Leonard checks his watch. Francine will not finish work till late today — a staff meeting. He wants her home. Her unexpected — undeserved, in fact — kisses of last night, her fingers wrapped in his, her saying, “Carry me upstairs,” have filled him with hope and expectation for this evening, despite her closing “Too late now” and the enduring “But that was then” of yesterday. As soon as she walks through that door, he thinks, before she has a chance to put her bags down in the hall, kick off her shoes, disappear into the loo, he’ll make rapprochements of his own, he’ll put an arm round her waist and press his embouchures on her to improvise his love. He’ll carry her. He’s energized. Can hardly wait. All he needs to do is survive the day without too much crushing introspection, and for that he needs to escape the news. He must not waste the day couch-surfing for bulletins from the hostage house. He has to step away from all of that.
It’s raining resolutely, but nevertheless Leonard finds a raincoat and his wet-weather shoes and, setting the house to Alarm/Standby, steps into the leaf litter of the mews. The Celandines are still piled up across the screen.
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.