La's Orchestra Saves the World (2 page)

“And afterwards, when all the fuss was over and people didn’t have to grow so many vegetables, she put that lawn back in, and replaced all the shrubs that she had taken up. She put them all back, in their original spot, working from memory and from photographs.”

They talked. Then, when they had finished their tea, she suggested that they walk the short distance to the church hall.

“It’s a tin hall,” she said, as they approached it. “Made
entirely of corrugated tin. You occasionally get that in this county—little tin halls that have withstood the weather, and the years. It was a way of making something reasonably durable on the cheap.”

They stood still for a few minutes and admired the modest building from the end of its path. The walls of tin had been painted in a colour somewhere between ochre and cream, and the roof was rust-red. At one end of the building—the one facing them—there was a small veranda, dominated by a green door. The door, the thin casements of the windows, and the supports under the eaves, were the only wood on the outer surface of the building.

“I have a key,” she said, reaching into a pocket. “It’s a privilege of being on the parish council. We can look inside—not that there’s much to see.”

They walked down the path. The lock, an old-fashioned one, was stiff, and had to be coaxed into opening, but at last the door was pushed open and they found themselves standing in a vestibule. There was a notice-board, a square of faded baize, criss-crossed with tape; but no notices; a boot-scraper with bristle and a metal bar. That was all.

She pushed open the inner door, which was unlocked. The air inside was cool, but with a slight musty smell. Light filtered in through small windows that needed cleaning, bars of weak sunlight slanting across the benches stacked along the side of the wall.

“Nowadays,” she said, “it’s used for the school play and the occasional dance. We still have a village dance, you know, in spite of everything. And everybody goes.”

“And the orchestra?”

She gestured about her. “Under this very roof. Right here. This is where the orchestra played—so I’m told.” She pointed at the windows. “They were covered, of course. Black-out curtains.”

The driver detached himself and walked to the far end of the hall. The floor underfoot was red polished concrete of a sort that for some reason he associated with hospitals in foreign countries. He had become sick once as a student, travelling in India, and the hospital ward, with its red concrete floor, had been a little like this.

She spoke to him from the other end of the hall. “I met somebody who had played here,” she said. “The orchestra sat over there, where you are now, and when they gave a concert the audience sat at this end. It would have been the whole village, then. Everybody would have come to listen. Everybody.”

He turned round. He looked up at the ceiling, which was made of large expanses of white board nailed onto the roof-beams. The board was discoloured here and there from leaks, brown rings spreading out in concentric circles. He did not think that anything had been painted recently, perhaps not since La’s time.

“If you’ve seen enough,” she said. “Perhaps we should go back.”

She locked the door behind them, and they walked back in silence, until they had almost reached the house.

“Could you tell me more?” the driver asked. “About the orchestra?”

He looked up at the sky, which was wide and empty. High above them a line of stratus moved quickly in the air-stream. She followed his gaze. She loved the skies of East Anglia; she loved this flat landscape, which she thought of, in a curious way, as a holy place.

“A bit. Not very much. If you don’t mind my being a bit vague.”

“Not at all.” He paused. “If you have the time.”

She smiled at him. “In this village, there’s not a great deal to do. But remembering is something we’re rather good at in these places. Have you noticed that? Go to any small village anywhere in the world, and see what they remember. Everything. It’s all there—passed on like a precious piece of information, some secret imparted from one who knew to one who yearns to know. Taken good care of.”

They walked towards the house. The driver touched the Bristol as he passed it, let his fingers brush against the cool of the metal, in a gesture of appreciation that came close, he thought, to talismanic. He had rebuilt the Bristol, part by part, and now he loved it with that very intensity a man might feel for a machine he created himself out of metal, and the things that bind metal.

