, to speak your mind. That’s what alliance means.” He let her down in Texas. He’s let her down again.

“I’ve never had a head for heights,” he says, spreading his hands to surrender an apology. “Or fights.”

“Well, that’s the truth. Ever the invertebrate.”

“What are you thinking now?” Leonard wants to move their conversation away from bruising territory. Decaf? Invertebrate? This is a consensus he would prefer not to explore.

“I think I’m feeling mightily relieved. No thanks to you. Well, hardly any thanks to you. Quite honestly, I couldn’t trust you less right now. Lennie Less.” She laughs at him.

“I mean, what do you think you’ll do?”

“It’s not your business, is it? Except you’ll have to talk to someone and own up to your lack of brains.”

“Not yet.”

“Yes, at once. Upstairs. I want you talking to my cop. And I want my daughter back with me by teatime. Otherwise. Well, otherwise, the shame is yours.” Nadia pauses for a moment, an eye flicker, no more. “Shame, shame, shame. Remember that, Comrade Leon? Ring any bells? I’ve not forgotten it. Nor the fourteen months I served for it. Malicious damage, public disorder, and assault. Lucy is a prison kid. Did you know that?” She offers him a nod, and then – seeing how appalled he looks – the stiffest of smiles. She’s still attractive, sparky too, he thinks, surprised that he can rescue any comfort from the jaws of this defeat. She stands and turns to collect her scarf and bag from the back of her chair. “A nightmare, yes. Don’t make it worse,” she says. “Do yourself a favor. Go to the police at once. Before I start to yell.”

Now that Nadia is no longer looking at him directly, Leonard dares to touch her lightly on her upper arm. “What if—”

“I’ve heard enough. Don’t try to wheedle me.” She shakes him off.

“I wasn’t wheedling. It’s just …” He pauses, choosing his words carefully. He has got to get this right. “I was telling Lucy how you …” He was going to say, used to be a militant. But used to beis a loaded phrase. “What a firebrand you are. Really headstrong, like we said. I have to tell you that Lucy said she’s never seen that part of you. I think she’d like to see that part of you. What daughter wouldn’t?”

“What are you now, a family counselor?”

“Sorry,” Leonard says, not meaning it. He can see by the flutter of her eyes that what he says is reaching her. “What if …” he asks again. What if her daughter has had a truly genius idea? What if Lucy is correct, that believing his rediscovered child is in tit-for-tat danger might stop Maxie hurting anyone, including himself, might bring the Alderbeech siege to a bloodless end? “Could you live with not giving it a chance?”

“Nobody wants bloodshed,” she says distractedly. Nobody except Maxie, that is. Bluedsched.

“So here’s my thought, Nadia: keep Lucy’s secret for a while. No one need ever know. Give her till Monday, say. Let her be the little heroine while she’s young enough to care. Be her comrade here. The firebrand mum. That’s what she wants.”

She shakes her head. She’s wavering but not enough. “Who are you to say what Lucy wants?”

He almost answers that he is her unofficial godfather. If it weren’t for him and the thousand dollars, “twelve hundred, tops,” that he wouldn’t loan Maxie, none of this might have happened. Instead, he says, “It’s my birthday, Nadia. Today.”

“You said.”

“So just for old times’ sake—”

“Ha! What old times?”

“Allow me this. Allow your daughter this. One final thing. One final favor, please.”

“Allow you what?”

“I want you to meet my wife. Francine.”

“Why would I ever want to meet your wife?”

“Because if you two meet, you’re bound to trust me more.”

13

LEONARD PARKS AGAIN ON THE EDGES of the waste ground. There are a couple of half-erected marquees adding a dash of color – Oxford blue – but otherwise the makeshift village of trucks and buses has not changed much since Thursday, except that the earth is more churned up by vehicles and there is a collage of litter blown against the outer fence or kicked there by time-killing policemen. There is no longer any sense of urgency or excitement. Everyone is bored and regimented. Day four, it’s almost 5 p.m., and nothing much is happening.

This time Leonard has company. In fact, it has been Francine’s suggestion that they drive down to the hostage street. She’s curious to see it for herself, and she has promised Nadia that she will phone tomorrow evening with her report. As Leonard has suspected, the two women are prepared to like each other instantly. Within minutes, after Nadia says, “You’re the woman at my door,” they are holding hands across the cafeteria table while Leonard acts the waiter, bringing teas and pastries. Women are so skilled at reaching out, he thinks, at finding sisters, listening. He sits with them for a while, his chair drawn slightly back, indicating that he does not wish to intrude, as they take turns showing interest in each other’s daughters and their current whereabouts. He’s happy to stay silent and just look at them, a jealous spectator.

