La's Orchestra Saves the World

by Alexander McCall Smith

  The following morning, La walked down to Mrs. Agg’s farm. Agg himself was not there, but she saw a man in the distance, in a field where sheep were kept, and that was Agg. Mrs. Agg was happy enough to sell La a large packet of seed potatoes. “Late-growing,” she said. “You will still have time to plant these and to harvest them in the late autumn, before the ground becomes hard.” She paused. “Why is a young person like you shutting herself away in that house? Sorry to ask.”

  La thought for a moment before replying. “My husband ran away with another woman, Mrs. Agg. I was very unhappy. I felt that I wanted to get away.”

  Mrs. Agg nodded. “I thought it was something like that. Any woman who’s unhappy—look for the cause and it’ll be a man.”

  “So here I am,” said La.

  La cleared a patch of vegetable garden. The long roots of the weeds yielded only under protest, clinging to the soil, and it was hard work. But by late afternoon she had two freshly turned mounds of earth in which the potatoes could be planted. It was good soil; clay loam. I shall not starve, she thought. Whatever happens in the world, I shall not starve here in this quiet corner of England.

  Six

  AFEW DAYS LATER, La drove to Bury in the car that she had bought for sixty-five pounds from the garage-man, Mr. Granger. It was an Austin Seven, a small car painted in dark green with a hood that could be taken down in fine weather. La kept the hood on that day, as she was not sure how to operate the mechanism that released it; Mr. Granger had shown her, but she had forgotten; there were levers which had to be pushed a particular way, this way or that, she could not remember. There was quite enough air, though, from the wound-down windows to give the feeling of being in the open.

  La had some experience of driving, even if not a great deal. Richard had owned a car, which she had taken out from time to time when she went to play tennis in Richmond. She realised now that she had no idea what had happened to that car. Perhaps it had been left at the office, but nothing had been said, and she did not want to ask. Perhaps he had taken it on the boat with him to France; perhaps the Frenchwoman would be sitting in her seat—La’s seat—and driving with Richard along the winding roads of Aquitaine; in her seat; with her husband. She put the thought out of her mind; if she allowed it to stay, then for the rest of the day it would be like a nagging pain, refusing to budge, always there. She would not let that happen to her, now that she had started this new life.

  You can forget his car, she told herself, because you have your own car now. And you have your own life, here in Suffolk, with your own friends … But that is where the attempt at re assurance stumbled. There were no new friends; not yet. The only people she had met so far, apart from Mrs. Agg, were Ethel, the woman who ran the village post office, and a man who had come out of the pub and lifted his hat to her in a show of elaborate courtesy; he had been drunk, she decided, but she had nodded curtly and had not stayed to hear him out. Mrs. Agg was solicitous, yet she could hardly imagine herself developing a friendship with the farmer’s wife. La was no snob, and did not care what drawer people were from—her mother’s expression, and like many of the things said by mothers, alarmingly persistent in its resonance. The problem with Mrs. Agg was that they had no interests in common, other than the cultivation of vegetables, perhaps; on which subject Mrs. Agg had revealed her misgivings about the extent of La’s knowledge. I can grow potatoes, La thought, through the mental equivalent of clenched teeth. I know about these things. In Surrey we … But she had never grown potatoes in Surrey, she had to admit. There may have been potatoes in the walled kitchen garden, but she had neither put them there nor nursed them to readiness. There had been a gardener who came three days a week; her involvement with potatoes had extended at this point merely to the eating of them; not that she could mention that to Mrs. Agg, who would have simply had her prejudices confirmed by such a disclosure.

  In due course, thought La, I shall receive invitations. These would not come from the villagers, who would not make a habit of entertaining, but from the larger houses in the vicinity. And there was always Bury, which was not too far away and which had the sort of population that one might expect to find in a prosperous market town: professional people, business people, teachers and so on. These were people with whom she would be able to discuss things, who read books and had views. And people of her own age, with a social life.

