La's Orchestra Saves the World

  She had put tea in the pot and there was a small plate of freshly baked scones.

  He gestured to the scones. “You should not have bothered … just for me.”

  “I had some flour. If you don’t use it, it gets weevils.”

  He looked confused, and she explained. His English was good, but there were words now and then that defeated him. One would not learn weevils.

  She went out of the room to get the flute. When she came back in, he sprang to his feet.

  “This is for you.”

  She handed him the box.

  He looked at her.

  “Go on. Open it. Please.”

  He eased back the catch and pushed open the lid. She noticed that his hands were trembling slightly.

  “Oh. Oh.”

  He looked up at her again. She found it hard to read his expression.

  She smiled. “You did say that you played the flute, didn’t you? Well, there you are. A flute. Try it.”

  He shook his head while he eased the flute joints into place. He muttered something, which she thought was in Polish. She hardly heard it.

  “I believe it’s a good one,” said La. “Not that I’m the best judge of these things.”

  He raised the flute to his lips. La saw the concentration, and she knew, even before he drew breath, that he would play it well.

  After a few notes, a scale, he lowered the flute and shook his head. “It is so kind of you,” he said. “But I cannot pay for this. I do not have the money.”

  He began to disassemble the flute.

  “No,” La protested. “Don’t do that. You don’t have to pay for it. Don’t be so silly. It’s a present. I told you.”

  “But I can’t accept a big present like this. A small present, perhaps … but this is a very big thing. It’s a good flute. And I can’t pay.”

  It was not going well. She had anticipated some awkwardness over her gift, but not this. She had not thought he would insist on paying for it.

  “Listen, Feliks. This is a present from me to you. I’m giving it to you because you are far away from your home. Maybe you have a flute back in Poland—I don’t know. But I want you to have this because we are in the same war together.” She sighed. She did not think that she was convincing him. “All right. When the war is over, pay me then.”

  He stopped disassembling the flute. “At the end?”

  “Yes. Whatever will make you happy.”

  He thought. “All right. But in the meantime, you must let me do something for you.” He gestured behind him, out of the window. “Your garden. I could help you with your garden.”

  She felt the release of tension, and laughed. “My garden? Yes, that would be very useful. Such as it is, now that I have all those potatoes.”

  He was staring out of the window. “You can make a garden around the potatoes. I could make it beautiful for you. Next spring you would see the difference.”

  She accepted. She felt gratitude at the thought that he would be there, in her garden. That was what pleased her.

  “And you can play in my orchestra. It’s not much, but we don’t have a flautist.”

  He made a gesture of modesty, of reluctance. “I will not improve it. My reading of music is rusty.”

  “Anybody would improve us,” said La. “Even a rusty player. You must.”

  He picked up the flute and slipped the joints together again. She could tell that he held it with love, and that convinced her that she had done the right thing.

  “Go on. Why not play it? Play anything that comes to mind. Something Polish, perhaps.”

  “I had an uncle who was a very good player. He played beautifully. My uncle in Frank …”

  He broke off, his comment left hanging in the air. La looked down at her shoes. One of them, the left one, had a small crust of mud on the tip. She had not noticed it. She moved her other foot to dislodge it. Perhaps she had misheard.

  He did not play the flute, but twisted its sections apart, put them away quickly and then rose to his feet, suddenly formal again.

  “I’m very grateful for this gift,” Feliks said.

  She forced herself to smile. “Good.”

  “I must go now,” he said.

  “Of course.”

  She watched him from the window, her thoughts in confusion. She saw him walk down the gravel drive towards the bicycle. Then suddenly he turned round and looked back at the house. La took a hurried step back so that he should not see her at the window. But he had spotted her, she thought, because his eyes had gone to the window at which she had been standing.

  She crossed to the back of the room and pushed the door shut. Then she sat down, in the chair that he had occupied. She noticed that he had left a small canvas shopping bag on the floor. She hesitated for a moment, and then picked it up and looked inside.

  What did I expect? she asked herself. Something more than this? There was a small onion at the bottom of the bag; a small, scruffy onion from which the first layer of skin had begun to peel; that was all. She replaced the onion and put the bag on the dresser. She would take it back to him tomorrow, at the farm. She moved back to the window and gazed out at the field on the other side of the road. What had he said? That he had an uncle in somewhere that sounded like Frankfurt. It was a perfectly innocuous comment: anybody might have an uncle in Frankfurt—if that is what he had said; the husband of his aunt, for instance—a Polish woman married to a German; there must be many such marriages when countries neighbour upon one another. Poles and Germans spilled across one another’s borders, and where exactly these borders should be was one of the issues behind the war anyway. Feliks could be a Silesian German who saw himself as a Pole; such people presumably had to make a choice, and many of them must have thrown in their lot with Poland rather than Germany. But would a German-speaking Pole have an uncle in Frankfurt? Quite possibly: having an uncle in Frankfurt did not make one a German.

  She persuaded herself. It was nonsense. The problem with war was that it made us all so suspicious. We saw things that were not there; we imagined an enemy behind every innocent bush or tree; saw clouds as veils for bombers, and death; saw the world as a place of dread and distrust; saw an honourable Polish airman as a fifth columnist, or even something worse.

