La's Orchestra Saves the World (16 page)

“Everything we need, La,” he said enthusiastically as he dug into the music. “Look. W. A. Mozart, no less. Arranged by J. M. Williams. We’ve got a J. Williams at the base. One of the catering officers. Different chap. And this stuff here.
‘An Evening in a Viennese Café’ arranged for school orchestra. Not bad. All the parts seem to be there. More than we need.”

They sorted out the music as best they could and chose a piece for the first meeting. La looked at the conductor’s score and wondered how she would cope with the reading of so many parts simultaneously. “Easy,” said Tim. “Concentrate on one section and conduct it. The others will find their way.”

They met for the first time in mid-August on a Saturday afternoon. La was waiting for the truck to arrive, standing in the village hall with the postman and his sister-in-law. They had arranged the hall chairs in a semi-circle around a portable pulpit that they had borrowed from the church.

The truck arrived and disgorged the players. Three of the men from the base were in uniform, the others were wearing civilian clothes. A couple were officers, both navigators; the other men were ground crew, including the station barber, a thick-set man with a Cockney accent, who had with him a battered silver trombone. The navigators looked tired, and one stared out of the window while La addressed the orchestra, as if he was looking for something. Tim threw him a glance, and then looked at La, as if in apology.

They played for an hour. It was ragged and discordant. Two of the violins, La was sure, were out of tune, and she stopped half-way through to try to get people in tune again.

“We sound a bit flat,” she said.

Tim laughed, and this released the tension. “Does it matter?”

“I suppose not,” said La.

“It’s not me,” said the postman, and everybody smiled.

At the end of the session there was a cup of tea. The village hall had an urn, which had been switched on at the beginning of the practice and was now just at boiling point. The postman’s sister-in-law took it upon herself to make the tea, and to serve it, using a jug of milk which had been donated by Mrs. Agg, who was a cousin of hers. Their instruments packed away, the members of the orchestra stood and drank tea together.

“Are we going to give a concert?” asked one of the men from the base.

“Of course,” said Tim. “We are, aren’t we, La?”

She hesitated. Tim looked at her expectantly. “At Christmas,” she said. “We shall give a concert at Christmas. Here in the hall.”

“And at the base, too?” asked Tim.

“Of course.”

“An Evening in a Viennese Café?’” asked one of the navigators.

“Pre-Anschluss,”
said La. “Yes. And then …” She paused. “And then, at the end of all this, at the end of the war, we’ll give a victory concert. That’s what we’ll start practising for. A victory concert.”

There was silence for a moment. The postman looked
down at the floor. Then Tim cleared his throat. “A good idea. Look out suitable pieces, La.”

There were murmurs of agreement.

As they prepared to leave, Tim turned to her and whispered, “Yes?”

She looked puzzled. “What?”

“It worked? Do you think it worked?”

La smiled. “Of course it did. You heard it, didn’t you? You could tell?”

The engine of the truck was running and the driver was waiting for him. “I mustn’t keep them. Yes, I think it’s fine. And that business about being flat …”

“It’s not our fault,” said La. “We’re in the middle of a war, aren’t we?”

Tim chuckled. “Of course. It’s the war.”

“Well, there you are,” said La.

She helped the postman and his sister-in-law clear up. They stacked the chairs to the side of the hall, as the vicar had asked them to do, and the pulpit was left for the verger to collect the next day. The postman emptied the urn onto the gravel path at the back of the hall.

“That’s it,” said La. “That’s it until next month.”

As she walked back to her cottage, Mrs. Agg passed on her bicycle, heading back from the village. “I heard you,” she called out. “They all heard you down in the village. Came across lovely. Lovely sound.”

“We’re not very good,” said La.

“Sounded fine to me. Tra-la-la!”

The farmer’s wife disappeared down the lane, and La continued her walk. I have an orchestra, she thought. Other people have … well, they have what they have. I have an orchestra. It was a sobering thought, every bit as sobering as if one awoke one day to find oneself in charge of Covent Garden or La Scala. There were shoulders that bore those very responsibilities, of course, but they did not belong to a woman in her early thirties, who lived at the edge of a small village in Suffolk, and who each morning looked after hens.

