“Of course not.”
“Frankly, I’d say that he’s disappeared for the duration, and … That’s one of the wretched things about this whole show. All this not knowing where anybody is or what’s going on. It’s like being in a forest with a candle.”
She was distracted by the metaphor. Tim occasionally came up with expressions that did not quite fit. She pictured herself in a wood, with a candle. “How far that little candle throws his beams,” she mused.
He stared at her. “What?”
“Shakespeare. You know how you remember bits and pieces? That’s one that I always remembered. The Merchant of Venice. How far that little candle throws his beams / So shines a good deed in a naughty world.”
“I see.” He paused. Shakespeare. He had a vague sense that Shakespeare came into what they were all doing; somewhere, in a way of which he was not certain. Somebody had said something about that on the wireless the other day, but it had gone in one ear and out the other, he thought. “You’re going to miss him, aren’t you?”
She closed her eyes. “I will. Yes, I’ll miss him. I’ll miss him an awful lot …”
“I’m sorry, La. I’m sorry about all of this. This wretched war. Everything. Maybe at the end of it all, he’ll … he’ll come back here.”
She did not think that likely. “I doubt it.”
They sat in silence. Then Tim looked at his watch, and frowned.
“I’d better go. I’m on duty again in an hour.”
La rose to her feet. “One last thing. Do you think he knows that I was the one who mentioned his … his slips of the tongue?”
Tim was not sure. “Maybe. It depends on the interrogators. I imagine that they usually protect their informants, but then they may ask things that make it pretty obvious who’s said what.” He stopped, and put a hand on her shoulder. He was like a brother, she thought. “Are you worried? I don’t think he’s the sort to hold a grudge, if that’s any help.”
THE NEXT DAY, when she had finished with the hens—the fox had learned to leap up into the laying boxes and had taken two overnight—she found Henry struggling to fix the latch on a gate. With his arthritic hands it was difficult to use a screwdriver, and La gently took the implement from him and quickly effected the repair.
“I could do it,” he muttered. “But my hands are bad today. Thank you, La.”
She looked at him sympathetically. “You’re doing well in the circumstances. Lots of people would have given up.”
“We don’t give up,” said Henry. “My dad didn’t. He had the same thing. He never gave up.”
“Good. That’s the spirit.”
She wiped her hands on the sides of her breeches; the screwdriver handle had been greasy. One of Henry’s geese waddled past them and inspected them casually before continuing her journey.
“She’s going to make somebody’s Christmas,” said Henry. “Look at her. Fattening up nicely. Getting ready for the big day.”
They began to walk back to the farmhouse, where the eggs were to be stacked before La left.
She chose her moment. “I’ve had news of Feliks,” she said, once they were in the kitchen and Henry was putting on the kettle.
He was about to place the kettle on the range, and his hand stopped in mid-air before he lowered it. “Yes?”
“Yes. Are you interested?”
He shrugged. “Don’t think much about him.”
La had not expected this. “But you think he stole your money. Surely you …”
“No. Not any more.”
She stared at him. “You do know that Percy Brown let him go?”
He stood with his back to her, watching the kettle. “Knew that. He told me himself. Cycled out here and told me. No evidence, he said. Never liked him, that Percy Brown.”
“But he cleared Feliks. So that’s that, isn’t it?” She paused. She felt anger rising within her. Henry clearly felt no guilt about Feliks, and this appalled her. She would stop doing his hens; she did not have to stay. “And you might think about saying sorry to him, you know. Not that you’ll be able to find him.”
Now she added, although she did not know why; he did not deserve it. “And I have an idea who took your money, if you’re interested.”
He turned round to face her. He was smiling. “Nobody,” he said. “Nobody took it. It was in the other cupboard. Got a bit mixed up. It’s all there. Every penny.”
She did not drink tea with him, but attended to the stacking of the eggs in silence. He watched her from the other side of the room, and although she tried to ignore him, she was conscious of his gaze.
“You’re not cross with me?” he asked.
She did not reply.
“La? You’re not cross, are you? I really thought it had gone. I looked and looked. But I had forgotten, you see, that I had moved it. It’s easy to make a mistake, La.”
She sighed. “All right, Henry. All right. I’m not cross with you.”
“Good. Careful with those eggs now. The shells get very brittle, you know, round about this time of year, when the hens are hungry.”
Twenty-two
DURING WARTIME,” remarked one of La’s friends, much later, “women receive offers. Later these offers seem so much less frequent.”
“What a peculiar thing to say!”
“But it’s true, La. I really think it’s true. Look at us. Look at both of us. How old were you when it started? You must have been about the same age as me—late twenties? Twenty-eight? Twenty-nine?”
“Twenty-eight. I was thirty-four when it finished.”
Her friend smiled. “And you didn’t meet any men? Right next door to an RAF base? What about that band of yours?”
“It was an orchestra.”
“Orchestra, then. Somebody said that you had air force people in it. You must have met bags of men, La. Nice ones, too. Americans. You could have ended up in New York …”
“I did meet men. But remember, I was a widow. I didn’t feel that I wanted to get involved. It was such an odd time. There were one or two, yes. One, I suppose. A man who played the flute in the orchestra. A Pole.”
