La's Orchestra Saves the World

  After breakfast she set out for the farm. Yesterday’s clouds had been blown away by a change in the wind, and the morning sky was high and open. This was good weather for bombers in search of targets, but it would also be good news for the RAF, who liked a sun out of which to swoop. Things were getting worse now; the battle was intense. Every day, almost without let-up, flights of marauders came in, wave upon wave of them, hammering hard at England. Frighten them, said Hitler; terrify them into submission. But the onslaught had the opposite effect, and strengthened resolve. Every day the RAF committed virtually all its men and machines to the air in desperate sorties, one after the other, mercilessly. She had heard of pilots going to sleep at the controls of their aircraft, utterly exhausted, pushed beyond any normal human limits; she had heard of them drinking before they went up, trying to dull the fear, to obliterate their knowledge of the odds.

  And here, in spite of all that was happening only a short way away, was a summer morning, with ripening ears of wheat, of barley, swaying in the wind, with a man walking a dog alongside a hedgerow, with a knot of sheep around a tin hopper, waiting for salt-cake. Manna, thought La; animals believe in manna because for them it is quite real: food appears. And if we believed in the possibility of manna, then what might we want now? For the heavens to open and a cornucopia of arms to be disgorged upon the land? Tanks, gleaming planes, shiny rifles, fountains of petrol and oil.

  Before the war, she had kept a lingering belief in God, not much more than a few scraps from the religious education she had received at school: the sermon on the mount, the walking on water, the wedding feast at Cana. At a wedding or a christening she would bow her head and go through the motions, along with everybody else, but the words, beautiful though they might be, were empty ones, for her at least, no more than shibboleths uttered because it was expected of one. Then the idea of God had become weaker and weaker until it had faded altogether, to become a recollection of somebody she used to know vaguely, but whose memory had become attenuated, like that of an old uncle met once in childhood. The war had convinced her that he simply was not there. If he were, then how could he not intervene? It would be so simple for God to dispose of Hitler. He would only have to raise a finger, just a finger, and flick him out of the way; and do the same for Goering and his air force, too. How satisfying it would be for a divine hand to knock the bombers out of the air. Imagine their surprise! But there was no divine hand, she told herself; we are in this quite alone. It was perfectly possible for might to triumph, because that was what human history had shown all along: might prevailed.

  Lost in her thoughts, she did not see the car until it was almost upon her. She had plenty of time to stop, though, to dismount and pull her bicycle over to the side; the road was too narrow there for both of them and cycles gave way to motor vehicles. Again it was a question of might.

  The driver wound down his window and inched the car forward until it was level with her.

  “Early to work, I see.”

  She smiled. It was Tim Honey, driving a different car. This was an official one, a dark blue Austin with a military number plate.

  “I didn’t recognise you. Your nice little sports car …”

  He tapped his hand on the wheel. “This goes with the job. I use my own for social purposes—when I can lay my hands on any petrol for it. And when I’m fortunate enough for social purposes to turn up.”

  Tim jerked his head in the direction of the farm. “I’ve just dropped Dab—Feliks, rather, up there. I saw the billet you’d prepared for him. Madder said it was all your work. Well done.”

  “It was a bit dark and dingy,” said La. “I wanted him to be moderately comfortable.”

  “Moderately comfortable? He can’t believe his luck! He said he couldn’t remember when he last had a room to himself.”

  Tim glanced at his watch. “I mustn’t linger, I’m afraid. We’re very busy right now, and I’m due back on duty in half an hour. By the way …”

  La knew what he was going to ask. “My orchestra?”

  “Yes. I spoke to those chaps I mentioned, and to a couple of others. They’re very keen.”

  “So you might be able to fix something up?”

