La's Orchestra Saves the World

by Alexander McCall Smith

  La looked in the window before going in. She had discussed with Tim what scores they might obtain—the crate of printed music from the RAF had its limitations—and she would see whether she could order these. In the advertisement she had seen, Mr. Paulson claimed to be an expert in obtaining the unobtainable: she would now put that to the test.

  Mr. Paulson, who appeared from a back room in response to the bell triggered by the front door, was finishing a cup of tea. He put the tea-cup down, straightened his tie and greeted La.

  “Such a promising day earlier on,” he said. “But now, look at that.” He pointed at the sky through the window; a bank of heavy cloud had blown up from the east, high cumulo-nimbus, purple with rain.

  “Yes. It looks very threatening.”

  “But,” Mr. Paulson went on, “we are not to be dispirited by such small things as the weather. Especially when there is so much else happening.”

  La produced the list she had written out and passed it over to him. Mr. Paulson took a small pair of unframed reading glasses out of his jacket pocket and placed them on the end of his nose.

  “Rossini. Yes. Mozart. Yes, and yes. Yes. That, alas, that piece there, no. That is out of print as far as I know and these days … It is more difficult to get things. People often don’t answer letters because … well, there are no people in the offices any more. Heaven knows what happens to the letters.”

  “If you can get just half of my list,” said La, “I shall be very happy.”

  Mr. Paulson nodded. “That will be no problem.” He slipped the piece of paper into a drawer. “This is a school orchestra, I take it?”

  La shook her head. “I suppose that you would call it a village orchestra.”

  Mr. Paulson was impressed. “Admirable! There used to be village bands, but now people seem to have lost the habit of making music together. Even the bell-ringers are finding it difficult to recruit, you know. We have a team in my own parish, but there are very few young people in it. Sad.”

  La agreed that it was. Then, “And I wondered about a flute. I wondered if you had any second-hand flutes in stock.”

  Mr. Paulson did not answer directly, but turned and opened a large drawer to his side. He reached in and took out a small box, covered in black leather. “Now this is a very nice instrument,” he said. “It belonged to a young man who was at Clare until a few months ago. He took a commission in the Royal Artillery and sold this to me before he left. He said that he hadn’t played it since he left Harrow. He said that it would be better if it were to be used.”

  He slipped open the catch on the side of the box and extracted the disjointed pieces of the flute. These he quickly fitted together and handed the instrument over to La.

  “There you are,” he said. “That’s a lovely old flute. Rudall, Rose, Carte and Co. You see, that’s their stamp there. Theodore Boehm himself authorised them to make his system here in England. They also made an eight-hole system, as I’m sure you know …”

  La raised the flute to her lips and blew across the mouth-hole.

  “A very true note,” said Mr. Paulson. “Try it across the range. You’ll see how sweet it is. Lovely action.”

  La lowered the flute and handed it back to him. “It’s not for me,” she said. “My playing is a bit rusty. It’s for a man who would like to play in our little orchestra, but who doesn’t have a flute.” She paused. “He’s one of those Polish airmen.”

  Mr. Paulson nodded. “I see. Well, that’s a nice thought. I’m sure that the young man who owned this would like to see it going to a fellow combatant.”

  They discussed the price. La saw the ticket on the box—it was surprisingly expensive—but Mr. Paulson quickly reduced it. “For our Polish friend,” he said. “And they have suffered so.”

  She wrote out a cheque. Her account was flush with funds; Gerald had given her Richard’s share of the family company in cash, and had been generous; she could live on the interest alone. There was nothing to spend her money on in the village, and funds had accumulated.

  The flute, and such sheet music from the list as had been in stock, were neatly tied in a brown paper parcel and handed to La. Then, with an anxious eye at the storm clouds, and with Mr. Paulson’s assurances that the other sets of music would be found if humanly possible, she left the shop and headed back towards Trinity Street. She looked at her watch. There was a further appointment in Cambridge, before she caught the bus home, and for that she would treat herself to a taxi.