  She drove into Bury and parked a short distance away from the Cornhill. It was market day, and produce stands stood in a colourful row along the side of the street. She walked past these, looking at the vegetables, the unpopular Flet cheeses, the bottled fruit. On impulse she bought a large ball of string—she had not seen any string when she went through the drawers in the kitchen—and it was something one always needed. Soap, a roll of white bandage for domestic injuries, two large boxes of cook’s matches; these were all cheaper here, and she would need them. She found a stall selling books, and could not resist a book on the growing of roses. She noticed that the author’s name was Thorn, and pointed this out to the stall-holder, who glanced at the cover, nodded and said, “Terry Thorn. Big rose man over in Ipswich.”

  “I suppose he had to write books about roses,” said La. “It was inevitable. Mr. Thorn.”

  The stall-holder nodded. “Knew so much about roses that he had to put pen to paper.”

  Then she found a grocery store and went through the list of supplies she had written out the day before. We haven’t seen you before, madam; would you like to establish an account? Of course. Thank you. An account gave her a feeling of belonging; it was a small part of her new identity.

  The grocer’s boy carried her purchases to the car. He whistled as he walked behind her, but stopped when La turned round to smile at him.

  “Don’t stop. I know that tune.”

  “I wasn’t thinking.”

  “Whistling’s nice. Cheerful. You must be happy.”

  “I can’t complain.”

  Suddenly she felt that she wanted to ask him something. “How old are you?”

  He looked away. “Sixteen. Seventeen in December.”

  She was walking beside him now, not ahead. “And do you think there’s going to be a war?”

  He was surprised by her question. He’s just a boy, she thought.

  “Maybe,” he said. “Yes, maybe. Mr. Evans in the shop says that there’s going to be a war very soon. A couple of weeks, he thinks. He says that old Hitler has wanted it for years to make up for the fact that they lost last time. He says that if there is one, then he’ll have to get a girl to do my job as I’ll have to go off and fight. That’s what he says. My Mam says different, though.”

  She looked at him, and saw him, in her mind, in a uniform. It would be too big for him; too big around the shoulders.

  “And what do you think about that? Going off to fight?”

  He shrugged, and shifted the weight of the box of groceries in his arms. “I don’t know. If the other lads go, then I’ll go. I don’t mind. Better than sitting around here. Might meet some girls, you know, if I go somewhere else. Better than the girls round here, most likely.”

  She wanted to say to him that one did not join the army to meet girls, but did not. Instead, she said, “Have you ever read any poetry?”

  The boy shook his head, and gave her a sideways look. “No. I can’t say I have.”

  She had been thinking of Dr. Price, her tutor, who had introduced her to the work of Wilfred Owen. She wanted to talk about Owen now, suddenly, rather urgently, but could not, of course, to this boy, even if he was exactly the sort of boy that Owen wrote about; gentle, rather passive boys from places like this, innocents who had been tossed so heartlessly into veils of gunfire: The shrill demented choirs of wailing shells; And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

  The boy muttered, “What did you say?”

  She had not been aware of saying anything; but she had. “I was thinking about how horrible war is.”

  “Is it?”

  “I’
m afraid it is. That’s why I hope that there isn’t going to be one after all.”

  IT WAS WHEN LA RETURNED to the house after this trip to Bury that she noticed it. She was unpacking her purchases in the kitchen—the string, the groceries, the book on roses—laying everything out at one end of the scrubbed-pine table when she saw that the tea caddy had been moved. It was not something, perhaps, that she would normally have paid much attention to, but she remembered very clearly placing it back on the lowest of the kitchen shelves, just above the hook on which the largest of her saucepans was hung. She remembered that because she had spotted a patch of grease on the bottom of the large saucepan and had dabbed at it with a kitchen towel. She had thought that she should wash the saucepan again, but had decided to leave it, and had given the tea caddy a quick wipe with the towel. She had not moved it; it had been there on the shelf, and now it was on the shelf above that.