THE FOLLOWING SATURDAY
, after attending early to the hens, La made the journey into Cambridge. There was a bus that stopped in the village and then went on to Newmarket, and Cambridge beyond. She caught this at ten in the morning and by noon she was in Cambridge.

As she began her journey the sky was clear, and the ripening fields made swathes of golden brown, criss-crossed by the dark green lines of the hedgerows. It had been a good growing season, and crops both official and unofficial were in riot: banks of nettles had taken hold of some of the roadsides; even the trees themselves seemed to have spread their reach, now and then brushing against the roof of the bus. As the journey progressed, La watched the men and women boarding the bus. For the most part they were going to Newmarket or Cambridge, setting out to buy the bigger
things that village stores did not stock: a dress to wear at somebody’s wedding in the autumn; a pair of stout breeches for the winter. La looked at the faces. When she had first come from London, the people had seemed somehow different, their eyes brighter, their skin a different tone. She remembered what Rupert Brooke had written in “Grant -chester” about the characteristics of people from the various Cambridgeshire villages; such exaggerated, tongue-in-cheek nonsense, but concealing a truth: people were different in different places. In the small corners of Suffolk there were families that had not moved for centuries; of course they would develop physical characteristics that were typical of place. And with those physical characteristics went moral qualities. Determination, courage, a sort of native cunning: those crossed generations, La thought. It took centuries to breed an Agg, she said to herself; and smiled at the thought.

In Cambridge she alighted on Trinity Street. The University was still on summer vacation—
down
they called it—and the street was quiet. A middle-aged man, a college servant La thought, judging from his formal black suit, was walking a small terrier along the pavement; a couple of women, smartly dressed and not much older than La, came out of Heffers. One was holding a book that she had just bought and was discussing it with her friend, who nodded agreement at what she was being told. La watched this wistfully; this was what she was missing. She might be in such
company, talking about the latest novel, instead of tending to hens at Madder’s Farm and digging potatoes in what had once been a lawn.

She turned the corner. Paulson’s Music Shop was exactly where the advertisement claimed it would be, next door to a high-quality butcher on the one side and an outfitter’s on the other. Both the butcher and the outfitter were trying to make the best of a bad moment in their history, with more or less empty windows. The outfitter had obtained an academic robe in bright scarlet and had rigged this up on one of their mannequins; it made for a bright splash of colour. The music shop, though, was not feeling the emergency. There were still musical instruments to be had, and the window boasted a small display of violins and violas, alongside a couple of ornate wooden music stands.

La looked in the window before going in. She had discussed with Tim what scores they might obtain—the crate of printed music from the RAF had its limitations—and she would see whether she could order these. In the advertisement she had seen, Mr. Paulson claimed to be an expert in obtaining the unobtainable: she would now put that to the test.

Mr. Paulson, who appeared from a back room in response to the bell triggered by the front door, was finishing a cup of tea. He put the tea-cup down, straightened his tie and greeted La.

“Such a promising day earlier on,” he said. “But now,
look at that.” He pointed at the sky through the window; a bank of heavy cloud had blown up from the east, high cumulo-nimbus, purple with rain.

“Yes. It looks very threatening.”

“But,” Mr. Paulson went on, “we are not to be dispirited by such small things as the weather. Especially when there is so much else happening.”

La produced the list she had written out and passed it over to him. Mr. Paulson took a small pair of unframed reading glasses out of his jacket pocket and placed them on the end of his nose.

“Rossini. Yes. Mozart. Yes, and yes. Yes. That, alas, that piece there, no. That is out of print as far as I know and these days … It is more difficult to get things. People often don’t answer letters because … well, there are no people in the offices any more. Heaven knows what happens to the letters.”

“If you can get just half of my list,” said La, “I shall be very happy.”

Mr. Paulson nodded. “That will be no problem.” He slipped the piece of paper into a drawer. “This is a school orchestra, I take it?”

