La's Orchestra Saves the World

  La had not, and shook her head. “Of course there could have been somebody else.”

  “Other than Hitler? Somebody other than Hitler?”

  “Yes. There could have been somebody else who would have had the same idea of whipping people up; who had the same madness within them. People are the products of their time, Mrs. Agg.”

  Mrs. Agg glanced at her.

  “What I mean, Mrs. Agg, is that the times throw up their man. If there hadn’t been a Nelson, there would have been another sailor like him. There would have been plenty of small, nasty people like Hitler, even if he had never existed.”

  She let Mrs. Agg think about this as she attached several pairs of socks to the line with large wooden clothes-pegs. She returned, though, to the subject of Madder’s Farm. “Who was he, this boy who was helping him. The boy whose job I’m taking on?”

  Mrs. Agg, who had been holding a clothes-peg in her mouth while she attended to the socks, took the peg out of her mouth to answer. “A nice boy. A really nice boy called Neil. The son of Mrs. Howarth who used to work in the post office. He went off and volunteered. Who can blame him? That’s what all young men want to do.”

  La thought for a moment. All young men? What about Lennie? She tried to imagine Lennie in a uniform, but she could not. Mrs. Agg glanced at her. She had guessed what her visitor was thinking.

  “Lennie can’t,” she said. “Or, rather, I don’t think he should.”

  “But what if he wanted to? What if he wanted to join his friends?”

  Mrs. Agg give the socks a final, almost affectionate squeeze. “Lennie can’t be doing with friends, you know. He’s a loner. He doesn’t …”

  She left the sentence unfinished, reaching for the last of her washing. Then, quietly, she said, “Lennie doesn’t trouble you, I hope.”

  La looked up at the sky. After the incident in the garden, Lennie had not troubled her. In fact, she could barely remember when she had last seen him; it must have been months before, when she had driven past him on the road to Bury. He had been walking in the same direction, and she had slowed down, thinking that she might offer to drive him to wherever he was going, but he had pointedly looked over the hedge to his side, as if absorbed by something he saw in the field. She had driven on.

  “Lennie doesn’t trouble me, Mrs. Agg. You needn’t worry.”

  Mrs. Agg finished hanging up the rest of the washing and dried her hands on her apron. “Good. You see, Mrs. Stone … You see, Lennie is not all that easy. A lot of men aren’t. But we get by.” She turned and smiled at La. “Which is all that we can hope for in this life, don’t you think? To get by?”

  That was quite true, thought La, reductionist though the sentiment might be. In a way, all our human systems, our culture, music, literature, painting—all of that—was effectively an attempt to make life more bearable, to enable us to get by. She got by. She had got by, in this quiet corner of England, for two years now, and was happy enough where she was. She had stopped thinking of Richard every day, and she found it harder to bring up a mental image of the man who had been her husband. There was a face, certainly, but it was fading, as an old photograph will fade. What had his voice sounded like? He used to sing in the bath—she remembered that—but what were the words of the songs that he sang? She could not bring them to mind, and she no longer dreamed of him, or only did so very occasionally.

  She was getting by quite well without him, as a widow. And the country was trying to get by in the face of a terrifying nightmare that was about to get much more vivid and more frightening.

  “They’re coming,” said the butcher in the village. “They’re coming over, Mrs. Stone. God help us, so he must.”

  “There’s the RAF,” said La. “They’ll have to get past them.”

  “Have you seen the boys they’re using?” asked the butcher. There was a base nearby, at Stradishall, where the clay soil made good, hard runways for heavy bombers. “Some of them not shaving yet, I think.”

  “Boys have quick reactions,” said La. It was a glib remark, of the sort that came from inner conviction; but La felt despair. The strutting demagogue, with his insane shouting, had fixed his eyes on them, and he was coming.

  Twelve

  POOR HENRY MADDER, she thought; look at him. His hands had twisted, as if they had been placed in a vice and wrenched off true. And he could not bend his knees, which seemed to have locked at a forty-degree angle, giving him a curious, deliberate-looking gait, as if he were walking through a bed of treacle. But he did not complain and impatiently brushed off La’s concern.

