Текст книги "All That Follows"

Автор книги: Jim Crace

Соавторы: Jim Crace,Jim Crace,Jim Crace
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Текущая страница: 5 (всего у книги 15 страниц)

6

THE PARK IS ALL BUT EMPTY. Only dog walkers and garden rangers labor through the rain and wind. A fast sky keeps on promising a break of light, but breaks its word. It hints at blue. It pulls its drapes aside to let a distant, better day grin through, but closes them again.

Leonard follows paved and surfaced paths, through copses of mazzard and mountain ash, skirting mud but not avoiding puddles. He’s been this way many times before, though not recently. It used to be their regular stretch, especially when their terrier, Frazzle, was still alive and Celandine was young and biddable enough to tolerate and even like a walk with her parents and her pet. Now such family days are beyond reach, and would be even if Celandine were still at home, Leonard thinks, not unhappily. Kids grow up. You want them to. He’s grateful, though, for the many satisfying afternoons they’ve spent together in this place, the three of them spread out across the path, hands linked, amused, bothered, and unified by their dog forever chasing geese and cyclists.

Leonard’s smiling to himself as he recalls the afternoon when Frazzle, still an undisciplined and yapping puppy, came out of the undergrowth with a piece of wood like a sailor’s corncob pipe in her mouth, and Celandine – she would have been about twelve – had the foresight and good luck, in the few seconds before the wood was crunched and dropped, to capture a hilarious, cartoonish photograph with her new Multifone.

“Popeye!” Francine said. “All she needs is the hat.”

A passerby made almost exactly the same observation: “It’s Popeye the sailor dog.”

Celandine started chuckling, amused more by the unlikely repetition than by the joke. The man went off believing he was quite the wit. “All she needs is the hat,” she called out after him, and then was lost to giggles.

“Show the photo to these people coming up,” said Leonard, pointing at an elderly couple walking their own red setter farther down the path. “If you can make anybody else mention Popeye between here and the shops, I’ll double your pocket money. I bet you can’t.” Celandine looked excited and determined, already plucking up courage to offer her photograph to strangers and wondering how she might prompt the winning and profitable words. But soon she and her mother were pressed against each other in a shaking hug, too drenched in laughter even to look at the approaching couple, let alone speak to them. The dog, the pipe, the photograph, the joke, the “Bet you can’t,” seemed then and still seem like a gift, a charm, a formula for happiness. He hears their laughter now. The park is hanging on to it, and so must he.

Leonard’s feeling spirited again and boyishly adventurous. He takes the direct route out of the copses, striding off his stiffness and smiling to himself, until he reaches the bracelet of artificial lakes in the more formal part of the park, a few hundred meters from the shops where he has planned to treat himself to an early birthday indulgence – coffee and a pastry – and then book a bistro table for this evening. The ducks and geese draw in to him, like model boats on strings. Leonard shows them empty hands, a childish mime: no bread. They comprehend at once and drift away again, an aimless arc of coddled birds, as finally a more determined arc, of light, curves across the water, at the venting of the clouds, and resuscitates the day.

It’s midday now. Leonard should be waiting at the Zone. His face is wet, as are his trouser legs, but now that the sun is strengthening he is no longer tempted by a coffee and a cake. He’s bound to meet acquaintances or neighbors or some of Francine’s many friends and have to answer queries. How’s the shoulder? Any news of Celandine? How’s Francine bearing up? Yet it’s too promising – the weather, that is, and his mood – to spend the afternoon at home. Besides, this park has not provided the safe adventure he was hoping for. Too limited and tame, despite the vestiges of happy times among his family. Thirty minutes’ walk is not enough. He wants to truly stretch and tire himself in grander and more vitalizing landscapes than a park.

Leonard drives the gigmobile along the ever-busy city loop and heads northward on the payroad. He travels in silence, not risking any radio and its invasive twitter for the moment. Not requiring any jazz. But he does instruct and activate the satnav and wait for its directive: Take the next junction for the National Forest and Pepper’s Holt. This is not a bad idea, this little trip, this secret trip, he thinks. It will make good the lie. He’ll do the walk he’s claimed to have already done. Maybe in making good the lie he will also be making good the other embarrassments of yesterday, from hostage house to cigarettes. It will be like hitting the Restore button on a computer. By taking to the woods, he’ll turn the clocks back to an Earlier Selected Date. He can imagine sitting opposite Francine this evening in whatever restaurant they end up in and being able to describe to her with brazen confidence his visit to Pepper’s Holt. Thursday, Friday? What’s the difference? And if she asks him what he did today, he’ll say he played his saxophone, composed a tune called “Davey, Joan, and Lavender,” then walked round the park but didn’t feed the ducks. No actual fibbing there. He shakes his head, exasperated with himself. Why does he have to straighten out his life by complicating everything, by piling up, not lie on lie exactly, but secrecy on secrecy?