Here, unpredictably together and touching hands, are – so very few – the only two women in his life that he has ever cared for. Cared for sexually, that is. Observing them so openly, and comparing them, is curiously rewarding. His wife is thoroughly familiar, of course. After nine years of marriage, they have hardly any secret drawers. He’s intimate with everything she does. He knows the clothes she’s wearing, what she’s now wearing underneath, the dots and pigments of her skin, her range of smells; he recognizes what she says and how she says it, the characteristic language and expressions that she uses, the expressions on her face; that hanging thread; that single less-than-perfect fingernail; her slender upper body with its small breasts, the fuller hips and upper legs she regrets so much, the waist she’s learned to emphasize. Francine is the breathing, vivid detail of his life, a woman in hi-def, a wife till death do part, while Nadia is just a smudge. He’ll never know about her breasts and waist or recognize her underwear and fingernails, except in fantasy, this current fantasy, which causes him to close his eyes and exhale noisily: he’s loving both of them. He has to sit straight on his chair and breathe less heavily.

“Are you okay?” Nadia and Francine stare back at him.

“Yes, why?”

“You’re talking to yourself. You’re muttering.”

“No, I was only thinking … saying that I’m going to stretch my legs, leave you two pals in peace.”

For a moment, as he picks his way between the cafeteria tables and loaded shopping bags, Leonard feels a little like a man doubly rejected. He would have preferred it if they’d said, “No, stay. We want you sitting here with us.” But instinctively he sees that what he wants – what Lucy wants – will come about only behind his back and only if Francine mediates. He finds his way back through Maven’s into the concourse and wanders with his shoulders down and his hands in his pockets toward the exit doors and the open air, where he will – what? Sit among the flower beds with the smokers and feel his age advancing by the minute? It would be a surrender to beg a cigarette for himself; nevertheless, it is tempting. Lucy’s roll-ups have infiltrated him. Her nicotine has not cleared yet. The weather saves him, though. Yet again it’s damp outside, misty and autumnal rather than showery. So he comes back into the precinct and cuts across to the bookshop. If he can’t smoke, he’ll treat himself – why not? He’ll buy himself a birthday treat, something, anything. So far today, it occurs to him without self-pity, he hasn’t opened a single card or unwrapped a gift. He hasn’t even had a kiss.

He’s waylaid again before he reaches the bookshop, this time by a two-meter-wide concourse telescreen showing music videos, film trailers, advertisements, sports highlights, and every hour a home news and showbiz bulletin. What catches Leonard’s eye is Lucy’s face, that same schoolgirl photograph that the police showed him this morning: “Do either of you know, have either of you seen, this girl?” He stands and stares, tipping his head toward the screen, doing his best to pick up what is being said above the din of passersby. A “new communiqué” has been delivered, together with a long and heavy lock of Lucy’s hair. Nice touch, you clever girl, he thinks. A deadline has been set, it seems. Release the Alderbeech hostages by midnight (which midnight, when?). He steps closer to the screen, but almost at once he’s required to move aside by two women with prams. So he misses the final sentences of the commentary. By the time he has repositioned himself, the bulletin has finished and the first match results are on display. He has to stand among the jostling football fans and wait for the news strapline to track across the bottom of the screen. “Unknown Terror Group SOFA Holding Kidnap Girl.” Leonard smiles at that. No doubt the pundits will already be speculating what such an acronym might signify. Save Our Fat Arses, Leonard thinks. Pass the velvet cushions, please.

Leonard does not hold his smile for long, however. A moment later and he’s panicking again. The half-heard bulletin, with its totemic lock of hair and the always chilling word deadline, snaps him free from his earlier illusions. His all-too-recent and romantic entreaties for Nadia to allow her daughter this one chance to be the little heroine suddenly seem disastrously poor advice, given for the benefit of no one but himself. He has naively hoped that when this is over and everything is told, he will be reported as a genuine comrade by her mother to Lucy, a man who backed her up, not let her down, a man who’s still prepared to throw his pebble at the wall. But the revelation that Nadia served fourteen months and Lucy is a prison kid and he’s a bit – a lot – to blame has darkened everything. He knows he ought to go back into the cafeteria at once and tell the two women he has changed his mind, that caution – he’ll call it circumspection – is always sensible in situations such as this. He ought to do it straightaway, because at this very moment – if he has understood his wife’s intentions clearly – Francine will be charming Nadia, persuading her to go along with what Leonard has proposed, that she keep Lucy’s secret for a while. And Francine will agree with him. She always loves an escapade.

