La's Orchestra Saves the World (8 page)

She moved towards the door and opened it, trying not to look at the signs of its earlier forcing. She did not wish to be reminded of her conversation earlier that day with Percy
Brown—a conversation that had ended with his concluding that there was very little that he could do about her break-in. Now she took a few steps into the dark, and began to remove the wooden pegs that kept the blouse on the line. The garment was dry, and had the fresh smell of cotton that has been left out in the fresh country air, something that her clothing never had in London. Clothing left out in the garden there came in slightly grey, with that vaguely stale smell that could linger in the atmosphere for days when the winds were sluggish.

She held the cotton of the blouse against her cheeks, and breathed in. She looked about her, her eyes gradually becoming accustomed to the dark. The shapes became more defined now; the woody lavender emerged, the line of box, the large pieris at the edge of the lawn. She took a few steps deeper into the darkness, looking up as she did so, up at the stars, fields of them, it seemed, stretching above in the chambered sky above. As a girl she had known the names and position of the constellations, and some of these were still lodged in memory: Ursa Major, Andromeda, Cassiopeia. She would renew her acquaintance with them now that she was here in a place where the sky was not spoiled by light.

Suddenly she thought of Richard. She still thought of him every day, but for shorter periods now; he was still there, a stubborn presence, like a scar. Now, at this moment, she missed him sorely. She would give anything, she
thought, to have him here beside her; to be with him right now, under this sky, in this place. Without him she had nobody to share this with; the experience was half what it could be.

She put the thought out of her mind. Shortly after Richard had left, a friend in London, to whom the same thing had happened—at the hands of a charming womaniser—had said to her that the trick was to forget the man. “If they’re not there, then we feel much better, you know. So banish him.”

“But how? How do you stop thinking of somebody when they keep coming back to you? When that person is the only person you want to think about?”

“You do what monks do when they think about women. You train yourself to think of something else. In their case, the Holy Ghost, I suppose. Or the Devil, I suppose, if they wish to frighten themselves.” She made a face, which indicated that she did not believe in the Devil.

She had decided to do that; every time he came to mind, she would think of something else, of something very far from Richard. Dr. Price, perhaps, her Cambridge tutor, about whose person there was not the faintest whiff of sulphur, but who could stand in for the Devil. She conjured up an image of Dr. Price, even though her old tutor was no Old English expert, expounding to her on
Beowulf
in a drowsy supervision, neither of them enjoying the experience, both wanting to talk about Eliot, who was much more to
the
point
than any Scandinavian hero. The dissonance between her memories and
Beowulf was
sufficient to banish the thought of Richard. And now, out in the garden at night, she thought of
Beowulf
, and vaguely of Dr. Price, and Richard was gone.

She walked round towards the front of the house, enjoying the cool evening air. The lawn stretched before her, a dark sward, beyond which the plane trees were a black expanse reaching up to the rather lighter sky. She decided to walk in the direction of the trees; the conquering of her fear made her feel almost giddy and for a few moments she felt as if she might break into song. Once on the lawn, she slipped off her shoes, and felt the grass soft beneath her feet. Somewhere in the distance an owl cried, a sharp sound that she remembered from her childhood; there had been owls in the barn beside the house in Surrey and they were forever screeching.

She reached the plane trees and stood beneath them for a couple of minutes, relishing the sound of their leaves in the slight breeze that had blown up. Within moments the breeze dropped and the trees were silent again. A leaf dropped, and touched her gently on the cheek as it fell, like the wing of a tiny bird.

Then she saw the movement. A dark shape on the other side of the lawn detached itself from a shadow and moved, to become another dark shape closer to the house. La caught her breath and stared into the darkness, straining to
make out the form of what she had seen. For a few moments it became even darker, though, as a wisp of cloud moved across what little moon there was; La thought she could make out the figure of a man, but then she realised that she was staring at the large wisteria she had been trimming earlier that day. To the right, then, and …

The man moved suddenly; just a few yards, but enough to make himself distinct against the light that was coming from corner of the large window in the sitting room; the curtains did not meet exactly, and light escaped, enough to silhouette the figure of a man.

