La hoped that Feliks would get in touch with her, but he did not. She sent him a Christmas card that December, and told him that she had moved back to Suffolk. With the card she sent him a newspaper cutting about an amateur orchestra in Norwich. “I thought you might find this interesting,” she wrote at the top of the report. “Remember how it was.”
LA THOUGHT ABOUT PEACE. She had been born just before the first war, and had been seven when it ended. She remembered the Armistice as a time of bells and strange, adult rejoicing. She remembered tears and solemnity. Then there had been her own war, the one which she knew had involved such a narrow escape. She had seen the estimates of the number killed: the mind could hardly contemplate those tens of millions, all those wasted, curtailed lives; all that misery. And then, after all that, an arms race that threatened to obscure the losses of the first fifty years of the century; this could destroy all human life, pulverise continents, darken the skies for centuries. And that apocalyptic vision was not fantasy; it was real. They could work out—and had done so—how many tons of dynamite there were for each of our human lives, for every one of us. She awoke sometimes at night and thought of this. But it cannot happen, she told herself. Humanity could not be so stupid.
But it almost did happen. The world had become divided into two hostile camps, each bristling with arms, each warily guarding its appointed patch, marking out territory with barbed wire and towers. In one of these camps, people lived under the thumb of a tsar in modern clothing, serfs to an ideology that sought to bend human nature to its particular vision; in the other, human nature could be itself, but that brought injustice and exploitation, not always held in check by the values proclaimed by the rhetoric of freedom. La saw the world change before her eyes; people relaxed, dressed less formally, spoke about the end of the old oppressive structures that had held people down in ways subtle and unsubtle. But for her, life seemed unchanged, barely touched by the movements and shifts of the times. Again I have missed it, she thought; heady things are happening, and I am not there; I am somewhere in the wings, watching what is happening on the stage, in a play in which I have no real part. That is what my life has been. Even in my marriage, Richard’s heart was elsewhere. I have been a handmaiden; she relished the word—a handmaiden; one who waits and watches; assists, perhaps, but only in a small way. Standing in her kitchen in the house in Suffolk, one afternoon in late summer, she looked out of her window, over the fields on the other side of the road and to the sky beyond. Clouds had built up, heavy purple banks; rain would reach her soon—it was already falling on the ploughed fields to the east, a veil of it drifting down, caught in the slanting afternoon light, white against the inky bulk of the clouds behind. She stood quite still, transfixed by the moment; as happens sometimes, when we are not expecting it; we stop and think about the beauty of the world, and its majesty, and the insignificance of our concerns and cares. And yet we know that they are not insignificant—at least not to us; pain and loss may be little things sub specie aeternitatis but to us, even in our ultimate insignificance, they loom large, are wounding, are sore. So each of us, thought La, each one of us should do something to make life better for somebody, to change the course of events, even if only in the most local sense. Even a handmaiden can do something about that.
The moment passed. La had become accustomed to an uneventful life; a life of reading, of listening to music, of occasional entertaining of friends from London. She travelled to Italy, taking guided art tours in groups of like-minded people. Friendships developed on these trips, but even when addresses were exchanged at the end, and promises were made to keep in touch, this rarely happened. La did not mind; she was lonely, but had accepted loneliness as her lot. There were her authors and her composers; they kept her company; Bach, Mozart, Rossini were always at hand, did not let her down.
A friend passed her literature on the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. She read the leaflets and thought: everything they say here is true. We cannot use these weapons; nobody can. But she knew that there were those who did not think this way, and that some of these people, many of them, in fact, were generals and military strategists. For them, atomic weapons were simply another item in their bulging armamentarium—a powerful item, but one that had a trigger that could be pulled in the same way as any other trigger.
She joined a march from Aldermaston, where these weapons were developed, to London, to stand in Trafalgar Square in a crowd of almost one hundred thousand people and listen to the call for the rejection of these ways of killing us all. She was not a pacifist, and argued quite strongly with a man who walked beside her on the march. He said that humanity would never restrain itself in war, and that the only solution was to eschew war altogether; he said that, with all the conviction of his eighteen or nineteen years. But he was too young, she felt, to remember what it was like to be faced with evil that is intent on fulfilling itself.
“What about Hitler?” she said.
“People always ask that question,” he said. “Like the rabbit out of the hat. What about Hitler?”
“Well,” said La. “What about him? What would you have done?”
