La's Orchestra Saves the World (25 page)

“Would he?” Tim asked. “Do you really think so?”

“Possibly not.”

They talked about Feliks. “I’ve often thought,” Tim said, “that you and Feliks might have been … suited. You were very friendly, weren’t you?” He smiled encouragingly. “Was there ever anything between you?”

La held his gaze. “Nothing. Not really.”

“Pity.”

IN THE LATE SUMMER
of 1960, La went to Edinburgh, to the Festival. She travelled up with her friend Valerie, who was at a loose end because her husband was in Australia on business. They decided that they would spend ten days there, at concerts and at the theatre. They had different tastes and so they did not go to the same events, but they had each other’s company for dinner.

On the evening before they were due to return to London, La went by herself to an orchestral concert at the Usher Hall. At the end of the concert, there was still some light in the northern sky, and the evening was a warm one. The audience spilled out onto the pavement in front of the hall, talking about the programme, exchanging the welled-up small talk that concert audiences release at the end of a performance. La stood for a moment on the steps, enjoying the festival feel of the occasion, and it was then that she saw Feliks.

He had come out of a side door and was about to walk up Lothian Road when he stopped and turned to face her. It
seemed that he was hesitant to approach her, but she made the first move and took a few steps towards him.

They shook hands. It was very formal.

She smiled at him, hoping that he could not hear her wildly beating heart. “I thought it was you.”

“And it is. Fifteen years later? Yes, fifteen.”

He seemed pleased to see her, in spite of the formality.

“Where …,” she began to ask. But he cut her short.

“I live in Glasgow now. I’ve lived there since the end of the war. I was offered a job there by a Pole who had set up a business.”

“Oh.”

She did not look for it, but she saw the ring. He noticed.

“Yes. I married a Scottish lady. Twelve years ago. We have two small boys. One is five and the other is seven.”

La tried to smile. Again he noticed. He could see the effort.

“My marriage is not a success,” he said. “She calls herself a Catholic, but she is a rather bad Catholic, I’m afraid. I see her every few weeks—she comes to visit the boys—but she is living with a man who has a bar.” He shrugged. “That is how it is.”

“I’m very sorry to hear that.”

He nodded. “Not good. But you—where are you?”

“I am in London.”

“And you are happy there?”

“Yes. But I still go out to Suffolk. I still have the house.”

His eyes lit up. “With the lavender bushes?”

“Yes. They need cutting back, I think.”

They both laughed. Then La said, “Feliks, I have to ask you. If I don’t ask you now, then I may never know. Do you know why I had to speak to Tim as I did? Do you understand?”

Behind them a woman said something to a man in a dinner jacket and the man chuckled. Feliks glanced at the couple and then back at La. “Yes, I do understand. You knew that I was German.”

It took her a moment to grasp what he said.

“So I was right?”

“Yes. But you were kind to me and you did nothing about it. You see …” He looked over his shoulder, as if concerned that he might be overheard. “You see, my parents were Germans who went to live in Poland. My father was a businessman. I was eight when they went and I went to school there. I learned Polish and spoke it all the time. We stayed, and then when I went to university I decided that I would be Polish altogether. What is the first eight years of your life? Not very much. The Nazis had come to power then in Germany. I had no desire to go back. Then I joined the air force. I took the identity of a man who had worked for my father and who had died. I joined the air force under his name.”

She reached out and took his hand. He did not resist; they held hands.

“It seemed clear to me,” he continued. “If I tried to explain to people who I really was, they would have been suspicious. When I ended up in England, they would probably have interned me.”

He was right. People were interned indiscriminately. “Yes, that could have happened.”

“It was simpler to be Polish,” he said. “Which is what I felt, and what I feel now.”

She wanted to hug him.

“I understand,” she said. “I understand.”

“They found all this out in London, but the man who interrogated me was sympathetic. He had a German grandfather and he knew that we were not all monsters. He gave me clearance and they found work for me.”

“So,” she said.

“Yes. So.”

He looked at his watch. “I have to get back to Glasgow. The boys are being looked after tonight by the wife of a friend. But I have to get the last train back.” He reached for a pen from his jacket pocket and started to write on the back of his programme. “Here is my address in Glasgow. Perhaps one day we shall be able to meet again.”

She took the programme for him, and put it in her bag. She felt tears in her eyes and turned away. It is always like this, she thought; I cry. He pressed her hand briefly, and was gone.

T
HE FOLLOWING YEAR
, in 1961, the year of La’s fiftieth birthday, the music publishers were acquired by a larger firm, competitors who had eyed them for some years and were now in a position to make an offer that the handful of shareholders in the smaller company found sufficiently attractive. Nobody’s job was threatened, the new owners said, but people would have to be prepared to be flexible. La was told that she was still needed, but that she would have to move to a smaller office in a new building. The old premises, with their view of the small garden and the wall, with their creaky staircase and their staff coffee-room with the Georgian cornice, were too valuable to keep and would be sold.

La resigned. She would miss the job, but she did not need to work; and London was becoming more of an effort, with its crowds and its noise. A hotel had opened near her
house in Chiswick, and its bar was a source of disturbance at night. She decided to go back to Suffolk, keeping the London house for when she wanted to spend time in town. Mrs. Eaton had long since retired; she could find a lodger who would look after it, a student nurse perhaps, somebody like that.

Agg had retired, and sat in the kitchen all day, complaining to Mrs. Agg about the weather and the government, and other matters, too. Lennie ran the farm, and had married the woman he called his sweetheart. She got on well with her mother-in-law, and they seemed happy enough. “You can’t make a farmer’s wife,” said Mrs. Agg. “You’re born to it or you’re not. Lennie’s sweetheart was born to it.”

Henry Madder was in a wheelchair, but had stayed where he was; no Madder had ever gone anywhere, he claimed. A nephew on his wife’s side had taken over the running of his farm and had got rid of the hens, using the wood from the hen houses to patch up fences and gates. The pig farmer had died in a fall from his horse. Percy Brown had become a sergeant and had left the force to drive a taxi in Bury in his retirement. He picked up La from the station one day and told her that his one outstanding ambition had never been fulfilled: to catch one of the gypsies from Foster’s Field red-handed. “They were too wily for me,” he said. “Our problem in the police was always proof. Still is, I suppose.”

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.