All That Follows

The Rise­Time television show on the little kitchen screen has no new angle on the house where Maxie, Leonard’s one­time adversary and friend, is angry, armed and holding hostages. 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 neighbours: an unnamed family of five. Three generations, evidently. Leonard listens for their street vicinity and writes it down: Alderbeech. Two trees where probably no woods or orchards have survived. He knows at once what kind of upright suburb it will be. He can get there in an hour or so if he uses Routeway points and takes the motorway. Then what? He can’t be sure what he might do, or should. Being there, he thinks, will help him to decide.

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, pulling across 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 colour. I need the exercise. I’m getting portly.’ He pinches the flesh at his waist and stretches it out a few centimetres. She cannot see his face, though he can see her in the window glass, sitting up in bed and staring squarely at the skelfwood cupboards opposite.

‘Yes, go,’ she says. ‘Enjoy yourself’ – not meaning it but wanting to.

He drives the gigmobile, his aged, liquid­fuel 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 Lemon, 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, one­armed, 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 life­changing ways. ‘In an unexpected adjustment to this evening’s jazz recital,’ the announcer explains, as the van heads south through suburbs and doughnut estates into the managed countryside and its network of preservation highways, ‘composer and saxophonist Lennie Less will play unaccompanied. Owing to the severe weather, his quartet has not been able to reach Brighton.’ There is laughter and applause, and someone shouts out ‘Less is More’, as someone nearly always does when Leonard’s in the line­up. Then the concert host, reduced to cliché by the pressure of live radio and the panic of a green on­air light, overloads the microphone with ‘Ladies and gentlemen, let’s welcome to The Factory tonight… on tenor’ – and then steps a pace too far away, reproved by his own feedback, to offer, not audibly enough: ‘Mister. Lennie. Less.’ (‘It rhymes with penniless, as befits a jazzman,’ his agent said when they agreed on this stage name instead of plain, unexciting Leonard Lessing.)