La's Orchestra Saves the World (6 page)

Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek? I gather that you met him. “And Madame Chiang as well—we met both of them. We went to tea with Madame Chiang, actually, and she said
to Wystan, ‘Please tell me, do poets like cake?’ Auden replied: ‘Yes. Very much indeed.’ ‘Oh, I am very glad to hear it,’ Madame Chiang said. ‘I thought they preferred only spiritual food.’”

La thought she heard the interviewer laugh, but only briefly. She wondered how she would do if she went off somewhere, as Auden and Isherwood had done. She had known somebody who had gone to Spain, to drive an ambulance with the International Brigade, where he had witnessed a massacre by the Nationalists. Almost every adult male in a particular village had been shot, and the women and children had been made to watch. He had returned to England silent and withdrawn. His smile, which she remembered for its breadth and readiness, had disappeared, and now he looked away when you spoke to him. He never talked about it; no mention of the ambulance, nor the massacre, which had been reported by somebody else. He just nodded and said that he had been in Spain but that now he was back.

People were talking of another war, and had been doing so more fervently since the Austrian
Anschluss
. But La thought that war was unlikely, if not impossible. Rational men, meeting around a table, could surely never sanction something like that again. They all knew—they had seen the newsreel footage—of the sheer hell of the trenches; the pitiless carnage. How could anybody with any grip of their senses envisage doing something like that again? It was
inconceivable, and Mr. Chamberlain obviously understood that very well. But did Mr. Hitler? What a buffoon that man was, thought La. With all his strutting and ridiculous bombast; an Austrian rabble-rouser pretending to be a statesman. Ridiculous.

If war came, then what would she do? There would be no point in going back to London, as she would have nowhere to stay and she would just be another mouth to feed. It would be better to remain in the country; to grow vegetables and contribute to the war effort in whatever other way she could. But it would not come: war was an abomination, a sickness of the mind; at the last moment people would surely pull back from something that brought with it a risk of their destruction. Or would they?

The voice on the radio caught her attention. It was another poet. “War seems inevitable to me,” he was saying, “because the monster of fascism can survive only if it has people to devour. There is no dealing with such a creed. To talk is a sign of weakness which will be pounced upon. To negotiate is to expose one’s fear. The only hope for us is to become strong; for trade-unionists and workers to assert themselves and to make sure that the country allies itself with the great progressive forces of our modern world—and by that I mean the Soviet Union. Sooner or later the working people of Germany and Spain will rise up and defeat their oppressors. That’s the way to avoid war. The dictators will fall at the hands of their own people.”

She went to bed. The sheets smelled strongly of lavender, a soporific smell; and she was tired from the trip, so sleep overtook her quickly. It was so quiet; that surprised her, as she was used to the constant background noise of London, the distant rumble of trains, the sound of traffic, the noise of millions of people breathing—even that must create a background of sound. Here there was nothing, just the occasional creaking of the house and a scurrying sound of mice or some other small creatures across the roof or in the attic above her head.

She awoke in the night, disoriented, and it took her a few seconds to remember where she was. She switched on her bedside lamp, and looked about her; her door was open—had she left it like that? She got out of bed and pushed it shut. She had locked the front door before she had turned in; would Mrs. Agg censure her for that, she wondered, or was one meant to leave one’s door open at night as well?

The following morning, La walked down to Mrs. Agg’s farm. Agg himself was not there, but she saw a man in the distance, in a field where sheep were kept, and that was Agg. Mrs. Agg was happy enough to sell La a large packet of seed potatoes. “Late-growing,” she said. “You will still have time to plant these and to harvest them in the late autumn, before the ground becomes hard.” She paused. “Why is a young person like you shutting herself away in that house? Sorry to ask.”

La thought for a moment before replying. “My husband
ran away with another woman, Mrs. Agg. I was very unhappy. I felt that I wanted to get away.”

Mrs. Agg nodded. “I thought it was something like that. Any woman who’s unhappy—look for the cause and it’ll be a man.”

“So here I am,” said La.