  Of course she doubted her recollection. Perhaps she had lifted the caddy from its place to dust it and had then replaced it on the shelf above. But asking herself this question she answered it immediately: she had not done that. She simply had not done that.

  She crossed the room and took down the tea caddy from the shelf. Reaching for it gave her another reason to be sure; she could not reach the higher shelf unless she stood on a stool. She stopped, her hand barely around the caddy above her head. Suddenly she was frightened. She stepped down off the stool and spun round; she did not want her back turned to the open kitchen door, and the corridor beyond it. Somebody had been in her kitchen and had moved the tea caddy. That person, whoever it was, could still be in the house.

  She left the kitchen and made her way slowly down the corridor towards the front of the house. Once in the hall, she pushed the sitting-room door open and peered in. There was nobody. Nor was there anybody in any of the other rooms; she went into each of them, her heart racing with anxiety, but she saw nothing untoward.

  She returned to the kitchen, where she riddled the cooking range before feeding in fresh coal. Then she put on the kettle and sat down at the kitchen table. She picked up the newly acquired ball of string and fiddled with it briefly, thinking. She could not remember whether she had locked the back door on leaving for Bury; and if she had locked it, then had she locked the front door as well? She thought that she had, but she could not be sure.

  She rehearsed the possibilities in her mind. If she had locked up, the only other person who could have been in the house was Mrs. Agg. She still had the key that she had used when she had been looking after the house, and La had suggested that she keep it. “I’ll need somebody to have a key in case I lock myself out,” she had said. “Will you hold on to it?”

  Mrs. Agg had agreed, but had not used it, as far as La knew. In fact, after their first encounter, when Mrs. Agg had come into the house unannounced, she had only come to the house once or twice, and on each occasion had made a point of knocking. It was possible, she supposed, that the farmer’s wife had taken it upon herself to come into the house, but it seemed unlikely.

  La decided to speak to her. She left the house, locking the back door carefully this time, and walked down the lane to Ingoldsby Farm. Mrs. Agg was in the yard, gathering washing from the line, and waved to La as she saw her approaching.

  “I saw your new car,” she called as La crossed the yard towards her. “It’s a very nice little car.”

  “Thank you. Mr. Granger …”

  “He knows his cars,” said Mrs. Agg. “If Agg bought a car it would be from Mr. Granger. But he hasn’t.”

  “I’ll run you anywhere in mine,” said La. “Just let me know.”

  La was standing before her now, watching the other woman wiping her hands on her apron. “Mrs. Agg,” she began. “Thank you for keeping an eye on the house.”

  Mrs. Agg looked up in surprise. “Don’t do much,” she mumbled; she had wooden washing pegs in her mouth. She removed the pegs before continuing, tucking them into the pocket of her apron. “When I walk past, of course, I cast an eye to make sure you‘re not on fire, or something awful like that. Apart from that, don’t do anything as I can see.”

  La caught her breath. “But I thought that you dropped in today.”

  Mrs. Agg shook her head. “No. I’ve been busy here all the time. I didn’t drop in.”

  La could tell that she was telling the truth. “Oh well …”

  Mrs. Agg looked at her expectantly, and then changed the subject. Would La fancy a couple of duck eggs? Not everyone liked duck eggs, of course; one of Mrs. Agg’s relatives was sick if she ate anything with duck egg in it. Just the yolks, though; the whites did not have that effect.

  She went to fetch the duck eggs from the kitchen and handed them over to La; pale blue things, larger than hen’s eggs, fragile, warm to the touch. La carried them back to the house, one in each hand, gingerly. But her mind was on other things. When she got back, she laid the duck eggs down on a clump of grass outside the kitchen and reached into her pocket for the key to the door.

  She would not need it. The door had been forced, from the inside, the split wood of the frame sticking up in splinters, like small pieces of straw.

  Seven

  THE POLICEMAN LIVED in a neighbouring village, in a house behind a small sign saying Police House. He heard La out on the doorstep, raising an eyebrow when she explained that it looked as if the door had been forced from within.

