La's Orchestra Saves the World

by Alexander McCall Smith

  The driver went off for the last of her suitcases and brought them back to her. She reached for her purse to pay him, but he laid a hand on her forearm. “No, that won’t be necessary. Not if we’re going to be doing business together.”

  “That would never happen in London,” she said, laughing. She was touched by his gesture.

  “Never been there,” said the driver. “No need for me to put up with their unfriendly ways.”

  La, momentarily taken aback, glanced at him, and then looked away. Of course there were people in the country who had never been to London; she should not be surprised by that. But where, she wondered, did his world end? At Newmarket? Or Cambridge perhaps?

  “I’ve been to Ipswich,” he said, as if he had guessed the question that had taken shape in her mind. “And Norwich, once.”

  “You don’t need to go to London,” she said quickly. “I’m pleased to be away from it, as you can see.”

  If he had taken offence, it did not show. “London’s all right for them that wants to live on top of one another,” he said. “But if you like a bit of sky …”—he pointed up—“then Suffolk’s your place.”

  She fumbled with the key that her father-in-law had given her.

  “Rain,” said the driver, taking the key from her. “Rain gets into a lock and brings on rust. She’ll ease up once you’re using her. A spot of oil, too—that helps.”

  He pulled the door towards him and twisted the key in the lock at the same time. The door opened, and at that moment, in headlong flight towards the light, a bird flew past them, out into the air. La screamed; the driver turned round and looked at the disappearing bird. “A magpie,” he said. “They get down the chimney. That one can’t have been trapped for long—still plenty of energy in him.”

  They entered the hall. There were white bird droppings like lime on the floorboards.

  La looked about her. “Poor bird. What a nightmare to be imprisoned.”

  “Put a cowl on the chimney,” said the driver. He thought of further perils. “And you could get bats, you know. They like to get in under the eaves; swoop around at night. Dive-bomb you.”

  La wondered whether he was trying to scare her, as country people might do with somebody from the city. She thought she would tell him. “I grew up in the country,” she said. “In Surrey. I know about bats.”

  He put a suitcase down and went out to collect another from just outside the door. Once he had brought them all in, he took a step back and smiled at her. “People will help you,” he said. “I expect that they’ll already know you’re here. Mrs. Agg at the farm. Mrs. Wilson in the village. They’ll be round soon enough.”

  He left, promising to bring the car a few days later—after he had attended to one or two little problems it had. “Nothing big, mind. Small things. Spark plugs and the like.”

  Alone, she closed the front door behind her. It was summer, and yet the air inside had that coldness that one finds in a house that has been shut up too long and not lived in; coldness and dankness. But these would be dispelled once the windows were open. The air outside had been warm and scented with grass, a sweet scent that would quickly pervade the house once it was admitted.

  She moved through the hall, a square room on each side of which there were closed doors, panelled and painted in the same stark white that had been used on the walls. At the far end of the hall, a not-quite-straight corridor led off to the back of the house; light, a bright square of it, flooded through a window at the end of the corridor, yellow as butter. A pane was missing—she could see that from where she stood—that was what had provided ingress for the magpie, and could be more easily remedied than the lack of a cowl on the chimney.

  La opened the door to her left. Richard’s mother had told her about the sitting room, that it enjoyed the sun in the mornings and that they had taken breakfast in there as the kitchen, on the other side of the house, was cold until the late afternoon. Now, at midday, the sitting room seemed warmer than the rest of the house.

  “It’s not a grand place,” she had been warned by her mother-in-law. “It’s a farm house, really, nothing more, but over the years it has been added to. There’s some panelling—of a sort—in the sitting room. That’s its sole distinction, I’m afraid.”