L
A’S CHILDHOOD WAS SPENT
in the shadow of Death. He was an uninvited guest at their table, sitting patiently, watching La’s mother, his target, bemused, perhaps, that such courage and determination could keep an illness at bay for so long. But he was in no hurry, and would make his move when every one of the expensive treatments had been tried, and failed. The last of these involved a trip to Switzerland, to a sanatorium near Gstaad, where optimistic doctors prescribed Alpine air and light, but Death accompanied her there, too; he was no respecter of altitude and had business with some of the other patients lying on their extended deck chairs. When, shortly after her return to England, the end came, La was just fifteen and at boarding school. The news was broken by a housemistress who found such blows almost impossible to convey, choking with emotion as she spoke, just as La, who had long since
realised that this moment was inevitable, and who remained calm, sought to comfort her.

La’s father did his best to fill the gap, but it was difficult for him. He was not a demonstrative man, and he simply could not express the love and concern he felt for the child who was the living reminder of his wife in all her gestures and looks. A female child, he felt, needed a woman to look after her, to say and do the things a woman could do. For this reason, he hired a housekeeper who doubled up as mother and, as La realised with shock, as wife. She heard conversation from behind the closed door of her father’s bedroom, lowered voices, but in an unmistakeable emotional register. He could not marry her—no, it was impossible. Nobody knew, he said; and even if they did it was none of their business. And why was it impossible? Silence. Was he ashamed of her, of her very ordinary origins? More silence. That’s it, isn’t it? Ashamed.

The house they lived in was in Surrey, on the brow of a hill. London, or its very fringes, might be seen through the darkness from that vantage point—a low line of lights—and in the day, if conditions were right, it was there as a distant smudge against the horizon. La liked the fact that they lived on a hill, and would introduce herself as one who came from the top of a hill in Surrey.

“I am going to university in a very flat place,” she said to her father. “You’re sending me down from my hill to a very flat place.”

“Cambridge is indeed flat,” he said. “And …” She waited for him to say more, but he often failed to complete these utterances. She asked him once what he was thinking of when his sentences petered out, and he had replied, “Oh, various things, things that …”

Cambridge had been La’s choice, even if one that had been heavily backed by her English teacher at school, a graduate of Girton. She knew the admissions tutor, she said; they had gone walking in France together as students, and she would make sure that any application would be sympathetically viewed. La wondered what that had to do with her; she did not want to be accepted because of some remote bond of friendship, the outcome of a walking tour.

“I’m not saying that,” said the teacher. “But you’ll learn as you go through life that friendship, contacts, call it what you will, lies behind so many of the decisions that people make. It’s just the way the world is.”

Girton accepted her, and she began the study of English literature in the autumn of 1929. It seemed that everybody in Cambridge was talking about Mr. Leavis, who was on the verge of publishing a great work of criticism, it was said. She met Leavis, and his new wife, Queenie Roth, who talked to her at a party about Jane Austen. It was just one of the heady experiences that Cambridge had in store for La, and it made the hill-top in Surrey seem irredeemably dull.

Her tutor, Dr. Price, was ambitious for her. “You could do a further degree. There’s so much to choose from.”

That was not how La saw it. In her view there was so little choice—if one was a woman. “It’s men who have all the opportunities,” she said. “Look at what they can do. At the most, we have their leavings, the crumbs from their table. It’s 1931 and that’s all we have. Still.”

“That’s because women haven’t learned their lesson,” said the tutor.

“Which is?”

“To live their lives as if men did not exist.”

That was easily said by a tutor in a women’s college. But La did not point this out.

“It breaks my heart,” the tutor went on, “to see all these intelligent girls come to us and then leave, more or less promised to some man. And they go off and marry him and that’s the end. What a waste. What a criminal waste.”

Seeing La’s reaction, the tutor offered a list of names. “Andrews last year; Paterson, too, such a brilliant person. Married. Buried away in some dim town somewhere, playing bridge and practising domestic economy. Is that what Cambridge is for?”

La agreed with Dr. Price, on that, at least, if not on other matters. She had not come to Cambridge to find a husband; she found it astonishing that there were girls who did just that—she had met some of them, and they admitted it. Our best chance, one said. You’d have to be a fool not to take it. La said nothing; she had come, she believed, to be taught how to think. At school she had been subjected to rote-learning
intended to enable her to recite the opinions of others; now she wanted to form her own views, but was finding it difficult. What would these views be, she wondered, once she had formed them?