La cleared a patch of vegetable garden. The long roots of the weeds yielded only under protest, clinging to the soil, and it was hard work. But by late afternoon she had two freshly turned mounds of earth in which the potatoes could be planted. It was good soil; clay loam. I shall not starve, she thought. Whatever happens in the world, I shall not starve here in this quiet corner of England.

A
FEW DAYS LATER
, La drove to Bury in the car that she had bought for sixty-five pounds from the garage-man, Mr. Granger. It was an Austin Seven, a small car painted in dark green with a hood that could be taken down in fine weather. La kept the hood on that day, as she was not sure how to operate the mechanism that released it; Mr. Granger had shown her, but she had forgotten; there were levers which had to be pushed a particular way, this way or that, she could not remember. There was quite enough air, though, from the wound-down windows to give the feeling of being in the open.

La had some experience of driving, even if not a great deal. Richard had owned a car, which she had taken out from time to time when she went to play tennis in Richmond. She realised now that she had no idea what had happened to that car. Perhaps it had been left at the office, but
nothing had been said, and she did not want to ask. Perhaps he had taken it on the boat with him to France; perhaps the Frenchwoman would be sitting in her seat—La’s seat—and driving with Richard along the winding roads of Aquitaine; in her seat; with her husband. She put the thought out of her mind; if she allowed it to stay, then for the rest of the day it would be like a nagging pain, refusing to budge, always there. She would not let that happen to her, now that she had started this new life.

You can forget his car, she told herself, because you have your own car now. And you have your own life, here in Suffolk, with your own friends … But that is where the attempt at re assurance stumbled. There were no new friends; not yet. The only people she had met so far, apart from Mrs. Agg, were Ethel, the woman who ran the village post office, and a man who had come out of the pub and lifted his hat to her in a show of elaborate courtesy; he had been drunk, she decided, but she had nodded curtly and had not stayed to hear him out. Mrs. Agg was solicitous, yet she could hardly imagine herself developing a friendship with the farmer’s wife. La was no snob, and did not care what drawer people were from—her mother’s expression, and like many of the things said by mothers, alarmingly persistent in its resonance. The problem with Mrs. Agg was that they had no interests in common, other than the cultivation of vegetables, perhaps; on which subject Mrs. Agg had revealed her misgivings about the extent of La’s knowledge.
I can grow
potatoes
, La thought, through the mental equivalent of clenched teeth.
I know about these things. In Surrey we …
But she had never grown potatoes in Surrey, she had to admit. There may have been potatoes in the walled kitchen garden, but she had neither put them there nor nursed them to readiness. There had been a gardener who came three days a week; her involvement with potatoes had extended at this point merely to the eating of them; not that she could mention that to Mrs. Agg, who would have simply had her prejudices confirmed by such a disclosure.

In due course, thought La, I shall receive invitations. These would not come from the villagers, who would not make a habit of entertaining, but from the larger houses in the vicinity. And there was always Bury, which was not too far away and which had the sort of population that one might expect to find in a prosperous market town: professional people, business people, teachers and so on. These were people with whom she would be able to discuss things, who read books and had views. And people of her own age, with a social life.

She drove into Bury and parked a short distance away from the Cornhill. It was market day, and produce stands stood in a colourful row along the side of the street. She walked past these, looking at the vegetables, the unpopular Flet cheeses, the bottled fruit. On impulse she bought a large ball of string—she had not seen any string when she went through the drawers in the kitchen—and it was something
one always needed. Soap, a roll of white bandage for domestic injuries, two large boxes of cook’s matches; these were all cheaper here, and she would need them. She found a stall selling books, and could not resist a book on the growing of roses. She noticed that the author’s name was Thorn, and pointed this out to the stall-holder, who glanced at the cover, nodded and said, “Terry Thorn. Big rose man over in Ipswich.”

“I suppose he had to write books about roses,” said La. “It was inevitable. Mr. Thorn.”

The stall-holder nodded. “Knew so much about roses that he had to put pen to paper.”

Then she found a grocery store and went through the list of supplies she had written out the day before. We haven’t seen you before, madam; would you like to establish an account? Of course. Thank you. An account gave her a feeling of belonging; it was a small part of her new identity.