“Tragic. What they put up with.”
“Yes.”
“Tell me about him, La. Would you?”
I DON’T REALLY KNOW HOW to put it. You know how sometimes you meet somebody and you know that this person is going to be more than a mere acquaintance—you just know that. It’s difficult to put one’s finger on why you feel that—perhaps there’s some form of chemistry there—not sexual—just a chemistry of friendship, if there’s such a thing. That’s how I felt about this man, Feliks. I just felt that.
Remember that I was widowed very young. In fact, I had already been left by Richard when he died. That was such a strange marriage. He had more or less pestered me into marrying him in the first place—he proposed after we had known one another for hardly more than a month. You know how it was in those days—you got married very early because that’s the way it was. People expected it of you, and then you came to expect it of yourself. That was the way it was.
Do you remember Dr. Price? Did you know her? We didn’t really see much of one another when we were at Girton, did we, you and I? Of course I had just gone up when you were about to graduate, and so it was inevitable that we didn’t get to know one another all that well. But you do remember Price, don’t you? She was not at all keen on men—the female equivalent of some of those bachelor classicists in places like King’s or Trinity who would run a mile rather than talk to a woman. Dr. Price used to talk about the tragedy of her girls who went off and got married more or less immediately after finishing at Cambridge. She hated it. She said most of us would be unhappy. She revelled in that prediction; she loved news of divorce.
And she was right. Of course some were happy, but I think they were the minority. Most of us just made do. We worked at our marriages. We put up with unfaithfulness and unreasonableness and seven-year itches and all that. And we were unhappy.
You may think that’s a bit cynical, but there we are. That’s what I felt. Richard went off with somebody else and left me. Then he died. I was pretty confused, as you can imagine. I had fallen in love with him after we married—a dependence that you suddenly find has settled on you like a blanket you can’t kick off. Well, I felt that. And so I felt terribly let down. I went off to the country, to a house that my parents-in-law had. And that’s where I spent the war. All of it.
Men? There was a very nice man called Tim. He was married, though, and we were just friends—there was nothing more to it than that. I thought at one stage that he felt something more, and that it could have gone the other way, but it never did: I would not have allowed it. I remembered what the Frenchwoman had done to me and I could not do it to his wife, who was stuck over in Cardiff with an invalid aunt. And there was an American officer, also air force. He played the clarinet in the orchestra for almost eight months, and he came to see me at the house. He came from a place called Des Moines, which people said was in the middle of nowhere, but which he described as if it were Eden itself. He was charming; he amused me, and I liked him a great deal, but again I held back from any involvement.
Why? Well, I think that it had something to do with Feliks. I suppose if I’m honest with myself, I have to say that I had fallen in love with Feliks. He was reserved with me, and I thought at first that he didn’t like me, but then I realised that this was just the way he was with everyone. He was very formal, very polite in an old-fashioned way.
I thought of him so much. When I woke up in the morning he was in my mind, and my first thought was whether I would see him that day. And if I did see him, if we talked or had any sort of contact, it was as if the day had been sanctified, rendered holy by his presence. Absurd? Of course it was, but love is an absurd phenomenon, utterly and completely different from any other state of mind. Do you know the feeling? You must do. It’s as if the world has changed about you. Everything seems more vital, more charged. That’s how it was. In the middle of that seemingly endless, ghastly battle with shortages and cold and, in my case, hungry foxes, everything is suddenly changed. Had he shown any sign of affection for me—in that way—then I’m sure that we would have been lovers. But he did not. And so I watched him from afar, as some women have to do; they wait upon the man they love, discreetly, and in fear of rejection, like somebody worshipping a god whom they can’t quite see.
There was an issue. That’s the best way I can describe it—and he had to go away. They took him off to do sensitive work near Cambridge and I did not see him again until, well, it was right at the end. VE Day, more or less—a few days afterwards, in fact. Do you remember the atmosphere then? How things were? My little orchestra had scraped its way through the entire war, and now it had come to an end we decided to hold a victory concert. That was when it happened. That was when I saw him again.
But do you know something? Do you know what I think of myself? I think here I am at the age of forty-five, by myself. Men liked me. I was young enough during the war and immediately afterwards. It could have been different. But I think: here you are, one of those who have missed the bus.
Twenty-three
LA REMEMBERED HOW at the beginning, before the war really got going, they had spoken, half in jest but half seriously, about a victory concert. Superstition had taken over, and there had been no such hubristic talk after that, until April 1945, when one of the sisters from Bury whispered to La—this sister for some reason always whispered when addressing La: “La, it’s getting close, I think. Maybe the orchestra should be ready.”
She agreed, but said that they would not talk about it just yet. “I’ll look out some pieces. I’ll find something.”
