La's Orchestra Saves the World

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “So I persisted, because that’s the way you get anything done with him. If you ask twice the answer is usually no. Three times and it’s still no, but the no takes a little longer to come out. Four times and he begins to think of it, and then five times and you get a yes. It works every time.

  “He said that we could use transport to get people over to your village, and that we could collect people from Bury St. Edmunds, as long as they don’t mind travelling in a truck—not the normal transport for an orchestra! So that means that our driver can go up to Bury, collect the players and then drive down to you. Once a month, though: no more, I’m afraid.

  “I put a sign up in the Mess and on station notice-boards. We’ve had seven people say that they’re interested, and that makes eight, with me. So all you need to do is to get the word out in Bury—in the parish magazines perhaps, and then we’re ready. I’m calling it La’s Orchestra, by the way. Nice name!

  “Have you found a conductor? Or will you do it yourself? Conducting doesn’t seem awfully difficult to me—you just beat time and try to keep everybody together. Piece of cake, I would have thought.”

  She smiled as she read the letter. The orchestra had been an impulsive idea on her part, and she had not imagined that it would get this far. But now it seemed to have taken on an energy of its own, and … well, why not? Why should she not have a little orchestra that would entertain the players even if it never entertained anybody else? People spoke about morale—there was a lot in the newspapers about that, and an orchestra would certainly help morale. That was what orchestras did. They played in the face of everything, as the orchestra on the Titanic did when it was sinking. It played. Well, we shall play while the country is fighting for its life. We shall play no matter what the enemy throws at us. They would prefer silence—so we shall answer them with music, or cacophony—it did not matter a great deal. As long it was not silence.

  She put the letter aside but brought it out that evening when she was waiting for Feliks to arrive. He had said that he would be there at seven, but did not come until almost a quarter to eight, when La had been on the point of deciding that he would not be coming at all. She thought it unlikely that he had forgotten, and he seemed too well-mannered to stand her up. He had lost his way, perhaps, or there had been some crisis at the farm—the fox, maybe, attacking the hen house. But he did not do that in broad daylight; his raids came at night.

  She felt uneasy, on tenterhooks; she paced about the kitchen and went out into the garden to look at the rows of potatoes she had planted in a dug-up section of the lawn. The garden was almost entirely given over to vegetables now—a wartime garden in which flowers and shrubs took second place. But she could not concentrate this evening, and found herself looking anxiously down the lane for any signs of Feliks.

  When he eventually arrived, she felt only relief.

  “I’m very sorry,” he said. “Henry cut himself. I had to make up a bandage. His finger.”

  She winced. She had seen Henry fumbling with a vegetable knife in the kitchen. She asked how he was and was reassured that the cut was not too bad. “I have told him that I can cut things for him,” said Feliks. “But he is proud.”

  “Yes. He does not want to be an invalid.”

  He had ridden over on Henry’s old bicycle, which La had seen stored in a barn, covered in cobwebs. She showed him where he might stow it, and took him into the house. “It is very beautiful,” he said, looking about him. “These houses in England are so beautiful. They are so peaceful.”

  She led him into the sitting room. When she had first come to the house, she had found a bottle of Gerald’s expensive sherry, which she now opened. She poured a small glass for each of them and passed one to him. He raised it politely, straightening up as he did so, and then bowing slightly in her direction. The gesture seemed to her to be very formal, almost Prussian, but she remembered what Tim had said about his background. This was no ordinary farm worker; this was an educated man, a member of a landed family, for all she knew. Many of the Poles in their air force were from that sector of society, she had heard.

  While they drank the sherry, they spoke about his cottage. He was completely satisfied with it, he said. It was heaven. “I do not have to listen to other men snoring,” he said. “That is bliss for me. Bliss.”

  She asked him about his English. He had studied it at university level, he said. English and Polish literature. He found that languages came naturally to him, and that when the war was over, if Poland was still there, he would return to the university and complete the doctorate he had embarked upon.

  “It must be strange,” she said. “One moment you are studying for a doctorate and the next you are in the air force. And then you’re digging ditches on a farm.”

  “Everybody’s life is strange. Everything is turned upside down in war. It is not strange.”

  She read him the letter from Tim. “He said that you play the flute. He thought you would be able to play in our little orchestra.”

  Feliks was self-deprecating. “Me? I am not very good. Not good enough for an orchestra.”

  “There are orchestras and orchestras,” she assured him. “Nobody in this one will be very good.”

  “Even so, I have no flute. I’m sorry. I cannot.”

  He moved the conversation on to another subject, and then they went through to the kitchen, where she had laid a gingham tablecloth on the table and place-mats at either end. She had made a salad using lettuce and radishes grown in her garden, and a sausage and sultana casserole. There were still sausages to be had, and she had prepared generous portions.

  After the meal he looked at his watch. “I will have to go now.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  There was still some light left in the sky, but he had brought a small carbide lamp should he need to cycle back through the darkness. She went into the garden with him and watched him mount the cycle. He smiled, and doffed the grey tweed cap he had brought with him.