  She saw the panelling, wainscot high, left unpainted; it had been faded by the sun, which, through the unusually large windows, must have reached into every corner of the room; now the wood was almost white, all colour drained from it. There was an attempt at a cornice on the ceiling, a strip of plaster relief running round the room, and, in the centre, a half-hearted plaster rose from which the ceiling light descended. The floor was made of broad oak boards, faded and uneven, but with a sheen to them, as if polish had been applied. A large russet-coloured carpet, almost perfectly square, of the sort that La’s parents called a Turkey, dominated the centre of the room. Armchairs, shrouded with dust sheets, had been moved against the walls, watched over by paintings of country subjects: a still-life of a hare and pheasant shot for the pot, a watercolour of a flat landscape under banks of clouds, a hunting print of a line of horses launching themselves over a hedgerow.

  La stood quite still. It was a room without life, like one of those Dutch interiors from which the people had disappeared, paintings of emptiness. She moved to a window and looked out. This was her first glimpse of the garden, as it was concealed from the front and one could only guess at what lay behind the house. Somebody had cut the lawn—quite recently, it seemed, which would explain the smell of grass on the air outside, that sweet, promising scent. At the end of the lawn, a line of plane trees interspersed with chestnuts marched several hundred yards to a low stone wall, and beyond the trees were fields. It was a warm day, and there was a slight haze hanging above the horizon, a smudge of blue that could mislead one into thinking that there were hills. London was far away already; how quickly would one forget in a place like this, she wondered. Would her own world draw in just as the driver’s had? Suddenly it seemed perfectly possible that it might; that this was precisely the sort of place where one could cocoon oneself in a tiny world and forget about one’s previous life.

  She turned away from the window and continued her exploration of the house. Half-way down the corridor a steep wooden staircase, painted light grey, ascended to the floor above. La climbed this, the boards of the stair creaking beneath her, the only sound in the house. She looked into the bedrooms; there was a well-stocked linen cupboard, she had been told, but the beds were bare, the mattresses stripped of sheets. There was a bathroom with a claw-foot iron tub and a generous, shell-shaped porcelain basin. She turned a tap and water flowed, brown for the first few seconds, and then clear. A magazine, Country Life, a year old, lay on top of a laundry basket; a large cake of soap, cracked and ancient, had been left in a small china soap-dish by the side of the bath.

  She went out onto the landing, and that was where she was standing when she heard the sound of somebody downstairs, the sound of feet upon the floorboards of the corridor.

  Five

  MRS. AGG EXPLAINED that she had come into the house because she had seen the front door open.

  “I didn’t mean to give you a fright,” she said. “I saw you coming, see. And I thought that’ll be the woman from London. Mrs. S wrote to me to tell me.”

  Mrs. S, thought La. Mrs. S and her husband, Mr. S and their son, R …

  “I had a bit of a fright,” she said. “But not much. I didn’t realise that I’d left the door open.”

  “Oh, it was closed. But not locked. We don’t lock our doors in the country.”

  La wondered whether there was reproach in the tone of voice, but decided that it was more a weariness at having to make what might be the first of many explanations. She felt a momentary resentment; she was not going to be condescended to because she came from London.

  “Actually, I was brought up in the country myself,” said La. “Surrey.”

  Mrs. Agg shook her head vehemently—with the air o
f one to whom the idea of visiting Surrey was anathema. Then they looked at one another in appraising silence. La saw a woman in her fifties somewhere, a thin face under greying hair pulled back into a bun, dark eyes. And Mrs. Agg, for her part, saw a woman in her late twenties—much younger than she had expected—dressed in a London way, or what she thought they must be wearing in London. She glanced down at La’s shoes; they would not last long in the mud. The soles would peel off; Mrs. Agg had seen that before; people who came here and thought that they could wear London shoes; their soles peeled off quickly enough.

  “I didn’t tell you my name,” the older woman said. “Glenys Agg.”

  “And I’m La Stone.”

  Mrs. Agg frowned. “La is that Lah, with an h? Or Lar, with an r?”

  “La, with nothing. As in do-ray-me-fa-so.”

  Mrs. Agg looked puzzled. “It’s short for something, is it?”

  La sighed. “Lavender, I’m afraid.”

  “No reason to be afraid of that,” said Mrs. Agg. “Plenty of lavender round here. And they could call you Lav, couldn’t they, which would never do, would it?”