But if there is an escapade, costs and consequences are bound to follow it. Especially for Lucy. She’s piling up problems for herself – and for her mother now. Monday is two days away, and two extra days is a deep hole into which the police might pour a thousand men, as well as dogs, helicopters, news teams, public appeals, not to mention money. One million euros? Two million? He has heard of such cases before and has been shocked by how much such operations cost – and by how unamused and vengeful the police, the public, and the courts can be when it turns out that the missing person wasn’t kidnapped after all but playing games, “playing costly games with people’s lives.”

Leonard steadies himself. He thinks it through again from the bottom up, rehearsing the debates he has already had with himself and with Nadia and Francine for and against Lucy’s “genius.” It’s possible, of course, that the police will merely bof and shrug when they learn the truth, as they are bound to. Lucy cannot disappear for good. She isn’t Celandine. When she does show up, they might only tell her off, issue her a caution, then let her go. That’s possible. She is just a child, after all, a minor. But the more Leonard considers that outcome, the less likely it seems. The authorities will have to punish Lucy in some way. They’ll have to punish everyone involved. Public opinion will insist on it. The public do not like to be mischled.

Leonard can imagine the headlines already: “Tearful Mother Knew Lucy Was Not Kidnapped” and “Kidnap Mother Charged.” Francine will be implicated too. He has a sudden image of his wife, defiant in the courts. “I accept that you were a minor player in this deception, misled by your husband,” the judge is telling her, “but nevertheless this has been a thoughtless and costly hoax and one for which an exemplary custodial sentence is inevitable.” Now Leonard is almost running into Maven’s and up the single flight of stairs to the cafeteria. Just before he catches sight of Francine and Nadia, still sitting over their cups with their foreheads almost touching, he has another thought. His own genius idea. He doesn’t have to look a fool in front of them, by changing his mind so soon after arguing in favor of Lucy’s plan. He doesn’t have to tell them anything, in fact. It’s just the authorities who need to know. But not the cop on the roof. He’ll phone NADA, then keep that phone call to himself. What happens next is up to them. If they choose and if it serves their purposes, they can even decide to keep the matter quiet, sit back and see what comes about in Alderbeech. After all, it might be the best of strategies, even for the police, to encourage Maxie to believe that Lucy’s still in danger.

Leonard uses his own cell phone, standing on the landing of the store. It doesn’t matter if his calls are being bugged or logged. He isn’t hiding anymore. He texts in “National Defense Agency” and connects to the number that the directory provides. It’s Saturday, the switchboard is unattended, but Leonard leaves his information anyway. “This message cache is checked regularly at weekends and during public holidays,” a voice informs him. “Start recording now.” “This is urgent and it’s for …” What was that agent’s name? Yes, Rollins, not the saxophone colossus but Simon Rollins. “For NADA agent Simon Rollins. You visited me at home today, remember? This is Leonard Lessing. You asked if I could throw any light, any light at all, on the whereabouts of Lucy Katerina Emmerson. Or who it is that’s taken her. To tell the truth, since we spoke, the girl has been in touch …”

NOW HE AND FRANCINE WALK arm in arm from the waste ground to the hostage street. There are fewer gawpers at the barrier than on Thursday, fewer know-alls with opinions that they want to share and spread. And there are fewer men in uniform in the approaches to the house. Nobody at all is keeping armed watch behind steel shields in what has been designated an arc of fire. Keep It Tight has been replaced by Keep It Calm. The nation is a little bored with Maxim Lermontov, it would appear. He’s let them down. He hasn’t starved or handcuffed anyone. He hasn’t fired his gun enough. He hasn’t tossed a body out of an upper window, providing drama and pictures for the evening news. He hasn’t tried to master an escape or released a second video detailing future misch-apps. Instead, he and his two accomplices have simply run a tidy house for four days, ordering in food and toiletries like any family. It is even easy to imagine Maxie fascinating those nonvolunteers inside, the hostages for whom he will seem to presume a duty of care, the two sons especially. They will be glued to his great smile, no doubt, his sense of fun, his devastating and unstable charm, his artificial tenderness.

Tonally, today the house is like the sky, grayed out and smudged. The weather is contagious, showering the suburb in gloom. The street seems washed of energy, and muted. The afternoon is deepening as what little light there is sinks behind the rooftops. No bulbs are burning in the hostage house; all lights are doused, nor are there any in the evacuated neighboring and opposite houses. There are no moving window silhouettes or twitching curtains. Behind the barriers the television crews have been downgraded, and the remaining journalists are mostly juniors detailed just to keep an eye on things and then call for more experienced backup should anything kick off. Restricted by the police to one small area, they pass their time sitting under their fishermen’s umbrellas, texting, smoking, drinking coffee from their flasks, watching palm sets. Except for one wall-perched cat, wondering why nobody is passing to stop and rub its back, and pigeons on the roof, the hostage house is not worth looking at. The only sounds are the drones of distant traffic and, occasionally, a dog barking.