“Boo!”

It came to her completely spontaneously; so quickly, in fact, that she was unaware of any decision to shout out. And afterwards, when the childish word had been uttered, so loudly that it seemed to fill the night, her breath was gone from her, and she gasped. And the gasp might have been at her own sheer effrontery, or her surprise at what happened next. She saw the man jerk, like a cut-out in a shadow-play, as if invisible strings holding him up had been jerked. Then she heard the thudding of his feet on the gravel as he tore along the path beside the house to make good his escape down the drive.

She stayed where she was for a few moments. She was shaking, but felt strangely elated, as if she had just run a race and reached the finish line far ahead of the other contestants. She thought she should be feeling frightened, but she
did not; she had done exactly what Percy Brown had implied one should do to burglars. You should say boo, and then, exactly as he had predicted, they would run, or scarper, as he put it. He had been talking of a metaphorical boo, but she had taken him at his word and done as advised, with the result that she now saw.

La crossed the lawn, back towards the house. Then, following the path round towards the back, she found herself on the drive. She felt no fear now as she walked down to the point where the drive joined the lane; the intruder would be well down the road now, heading back to wherever he came from; which must be, she thought, her village, or possibly the neighbouring village two miles away on the Bury road. That thought unnerved her; the idea that this sleepy little place could conceal somebody given to creeping round—and into—the houses of others was not a comfortable one. And yet criminals had to live somewhere; burglars had their neighbours, as indeed did murderers. Such people also had jobs, in many cases; worked alongside workmates, stood or sat beside them in the pub; passed the time of day with others at the bus-stop. In spite of all this, of course, such people still did the things that they did: looked through windows, forced doors, and worse; even if it must have been more difficult for them than their city equivalents. In the city crime was anonymous; here it was personal.

From the edge of the drive, La noticed a light at
Ingoldsby’s farmhouse in the distance, in spite of the lateness of the hour. Agg was up, or Mrs. Agg, perhaps, baking bread in the kitchen. She toyed with the idea of going over there right away, to tell her that that there was a prowler on the loose. Mrs. Agg was proud of her Aylesbury ducks, and if the prowler was a thief—and he must be—then a duck would be a tempting target. But she decided not to go; she had no torch and the car was put away in the garage. She would go tomorrow.

She was at the back of the house now—the side that faced the lane—close to the kitchen door, from which she had left the house to go into the garden. She made her way to the door and pushed it open—or was it already open? She stopped. She tried to remember: Had she left it ajar when she had gone into the garden, or had she closed it behind her? She closed her eyes. She had been at the kitchen window when she had seen the flapping of her blouse on the line; she had opened the door—she remembered the light from the door falling across the stone paving outside and then … then she had closed it because she remembered how dark it became when she did so. The paving had been dark. It had.

And now the door was slightly ajar and she did not have to turn the handle. This meant that the intruder had run round the side of the house and rather than running down the drive, as she had imagined he would do, he had gone into the house. She opened her eyes. She had forgotten that
she had left a full kettle on the range and it was boiling vigorously now; its whistle had broken and it now let forth little more than a sigh. In the air there was the smell of onions; she had fried some onions earlier on to have with a piece of liver and there was lingering in the air that sweet, slightly pungent smell that took its time to fade. The thought occurred to her: he would have smelled that smell when he came in; he would have become party to that bit of her domestic life—her choice of dinner.

She hesitated. She wondered whether she should telephone Percy Brown and tell him that she suspected that the intruder was in the house again. But the policeman would probably be asleep by now, and surely he would ask her why she thought that there was somebody in the house. If she explained that the back door was slightly ajar, then he would be bound to think that she was imagining things. Doors can be blown open by the wind; doors could swing open entirely by themselves if not hung true. There were all sorts of reasons why doors could be thought to have been opened by somebody else—and one of these reasons was the overactive imagination of a woman adjusting to the business of living on her own.