  “Don’t worry about me,” he said. “As long as I can hook Tommy up to the plough, I’m all right. I’m not an old man yet.”

  He was somewhere in his forties, La thought, but the crippling disease had aged him prematurely.

  “I could do more here,” she said. “It’s much easier than I thought—looking after your chickens. There must be other things.”

  He shook his head. “I have to do something, and they’ve promised me a man, full-time. When they find one—whenever that will be.” He smiled. “Heaven knows what I’ll get. Somebody from Timbuktu maybe. Or a chap let out of prison on condition that he works on the land. Old Billy Stevens got somebody like that. A car thief from London, would you believe it? A Cockney spiv. He found him selling his eggs down at the pub.”

  La’s work was light. The chickens were kept on the edge of a field in two large coops. They were elongated, flimsily built structures with tin roofs. Inside there were rows of nesting boxes and high, roughly hewn perches on which the hens could take refuge at night from predators. There was also a fence that had been designed to protect the birds from the fox, but he could burrow his way under that, as the wire did not always reach far enough down. One of La’s jobs was to pick up the feathers where the fox had made a kill; feathers that, with their occasional flecked blood stains, told the story of the sharp and one-sided little conflict. For La it was like attending a scene of the crime; the feathers on the ground, the hens clucking away in disapproval of what had happened—move along please, madam, there is nothing to be seen here—the place where the fox had pushed up the fence wire from its anchoring. There was always only one suspect.

  La made her way up to Madder’s Farm shortly after breakfast every day. She had to ride there; fuel was in short supply and she wanted to husband the small amount she could get. Cycling kept her fit, and it was pleasant enough, too, in the mild April weather; of course, it would be different in winter, with those dark mornings and the cold wind which in that part of England swept straight across the North Sea, from Siberia, it seemed. I shall be tougher then, she told herself, and if the war was over, then she would no longer have to work on Madder’s Farm and could lie in bed on winter’s mornings, as she had done last winter, watching her breath make white mist in the unheated air. Wars did not last forever; one hundred years at the most.

  On arrival at the farm she reported to Henry if he was in the farmyard, or went directly about her duties if he was not. She collected the eggs first, making her way along the nesting boxes, taking out the eggs and placing them carefully in the large baskets that Henry provided. If a hen was still in the box, she would feel under her for eggs, amongst the soft, belly feathers, warm and downy, and the hens would occasionally peck at her, quite hard. She started to use gloves—an old pair of gardening gloves that she had found in the house, that Gerald must have used; the hens ineffectively pecked at the leather, and La would blow in their faces to distract them.

  She cleaned the floor below the perches and changed the straw in the nesting boxes. Then she filled a wheelbarrow with feed and distributed that amongst the brood. The acrid smell of the coops lingered; it was in her clothes. I smell like a chicken, she thought. I am a fox’s dream.

  Henry Madder said, “You’ve taken to this like a duck to water.”

  “Chicken,” she said.

  He smiled. “They said you didn’t want any pay. Is that correct?”
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  “I have enough to live on,” La said. “I have more than enough. If they don’t pay me, then the money can go to other land army workers.”

  He looked at her intently. “You’re the type who’ll win this war for us,” he said.

  “There are people working far harder than I am,” said La. “Miners, for instance.”

  Henry thought about this. “That’s something I could never do. Go underground. Crawl around in the darkness. At least we get fresh air in our work. It may be cold and dirty sometimes, but there’s fresh air.”

  He looked up at the sky, and La followed his gaze. It was broad, limitless, unclouded now; the wide sky of East Anglia.

  She took her leave and began the cycle back. She reached home at about half past eleven every morning, her labours done. Then she read, and worked in the garden. She had started to sew, thinking it might be useful; she could make things for people when clothing became scarce. Everything would become scarce, she thought; soap, clothing, shoes. Hitler wanted to starve them into submission, and they would have to grub around, turning to every little bit of earth to coax food from it. She looked at her lawn. She would dig it up and plant potatoes. It could yield sacks of potatoes that would see her through the winter, if supplies of everything dried up.