  He said, “If you wish, I could look after the hens for you tomorrow. You could have a day off.”

  She did not want that. She was used to her hens, and she felt responsible for them. She knew the fox and his ways; if her back was turned he would surely take advantage of that.

  He cycled off, waving as he turned out of her drive and onto the lane, wobbling as he picked up speed. She stood for a moment and watched him before she went back into her house; he did not look back, and did not see her. The gingham tablecloth brought a touch of colour into the kitchen, a splash of red. That cheered the place up, but the house seemed empty now that he had gone, and for her part La felt ill at ease. She locked the back door and went into the sitting room. She had missed the main news bulletin on the wireless, but there was a later one that she just managed to catch. There had been further raids, and the enemy had lost a substantial number of aircraft before they had been able to reach their targets. The voice of the newsreader was even; the voice of one who was used to the breaking of bad news.

  She listened in a half-hearted way, before switching off. She wondered what he thought of her. It was difficult to read him, and she feared that his politeness was just that and no more: politeness. He had shown no desire to stay and chat after dinner, and it was difficult to see why he should want to get back to his cottage when there can have been very little for him to do there. He did not want to spend more time in her company; that was the only conclusion she could reach.

  She turned out the lights and went into her bedroom to get ready for bed. There was a mirror beside her wardrobe, and she looked at herself in this. I am not attractive, she said to herself. Not really. I am just the woman who looks after the hens. If he wants anybody, then it will be somebody younger, somebody more appealing than I am. There are plenty of girls, and with most young men away, they were eager to meet any man they could. Feliks was good-looking; he would turn heads. He could have any woman; he would not be interested in me.

  She sat on the bed and removed
her stockings. She glanced again at her reflection in the mirror. There are ways of looking into mirrors, she thought, one of which is to open your eyes and see the person who is looking back at you.

  Fifteen

  IT WAS TIM HONEY who did most of the work of getting the orchestra together. La recognised this all along, and later she said, “Tim, you may call this La’s Orchestra, but it’s really you who’s done all the work.”

  He was modest. “Nonsense. It’s La’s Orchestra because it was your idea and you’re the conductor. Enough said.”

  But she was right about the work. After he had written the letter to La, it was Tim who was in touch with the vicar in Bury. He proved enthusiastic: “Can’t play a note myself, not a note. Can’t sing either—if you came to evensong here you’d know all about that. But there are plenty of people here who would like to join.”

  The plenty of people of the vicar’s imaginings turned out to be seven, but four of them were strings players—three violinists and a cellist—and one of them was a reasonably strong player. The violinists were all women—two sisters, retired teachers, who lived together, and the almoner from the hospital. The cellist was a man, a youngish bank manager whose asthma prevented him from joining anything more demanding than the Home Guard. They were all enthusiastic and had time on their hands, and had no objection to making the short journey from Bury in the back of an RAF truck.

  With the eight volunteers from the base, most of whom were wind players, the orchestra at least had a core. To this there were added two players whom La had discovered in the village—the postman, Mr. North, who had an ancient set of drums in his attic, and his sister-in-law, who was prepared to assist him in the percussion section “as long as North keeps me right on the rhythm.”

  “I shall do that,” said La. “I am the conductor. You watch me.”

  It was Tim, too, who managed to get together the music to start them off. The air force, he explained, had a music department—bands and the like—and they were sympathetic. A crate of sheet music was dispatched and triumphantly delivered to La’s doorstep by Tim.

  “Everything we need, La,” he said enthusiastically as he dug into the music. “Look. W. A. Mozart, no less. Arranged by J. M. Williams. We’ve got a J. Williams at the base. One of the catering officers. Different chap. And this stuff here. ‘An Evening in a Viennese Café’ arranged for school orchestra. Not bad. All the parts seem to be there. More than we need.”

  They sorted out the music as best they could and chose a piece for the first meeting. La looked at the conductor’s score and wondered how she would cope with the reading of so many parts simultaneously. “Easy,” said Tim. “Concentrate on one section and conduct it. The others will find their way.”

  They met for the first time in mid-August on a Saturday afternoon. La was waiting for the truck to arrive, standing in the village hall with the postman and his sister-in-law. They had arranged the hall chairs in a semi-circle around a portable pulpit that they had borrowed from the church.

  The truck arrived and disgorged the players. Three of the men from the base were in uniform, the others were wearing civilian clothes. A couple were officers, both navigators; the other men were ground crew, including the station barber, a thick-set man with a Cockney accent, who had with him a battered silver trombone. The navigators looked tired, and one stared out of the window while La addressed the orchestra, as if he was looking for something. Tim threw him a glance, and then looked at La, as if in apology.

  They played for an hour. It was ragged and discordant. Two of the violins, La was sure, were out of tune, and she stopped half-way through to try to get people in tune again.

  “We sound a bit flat,” she said.

  Tim laughed, and this released the tension. “Does it matter?”

  “I suppose not,” said La.

  “It’s not me,” said the postman, and everybody smiled.

