These are the moments—the blacksmithing, the bleats—that most please and terrify Leonard, the moments of abandonment when he can sense the audience shifting and disbanding. He fancies he can see the flash of watches being checked. Certainly he can see how many in the audience are on the edges of their seats and how many more are slumped, looking at their fingernails or fidgeting. He knows he is offending many pairs of ears. They’ve come for those
cool
and moodily bluesy countermelodies that have made the quartet celebrated, not for these restless, heated, cranked-up overloads. But still he has to carry on, he has to nag at them, because he won’t be satisfied until he has lost and possibly offended himself. So that night,
this
night, at Brighton’s Factory, this night of radio and storms, this night of musical soliloquies, is one he cherishes because he has not backed away. The watches and the slumpers spur him on. As soon as he’s dispatched the mice and sheep, he’s taking further liberties, he’s giving Francine and two hundred others in the audience, plus any late-night listeners who’ve not switched off their radios, “Ding, Dong, Bell,” sending pussy down the well into musical deep space with a tumbling crescendo, followed by some risky trickery, not blowing on his saxophone at all but drumming with his fingers on the body and the keys close to the microphone so that it seems a lost and distant cat is scratching frantically at bricks.
However testing this might be, however intractable, no one there can say that Lennie Less does not love or does not suit his instrument, his perfect southpaw tenor, a costly Selmer paid for by
Mister Sinister
, his unexpectedly successful first collection. From the sardonic extra curve of the crook where the body meets the mouthpiece and the lips to the great flared bell that, depending on the slope and stoop of his back, can just as readily swing priapically between his legs as fit snugly against his abdomen or thigh, this saxophone has become a visceral appendix to the man. Flesh and brass seem unified. It is as if his fingertips and the flat tops of the keys are made from one material, as if breath and metal share substance and weight. So he is mesmerizing. Even for those who are impatient with his gimmickry or antagonized by his excesses or dislocated by his syncopation, there is plenty to wonder at and watch. This man who has come onstage in a dark suit with a shiny patch on the right trouser leg, at pocket level, where the bore and bell of his Selmer have worn the cloth, this man so evidently beset by nervousness that he at first can hardly lift his head to face the audience, this musician who has opened so carefully and timidly with “Three Blind Mice,” has started to transmogrify—there is no better word—before their eyes. It’s theater. You could be deaf and it would still be theater.
Leonard feels it too. He’s on the tightrope, balancing. It’s technique and abandonment. He is elated, yes, but he is also terrified. Usually when he is stepping in to improvise he can expect to play what he hears: all his daily practices, those hours spent running through arpeggios or exploring patterns, accents, sequences, and articulations in his song repertoire, provide him with a soundscape of tried and tested options; he merely has to choose and follow. He has exhaustively prepared in order to seem daringly unprepared. But here, tonight, he is not playing what he hears; he is hearing what he plays, hearing it for the first time, and only at the moment he—his lips—impart it to his reed. Each note is imminent with failure. But there is no retreat. Nor does he want to find a safer place, “a comfort groove,” as it is called. This is the moment he’s been waiting for, the moment when the wind picks up the kite and lets it soar. Some of the greatest improvisers claim, at rare times such as this, that when the music tumbles out unaided, as it were, it seems as if the notes are physical, fat shapes that dance, or colors pulsing, currents, swirls. For Leonard, because he always taps a foot, playing is more commonly like walking, corporal and muscular, walking tightropes, walking gangplanks, walking over coals, also walking on thin air, on ice, in darkness, on rock, on glass, but always walking blindfolded. Tonight, though, he is walking through a landscape forested in notes toward a clearing sky. The wind is at his back. The path ahead is widening. Statement, repetition, contrast, and return. Another sixteen bars and he’ll be there.
Recognize when you have done enough, he tells himself. Head home. He’s hardly moving now, no showboating. He doesn’t even tap his feet or rock his body. Apart from fingertips just lifting and the bulging of his throat, he is a statue voicing nursery rhymes, the final measure, ding dong bell.