“Reasoned with him. Shown him and everybody like him that violence gets you nowhere.”
She stared at him. Someone on the other side of the column of marchers was singing, and the words of the song were being taken up by others.
“That would not have worked,” she said. “It would not have stopped Belsen. It would not have stopped Auschwitz. The only way to stop those was to fight those who created them.”
“And kill them?”
“Yes,” said La. “I suppose so.”
He looked at her scornfully. “Then what are you doing here?” he asked, and moved away to walk with somebody else. La thought: perhaps he does not really know; perhaps Auschwitz is just a name to him, like the name of any other place in the history of other people.
That autumn, the Russians exploded a fifty-megaton bomb above an Arctic island. This was four thousand times as powerful as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. La read about it in the newspapers and sat in silence. She remembered as a child a boy who lived a few houses away who loved fireworks. She had watched him once when he had tied ten squibs together to make a more powerful explosion. She had seen the light in his eyes, the enthusiasm, and had been aware, for the first time in her life, that there was something very different about the way in which boys thought. This came back to her now.
And then, the following year, it all almost came true. It happened so quickly; the photographic evidence was pinned up and pointed to by indignant politicians. The Russians were placing missiles in Cuba that would enable them to strike the United States at short range. Demands were made, and positions taken. Two deadly enemies, each capable of destroying the other, and everyone else with them, faced one another over a chess board of bristling missiles. When the news sank in, and what it could mean, La went out into her garden and stood for a moment, silent under the sky. The leaves had fallen and the garden was braced for winter; somewhere, high above her head, there was an aeroplane; the droning of its engine seemed ominous now, just as that same sound had been ominous exactly twenty years previously.
La thought: there is nothing that anybody can do. We are powerless. Last time, when evil incarnate threatened us, we could do something—and did. We each did something, even if it was only looking after hens. The world was smaller, more personal then; now there is nothing that any of us can do. This is being decided by machines with blinking lights; by radar screens; by the switches and levers of a world that has ceased to have anything to do with an ordinary person standing in her garden.
On the day after President Kennedy addressed the American people and the full gravity of the Cuban situation came to be understood, La sat down and drew up a list of those members of her orchestra with whom she was still in touch, or whose telephone number she knew. It came to twelve names, including Tim, Feliks and the two sisters from Bury. She telephoned them all that afterno
on and evening.
“Do you remember our victory concert?” she said.
Of course they did.
“I want to hold a concert for peace,” she said. “In five days’ time. I know that it’s not much notice, but there isn’t much time, I’m afraid.”
She asked people to contact other members of the orchestra and pass on the message. Everyone she spoke to said they would participate; nobody said that he or she could not come. Leave was taken. It was too important to say no, and they felt that they owed this to La.
She prepared the hall, helped by Mrs. Agg. Lennie put up notices, and the sisters in Bury spoke to the vicar of their parish, who passed the word around his congregation, and around others.
On the morning of the concert, La awoke early and walked in her garden, nursing a cup of tea. She looked up at the sky. If the end were to come, it would be the end of everything—the end of music, the end of her house, of Suffolk, of the birds, of lavender bushes, of England. She stood quite still and put her empty tea-cup down on the stone bench beside the pond she had created the previous year. A small frog launched itself into the water; it would be the end of frogs, and of whales, and of the sea itself.
They gathered in the tin hall. Many people came—so many that, as at the victory concert, there were people standing outside. The atmosphere was grave. They were silent; nobody talked or smiled as they had done in 1945.
La stood at the podium. She had chosen the music carefully, and although they had not had time to rehearse, and although so many were rusty, they played to the best of their ability, and the audience listened with solemnity. Nobody clapped in between the pieces. They were silent.
It could have been a time for gravity, for music in the minor keys of sadness and farewell, for that, in large part, is how people felt when the concert began. It hit them abruptly, and with shocking force: this could so easily be good-bye. They had lived with that knowledge ever since mushroom clouds first started to rise in the sky; they knew that a rash decision, a moment of reckless anger in the mind of a powerful man could bring the world to an end. It was almost impossible to absorb that knowledge, yet people had done so. But that was not really why La had called the concert. She had called it because she believed in the power of music. Absurdly, irrationally, she believed that music could make a difference to the temper of the world. She did not investigate this belief, test it to see whether it made sense; she simply believed it, and so she chose music that expressed order and healing; Bach for order; Mozart for healing. This was the antithesis of the anger and fear that could unleash the missiles; this was music showing the face of love, and forgiveness.