  At the end of the session there was a cup of tea. The village hall had an urn, which had been switched on at the beginning of the practice and was now just at boiling point. The postman’s sister-in-law took it upon herself to make the tea, and to serve it, using a jug of milk which had been donated by Mrs. Agg, who was a cousin of hers. Their instruments packed away, the members of the orchestra stood and drank tea together.

  “Are we going to give a concert?” asked one of the men from the base.

  “Of course,” said Tim. “We are, aren’t we, La?”

  She hesitated. Tim looked at her expectantly. “At Christmas,” she said. “We shall give a concert at Christmas. Here in the hall.”

  “And at the base, too?” asked Tim.

  “Of course.”

  “An Evening in a Viennese Café?’” asked one of the navigators.

  “Pre-Anschluss,” said La. “Yes. And then …” She paused. “And then, at the end of all this, at the end of the war, we’ll give a victory concert. That’s what we’ll start practising for. A victory concert.”

  There was silence for a moment. The postman looked down at the floor. Then Tim cleared his throat. “A good idea. Look out suitable pieces, La.”

  There were murmurs of agreement.

  As they prepared to leave, Tim turned to her and whispered, “Yes?”

  She looked puzzled. “What?”

  “It worked? Do you think it worked?”

  La smiled. “Of course it did. You heard it, didn’t you? You could tell?”

  The engine of the truck was running and the driver was waiting for him. “I mustn’t keep them. Yes, I think it’s fine. And that business about being flat …”

  “It’s not our fault,” said La. “We’re in the middle of a war, aren’t we?”

  Tim chuckled. “Of course. It’s the war.”

  “Well, there you are,” said La.

  She helped the postman and his sister-in-law clear up. They stacked the chairs to the side of the hall, as the vicar had asked them to do, and the pulpit was left for the verger to collect the next day. The postman emptied the urn onto the gravel path at the back of the hall.

  “That’s it,” said La. “That’s it until next month.”

  As she walked back to her cottage, Mrs. Agg passed on her bicycle, heading back from the village. “I heard you,” she called out. “They all heard you down in the village. Came across lovely. Lovely sound.”

  “We’re not very good,” said La.

  “Sounded fine to me. Tra-la-la!”

  The farmer’s wife disappeared down the lane, and La continued her walk. I have an orchestra, she thought. Other people have … well, they have what they have. I have an orchestra. It was a sobering thought, every bit as sobering as if one awoke one day to find oneself in charge of Covent Garden or La Scala. There were shoulders that bore those very responsibilities, of course, but they did not belong to a woman in her early thirties, who lived at the edge of a small village in Suffolk, and who each morning looked after hens.

  THE FOLLOWING SATURDAY, after attending early to the hens, La made the journey into Cambridge. There was a bus that stopped in the village and then went on to Newmarket, and Cambridge beyond. She caught this at ten in the morning and by noon she was in Cambridge.

  As she began her journey the sky was clear, and the ripening fields made swathes of golden brown, criss-crossed by the dark green lines of the hedgerows. It had been a good growing season, and crops both official and unofficial were in riot: banks of nettles had taken hold of some of the roadsides; even the trees themselves seemed to have spread their reach, now and then brushing against the roof of the bus. As the journey progressed, La watched the men and women boarding the bus. For the most part they were going to Newmarket or Cambridge, setting out to buy the bigger things that village stores did not stock: a dress to wear at somebody’s wedding in the autumn; a pair of stout breeches for the winter. La looked at the faces. When she had first come from London, the people had seemed somehow different, their eyes brighter, their skin a different tone. She remembered what Rupert
Brooke had written in “Grant -chester” about the characteristics of people from the various Cambridgeshire villages; such exaggerated, tongue-in-cheek nonsense, but concealing a truth: people were different in different places. In the small corners of Suffolk there were families that had not moved for centuries; of course they would develop physical characteristics that were typical of place. And with those physical characteristics went moral qualities. Determination, courage, a sort of native cunning: those crossed generations, La thought. It took centuries to breed an Agg, she said to herself; and smiled at the thought.

  In Cambridge she alighted on Trinity Street. The University was still on summer vacation—down they called it—and the street was quiet. A middle-aged man, a college servant La thought, judging from his formal black suit, was walking a small terrier along the pavement; a couple of women, smartly dressed and not much older than La, came out of Heffers. One was holding a book that she had just bought and was discussing it with her friend, who nodded agreement at what she was being told. La watched this wistfully; this was what she was missing. She might be in such company, talking about the latest novel, instead of tending to hens at Madder’s Farm and digging potatoes in what had once been a lawn.

  She turned the corner. Paulson’s Music Shop was exactly where the advertisement claimed it would be, next door to a high-quality butcher on the one side and an outfitter’s on the other. Both the butcher and the outfitter were trying to make the best of a bad moment in their history, with more or less empty windows. The outfitter had obtained an academic robe in bright scarlet and had rigged this up on one of their mannequins; it made for a bright splash of colour. The music shop, though, was not feeling the emergency. There were still musical instruments to be had, and the window boasted a small display of violins and violas, alongside a couple of ornate wooden music stands.