The music’s ended for the moment—but this rare night in Brighton has an unrecorded track, an afternote, a human lollipop. Leonard has finished signing a handful of booklets and programs with a shaking hand, his autograph a mess. Euphoric and consumed, wanting more but not expecting anything except a hotel room, he heads out of the auditorium onto the snow and toward his taxi. A small group of intimate strangers in the mostly deserted lobby smile at him and shake his hand. They call out, “That was beautiful.” And “That was fun.” And “That was truly weird.” All men. All hardcore fans. Then, yes, then Francine speaks to him. She has delayed him at the taxi door. Her hand is on his arm. “Truly valiant,” she says, blowing smoke, still a little tipsy and not quite knowing why she’s chosen the word, a word that even now has resonance for both of them. Leonard sees a woman just a little younger but a good deal shorter than himself, large-featured in a girlish way, her hair unkempt, her red coat still damp from the storm and smelling slightly wintry. “Valiant?” he repeats. “Does that mean rash?” Rash as in reckless? Foolhardy? He hopes it does. “No, I mean valiant,” she says. “You know … valiant, taking risks. Yes, it was pure valiance.” Embarrassed by her loss of eloquence, her tipsy failure to summon the simple word
valor
when she needs it, she laughs. Such a pealing, mezzo laugh. The evening’s most melodic note, he thinks. And that becomes the start of it, his great romance.
N
OW, WITH THE WORST
of the country roads and the best of that day’s weather behind him and with fresh suburbs gathering, their snouts pressed up against the fields, Leonard listens to himself again, listens to the music of everybody’s childhood, spontaneously reshaped, listens to the retrieved mistakes that masquerade as wit and bravery, the risk-taking, the nerve, the
valiance
, almost unaware of traffic, the dimming sky, or the windscreen wipers, and certainly without much thought of Maxim Lermontov. He presses the track button and returns to the beginning of the broadcast. “In an unexpected adjustment …” And then again. And then again. Announcements and applause, with Francine in the audience—but that was then—admiring him.
3
BY THE TIME LEONARD
has been navved to Alderbeech and parked the van outside the makeshift village of personnel buses, television trucks, portable lavatories, and police catering units on designated waste ground near the hostage street and the inevitable crowd of spectators, the gunman in the mask has been identified, or almost. He is, the radio announcer misinforms, “Maxie Lemon, a U.S. national.” Renamed, he sounds more like an end-of-pier comedian than a criminal or a terrorist. He has, they say, two accomplices, of whom no details are available, though one is possibly a female. Leonard wonders briefly if she might also be somebody he could identify but will not. He is at first a little disappointed that Maxie has been named already—but above all he is relieved. His knowledge hardly matters anymore. No decision that he takes will make a difference. When has it ever? If he chooses, he can stay dry—it is still raining despite the assurances of that morning’s forecast; the pavements are slippery with leaves—and drive home straightaway, with an almost easy conscience. He has not betrayed his Texan, despite his greater duty. He should feel more pleased than he does. He calls up Francine on the van’s speakerphone, but her handset is turned off. He can picture her in class, sitting with the children at her feet, singing nursery rhymes, her voice unburdening. Three blind mice. He hesitates for a moment when her answer service picks up his call. He wants to say that he has lied to her, and then explain it all. But it would take too long. Instead, he records, “It’s Leonard. Soaking day. I’ll be home before you are. Give yourself a hug.”
He needs a break from driving, though, and he is keen to get closer to events, to step into the news, to be at least an eyewitness. How can he come this far and not commit those extra meters? That would be perverse. He has not brought wet-weather wear, although there is a beach cap in the glove compartment: yellow linen with the logo
QUEUE HERE
across its peak. He turns up his collar, pulls the cap low, protecting his thin hair, and walks across the waste ground toward the street. It is a windy day as well as wet. The best of it is sorbus leaves, brick-red and orange, snapping free with every gust. The worst of it is beating rain. That morning’s blue has been misleading. It has been
mischleading
. He says the word out loud. Then, “Soaking day. Hugs, hugs …” He’s talking nonsense to himself. He’s walking through the wasteland mud in his beach cap, unprepared for anything but summer, and talking to himself.
Leonard has imagined on the journey down that he will be able to walk past the house as closely and as innocently as someone exercising a dog, that he will stand outside and stare into the rooms. And then, will Maxie Lemon / Lermon / Lermontov be peering out, behind his mask and E-clips, and see him there? The female too. He dreams up recognition on that veiled face, an eyebrow lifting possibly, a hand half raised, a gun held out at shoulder height and pointed playfully at Leonard in the street.
Kapow. You’re scathed. Kapow. You’re dead!