  La wanted to talk about something other than names. She asked about the farm.

  “It’s on the other side of your place,” said Mrs. Agg. “Ingoldsby Farm. Ingoldsby was my husband’s great uncle on his mother’s side. His son died in the war, and so when old Ingoldsby himself passed on five years back we got the farm.”

  La nodded towards the kitchen. She assumed there were chairs there and she could invite Mrs. Agg to sit down.

  “I can’t stop,” said Mrs. Agg. “Not now. But I’ve brought you some things to tide you over. It’s never easy moving into a new place. You never have any food in the house.”

  La saw that there was a basket at Mrs. Agg’s feet. Her eye took in the contents: a few eggs, a handful of green beans, a loaf of bread wrapped in a thin muslin cloth; a small jar of butter; some tea. “That’s very thoughtful of you,” she said. “I brought a few provisions with me, but it’s never enough, is it?”

  They went through to the kitchen and unpacked the basket. There was a meat-safe in the wall, a wooden cupboard that vented out through gauze into the open air outside. She put the bread and eggs in there, and placed the rest of the foodstuffs on the kitchen table.

  Mrs. Agg pointed to the range on the far side of the road. “There’s coal outside,” she said. “I had them drop some by when they brought our load the other day. Two shillings’ worth. You’ll need to get the range going if you’re going to have tea today. Do you know how to do it?”

  La thought that her visitor already knew the answer. It was not the sort of thing one learned in London, she would think; nor in Surrey for that matter. But she did not want to admit, to Mrs. Agg at least, that she had never fired up a range. “I’ll cope.”

  Mrs. Agg looked doubtful. “If there’s anything else you need, I’m at the farm. All the time.”

  La thanked her, and the other woman left. She was curious to find out more, but had not felt that this was the time to ask. What was Mr. Agg’s name? Was there a post-bus to Bury? Where was the nearest butcher’s, and when was it open? There would be an opportunity for that later; there would be time for her to learn everything about this place in the days and months to come.

  By herself again, she completed her exploration of the house, finding the linen cupboards and making a bed for herself in the bedroom at the back of the house, the airiest of the rooms she had found. The linen was clean, and smelled fresh, with small sachets of lavender laid upon it. Mrs. Agg kept an eye on the house, she had been told, and cleaned it thoroughly every month. La thought of the broken pane and the magpie; the pane must have been recently broken, or Mrs. Agg would have noticed it. How did a pane of glass break like that? Perhaps a bird had flown into it, or boys playing in the garden had thrown a stone.

  She investigated the garden. In the summer afternoon the plane trees cast long shadows across the lawn and against one side of the house. An unruly hedge of elder bushes, twelve feet high or so, shielded the garden from the lane. The bushes were in flower, and she picked a head from one of them as she walked past. She could make elder-flower wine, perhaps, or fry the flowers in sugar to make an old-fashioned sweet. Or simply weave elder branches about the kitchen door to ward off flies; her mother had sworn by that remedy.

  She stood still for a moment and looked at her garden. Cutting the grass had given it a not altogether deserted look, but at all the edges it was unkempt. The lavender that Mrs. Agg had mentioned was there, but had grown woody. What had been a vegetable patch was almost entirely overgrown by weeds, although La spotted a ridge of potato plants that had loyally persisted. She bent down to examine one of these and scrabbling in the earth beneath the foliage she retrieved a handful of small potatoes. She took these into the kitchen and dusted the earth from them; they would do for supper tonight, with the eggs that Mrs. Agg had brought. My first night in my new home, she thought; my first night. And then, sitting down on one of the chairs in the kitchen, she looked at the ceiling and thought: Have I made a terrible mistake?