  Henry Madder gave her eggs, which she turned into omelettes. There were chives in the garden, and these were chopped up to add flavour. She ate the omelettes at her kitchen table, a glass of cider beside her plate. She would have liked to talk to somebody, but the house was empty.

  Occasionally, after one of her lonely suppers, La would retrieve the flute that she kept in a drawer in her bureau. She had rarely played the instrument since leaving Cambridge, and her technique had suffered. But she could still manage most of the pieces in a large book of flute music she had found in a second-hand bookshop near the British Museum: Byrd, Morley, Tallis. At Cambridge she had played a madrigal called “In Nets of Golden Wires.” She thought it was by Morley, and she was sure it was in her book, but when she paged through the arrangements she could not find it. The title haunted her. What did it mean? Was it about love, or belonging, or about capturing a dream?

  Music was her refuge. There was madness abroad, an insanity of killing and cruelty that defied understanding—unless one took the view that this violence had always been there and had merely been masked by a veneer of civilisation. La thought that music disproved this. Reason, beauty, harmony: these were ultimately more real and powerful than any of the demons unleashed by dictators. But she feared that she was losing touch with these values—that her life in the country was simply too limited. She feared that she would forget if she did not go back.

  One evening, when she had finished her dinner and had sat reading for half an hour at the kitchen table, she reached a decision. She would return to London where the house in Maida Vale could be reclaimed from its tenant. She would take up with her old friends and bring an end to this unnatural life of seclusion. She wanted company; particularly the company of people of her own age, of her own outlook. She wanted to talk to somebody about books, about music, about the things that nobody seemed to talk about here. There were people in Bury, of course, with whom she had interests in common, but that was Bury, and there was no petrol to go there for purely social purposes. Cambridge would have been even better, but was further away, and she could not go back there; people who did that ended up like Dr. Price.

  She telephoned Valerie. “I want to come back to London,” she said. “I’ve made up my mind.”

  There was silence at the other end of the line. Then, “Are you mad?”

  “I don’t know what you mean. Why is it mad to want to come back to London?”

  Valerie laughed. “But, listen La: anybody with any sense is trying to get out of London. Have you heard of the Luftwaffe down there in Suffolk?”

  La said nothing.

  “The point is,” Valerie continued, “the point is that this is a very different city from the one you left.”

  La understood that places changed. “I know that. I don’t expect it to be the same. I’ve changed.”

  Valerie laughed dismissively. “I don’t think you’re grasping what I want to say. People are frightened, La. Anybody who is in a position to leave is thinking about it. They deny it, of course, but then everybody’s trying to look brave. We have to, because if we started to show what we really felt the whole place would come to a grinding halt. In fact, we’re frightened. London is not the place to be.”

  It was hard to argue against such a warning, and La did not. Their conversation continued briefly and without much understanding; it seemed to La that they now lived in different worlds. Then the allotted three minutes was up; La said good-bye and rang off.

  LA LIVED TOO FAR from the base at Stradishall to hear the planes taking off and landing, but now, at frequent intervals, she heard the drone of engines as a flight of bombers crossed the sky. Like everyone else, she had studied the outlines printed in the newspapers so that she could distinguish plane from plane, but it was hard to tell when they were little more than black dots against the white of the clouds. Spitfires, of course, were easily recognised, and over that summer and into the autumn she looked out for them. The battle had begun—the battle that would determine the course of the war—everyone knew that. And the Spitfire, with its stubby wings and its long nose, would, along with the Hurricane, determine the fate of the country—and the world. They had to win this part of it; if Britain fell, then Europe was lost to a devouring evil, and that evil would not stop at Europe.