Leonard and Francine walk twice across the street, hoping perhaps to catch some sign of life inside the house, but see nothing to detain them any longer.

“It looks more interesting on the television,” Leonard says. He feels he needs to apologize, as if somehow the scene’s lack of energy is his responsibility. “What do you suppose is going on in there?”

“They’re watching television,” Francine says. “That’s how it works. That’s the deal. We watch them, and they watch themselves. It doesn’t happen on the street. It only happens on the screen.” Leonard nods but does not meet her eye. She’s said as much before to him, and meant it as a criticism. She thinks he watches television far too much, that the remote console is well named. He is consoled by it; he is unreachable.

“I’ll mend my ways,” he says, though that is what he always says. He rarely acts on it. He cannot pretend to share his wife’s gadget nausea or sympathize with her refusal to engage with any of the bloatware he has downloaded to their systems.

“But now let’s wendour ways.” She’s evidently in a punning, merry frame of mind. Her time with Nadia has cheered her up, illogically. Their hearts have been emptied and their troubles have been shared. They’ve promised that they’ll stay in touch. They have agreed, as Leonard thought they would – his wife’s persuasive when she wants to be; she will have swept Nadia’s qualms aside – that Lucy should be allowed, until Monday anyway, to enjoy her adventure, unbetrayed, and that Celandine is bound to show up safe and well in her own good time. Both women leave the cafeteria less burdened. Excited, even.

“Back home?” says Leonard.

“No, let’s break the mold for once. It’s your birthday, isn’t it? I haven’t even kissed you yet.” She pecks his chin. “Let’s find a pub or restaurant. Let’s have champagne.”

It is the second time that Leonard walks the streets between the hostage house and the suburb’s row of shops with its one restaurant (not open yet) and the same pub – the Woodsman – that he and Lucy visited two days ago. They do not go into the yard. No need for that. They are no longer smokers. Instead, they find a table in what is called the Parlor Bar & Bistro, where there is waitress service and a sundown menu of appetizers. They order poppy bread and olive dip, vegetable wedges, fried garlic and haloumi, and a whole bottle of champagne. They are the only customers. It’s intimate: table lamps and easy chairs, a corner, dusk. They drink and talk and reminisce self-consciously.

“You realize I didn’t mean half that stuff this morning,” Francine says.

“What stuff?”

“You know …” She beams at him. “‘You selfish bloody idiot.’ That stuff.”

“So what half did you mean?”

“None of it – well, hardlynone of it. I only mean it at the time. It doesn’t last.”

It lasts for me, thinks Leonard, not quite managing a beam in return. “Decaf!” he says eventually. “That got to me. It sounds like impotent. In all its ways. And cowardly.”

“I didn’t mean you’re always cowardly … no, take that back.” She pegs her mouth playfully. “I’ll be careful. Timidis the better word.”

“Depends who’s saying it and who’s accused of it. Timid’s not a word I like that much, to tell the truth.”

“Squeamish, then.”

“Oh, this is so much fun when you’re being more careful! Squeamish, am I now? Hell, Frankie. Get out the thesaurus, why don’t you? How about inhibited … repressed—”

“You have a point. I’m teasing you.”

“You’re bullying me?”

“It’s good for you. You know it is. No, what I’m saying is … sometimes I think it’s just as well I’m here to bully you, because if I wasn’t breathing down your neck some of the time—”

“And prodding me.”

“And prodding you, then you’d just sit back and Google your life away. Admit it, you’re a screen slave, Leonard. I prefer it when …” She hesitates, wanting to strike a loving, hopeful note before it’s too late. She loves him, after all. And she is in a brighter mood than she has been in for months. For eighteen months. (Nadia has cheered her up. That daughter talk. That safe and well.)It’s time to end hostilities.

“You prefer it when what?” he asks.

“When we have fun.” Fun, as Leonard knows, is one of Francine’s favorite words, but one she hasn’t used much recently. It is her greatest compliment, to say that someone has been fun. “I’m going to hold my tongue from now on and be all sweetness and light, the perfect loving wife on hubby’s fiftieth. Because everything has started to turn out well today, hasn’t it?” she says, almost in her classroom voice. “I shouldn’t admit to this, I’m being bad, but it’s the truth. Dodging those awful goons back home. The drive down. Hunting Nadia in the shopping mall. Meeting one of your old flames—”

“Let’s not exaggerate.”