  She would not be part of that narrow climate of distrust and suspicion; that was simply not the way that she thought. Feliks was an exile, far away from home, friendless and dependent on the charity of others; she would not be the one to challenge him, to make him feel that he was the subject of narrow mistrust, from her, as much as from everybody else.

  The decision made, she did not allow herself to think about the matter again. And the next day, when she saw Feliks again, it was as if nothing untoward had occurred. That proves it, thought La. That proves that whatever it was that I heard was nothing of any significance. She made him his lemonade and took it down to Pott’s Field. He thanked her and told her that he had tried the flute out when he had got home the previous evening. He would never be able to repay her, he said; never, as it was far too good an instrument for him. She said, “But you’re going to do my garden for me, remember?”

  He nodded. “Of course, I’ll start that. I’ll come tomorrow. After work.”

  “Bring the flute. And you will play in my orchestra?”

  He hesitated for a moment. His eyes, with their rather un settling lucent quality, were upon her. “You really want me to?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Then I shall do what you want.”

  He arrived at her house the next day, in the late afternoon, as he had promised. She walked round the garden with him and discussed what needed to be done. They would grow more vegetables, because that was what everybody was being urged to do.

  “So there should be no flowers in wartime?” he asked.

  “Not so many, perhaps. But there should always be room for some flowers. Even in wartime.”

  He reached down and picked a weed that had intruded on a flower bed
. “Just as there should always be room for God, even in wartime. Some people in Poland, you know, said that he had gone away. Some of them were Jews who felt that they had been abandoned by God.”

  “One might understand their feelings. Everybody else seems to have abandoned them. Looking the other way.”

  “Not in this country,” said Feliks. “You have been kinder. You have never allowed that. Some people, maybe, have said cruel things. You had your fascists, too. But not in the same numbers as back there. These things go back a long time.”

  Cruel things. She liked his turn of phrase. It did not dress anything up. This war was about hatred, she thought; hatred and cruelty on a massive scale.

  “We can’t afford to be without God,” Feliks continued. “Even if he doesn’t exist, we have to hold on to him. Because if we don’t, then how are we to convince ourselves that we have to go on with this fight? If you take God out of it, then right and justice become small, human things. And weak things, too.”

  La thought about this. He was right, perhaps, even if she did not feel that she needed God in the same way Feliks seemed to need him. She would do whatever she had to do—even if it was for the sake of simple decency. You did not wipe a child‘s tears because God told you to do so. You did it because the tears were there.

  He worked in the garden for two hours before she called him in for a cup of tea. They sat together in the kitchen, and then La suggested that they play a duet together; she had looked out some music.

  He was better than she was; far better. But he was a considerate partner, and they reached the end of the piece together. He laid down his flute.

  “You are every good.”

  She laughed. “I’m not.”

  “No, your playing has expression. It is very good.”

  They played another piece. At the end of that, he looked at his watch. “It’s getting late.”

  She did not want him to go. She almost said, “Stay with me and have supper. I have enough food here.” But she did not. It was not a good idea, and she should not allow herself to become involved with this man; she would only make a fool of herself, as he would not reciprocate. If you are going to love him, she said to herself, it is going to have to be from a distance. Secretly.

  Seventeen

  IT WAS AUTUMN. Feliks had finished Pott’s Field and had brought in Henry’s harvest. The toll on the hens had been heavy: the foxes, perhaps sensing that their human adversaries were pre occupied, had bred enthusiastically and their cubs had proved cunning—and hungry. With Henry’s summer crops in, there was not much for Feliks to do on Madder’s Farm, and after a call from an official from the Ministry of Agriculture—a visit in which voices had been raised—he was allocated to help over the winter on a pig farm several miles away; he might come back in the spring, but no promises were made. Henry accused Feliks of requesting the transfer and did not believe him when he protested that it had not been his idea.

  La drove Feliks to his new cottage, his possessions packed into the back of her car. Everything he possessed had fitted into two trunks and a battered cardboard box; she found it difficult to take in that this could be all that a man might own in this world; if it was indeed all that he owned.

  She asked him about it as they drove over. It was a Sunday afternoon in late November. A cold fog had drifted in from the east that morning and had lingered, a white shroud over the landscape, dusting the hedgerows and the branches of the trees with rime. Here and there, stark against the white, a winter crop made a carpet of dark green. She thought it strange that war should go on when nature wanted things to stop, to pause, to sleep for a while.

  “What did you leave behind?” she asked. “You’ve never told me much about your life … before. Did you lose a lot?”

  His hands were clasped together on his lap. He opened them. There was an intimacy to their conversation in the car, an intimacy that seemed lacking elsewhere, lacking, even when they’d played a duet. When they spoke at the farm he was always on the point of doing something, on the point of going somewhere. He did not answer for a few moments. But then he said, “Leave behind? Nothing very much. A car. An elderly mother. A sister who is a nun.”

  She reflected on his answer. It was a life condensed into telegraphese. And her own life in such terms—what would it be? An unfaithful husband who died. A house in Suffolk. A rag-bag orchestra. A vegetable garden.