La shook her head. “I suppose that you would call it a village orchestra.”

Mr. Paulson was impressed. “Admirable! There used to be village bands, but now people seem to have lost the habit of making music together. Even the bell-ringers are
finding it difficult to recruit, you know. We have a team in my own parish, but there are very few young people in it. Sad.”

La agreed that it was. Then, “And I wondered about a flute. I wondered if you had any second-hand flutes in stock.”

Mr. Paulson did not answer directly, but turned and opened a large drawer to his side. He reached in and took out a small box, covered in black leather. “Now this is a very nice instrument,” he said. “It belonged to a young man who was at Clare until a few months ago. He took a commission in the Royal Artillery and sold this to me before he left. He said that he hadn’t played it since he left Harrow. He said that it would be better if it were to be used.”

He slipped open the catch on the side of the box and extracted the disjointed pieces of the flute. These he quickly fitted together and handed the instrument over to La.

“There you are,” he said. “That’s a lovely old flute. Rudall, Rose, Carte and Co. You see, that’s their stamp there. Theodore Boehm himself authorised them to make his system here in England. They also made an eight-hole system, as I’m sure you know …”

La raised the flute to her lips and blew across the mouth-hole.

“A very true note,” said Mr. Paulson. “Try it across the range. You’ll see how sweet it is. Lovely action.”

La lowered the flute and handed it back to him. “It’s not
for me,” she said. “My playing is a bit rusty. It’s for a man who would like to play in our little orchestra, but who doesn’t have a flute.” She paused. “He’s one of those Polish airmen.”

Mr. Paulson nodded. “I see. Well, that’s a nice thought. I’m sure that the young man who owned this would like to see it going to a fellow combatant.”

They discussed the price. La saw the ticket on the box—it was surprisingly expensive—but Mr. Paulson quickly reduced it. “For our Polish friend,” he said. “And they have suffered so.”

She wrote out a cheque. Her account was flush with funds; Gerald had given her Richard’s share of the family company in cash, and had been generous; she could live on the interest alone. There was nothing to spend her money on in the village, and funds had accumulated.

The flute, and such sheet music from the list as had been in stock, were neatly tied in a brown paper parcel and handed to La. Then, with an anxious eye at the storm clouds, and with Mr. Paulson’s assurances that the other sets of music would be found if humanly possible, she left the shop and headed back towards Trinity Street. She looked at her watch. There was a further appointment in Cambridge, before she caught the bus home, and for that she would treat herself to a taxi.

• • •

AS SHE STOOD
before Dr. Leontine Price’s door, La thought: How many times have I stood here feeling slightly awkward about something? From her first visit to her tutor, summoned on the day after her arrival in Cambridge all those years ago, to her last visit, on the morning of her graduation, her encounters with Dr. Price had been ones in which guilt of some sort or another inevitably seemed to play a part. In her first year she had always felt that the essays that she wrote for delivery to her tutor were not quite her best work; that there were insights that she had but could not quite express; that Dr. Price would be bored by what she had to say. Later she had become more confident about her judgement—what she had to say about the Victorian novel, after all, was as
valid
as what any other undergraduate had to say, possibly even more so, as La knew that a number of the others who took the course with her were not above giving opinions on books they had not read. But Dr. Price never gave the impression that she shared this view, and listened to La with a vaguely pained expression, as if she were keen to be somewhere else, attending to more important things. “As a matter of interest,” La wanted to say, but never did, “you are being paid, are you not, to listen to me?”

Now she stood before Dr. Price’s door as a widow, the conductor of an orchestra, and the doer of war work, even if the war work in question was only the keeping of hens. Yet
the familiar anxiety returned, and there was hesitation in her knock.

Dr. Price was seated at her desk. La noticed, with some satisfaction, that the room was exactly as she remembered it. There was the chair in which she used to sit and read her essay to the tutor; there was the clock that, ahead of the church clock at Grantchester, stood always at five o’clock, and still did.

“Your clock,” she said, pointing across the room. “Still at five.”