  • • •

  AS SHE STOOD before Dr. Leontine Price’s door, La thought: How many times have I stood here feeling slightly awkward about something? From her first visit to her tutor, summoned on the day after her arrival in Cambridge all those years ago, to her last visit, on the morning of her graduation, her encounters with Dr. Price had been ones in which guilt of some sort or another inevitably seemed to play a part. In her first year she had always felt that the essays that she wrote for delivery to her tutor were not quite her best work; that there were insights that she had but could not quite express; that Dr. Price would be bored by what she had to say. Later she had become more confident about her judgement—what she had to say about the Victorian novel, after all, was as valid as what any other undergraduate had to say, possibly even more so, as La knew that a number of the others who took the course with her were not above giving opinions on books they had not read. But Dr. Price never gave the impression that she shared this view, and listened to La with a vaguely pained expression, as if she were keen to be somewhere else, attending to more important things. “As a matter of interest,” La wanted to say, but never did, “you are being paid, are you not, to listen to me?”

  Now she stood before Dr. Price’s door as a widow, the conductor of an orchestra, and the doer of war work, even if the war work in question was only the keeping of hens. Yet the familiar anxiety returned, and there was hesitation in her knock.

  Dr. Price was seated at her desk. La noticed, with some satisfaction, that the room was exactly as she remembered it. There was the chair in which she used to sit and read her essay to the tutor; there was the clock that, ahead of the church clock at Grantchester, stood always at five o’clock, and still did.

  “Your clock,” she said, pointing across the room. “Still at five.”

  Dr. Price looked up from the papers before her on the desk. “Ah, yes. I must wind it. So here you are, Ferguson. Here you are.”

  Yes, thought La, I am still Ferguson, I suppose.

  “Stone now.”

  “Of course. I’m sorry, but it’s hard for me to keep up. I tend to think of people as who they were when they first came up. You’re Mrs. Stone. And Mr. Stone, how is he?”

  La looked at the woman she had come to visit. One of the reasons why people like that were the way they were was because people let them get away with it. Well, she would not. Not this time.

  “He died, I’m afraid.” She surprised herself in the utterance; surprised that she could talk about Richard so dispassionately.

  If Dr. Price was taken aback, she did not show it. “I’m sorry to hear that.” But she went straight on; husbands died, and sometimes, Dr. Price felt, not prematurely. “You must sit down, Ferguson. Usual chair.”

  La looked about her. There was another chair, closer to Dr. Price’s desk. She chose that; and immediately felt petty. There was a war going on for the very soul of civilisation, and she was trying to avoid sitting in a particular chair.

  “You must tell me what you’re doing,” said Dr. Price. “The College newsletter lets one down a bit in that department. They’re good on graduations and obituaries, but not all that informative on what happens in between.”

  La smiled. “And that’s the important part, isn’t it?”

  “Indeed.”

  There was a brief silence. Then La said, “But what have you been doing? The usual?”

  La looked at Dr. Price, who held her gaze. “I see.”

  La knew immediately that Dr. Price had u
nderstood her. The chair. The immediate turning of the question back on her.

  The tutor waited for a moment. She ignored the question. “It’s good of you to come back. We don’t really change here very much. Universities think in centuries, of course. If you go and stand in some of the older colleges—Peterhouse, I suppose, would be the case par excellence—if one stands and contemplates what those buildings have seen, then things are rather put in perspective. Our current difficulties will pass.”

  “Our current difficulties?”

  “The war. Hostilities. This business between men.”

  La thought of her job with the hens. She thought of Tim and his talk of supplies. Petrol. Spare parts. She thought of the navigator who looked out of the window.

  “I’m not sure that it’s just between men.”

  Dr. Price waved a hand airily. “Men have always fought. It’s what they do. They jockey for position. Puff their chests up and strut around. Then, every so often, they unroll their sleeves and take a swipe at one another, just to establish the pecking order.” She paused. “I find it very entertaining.”