He pays his entry toll to a cheerily officious Natfo volunteer at the warden lodge and, following instructions, drives through disinfectant troughs and over wildlife grids into the woods and the cliff-shrouded clearings of the historic mine workings, where vehicles can park. Here the soil is still too impacted and toxic for any vegetable growth other than nettles, brambles, and knotweed. But beyond the barefaced cliffs, the light is high and bright, a fine day, at last, for walking. He will hike up into the birch hursts, where at this time of the year, with the trees half stripped of leaves, it should be easy to spot parties of deer and maybe even catch sight of this district’s almost-native bustards or the families of escaped wallabies that the Natfo man has said are “a must” for any visitor.

Leonard reaches for his binoculars. As his hand frees them from the van’s stowage box, he lets his knuckles brush against and nudge the radio alive. He can’t resist. Before he sets off on the walk, he might as well discover (if the news blackout has lifted) that Maxie is all right. Or that Maxie is in custody. Or that Maxie has agreed to talk. For Lucy’s sake, he doesn’t quite want Maxie dead, but he would certainly be relieved to hear that her hopes of visiting her father behind bars are likely to be realized, and soon. He’ll appreciate the hiking and the trees all the more, knowing that his caution and dishonesty this morning on the phone have been vindicated. No point pretending otherwise. But there is static on the set. The radio will only cough and clear its throat. He chooses another level of preselects, but these are no less bronchial. A couple more. With no success. And Retune fails to find any traction in the traffic of signals. The scanner shuffles through every single station and all the frequencies, chasing any signal strong enough to hold good. The numbers pelt across the screen; the stations briefly name themselves with their IDs, too fast to read, but nothing takes purchase. Then the names and numbers roll round again with little to delay them, not a note of music, not a human sound, not a word of news, just the woof and tweet of distant frequencies that sound like animals in undergrowth.

Neither the van’s speakerphone nor Leonard’s cell does any better. They offer only No network provision. Try again later. This clearing is not only toxic and impacted, it is information-dead as well, too buried in the countryside, too screened by cliffs and woods, too underused to merit contact. Whatever’s happened in the hostage house, whatever shape the greater world is in, cannot insinuate itself into Pepper’s Holt. Leonard is out of reach. He shrugs. He even says “So be it” to himself. Perhaps it’s just as well, preferable even, to be beyond the bulletins. Where ignorance is bliss, ’tis folly to have radios. He drops his cell phone into the space vacated by the binoculars and checks his watch. It’s almost disappointing to see the second hand circling so firmly. Time should have failed as well. It’s early afternoon. He has more than three hours in which to explore the forests and still get home in time for doormat hugs with Francine. He puts his binoculars and his coat into a backpack, tucks his trousers into his socks, pulls his beach cap on – QUEUE HERE – and starts to climb toward the freshened sky and the silver stands of birch.

It often happens when Leonard’s walking on his own. There is something about the countryside – woods, hills, the coast, the riverbanks, no matter what – that makes him feel both reckless and slightly anxious, like an escaped animal, one of those must-see wallabies, perhaps, or a family pet that has broken loose and is equally excited and unnerved by freedom. How could it not? Forests like these were where he and his boyhood friends played hidey-hunt and fought their concocted battles, carried out their ambushes, were Robin Hood and his Merry Men, were Spartacus, were fugitives. As a child, he spent countless Saturdays hiding from marauders in the branches of an oak when there were oaks, or creeping on all fours toward a suspect shed, or following the outer hedges of a field rather than cutting across on the footpath where his foes might spot him. Such unrealities, so sustained and engrossing for a child, should have been driven out of him with puberty. That’s growing up. When you finally become part of the world, there should no longer be any need to act it out. Can it be possible that from all those rough-and-tumble friends of forty years ago, only he – little nervous Lennie, now almost fifty years of age – is still enthralled by these compulsions, still favors hedgerows over the open field?