But of course the streets around the hostage house are sealed and Leonard must, like everybody else, like all the curious and nosy, find a place behind a barrier and try to glimpse—beyond the fire engines and ambulances, beyond the little group of armed officers in flak jackets and armor coats, beyond the row of freshly naked rowan trees (no alder here, or beech), the cars, the city furniture—a skinny view of the house’s gable and its chimney pots, little more than silhouettes on this dusklike morning. When Leonard arrives, the know-alls in the crowd are pointing at an upper window where a landing light has been turned on and there is a shadow, briefly. Everybody watches for a while, until a helicopter catches their attention, and then a running man in uniform (but running only to escape the rain), and then some other movement at the curtains in another room.
It’s tedious to stand and stare. Such scenes-of-crime are always more dramatic on a telescreen, when they’re well framed and mediated by a journalist. Here there’s very little to observe, and nothing to experience except the waiting. Leonard checks the time. It’s almost noon. He’ll stay till noon, six minutes more, and then decide on how to waste the afternoon. But finally and just in time there is a fresh development. Not in the street but on the television news, of course. Leonard’s neighbor at the barrier unfolds the screen and turns up the volume on his palm set for a headline summary. Maxie Lemon was identified, it claims, by an “estranged British relative. No more details at this time.”
One of the curbside experts has the information, though: “It’s the daughter. That’s her, see?” How can he be sure? “I overheard.” He says it boastfully, as if overhearing is a talent. “She’s just a kid.” He points toward a group of officers and there, not blending in, a spot of uncamouflaged color among the khakis, blues, and blacks, is an adolescent girl in a red beret, her face made indistinct by the weather and distance, her back turned to the hostage house, either speaking closely to her cell phone or crying.
She’s not a kid, thinks Leonard. She’s not a kid if she is who he thinks she is. He works it out. Austin in October 2006, and then some months. She would have been born in the summer of 2007, the summer of no sun. So that would make her not a kid and not a woman yet but seventeen. “Brave kid,” he says out loud. Yes, brave. Yes, valiant. While he hesitated by the phone last night—he will phone; he will never phone; he sleeps—Maxie’s daughter determined to put on her hat and go out in the rain to do what Leonard should have done at once. Name names. Again there is a reason to be disgruntled with himself, not quite ashamed but downcast, rather. He’s fumbled his opportunity. But still, as he knows well, an error can be retrieved and embellished in its retelling, and he is tempted to share his own information at once with this crowd of onlookers. I know him. I knew her, the girl, before she was even born. I can guess who the woman is. I thought I loved her once. But again he hesitates and the moment is lost.
He considers that possibly, no,
probably
, later in the evening, when he confesses to Francine what he has really done that day, not walking in the forest, he’ll add the detail—almost true—that he (an “estranged British friend”) has offered information to the police. Surely she will applaud him for it, and to be deserving of her approval, if only briefly, is what he most desires, her approval and her happiness. He envisages an evening like they used to have, before Celandine went missing, went silent, became estranged, whatever she has done, and his wife’s depression set in, an evening when he prepares the meal and they sit side by side with it on trays, their thighs and elbows bumping, watching television, and just for once not fretting for the phone to ring with news, good news or any news, of Francine’s daughter. Drive home, he thinks. Enough of this. There’s nothing to be done for Maxim Lermontov. That’s history. He’s history. But Francine needs you home.
It is the beret that he notices as he drives past on the first kilometer of his return to Francine. The “kid” isn’t wearing it but holds it in her hand. The wind is strengthening, but the rain has almost cleared. There are even a few blue shreds hoisting up from the west and enough sharp light for fitful shadows to spread across the road. Her hair, he sees, though bunched, is thick and sinewy like her father’s, but she has her mother’s squarish build and sun-shy English coloring. She is walking to the tram station, he thinks. On impulse he whirs down his side window and accelerates to draw alongside her on the pavement. But a teenager like her will know not to talk to cruising men in old-style vans with
QUEUE HERE
on their caps, and so he drops back and parks, despite the single yellow lines and
PERMIT HOLDERS ONLY
signs, and hurries after her on foot. He cannot call her name. He does not know her name and never has. He only knew her parents briefly. But there is one good reason to feel intimate. He was present in that Texan loft when they discussed aborting her. He thought but did not say—it was not his business, after all—that in his view, in his analysis, based on his older sister’s suicide aged twenty-two, terminations rarely terminate for the mother. His sister’s cut-short child, a boy, haunted her, a kind of toddler ghost, until she gave up the ghost herself. In a kinder universe, Leonard would be an uncle now. Instead, he has no sister and no nephew, no children of his own, and just one stepdaughter, Celandine, one missing stepdaughter. He is an orphan without heirs, he often thinks. And thinks it right now—how could he not?—as he pursues this teenage girl. His walking shadow clips her heels.