They would avoid triumphalism, she thought; there would be opportunity enough for that elsewhere. Their victory concert would be one that would give people the chance to think about what they had been through. There would be something reflective, something peaceful, and perhaps, at one point, just silence for a few minutes. Music on either side of a silence made that silence all the more powerful, all the more moving.
The moment itself was really a series of moments. She happened to hear the news flash: the brief sound of bells and then the words, The German Radio has just announced that Hitler is dead. She sat down and folded her hands on her lap. She stood up and then sat down again. She did not know what to do. It seemed to her that everything would now stop; everything had been geared to this moment, for year after year, and now it had arrived. What would there be to do?
She barely slept, and was bone-tired when she went to deal with the hens. Henry produced a bottle of brandy and poured her half a glass. He had been drinking already, and his words were slurred. He kissed her on the cheek, and she smelled the alcohol on his breath.
“You won’t leave the hens now, will you?” he asked.
“I haven’t thought about it,” she said. “I don’t want to look after them forever.”
“I understand. But please … please not just yet.”
She sipped cautiously at her brandy; it was not a drink that she liked. They listened to the prime minister together. La closed her eyes as the familiar voice spoke to them; she heard the words, but her mind wandered; she felt only gratitude that he was there, that he had lived to see this moment. She conjured up a mental picture of a man in a tank suit and slippers, smiling at her. Comfortable, slightly eccentric, kind; it was Mr. Churchill she saw, but it was also England.
We may allow ourselves a brief period of rejoicing, said Mr. Churchill.
She called on the Aggs. Mrs. Agg said, “I can’t believe it, Mrs. Stone. I just can’t.”
“Well it’s true.”
Lennie came into the room. “Good, isn’t it?” he muttered. “Old Hitler’s dead now.”
La rose to her feet and embraced him, planting a kiss on his cheek. He smelled slightly sour; the smell of clothes that were not washed frequently enough. She spoke on impulse. “Our orchestra is going to have a victory concert, Lennie. Would you like to play?”
He looked at her in astonishment. “Me? I can’t play.”
“But you like Billy Cotton, don’t you? You must be musical. You could play the drums. We need somebody for that. Our percussionist would like some help. She’ll tell you what to do.”
Mrs. Agg watched anxiously. “Go on, Lennie.”
He looked at his mother, and she nodded.
“All right. I’ll play.”
LA’S ORCHESTRA PERFORMED ITS CONCERT for victory a few days after VE Day. Word got out in the area and more people came than there were seats. The concert was on a Saturday afternoon, a warm day for that time of year. There were spring flowers on the banks and at the edge of the fields; the trees were coming into leaf. The Bury paper had mentioned the event—Small orchestra plans big concert—and there had been a brief piece in the Cambridge Daily News. It was this report that Feliks had seen, and that had brought him to the concert, arriving slightly later than the other players. He slipped in unnoticed by La, and he shared a music stand and music with another flautist, a driver from the base, who had recently joined the orchestra.
La looked up and saw Feliks just before they began the first piece—she had been busy handing out sheet music to one or two of the other players. For a few moments she stood quite still. Then Feliks looked up and their eyes met. He mouthed the word Hello. She nodded, and smiled. She did not show her feelings.
They started the concert. Tim stood up and made a short speech. He said, “I am one of those who are grateful to La for keeping our little orchestra going through thick and thin. I knew one day that we would have this victory concert, but obviously I did not know when it would be. I thought it might be two years; then I thought three. It’s been almost five. Now we are here to celebrate what has happened over the last few days and to think about some of the members of this orchestra who cannot be here because they have given their lives for their country—for their countries—and for peace.”
The ha
ll was quiet as he read out three names. There was a young airman from Lancaster—still a boy, at eighteen, who had played the trombone, and who had been teased at the base because he admitted to never having had a girlfriend; there was a Canadian mechanic, a man from Nova Scotia, a quiet man who talked only of fishing; and a man from Des Moines, who had played the clarinet, and who had been shot down over Holland.
Tim sat down. La did not want to be thanked, but the audience was clapping her now, including those who were standing outside, listening through the door because there were not enough seats to be had. They all applauded. She looked out, over the heads of the players. She saw Feliks, who had laid his flute on his lap and was clapping, too.
It was not easy for her to get through the programme. At the end, when the orchestra played “Jerusalem” and people started to sing, La cried. She continued to conduct, though, and made it to the end, when she turned and faced the audience and bowed.
Afterwards, there was tea and cake served from tables at the side of the hall. The village had baked for days, and every sultana and cherry for miles around had been committed to the purpose. She found herself talking to Tim, and could tell from his eyes that he had cried, too.
“Dab’s here,” he said. “Did you see him?”
She looked through the milling crowd. The whole village, together with everyone from the surrounding farms, was there. And there were at least thirty people from the air base, many in uniform. Where was Feliks?
She saw him near the door, talking to an airman. She slipped through the crowd until she was standing behind him.
“Feliks?”
He turned round slowly. She waited a moment, and then moved forward and put her arms round him.
“Thank you for coming,” she said. “I wish I had known.”
“I read about it in the paper,” he said. “I had to come.”
“Of course.”