And then, near the end, somebody outside shouted, and the shout came through the door and into the hall. Somebody had heard, and was spreading the news. Mr. Khrushchev had made a speech on Moscow Radio. They were not going to die.
They stopped. People dropped their instruments. They embraced one another. They cried. Lennie hit his drums enthusiastically in one long, powerful roll that threatened to burst the instruments’ skins. Nobody worried. The loss of drums was nothing to the loss of the world. They laughed.
La walked back to her house. She would return to the hall, where a party had broken out, but she wanted to go back and fetch a coat, for it had turned cold. She was in her kitchen, preparing to return to the hall, when the car came into the drive. It was Feliks.
He got out of the car, and his two small boys were with him. She had seen him in the hall, and they had exchanged a few words, but she had not seen the boys. They looked so like Feliks, she thought; his two sons with those serious expressions that only small boys can have.
“I wanted to see you,” he said.
“And you’ve brought your boys.”
“Yes, these are my boys.”
They sat in the kitchen, where they had sat together so many times all those years ago. The boys played outside, some odd little game that involved the one chasing the other. “They can play like that for hours,” he said. “Boys. So much energy.”
“I don’t suppose they have any idea of the danger we’ve been through,” said La. “Fortunately for them.”
Feliks nodded. “Sometimes we don’t have an idea of the danger we’re in. Did we? During the war? Did we really know how close it came?”
“Perhaps we did. But we couldn’t really lead our lives thinking about it. We had to believe that we were going to be all right.” She paused. “You said something a long time ago. You said something about having to believe or we wouldn’t be able to continue. Do you remember that conversation?”
“No. I remember that we talked about a lot of things. But I don’t remember that.”
“Well you did. And I think that I said something about how we could find courage in unexpected places. Something like that.”
They were silent.
“And now, here we are again.” He looked at her. “Happy or unhappy, as the case may be. Content with the way our lives have worked out. Which is it, La? Which is it for you?”
“Happy,” she said. “Or happy enough. Some parts of my life have been unhappy.”
He seemed to be waiting for her to say something more. He raised an eyebrow. “And can you tell me? Do you want to?”
Of course, she thought. Of course I do.
“I might have been happier if I had had children.”
He looked away. “Yes, I understand.”
“And if I had been a better musician.” She laughed, and he did, too.
“You still have time to improve,” he said. “You could start your orchestra again.”
She did not think that she could. “There was a special time for that,” she said. “Not now.”
“Maybe not.”
The silence returned. The kitchen door had been pushed open by a small hand, and the boys had returned. The smaller one had fallen and there was mud on the knees of his trousers. La got up and fetched a damp cloth from the sink. “I’ll do that for you,” she said to the boy. “Come over here. I’ll fix you up.”
Felix watched. When she had finished wiping off the mud, the boy took a step backwards. He was shy.
Felix spoke. “La, your orchestra has saved the world—again.”
She made a self-deprecatory gesture. “I don’t know about that,” she said.
“I do,” he said.
She reached out to ruffle the hair of the smaller boy, who had been staring at her with wide eyes. “What are you going to do now?” she asked Feliks. “Go back to Glasgow?”
“Yes. I suppose I should.”
She drew breath. In the face of the end of everything, even if the threat had suddenly passed, one might say what one had always wanted to say. That is what she thought.
“Stay with me,” she said. “You could stay here. I think we would be happy.”
Feliks held her gaze, and she looked into his eyes. Then he glanced at the boys. “But …”
“All of you,” she said.
And she picked up the boys, one after the other, and kissed them.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alexander McCall Smith is the author of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, the Isabel Dalhousie series, the Portuguese Irregular Verbs series, and the 44 Scotland Street series. He is professor emeritus of medical law at the University of Edinburgh and has served on many national and international bodies concerned with bioethics. He was born in what is now known as Zimbabwe and taught law at the University of Botswana. He lives in Scotland.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2008 by Alexander McCall Smith
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in Great Britain by Polygon, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd., Edinburgh, in 2008.
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bsp; Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McCall Smith, Alexander, [date]
La’s orchestra saves the world / Alexander McCall Smith.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-37866-8
1. World War, 1939–1945—England—Fiction. 2. Orchestra—Fiction.
I. Title.
PR6063.C326L37 2009 823′.914—dc22 2009008639
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Alexander McCall Smith, La's Orchestra Saves the World
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