“Going to the hostage house. Drinking bubbly here. It’s been enormous fun. And you’ve been bouncy, haven’t you? We’re always better together, don’t you think, when you show a bit of swing?”

“Like on gigs, you mean?” Her glass is empty. He looks down at the bottle. Almost empty too.

“No, not only with the saxophone. That was mean of me. Let’s see …” Now, here’s an opportunity. “Remember that ECM Jazz Gala in Budapest about six years ago?”

“I do.” They had sex every night. “We made love every night.”

“Do you remember flying out?”

He does. He’s never been that scared since. The gales were so turbulent across the runway that the pilot was forced to abort his landing a meter from the ground and toil into the storm again. They had to circle, jettisoning fuel in cyclone winds, for forty more minutes before being cleared to try again. Leonard’s terror was so excessive that it rendered him powerless, motionless, expressionless, and mute, hardly able to breathe, let alone scream. He still remembers with unnerving clarity how the luggage lockers in the cabin all dropped open in one deafening clunkand how the coats and cases stowed above their heads dislodged and fell into the aisles. Outside, beyond the streaming window glass, the skyline of Budapest tossed and seesawed like a ship.

“I was absolutely sick with fear,” Francine says. “But you were totally calm. And comforting. Boy, you hardly raised a sweat. The only one on board. I thought you were so cool that day. And hot!That’s why we tumbled into bed so much.”

“Not quite the Mile High Club.”

“Now there’s a thought.” Francine wraps her hands around her champagne glass and stares into it, smiling self-consciously. “Truth or dare,” she says finally. “Did you make love to Nadia? With Nadia?”

“When?”

“Not in Maven’s, obviously.”

“In Texas?”

“Yes.”

“The answer’s no.”

“Before that, then?”

“Not exactly.”

“You go blotchy when you’re lying, Leonard.”

“I’m blushing because I’m telling the truth. Because the answer’s no again. Another failure. We exchanged slogans but no fluids.”

“I wouldn’t blame you if you had. She must have been dramatic then. She still looks good. Don’t you think? Leonard, look at me. I’m asking you.”

It is the alcohol. They’re giggling, like people half their age, and Francine is reaching out to hold his hand across the table, not in the way she reached out for Nadia’s, stroking it to comfort her, but flirtingly, meshing her fingers between Leonard’s and lacing her legs round his below the tabletop.

“I always admired your hands,” she says, rubbing his palms and the backs of his fingers. “Long and strong. Sexy hands.”

“That’s from playing scales for more than thirty years.”

“I always liked your throat and cheeks and lips as well. From the first time I set eyes on you. You still look good. No sign of sag.”

“That’s blowing for a living. It gives you muscles in your face.”

“I’m sagging everywhere.”

“You’re not. In point of fact, you’re lovelier than you have ever been. I was watching you only today. In Maven’s cafeteria. With Nadia.”

“I saw you watching us. Bad boy.”

Leonard does not look at her. “Well, you were looking … fabulous.”

“Let’s not go home tonight. Let’s find a hotel,” she says.

“I’m okay to drive, I think. I haven’t downed as much as you.”

“No, Leonard. Let’s find a hotel now. I want to go to bed with you right now. A little birthday treat.” She twists around toward the bar hatch. “Let’s ask if they do rooms.” She laughs. That pealing, mezzo, Brighton laugh. “We don’t have to stay the night. An hour ought to do it, don’t you think?”

“Jesus, Francine, what are they going to think? We haven’t got any luggage, even.”

“Couldn’t give a damn what they think.” She’s standing up already and leaning over the bar, calling for attention—“Hello? Hello? Customers!”—while Leonard watches from the table, fearful and aroused.

The room is on the upper floor, an attic space with sloping ceilings and a tiny shoe-box sink. It isn’t clean and it isn’t comfortable. The mattress has been compacted by five years of heavy salesmen. The pillows smell of beer and other people’s scalps. Francine and Leonard do not notice any of this until they have tumbled onto the bed, pushed off their shoes, torn at each other’s lower clothes, and, in the words of a song from Leonard’s repertoire, Gotten so familiarwith each other, So fervent and familiar / That what they feel is similar / To floating on cloud nine. They’ve not made love like this, so thoroughly and so spontaneously, for years. The champagne was a genius idea. It helped them find the reckless courage to make love in this unlovely place, and now it helps them try to rest, half naked in each other’s gluey arms.