She could not end up running off to Percy Brown every time she felt nervous, and anyway what had happened outside had shown her that the nervousness was on the other side. Yet, would a nervous man have run into the house? Hardly; what refuge would there be for him there?

La closed the door behind her, slammed it for the noise, and then locked it. Radio Normandie was still playing dance music at the other end of the house. She walked down the corridor and went into the sitting room to turn off the radio. Now there was silence, and she listened to that silence, which is never really complete; there were sounds. She heard her own breathing, and her heart, too, she imagined; you could hear such things in a quiet house, if you listened hard, and were close enough. Now, though, she switched off the lamps in the sitting room, but left the light in the corridor burning, both for reassurance and in order to light her way up the first part of the stairs.

Upstairs she again went from room to room, and found nothing. She opened the door of a large wardrobe in the spare room and looked inside; she peered into the bathroom cupboard and behind curtains in her room. She said to herself:
There is nobody in this house, but me. I am not afraid
.

S
UCH A BRIGHT LIGHT
penetrated La’s bedroom curtain, and so early, as it was mid-summer, and the sun was already above the horizon. The birds had been in full throat from five o’clock, asserting their territory to anybody who cared to listen, announcing the beginning of the rural day. La was not a late riser, but five was too early, even for her, and she lay under her blankets for another forty minutes or so, drifting in and out of sleep, before she eventually slipped out of bed and walked barefoot into the upstairs bathroom. Through the bathroom window, a rectangle of old glass with a vertical fault-line of trapped bubbles, La looked out over the fields on the other side of the lane. The field nearest the house had Agg’s sheep in it, and a couple of his Jersey cows. The cows had been milked already, she could see; Mrs. Agg had told her that Agg got
up at four to do this, every day, month in, month out, and had been doing that since he was twelve. That was not uncommon in the country, where everybody seemed to have been in the same place, doing the same thing, for most of their lives. Percy Brown had told her that his father had been a policeman in a small town nearby, and the vicar, whom she had met briefly on the day after her arrival, had been born in a vicarage in Bury.

After breakfast La walked over to Ingoldsby Farm. Mrs. Agg was shelling peas in the kitchen and called her in from outside.

“I could help you,” said La.

“You don’t have to,” said Mrs. Agg.

“I want to. Please let me.”

She sat down at the table alongside her neighbour.

“I had an intruder last night,” she said. “In the garden. A man.”

Mrs. Agg continued with her peas. She did not look up. “I see.”

“Yes.” La had expected more of a reaction. Perhaps intruders did not count for much in the country.

Mrs. Agg looked up briefly. “A gypsy, I’d say. Foster’s Fields. There’s a gaggle of them down there.”

La remembered what Percy Brown had said. Gypsies were outside thieves. But surely not all of them; how could everybody be a thief?

“Yes,” Mrs. Agg continued. “They come round here on the look-out for anything not nailed to the ground. Like ducks.”

“So I shouldn’t be worried,” said La.

Mrs. Agg shook her head. “Worried? Oh, no. They slink away pretty quickly if you shine a light at them. Like foxes, they are.” She paused. “You weren’t worried, were you? You can come over here if you’re worried. I’ll send Agg over with his shotgun.”

They lapsed into silence. La felt relieved; if what Mrs. Agg said was true, and he had been a gypsy, then at least she could stop worrying about being watched. Gypsies stole, she had been told; they did not watch.

They worked for a further ten minutes. Mrs. Agg was not one for unnecessary conversation, and La assumed that there was nothing to be said. When they reached the end of the peas, the farmer’s wife stood up and brushed at her apron. As she did so, a door behind her opened and a young man entered the room. He was about to say something, and had opened his mouth to do so, when he spotted La and stopped himself in surprise.

“This is my Lennie,” said Mrs. Agg.