  There was a wireless in the sitting room, which she switched on after supper. There was still light in the evening sky, although it was now after nine o’clock. She turned on a table light, a single bulb under a cream-coloured shade. It provided a small pool of light, enough for comfort, but barely enough to read by. The wireless was comforting, too, another presence in the house, and a familiar presence as well: the national service of the BBC. There was a literary discussion: Mr. Isherwood and Mr. Auden had returned from China the previous month. Mr. Auden had written a number of poems and Mr. Isherwood had kept a diary. Literary London was waiting with bated breath; in New York, Harper’s Bazaar had already published a number of articles about their trip. Now people were wondering about the war that the Japanese had provoked with China. Was it true that normal life was going on in Shanghai even after the Japanese occupation? Mr. Isherwood had recorded some observations, which were broadcast in full. “You can buy anything in Shanghai,” he said. “And life proceeds as it always did, in spite of the Japanese occupation.” Did you see brutality? “We did. War is madness let loose. There is always brutality.”

  Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek? I gather that you met him. “And Madame Chiang as well—we met both of them. We went to tea with Madame Chiang, actually, and she said to Wystan, ‘Please tell me, do poets like cake?’ Auden replied: ‘Yes. Very much indeed.’ ‘Oh, I am very glad to hear it,’ Madame Chiang said. ‘I thought they preferred only spiritual food.’”

  La thought she heard the interviewer laugh, but only briefly. She wondered how she would do if she went off somewhere, as Auden and Isherwood had done. She had known somebody who had gone to Spain, to drive an ambulance with the International Brigade, where he had witnessed a massacre by the Nationalists. Almost every adult male in a particular village had been shot, and the women and children had been made to watch. He had returned to England silent and withdrawn. His smile, which she remembered for its breadth and readiness, had disappeared, and now he looked away when you spoke to him. He never talked about it; no mention of the ambulance, nor the massacre, which had been reported by somebody else. He just nodded and said that he had been in Spain but that now he was back.

  People were talking of another war, and had been doing so more fervently since the Austrian Anschluss. But La thought that war was unlikely, if not impossible. Rational men, meeting around a table, could surely never sanction something like that again. They all knew—they had seen the newsreel footage—of the sheer hell of the trenches; the pitiless carnage. How could anybody with any grip of their senses envisage doing something like that again? It was inconceivable, and Mr. Chamberlain obviously understood that very well. But did Mr. Hitler? What a buffoon that man was, thought La. With all his strutting and ridiculous bombast; an Austrian rabble-rouser pretending to be a statesman. Ridiculous.

  If war came, then what would she do? There would be
no point in going back to London, as she would have nowhere to stay and she would just be another mouth to feed. It would be better to remain in the country; to grow vegetables and contribute to the war effort in whatever other way she could. But it would not come: war was an abomination, a sickness of the mind; at the last moment people would surely pull back from something that brought with it a risk of their destruction. Or would they?

  The voice on the radio caught her attention. It was another poet. “War seems inevitable to me,” he was saying, “because the monster of fascism can survive only if it has people to devour. There is no dealing with such a creed. To talk is a sign of weakness which will be pounced upon. To negotiate is to expose one’s fear. The only hope for us is to become strong; for trade-unionists and workers to assert themselves and to make sure that the country allies itself with the great progressive forces of our modern world—and by that I mean the Soviet Union. Sooner or later the working people of Germany and Spain will rise up and defeat their oppressors. That’s the way to avoid war. The dictators will fall at the hands of their own people.”

  She went to bed. The sheets smelled strongly of lavender, a soporific smell; and she was tired from the trip, so sleep overtook her quickly. It was so quiet; that surprised her, as she was used to the constant background noise of London, the distant rumble of trains, the sound of traffic, the noise of millions of people breathing—even that must create a background of sound. Here there was nothing, just the occasional creaking of the house and a scurrying sound of mice or some other small creatures across the roof or in the attic above her head.

  She awoke in the night, disoriented, and it took her a few seconds to remember where she was. She switched on her bedside lamp, and looked about her; her door was open—had she left it like that? She got out of bed and pushed it shut. She had locked the front door before she had turned in; would Mrs. Agg censure her for that, she wondered, or was one meant to leave one’s door open at night as well?