“Don’t you think it exciting, La, to be alive at a time of crisis?”

The speaker was Janey Turner, a young woman who had befriended her at a poetry reading and invited her afterwards to a tea-room. The young men at the reading were hopeless, whispered Janey. “They’re interested only in themselves. Have you noticed that, La? They’re all trying to look poetic. All terribly narcissistic and intense. Except for that one who read out the bit about the man in the factory. He understood.”

La wondered about the crisis. Everybody said there was a cultural crisis—that the old certainties had been so destabilised that they were no longer capable of providing any answers. But if that was so, then how were we to know what to believe in? Janey knew the answer, with a confident, complete certainty. The common man, she said. He’s the future. We must believe in what he believes in.

“Which is what?”

“The ending of oppression. Freedom from hunger. Freedom from the deception of the Church and the tricks of the ruling class. Flags. National glory. Militarism.”

La pondered this. She agreed that freedom from hunger was an admirable goal—who could take a contrary view on
that? And oppression was bad, too; of course it was. But the Church? She thought of the college chaplain, a mild man with a strong interest in Jane Austen and in Tennyson, who was distantly related to Beatrix Potter and who would never have engaged in deception, surely. Or was Janey talking about a different sort of religion altogether? A religion of saints and icons of saints; of relics and miracles? England, she thought, was not like that.

“Is there a crisis in literature?” La asked Dr. Price.

The tutor looked at her as if she had asked an egregiously naïve question. “Of course. We all know there’s a crisis. Everybody.”

Except me, thought La. I’m prepared to accept that there’s a crisis—if only somebody would explain how the crisis had come about and just how it manifested itself.

“Why?” she persisted. “Why is there a crisis?”

Dr. Price waved a hand in the air. “Because of lies and rottenness. Simplicity and sincerity have been replaced by obfuscation and pretence. Men, of course. They love to create mystery where none exists. It’s the way they think.”

“So simplicity is a literary virtue?”

Dr. Price looked at her severely. “Yes, of course it is. And it is a virtue that is more assiduously practised by members of our own sex, if I may say so.” The severity of her expression slackened, and a smile began to play about her lips. “Do you know the story about Rupert Brooke’s mother? No? Well, let me tell you. She was shown a memoir of her son
composed by some man—one Edward Marsh, I believe. He had written: ‘Rupert Brooke left Rugby in a blaze of glory.’ And she, the poet’s mother, had crossed out
a blaze of glory
and substituted
July.”

Dr. Price looked at La. “You see?” she said.

La found that this conversation, as was the case with many of her discussions with Dr. Price, left her dissatisfied. If it was a teacher’s role to bring enlightenment, then Dr. Price failed in her calling. She behaved as if she were the custodian of a body of knowledge to which her students might aspire, as might one who stumbles upon Eleusinian mysteries yearn to know what is going on. But she did not impart that knowledge willingly.

La was happy enough at Girton, even if she found that the enlightenment she had hoped for was slow to arrive. When she returned after her first long summer vacation, a time spent travelling in Italy with a cousin, she decided that there would be no sudden moment of insight; at the most she would start to see things slightly differently, would understand the complexity that lay below the surface. She did not worry about that. At present she was free to read and to spend long hours in discussion with her fellow undergraduates, talking about what they had read. She joined a music society, and played the flute in a quartet. She had learned the instrument at school, where it had been something of a chore for her. Now she took it up without the
pressure of practice and examinations, and found that she enjoyed it. They struggled through Haydn and Mozart, and gave a concert for the junior common room at the end of the term. A young man, Richard Stone, came to that, sitting in a group of young men, wearing a blue cravat that caught La’s eye. He was tall, with the confident bearing of an athlete. She looked up from her music at the end of the first piece and noticed him. He caught her eye and smiled. Then, at the end of the concert, when they went into a room where tea had been prepared, he came up to her and introduced himself. He was not embarrassed, as some of the men were, but spoke to her as if they already knew one another.