  One afternoon she saw a Spitfire coming in from the coast. The main battle was being fought further to the south, but planes would sometimes chase raiders up over the North Sea until they reached the limit of their range and had to make for home. This one was flying low and was trailing smoke, limping across the sky to refuge at Stradishall. She watched it getting lower and lower and she thought of the pilot within. Sometimes nothing but air separates those who are in deadly peril from those who are safe. He would be twenty, perhaps even younger; a young man struggling to keep his wounded aircraft airborne, gasping for breath against the fumes from his burning plane. And then the plane was gone, vanished behind distant trees, and she did not know what had happened. Mrs. Agg said that the pilot had made it back to the airfield, but Mrs. Agg was optimistic about these things; she did not really know. She wanted him to be safe, and so she said that he was.

  An air force officer called at the house one day. He had been given La’s name by a cousin of hers who was working in Whitehall and who met officers in the course of her work. He drove up to the house one Saturday afternoon, parking his small green open-topped car in the driveway.

  “I’m very sorry turning up out of the blue,” he said when La opened the door to him. “I’m Tim Honey. I’m a friend of Lilly’s. She said that I should call on you if I was in the area.”

  La looked at the man standing on her doorstep. He was about her age, or perhaps a few years older, in his mid-thirties, and slightly plump. His uniform, she noticed, was pulled tight across the front. Rations, she thought; and then silently upbraided herself: if one was to die, as these men expected to, then they should at least be given good breakfasts.

  She invited him in. “I don’t have any coffee,” she said. “But I have some tea.”

  Tim smiled, and fished in one of the pockets of his jacket. “I anticipated that,” he said, drawing out a small packet. “This is Jamaican, believe it or not. I don’t know how we got it at the base, but it suddenly appeared. I think that our Canadian friends shipped it across. He laughed. “It’s amazing what you find in the back of a bomber once you begin to unpack it.”

  She took the packet and led the way into the kitchen. “Lilly,” she said.

  “Yes, dear Lilly. She says she hasn’t seen you for ages.”

  “No. I moved down here a few years ago, before the war started.” She wondered if he would think that she had fled from London. She did not wa
nt him to think that.

  He nodded. He was looking about the kitchen, appraisingly.

  “I’ve got everything I need in this house,” said La. “It’s really quite comfortable.”

  “Yes. It looks it.” He turned towards the window. “They look after us pretty well at the base. We can’t really complain. We have a very good mess—all the papers and magazines and your jolly good Suffolk beers. Everything we need, really.”

  There was a silence. Except company, thought La. Except women. Home cooking. Love.

  “I’m married,” Tim went on. “Four years ago. And I never thought that this would blow up and I’d find myself at one end of the country and Joyce at the other end. She’s in Cardiff, staying with an aunt for the duration. It’s safer there, I think, than where we lived in Kent. In Maidstone. That’s pretty much in the thick of things at the moment.”

  “You must miss her.”

  “Yes, I do. Awfully. But think of all those chaps who have been sent overseas. Or the chaps out East. What chance have they got of seeing their wives? At least I can go down for the occasional weekend.”

  The smell of coffee began to pervade. La took a deep breath. It reminded her of Cambridge, for some reason. Dr. Price; that was it. Dr. Price had served coffee at her very first supervision, when she had been nervous. “Coffee will clear your head,” she had said. “It always works.” And they had drunk a small cup of strong coffee and then Dr. Price had sat there with a rather pained expression on her face as La had read the first essay she had written.

  “We can drink our coffee in here,” said La. “There’s a drawing room of sorts, but it’s more comfortable in here.”

  “I’m happy,” said Tim, laying his cap down on the table. “I should have changed into civvies, but sometimes, when you’re visiting people, they like to see the uniform.”

  They talked. Tim told her about what he had done before the war and what he did now, approximately. “I shouldn’t say exactly,” he said. “Not that I imagine you’re a German spy, but you know the rules. Suffice it to say that I sit behind a desk all day and talk on the telephone, telling other people what we want. I’m in charge of supplies for the whole base. Not that I should probably tell you that. Do you know anywhere where I could get some supplies of aviation fuel?”