  La touched the fabric of her chair with her hand. It was a heavy tapestry. Roses. “I’m not sure if what is happening in France is entertaining for the French.”

  “France and Germany are old enemies,” said Dr. Price. “We must expect them to engage in these aggressive charades with one another.”

  “And Hitler?”

  “He is the worst sort of man, the very worst. And of course we have to do what we can to prevent him from invading this country. I wouldn’t dream of saying otherwise. But he does rather illustrate what I said about male behaviour, does he not?”

  Dr. Price allowed a few moments for her observation to be absorbed. She picked up a piece of paper from her desk, folded it and replaced it. In a moment of clarity, La remembered her doing that in their supervisions. She had watched her from the chair, wondering what the action showed about her reaction to the essay. Boredom, perhaps. Irritation?

  “Are you involved?” said Dr. Price after a while. “Remember Thompson? Mathematician—quite a good one, too. She was about your time, was she not? She’s down in Buckinghamshire doing something very hush-hush. Shades of Mata Hari. I met her at the station the other day. She declined to say very much.”

  “I remember her very slightly,” said La. “Am I involved? Well, I suppose we’re all involved, aren’t we? I do some work on a farm.”

  “Land girl?”

  “Not quite. It’s a private arrangement. I look after hens for a farmer. He’s got bad arthritis, you see, and can’t cope any more. I feed the hens.”

  Dr. Price nodded. “You’re busy.”

  “And I have a village orchestra,” La went on. “We have an RAF base nearby. Some of the men come and play music with us.”

  It all sounded so petty. Hens. Village orchestras.

  Dr. Price looked at her watch, surreptitiously, but sufficiently overtly for La to see that her visit was over.

  She rose to her feet. “I’ve enjoyed seeing you again, Dr. Price.” She paused. There was so much to say to this woman; so much that she had wanted to say over the years, but had never had the opportunity to do so. And even now, she could not bring herself to do it. But still she said, “Tell me, Dr. Price, what would happen, do you think, if Hitler came? What would you—and I mean you personally—what would you do?”

  Dr. Price uttered a sound that was mid-way between dismissal and irritation. “Strange question,” she said. “But don’t worry, he’s not coming.”

  La wanted to say, “Because there are hens and orchestras to stop him?” But Dr. Price gave her no opportunity, even had she found the courage. The tutor stood up, sighed and stretched out her hand for La to shake it. This, La knew, was a farewell that was not just for the moment, nor for the duration of the war, however long that would last.

  Sixteen

  SHE WATCHED FELIKS at work on the drainage scheme. Pott’s Field stretched over several acres, and it would take some time for the channels to be dug all along the edges and then led off downhill to the stank. And there were root systems to contend with—over the centuries the hedgerows and trees had consolidated their grip on the soil, knitting together in places, breaking up stones in the process; dying, renewing, creating a sub-soil through which the spade could cut only with difficulty.

  La watched the work progress; it was painfully slow, even though Feliks was always working when she looked across in that direction; a tiny figure from afar, bent over the land. She kept about her business with the hens and then, when she had finished and had washed up in Henry’s kitchen, she took a glass of lemonade to Feliks.

  “You’re spoiling him,” said Henry, half joking, half seriously. He seemed vaguely annoyed, and La suspected that he resented the attention she was giving Feliks. Why? She thought that it was probably not out of any hostility to Feliks himself, whom he appeared to like, but out of jealousy.

  “It’s hard work. Really hard. Have you been down there? He gets thirsty.”

  “There’s water,” muttered Henry.

  “But there’s also lemonade.”

  She found a recipe for lemonade that could be made without lemons, which had never been sold in the village store anyway. She made a quantity of this in the kitchen, not asking Henry’s permission but just doing it; if he wanted her to work on his farm, then she would use his kitchen. She tested it: it tasted good enough to her, and Feliks liked it. He smiled when she told him she had made it herself. “You’re so kind to me,” he said. He was always telling her that she was kind to him, and she wanted to stop him, to say this is what she wanted to do.