  “Yes. And Dab plays the flute, too, you know. He hasn’t got one, but when I told him about our conversation he let slip that he used to play. He’s an educated man, you know. A lot of those Poles are. You think you know them, and then you discover something extraordinary about them—that they had a big factory somewhere, or were trained as doctors, or were becoming priests when this business all started. All that sort of thing.” He sighed. “It makes it even tougher for them, I think. To lose your country and your family and everything—position, respect and all the rest … Well, that can’t be easy.”

  “We’ll try to look after him.”

  Tim smiled and stretched a hand out of the window of the car. She shook it.

  LA LEANED HER BICYCLE against the wall and bent down to remove the cycle clips that she placed about her trouser legs. She wore trousers for her work on the farm; not the most glamorous of outfits, she said, but very practical: strong gaberdine trousers of worsted that she had brought with her from London. Straightening up, she saw a light in Henry Madder’s kitchen, a dark room that received little sun. Even so, Henry was not one to waste electricity, or anything for that matter, and La had imagined him at night, with no lights on, fumbling about in the dark. The light, then, was in honour of Feliks.

  She approached the back door and knocked. “We’re in here,” Henry called out. “Come right in, La.” When La entered the room, she saw Henry standing near the range, holding the kettle, which he was about to put on the plate. At the table, half turned round to face her, sat a man wearing a leather jacket of the sort favoured by pilots; this one, though, was worn, the leather cracked about the shoulders and at the cuffs. La’s first thought was that it was too warm to be wearing that, but then she saw that he had a thin, collarless shirt underneath. And below that, dark trousers, of what looked to her like thin linen. When she entered, he sprang to his feet and stood facing her.

  “Dabrowski,” he said, inclining his head. “Feliks Dabrowski.”

  La moved forward. He had extended his hand towards her.

  “This is my other assistant,” said Henry. “La Stone. The saviour of the hens.”

  “I suspect that the hens would get by quite well without me,” said La.

  Henry shook his head. He was very literal. “No, they wouldn’t.”

  La glanced at Feliks. He looked younger than she had imagined; not as boyish as some of those pilots, but certainly younger than the thirty-four that Tim Honey had mentioned. Twenty-eight, perhaps. And he was definitely Slav; she could tell from the smoothness of the cheeks and the high cheekbones; it was a quite different look, an almost feminine beauty. His eyes: she wondered which one was the one that had been ruined. Would she be able to tell, or would she have to ask? It was potentially disconcerting, as it always was when one did not know which eye to look at. One might be gazing into the wrong eye, talking to that eye, so to speak, while all the time the other eye was watching one.

  “The left eye,” said Henry, pushing the kettle onto the plate with his twisted hand. “Feliks was telling me. He lost the sight in his left eye in action.”

  La dropped her gaze guiltily. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  Feliks sat down now. “Thank you. I have become used to it. You can get by with one of most things. There are men at the base with one leg or one arm. They get by, too.”

  His accent was certainly foreign, yet it was still clear enough and had a soft lilt to it, akin, La thought, to the way in which a Swede would speak English.

  “La will show you the hen houses,” said Henry. “Just so that you know everything that’s going on. But she does all the work down there.”

  Feliks looked at La and smiled. “That will be good.”

  There was a silence. La waited for something more to be said, but neither man sp
oke. She looked at the kettle. Henry’s range was always slow; it would take ten minutes for the water to boil. She would have liked to stay, but had no idea what she would say. Henry would not waste his words, and Feliks seemed shy. It would be strange for him, this farm, with this rather unusual farmer. And he would be wondering what her own role was, apart from tending the hens.

  “I’ll get on with things,” she said.

  Henry Madder nodded and Feliks rose to his feet again as La turned to the door. He rose automatically, as one in whom a chivalrous response had been inculcated. She thought, This is not a man who will be used to working on a farm. She wondered what he had been before the war. That was the extraordinary thing about what the war achieved: it transformed lives, made heroes out of the mildest of people, out of the most timid, showed the bravery that must always have been there but merely lacked the occasion to manifest itself. It revealed other things, too: greed and selfishness disclosed their hand as people faced the prospect of hardship or hunger. She wondered whether she herself had changed, and decided that she was probably unexcitedly in the middle, where she had always felt she belonged. Would she cheat to get petrol? No. Would she take risks, imperil her life, if the situation required it? Equally no.