  “Very unlikely,” he said. “Don’t you think? People break into houses, not out of them, at least in my experience.”

  La looked at the man standing in front of her, a tall, well-built man with sandy-coloured hair and a bemused expression. She wondered whether she had misinterpreted the evidence. But the wood had been splintered on the outside; if you pushed on the door from the outside, it would have broken on the inner part of the jamb.

  The policeman frowned. “Which way does the door swing? Out or in?”

  La thought for a moment. She could not answer, and the policeman’s frown became a tolerant smile. “You see? Sometimes things look black and they’re really white. And the other way round.” He paused, watching the effect of his remark on her. He was one of those men who treated women with well-meaning condescension, thought La. She had encountered them first in Cambridge, amongst the undergraduates who were the products of all-boys schools, whose only contact with women had been with their mothers or domestic staff. And there had been college fellows and professors, too, who had taken the same approach, and appeared vaguely irritated that the times required of them to engage intellectually with women.

  There was a silence. It made more sense for the door to have been forced from outside; otherwise … the thought appalled her. If it had been forced from inside that would have been because she had locked somebody up in the house when she had gone to see Mrs. Agg. So the intruder, the person who had moved the tea caddy, would have been hiding in the house and then, finding himself locked in, would have had to force the door to get out.

  “I shall come and take a look,” said the policeman. “I’d be obliged if you would take me in your car. Otherwise I should have to ride my bike and that would take a little while.”

  “Of course.”

  In the car, La asked him whether there had been burglaries in the district. “I can count on the fingers of this hand,” he said, raising his right hand, “the number of burglaries we’ve had in the last eight years, since I came to this job. And most of those were carried out by Ed Stanton over at Stradishall.” He gazed out of the window and laughed; he was relaxed now in her company, and La was warming to him.

  “Ed left the district after the last one,” the policeman went on. “He was roughed up by the victim’s son, who happened to be a boxer. That sorted him out. That, and his missus giving him his marching orders. Burglars are usually cowards, in my experience. Say ‘boo’ to them and they turn and run. That’s where women go wrong, in my view.”

  La was puzzled. “How do women go wrong?”

  The police
man looked straight ahead at the road. They were almost there, and perhaps, thought La, it was the wrong time to get involved in a debate about what women did or did not do; men thought they knew, but how strange that their view of what women did was often so different from the view held by women, who did it. He continued, “Burglars are scared of people who aren’t scared of them. That’s human nature, isn’t it? But if you’re scared of burglars, then they sense it, like animals do. You know how a dog will push its luck if it can tell that a person is frightened of it? Have you seen that?”

  La nodded. They were on the edge of her village now, and she slowed the Austin down.

  “Well,” said the policeman, “if women stood up to burglars, then they’d back down. Scarper. Burglars have mothers, you see. No burglar likes getting a tongue-lashing from his mum.”

  She had to laugh, and he laughed, too. Then, in a few moments, they arrived, and La pulled the car off the road onto the drive. The gravel was vocal underneath the tyres of the car, a crunching sound, like waves breaking, thought La.

  “So this is where you live,” said the policeman. “Some people by the name of Stone own this place, I understand.”

  “My husband’s parents,” La began. She could tell, as she spoke, what he was thinking. “He lives in France now, my husband. It’s just me here. I’m Mrs. Stone, too.”

  “Ah,” said the policeman. Then, as the car stopped, “By the way, I never even told you my name. It’s Brown, but everybody around here calls me by my Christian name and my surname together, Percy Brown. You can, too, if you like.”

  “Everybody calls me La,” said La, although nobody in the village, she realised, called her anything. Mrs. Agg knew her name, but had not used it, as far as she could recall. If anybody else referred to her—and they must have said something among themselves, even if only to note her arrival—then they must have called her something else. That woman, perhaps, or that woman who lives by herself. That, she thought, was what she was to them anyway.