  Which was what? What was it that she wanted to do? She asked herself the question and could not think of any answer other than that she wanted to look after a man; it was as simple as that. Some deep instinct within her had asserted itself: an instinct to cherish another person, a man in particular. What would Dr. Price make of that? She smiled. Dr. Price had never looked after anybody but herself.

  She found herself thinking of him a great deal. She thought of him as she cycled to the farm in the morning, wondering whether he would already be out in Pott’s Field when she arrived at the farm. She thought of him in the evenings, when she sat alone in her house and listened to the news and the musical programmes. She tried to stop herself, but could not.

  She asked herself whether he would have done this to her had he looked different, had he not had about him that unsettling male beauty, that glowing smoothness and harmony of feature. At first she thought yes, and then she thought no. And it was the no, she imagined, that was more realistic. Human beauty requires of us an intense response. We want to own the beautiful; we want to possess it. We wish that it would somehow rub off on us, simply by being in its presence. That is how she felt about Feliks.

  He was polite to her, but that was all. He was a shy man, she decided, and that was why he seemed reserved. That would pass, she thought, when they got to know one another better, but she was not quite sure how to achieve that. There was the flute, of course, sitting there in her house, in its fine leather-covered box, and she wanted to give it to him. But she was nervous; it was a large present, and she did not want to smother him.

  It took a week. Then he came into the kitchen when she was stacking eggs in the box that Henry used to transport them in to Bury. He used straw to prevent them from being broken; the dust from this would tickle her nose, make her eyes run.

  She heard his voice behind her. “You do not like that work. I could do it for you.”

  She turned round, wiping at her eyes with the back of her hand.

  “It’s all right. It passes. The straw …”

  He nodded. “When I was a little boy I used to sneeze all the time in the summer. Then suddenly—just like that—it stopped. No longer.”

  He moved past her and began to place the eggs in the box.

  “Do you like your work?” he asked.

  La sat down on one of
Henry’s rickety kitchen chairs. “I’ve got used to it. I suppose that the hens and I have become friends, in a way.” She looked up at him, noticing for the first time that there was a scar under his chin, a thin line that had been neatly sliced into the skin, as if by a flourish of a pencil.

  He fumbled with an egg.

  “Careful. Henry gets very upset if I drop one. He shouted at me once. He said, ‘The Germans want you to drop those eggs.’”

  Feliks smiled. “You could tell him it was me.” He paused. “I’m not sure that he likes me anyway. It would be one more thing for him, maybe.”

  La frowned. “You think that he doesn’t like you? Why?”

  “The way he speaks to me.”

  She thought about this. Henry had a grudging manner, but he was like that with everyone, La thought.

  “I don’t think he dislikes you,” she said. “It’s the way he is. Maybe it’s something to do with his illness. He has a lot of pain, you know.”

  Feliks nodded. “Maybe. It can’t be easy to be like that. His hands … I think that they must be very painful. But even so, I think that he does not like me because I am a foreigner.”

  La was about to reassure him that this was not true, but she realised that it might be exactly the reason; that, or he was jealous of the attention that she gave to Feliks. But she could not mention that.

  “I have something for you,” she said.

  He placed an egg on the straw and turned to her. “For me?”

  “Yes. I’ve bought you a present. I think that you’ll like it.”

  He looked puzzled. “But why? Why have you bought me a present?”

  La shrugged. “You’re far from home. Who else is there to buy you a present?”

  “But just because I’m far from home does not mean that you need to …”

  La interrupted him. “No. Of course I don’t need to. But I have. It’s at the house. My house. Perhaps you will come and fetch it.”

  • • •

  HE CAME THE NEXT DAY. She was in her garden when he arrived, riding the old bicycle from the farm. She saw him from her bedroom window upstairs and she watched him as he walked across the gravel to knock at her door.