  “You lived in a city?”

  He stared out of the car window; wiped at the condensation with his sleeve. “Yes. Although my mother lived in the country. A small estate. Not very big at all, and with quite a few debts. My father was never very good at such things.”

  La felt satisfaction that she had guessed correctly. A gentleman. “I could tell …”

  She noticed him tense up as she began her response. “You could tell what?” he asked.

  “I could tell that you came from a certain background.” She paused. “Well, to put it very directly, I could tell that you were a gentleman. Not …”

  He laughed. “Not a peasant?”

  “That’s not a word we use in this country.”

  He seemed intrigued. “You have no peasants? What about Henry? Is he a peasant?”

  It was La’s turn to laugh. “Henry, a peasant? That’s very amusing, Feliks. No, Henry would not describe himself as a peasant.”

  “But would you describe him as one?”

  “Certainly not. I told you: we don’t go in for peasants here. We have yeomen, of course. But that’s something quite different. To call somebody a peasant would be insulting. People are sensitive about that sort of thing.”

  “In Poland it’s not shameful to be a peasant. It’s an honest thing to be.”

  La thought that was right. After all, everything above the rank of peasant involved some pretension, some claims of superiority over others. But be that as it may, Henry Madder was certainly not a peasant.

  “He’s quite well-off, actually,” she said. “Henry. I think that he’s got money tucked away in that house of his.”

  “That’s what peasants do with money,” said Feliks. “They tuck it under the mattress. Everybody knows that—and that includes thieves!”

  “In Warsaw, were you …”

  He held up a hand. “Kraków. Not Warsaw.”

  She corrected herself. “Were you at the university in Kraków? Tim said that you were studying.”

  “I was. And then I went off to join the air force with some friends. It was just the thing to be in the air force. We Poles used to think that the cavalry was the place to be—it was very dashing, very romantic. You have no idea what the Polish cavalry was like. But the air force was even more so. My friends led a very romantic life. Lots of parties and aerobatics.”

  Parties and aerobatics: La smiled at this. And then, she assumed, everything had suddenly become very serious.

  “And now this,” she muttered.

  “What?”

  “I mean, this …” She took a hand off the wheel and waved it at the fields. “Suffolk. A pig farm. A funny little orchestra with a lot of people who can’t play very well.”

  “Maybe,” said Feliks. “But then you can consider anybody’s life, can’t you, and find things in it that are very ordinary. And in wartime, I think, the important thing is to be alive, don’t you think?”

  La suddenly thought of Richard. Yes, what Feliks said was right, even if … but there was no more time to discuss it. They were near the pig farm; they could smell it on the wind. She glanced at him quickly, and then looked back at the road ahead. She felt confused: she wanted to be with him, she wanted to be close to him, but she did not want to be rebuffed. If he did not reciprocate her feelings, and she thought that he did not, then she would make sure that she did not have those feelings. It was as simple as that. She was certainly not going to be one of those women who pined for an inaccessible or indifferent man; she would not be hurt again.

  She helped him with his suitcases and the box; his meagre possessi
ons that looked all the more pathetic when stacked outside the door of his new home—a life in two suitcases and a box. She remembered the words that had impressed her so deeply at that first funeral she had attended, that of an elderly homosexual uncle who had been shunned in his life and wept over in his death: It is certain that we bring nothing into the world and it is certain that we leave with nothing. So all the rest, even this small collection of possessions, was temporary. And yet so strong was our sense of ownership, even for our limited tenancy, that there were those who were prepared to kill others for what they had, just as there were those who were prepared to give their lives in its defence.

  The cottage that he had been allocated by the farmer turned out to be no more than two rooms added onto the end of a tackroom. La could smell the leather of the harnesses through the thin walls; the sweet smell of dubbin, the mixture of horse-sweat and oil. Everything was run-down: the grubby windows let in very little light, and there was a pervasive feel of damp in the air.

  La was indignant. “They can’t expect you to stay here. They can’t. Look. Look at the patches on the wall. That’s damp. See? If you put your hand there you can feel it.”

  Feliks looked about him. “It’s a roof over my head. I can’t be fussy.”

  La snorted. “I can. I’m going to talk to the farmer.”

  He took hold of her arm. It was the first time he had touched her. “Please don’t. I’ll tidy it up. I’ll heat it and the damp will go away. Everything will be all right.”

  She was reluctant, but he insisted. He would not let her stay to help him clean and tidy the place, and so she left him there in her anger and drove home. She had wanted to say that he should come and stay with her; she had more than enough room in the house, but she did not know how to put it; whatever she said, she suspected that it would sound like an invitation to be something more than a lodger.

  She asked herself whether that was what she wanted, whether she would like Feliks to be her lover. She was not sure; the war made everything different. If she became involved with him, she would have to accept that he could go away. He came from a different country, from a different world, and sooner or later he would want to go back to that world. She belonged in England, and her sense of that belonging was all the stronger now that England was under such threat. I love this country, she thought; I love everything about it; its lived-in shabbiness; its peculiar, old-fashioned gentleness. I love it.