  She made her way to the hen houses, where she worked for the next two hours. The fox had been active the previous night, having dug up a small section of chicken wire at the end of the run. There were feathers on the ground below one of the laying boxes, a broken egg and, at the end of one of the hen houses, obscured by shadows, the limp body of a hen, half of a wing torn off. The scattered feathers were clearly from a different hen, and from this La deduced that the fox had killed more than he needed and had been unable to carry away his second victim.

  When she had finished the repairs and had fed the chickens, she picked up the dead hen and carried it back to the house. Seeing her approach, Henry came out and examined the dead fowl.

  “The devil!” he said. “He kills out of spite. What animal does that, La?”

  “Cats,” said La. And added, “Men.”

  Henry took the hen from her and shook his head. “A fine layer, no doubt. What a waste!” He handed it back to her. “See if he wants it. Him.” He jerked his head in the direction of the cottage. “He looks as if he could do with a bit of feeding up. A nice chicken casserole will go down well there, I suspect.”

  “You take it.”

  Henry shook his head. “No you. I need to sit down. Take it to him. He’s getting himself sorted out and will be starting work after lunch. Take it.”

  She left him and walked over towards the cottage. Feliks must have seen her from the window, as he appeared at the door as she approached it.

  “This is for you. A fox killed it.”

  He frowned. “They are a nuisance.”

  “Round here they are.”

  He reached for the chicken. “Thank you.” He looked at it, holding it up and then putting it down on a shelf to the side of the door. “What do you say? Waste not …”

  “Want not.”

  “Yes. That’s it.”

  For a few moments he examined the chicken. It seemed to La that he was contemplating it with regret, and that surprised her. Then he looked up, and rubbed his hands on his trousers; the hen had begun to bleed, and there was blood on his hands. He should wipe it off, she thought, because it would coagulate and then smell if left where it was.

  She turned to go.

  “You are kind. People have been so kind. Everyone. The English.”

  She stopped. It had not occurred to her that the English would be judged by others. “Really?”

  “Yes. Very kind.”

  “I thought that maybe you met with … well, the opposite. Suspicion. Selfishness. What are you doing here? That sort of thing.”

  He shook his head. “There might be a little of that. But not usually. Usually it’s kindness. The English are a kind people.” He paused. “Maybe they don’t know it.”

  La waited for him to say something else, but that was the end of his observations on the English national character.

  “Oh well. Maybe.” She turned away again and left him. He took the chicken in and closed the door.

  She walked back to her bicycle, fastened the cycle clips around her ankles and set off on the ride home. The day had become warmer, the sun floating up the sky, painting the top of Henry Madder’s wheat crop with streaks of gold. She cycled slowly, thinking. Something had happened, something within her. It was an unsettling feeling, something she was not prepared for and had not imagined she would feel again. A mile or two down the lane, she stopped and dismounted from her bicycle. It was at a point where a small clump of willow trees grew behind the unruly hedgerow bordering the road. There was a gap here, just enough to let her through—a gap that had been made by the boys from the nearby village, perhaps, or by lovers seeking a quiet place away from the eyes of others. She crawled through, and then flopped down on a bank of grass next to the willows. She looked up. The sky was quite cloudless, a singing, echoing emptiness. This good place, this kind country, so gentle, so threatened. She lay back and closed her eyes. The strange, unsettling feeling was still with her; curiously, it made her aware of just how much she loved the piece of earth upon which she lay, that particular grass, that particular tiny patch of Suffolk.

  Fourteen

  OVER THE WEEKS that followed, La saw very little of Feliks. There was no sign of him when she arrived for work, nor when she left.

  “How’s he settling in?” she asked Henry Madder when he came down to the hen houses to inspect the place where La had fixed the fence.