The grocer’s boy carried her purchases to the car. He whistled as he walked behind her, but stopped when La turned round to smile at him.

“Don’t stop. I know that tune.”

“I wasn’t thinking.”

“Whistling’s nice. Cheerful. You must be happy.”

“I can’t complain.”

Suddenly she felt that she wanted to ask him something. “How old are you?”

He looked away. “Sixteen. Seventeen in December.”

She was walking beside him now, not ahead. “And do you think there’s going to be a war?”

He was surprised by her question. He’s just a boy, she thought.

“Maybe,” he said. “Yes, maybe. Mr. Evans in the shop says that there’s going to be a war very soon. A couple of weeks, he thinks. He says that old Hitler has wanted it for years to make up for the fact that they lost last time. He says that if there is one, then he’ll have to get a girl to do my job as I’ll have to go off and fight. That’s what he says. My Mam says different, though.”

She looked at him, and saw him, in her mind, in a uniform. It would be too big for him; too big around the shoulders.

“And what do you think about that? Going off to fight?”

He shrugged, and shifted the weight of the box of groceries in his arms. “I don’t know. If the other lads go, then I’ll go. I don’t mind. Better than sitting around here. Might meet some girls, you know, if I go somewhere else. Better than the girls round here, most likely.”

She wanted to say to him that one did not join the army to meet girls, but did not. Instead, she said, “Have you ever read any poetry?”

The boy shook his head, and gave her a sideways look. “No. I can’t say I have.”

She had been thinking of Dr. Price, her tutor, who had introduced her to the work of Wilfred Owen. She wanted to
talk about Owen now, suddenly, rather urgently, but could not, of course, to this boy, even if he was exactly the sort of boy that Owen wrote about; gentle, rather passive boys from places like this, innocents who had been tossed so heartlessly into veils of gunfire:
The shrill demented choirs of wailing shells; And bugles calling for them from sad shires
.

The boy muttered, “What did you say?”

She had not been aware of saying anything; but she had. “I was thinking about how horrible war is.”

“Is it?”

“I’m afraid it is. That’s why I hope that there isn’t going to be one after all.”

IT WAS WHEN LA RETURNED
to the house after this trip to Bury that she noticed it. She was unpacking her purchases in the kitchen—the string, the groceries, the book on roses—laying everything out at one end of the scrubbed-pine table when she saw that the tea caddy had been moved. It was not something, perhaps, that she would normally have paid much attention to, but she remembered very clearly placing it back on the lowest of the kitchen shelves, just above the hook on which the largest of her saucepans was hung. She remembered that because she had spotted a patch of grease on the bottom of the large saucepan and had dabbed at it with a kitchen towel. She had thought that she should wash the saucepan again, but had decided to leave it, and had given the tea caddy a
quick wipe with the towel. She had not moved it; it had been there on the shelf, and now it was on the shelf above that.

Of course she doubted her recollection. Perhaps she had lifted the caddy from its place to dust it and had then replaced it on the shelf above. But asking herself this question she answered it immediately: she had not done that. She simply had not done that.

She crossed the room and took down the tea caddy from the shelf. Reaching for it gave her another reason to be sure; she could not reach the higher shelf unless she stood on a stool. She stopped, her hand barely around the caddy above her head. Suddenly she was frightened. She stepped down off the stool and spun round; she did not want her back turned to the open kitchen door, and the corridor beyond it. Somebody had been in her kitchen and had moved the tea caddy. That person, whoever it was, could still be in the house.

She left the kitchen and made her way slowly down the corridor towards the front of the house. Once in the hall, she pushed the sitting-room door open and peered in. There was nobody. Nor was there anybody in any of the other rooms; she went into each of them, her heart racing with anxiety, but she saw nothing untoward.

She returned to the kitchen, where she riddled the cooking range before feeding in fresh coal. Then she put on the kettle and sat down at the kitchen table. She picked up the
newly acquired ball of string and fiddled with it briefly, thinking. She could not remember whether she had locked the back door on leaving for Bury; and if she had locked it, then had she locked the front door as well? She thought that she had, but she could not be sure.