All That Follows Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.
    “I knew your father,” he says, too softly, to her back. He says it again, and takes his beach cap off, more embarrassment than formality, before she has a chance to turn round.
    Although it’s damp and cold, they sit outside in the Woodsman’s yard, on a short timber bench, their shoulders touching or their elbows clashing when they lift their drinks: his prudent “regular” measure of wine and the defiantly large, liter glass of beer that Leonard has reluctantly bought her without challenge from the barman, even though she looks, and is, underage. Despite the tobacco ordinances, she smokes, an edgy and unbroken chain of roll-ups from a tin, as she justifies that morning’s “snitching” on her father: “What am I supposed to do? Sit back and watch it happen on the television? There’re hostages. He’s taken hostages …”
    “There’re guns!” adds Leonard, and he is unexpectedly roused by the effortless drama of the phrase. He’s keen for her to know he’s on her side, that (as he says, striving for effect) she has been “a