He has gone well beyond the car park and is climbing up less trodden paths with no reassuring signs of humankind except the occasional nesting box and the vapor trails of jets. The forest makes its comment every time he takes a step. Leaf litter cracks and rustles at his feet, mimicking the static on the radio. Saplings, bullied by the wind, yelp and squeak like animals. A patch of restless, waving light suggests at first that someone’s following – and then it stops, it hides itself. Leonard cannot help but pick up and carry the first strong branch he sees, holding it more like a cudgel than a walking stick. And then he holds it like a gun. He will defend himself. He’s acting as if he’s twelve years old again, a fearful and excited boy, lost in the tucks and folds of the forest, and imagining – his favored fantasy – that he’s fighting Fascism in 1930s Spain. What if he falls and breaks a leg, perhaps? What if a pack of wolves sweeps out of the trees? What if Franco’s men are closing in on him? How will he call for help, without a phone, without a working radio, but just the woof and tweet of distant frequencies? How can he safely reach Orwell, Perkiss, Hemingway, and his other comrades in the International Brigade? Alone in Pepper’s Holt this afternoon, when he could have been on active service in a real adventure with an actual “kidnapped” girl, Leonard Lessing cannot stop himself from imagining and forging filmy memories from things that have never occurred, at least to him. He’s stepping lightly through the undergrowth, in Catalonia.

He has reached the plug of weathered rock that offers views across the carbon-eating canopies into the wooded valleys of the reserve and the newly planted blocks of light-efficient, black-leaved trees, Turning Sunshine into Fuel. He is careful to be silent, watching where he steps, avoiding loose rocks and brittle timber, staying out of sight. When he’s found a high nook in the rocks where he can safely wedge himself, he takes out his binoculars and trains them on the countryside, checking every angle for signs of Franco’s men. No pasarán. His aching shoulder is a shrapnel wound. The birches are olive trees. The smudge of gray on the horizon is the fug of Barcelona, smarting from the bombs.

7

LEONARD’S BUSY IN THE TRAPEZIUM. His clothes are hardly damp from the afternoon of walking and combating Fascism in the woods, but he takes off his socks and trousers and pulls on a pair of sweatpants, still warm from the dryer. He continues to resist the news and tunes the DAB receiver to a New York jazz station and a Eurofusion band he does not recognize and does not like (“Oh, loosen up,” he thinks) while hunting in the cupboard for a vase. On the drive back home, he stopped at his local shops, booked a corner table for the evening at Wilbury’s, where the chef is used to naught percent diners, and bought an autumn mix, mostly garden perennials – Michaelmas daisies, chrysanthemums, rudbeckia. Already they are past their best. He has to pick up petals from the floor. He’ll spruce the bunch up a bit, he thinks, with foliage from the patio, some fern sprays or sprigs of variegated bay. Francine appreciates it, praises him, when he arranges and displays the flowers he has bought or picked for her, rather than just handing them to her in a wrapped bunch with the implication “women’s work.” He prepares a short strong coffee in their silver macinato and rewards himself with barely half a spoon of sugar. He puts away the crockery. Wipes surfaces and handles. Pours planet-friendly disinfectant down the sink. So this is what it’s like to be retired, a life of undemanding walks, role-play, light shopping, housework, nothing much to do that counts.

But this, today, is not a thought that bothers him. Today, so far, has been a chance to recuperate, to close a mortifying chapter in his life and plan the next, a better one. Fifty years of age. On Monday there will be changes. Improvements. He vows it for the hundredth time. But first he has a birthday and two days of rest, and fun. The weekend can be a breathing space.

The fusion band has finally finished its exasperating tour of Old World influences. The jazz DJ reads out the lineup. Leonard has played with only one of them. Rafaelo Vespucci, the not-so-Italian percussionist. Not that they’d ever spoken or even looked each other in the eye – the gig had been one of those show up, shake hands, and shimmy events, businesslike, unsociable. Several of the other names are familiar too. Bushy Miles (Milorad Busch) on assisted accordion, Adelina Julian on keyboards, and a reed player called Felix Marcel. It is that final syllable that sticks and hovers in the air. Leonard has to tussle with it for a moment or two before he remembers why it is shouting at him with such persistence. He mutters to himself, Marcel, Marcel, Mar Cel, and then, barefoot, walks into the living room and, sitting on the futon once again, fires up the telescreen where his Celandines have waited patiently all day. He clears the screen and starts again, clicking from Menu into Browse and on to UK Only, as he did last night. He enters the letters c e lwith his forefinger, percussively. The memory window prompts “Celandine,” but Leonard clicks Ignore, taps the Proceed arrow, and starts to scroll.

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 Celand 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 policemarksmen, 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 cannot 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 equivalenceand 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 provisionon 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.