  “Just fine. He’s a hard worker. Your squadron-leader friend was right.”

  “He said that he was a good worker?”

  Henry kicked at the fence repair to test its strength.

  “Nice job, La. No, he just said that he was a good man. Amounts to the same thing I suppose.” Henry kicked at the fence again. The repair held. “Damn fox. Damn war. The hunt can’t feed enough dogs. All that meat they need. So old fox gets away with murder.”

  La sighed. “Poor hens. They have no idea there’s a war on.”

  “Lucky them.”

  La brought the conversation back to Feliks. “Where is he? I haven’t seen him.”

  Henry pointed towards the far end of the farm. “Down there. Pott’s Field. He’s digging drainage. I’ve been meaning to do that for years, and now we can get it done. Pott’s has always been too marshy. If we drain it properly, we can get a winter crop maybe this year.”

  She saw him, though, a few days later, when she was just about to finish work. Henry had asked him to take a break from the drainage and cut grass for fodder; he was using a scythe, and had taken his shirt off for the heat. La watched him for a few moments, and then, fastening the hen-run door, she made her way up to Henry’s kitchen.

  Henry was sitting at the table with an open account book before him. He looked up when La entered.

  “If I had to pay you and Feliks proper wages,” he said, “I’d be bankrupt.”

  “You don’t expect me to believe that, Henry,” said La.

  “Believe it or not, it’s true.”

  “I think that you’re one of these farmers who keeps a lot of money under his bed, or in a cupboard somewhere.” She had read about just such a case; the farmer had died and his daughter had discovered six thousand pounds in a bag under the stairs.

  Henry moved in his seat. Just slightly. “What makes you say that?” There was an edge to his voice.

  “Oh, just a suspicion.” La moved to the sink, a large Belfast. “Anyway, I’d like to take him some water,” she said. “It must be hot work, out there in the sun.”

  “There’s lemonade in the cupboard,” said Henry. “Take a look. Go on. He deserves it.”

  She found the large bottle and poured a glass.

  “And you?” said Henry. “You can have some if you like.”

  “I don’t really deserve it,” said
La. “He’s the one who’s been working.”

  She went out with the glass of lemonade on a small tray and made her way down to the field. Feliks saw her coming before she arrived, and he stopped working, leaning on his scythe, waiting for her. She gave him the lemonade and he took it and drank it in one draught. He smiled at her, as if in triumph at the short work he had made of the drink, handing her back the empty glass.

  The feeling that she had experienced came back. She felt her heart thumping. Ridiculous, she thought. Ridiculous. She looked down at the ground, at the blade of the scythe, at the shoes he was wearing, boots that had badly scuffed toes.

  She felt the glass, cool to the touch, moist with condensation. “Would you like to come and have a meal at my house? Tonight?”

  She surprised herself. This had not been planned.

  He moved his hands on the handle of the scythe. “Yes, I would like that.”

  “Good.”

  “You must show me how to get there. Henry says there is a bicycle …”

  La explained and he listened. She gave him the directions and left him. Up at the house, Henry wordlessly took the glass from her and returned to the scrutiny of his account book. But then, a few moments later, he looked up and said, “Don’t go and get any silly ideas about that Pole.”

  La caught her breath. “What I do or don’t do is none of your business, Henry. Thank you.”

  He assumed a pained expression. “Sorry! I was only thinking of you. Men could take advantage of you, you see.”

  La’s answer was cold. “Thank you for worrying about me.”

  I am not in love, she said to herself. I am finished with love.

  WHEN SHE RETURNED to the house that morning, the postman had delivered a letter from Tim, written on RAF stationery. “I have spoken to the C.O. about your orchestra,” he wrote. “He was a bit sceptical at first, but he’s like that about every idea that anybody comes up with. He pointed out that there were so many comings and goings that it would be difficult to have any continuity. Then he said that if we had anything, we should have a station band. And that idea, he said, had already been rejected: nobody to organise it.