La's Orchestra Saves the World (9 page)

La looked up at the young man. He was tall—considerably taller than his father—and well-built. He had a shock of dark hair and one of those broad, country faces that could so easily become, as it did in this case, slightly
bovine. It was not an intelligent face, La thought, nor a comfortable one; there was resentment in it, she thought. Things were not quite right for Lennie.

Lennie stared at La for a few moments before his gaze slipped away to the side. As this happened, though, Mrs. Agg’s eyes moved up and met La’s briefly, as if in enquiry.

La forced a smile. “Hallo, Lennie.”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes.”

Mrs. Agg dusted again at her apron. “Those ewes, Lennie,” she said. “Dad says he wants them moved over to the big pasture.”

Lennie nodded and moved off towards the back door. La noticed that his trousers, which were made of thick grey hodden, had patches of mud upon them, caked dry. On the sleeves of his shirt, which were rolled half-way up the forearm, there were dark stains that looked like treacle: they basted something dark on the hooves of the sheep—she had seen it—to protect them from foot-rot; Stockholm Tar, she thought it was called. Some of this was on Lennie’s shirt now. She noticed the skin on the back of his neck, just above the collar of the stained shirt; she saw that it was tanned by the sun, red-brown, leathery.

With Lennie out of the room, Mrs. Agg glanced at her watch. “I have to let the ducks out,” she said. “We keep them in at night or the fox would get them.” She paused. “Lennie is a worry to me, you know. But what mother doesn’t worry?”

La felt a sudden surge of sympathy for Mrs. Agg. “I’m sure that he’s …” She was unsure what to say, and she trailed away.

“He’s twenty-three,” Mrs. Agg went on. “I sometimes wish that there was more for him to do round here, but there isn’t, you know. They have a dance in the village hall from time to time, but Lennie’s not very good with girls.”

“I’m sure that he’ll find somebody.”

La saw the appreciation in the look she received from Mrs. Agg. Nothing kind was ever said to her, thought La; she lived in a world of taciturn men, of hard work. “I hope so. But not every girl is going to want to marry a farmer, these days. Girls have ideas about living in town. The comforts. Our life here …” She looked about her, at the kitchen, with the bowls of shelled peas, and the stack of wood beside the range; at the blackened griddle; at the rush mats on the floor with their frayed edges.

“Farmers’ daughters?” asked La.

“Yes, that would be good. But Lennie, you see …” The sentence was not completed.

It then occurred to La that it was Lennie she had seen in the garden the previous evening. And it further occurred to her that Mrs. Agg knew that, but could not bring herself to say as much. She was his mother, after all, and few mothers accept the truth about their sons, no matter how glaringly obvious that truth may be.

OVER THE WEEKS THAT FOLLOWED
, the second half of July, La saw no more of the intruder. She was now convinced that it had been Lennie, and that Mrs. Agg might by now have spoken to him. It was also possible that he had merely been curious, and that having met her in the farmhouse kitchen had somehow taken the mystery out of her presence. Whatever it was, she was not frightened of him; rather, she felt sorry for him, for this farm boy in whose life nothing had happened, who had probably never been to London, whose world began and ended with Ingoldsby Farm. She wondered what went on in his head. Did he listen to the news? Did he know where Germany was; who Hitler and Mussolini were? For such a young man, the arrival of a new neighbour must have been an event of tremendous import—enough to lure him into trying to find out more about her. Viewed in that way, Lennie was nothing to worry about. Indeed, when she saw him next she would try to reach out to him, to engage him in conversation, to find out more about his world.

On a Thursday morning, a young man rode a bicycle up La’s drive. La spotted him from the kitchen. She saw him dismount, prop his bicycle against the sycamore sapling at the edge of the drive, and then take off his post office cap, wiping the sweat from his brow. It was warm work cycling in the summer heat and he must have come a fair distance—she had not seen him in the local post office. She dried her hands and went out to meet him.

“Mrs. Stone?”

She nodded. He had extracted a telegram from his pocket and she was going over in her mind which of her elderly relatives could have died. Her father, now in a nursing home in Brighton, was frail, but July was not a month for bronchitis and its mortal harvesting. There was an aunt in York who had been ill, but who had written to her recently and claimed to have been feeling much better, had even spoken of coming down to stay with her for a few days.

She took the telegram and signed the small notebook that the young man produced from another pocket. She searched his face for a sign; they knew what was in these telegrams, these men, but affected ignorance. They avoided smiling, she had been told, when the news was bad. His face was expressionless.

“Hot day, isn’t it?” he remarked, looking away.

“Yes.” She thanked him and gave the notebook back. He nodded, and went back to his bicycle.

She had not expected it to be Richard, and the bearer of this news to be his father.

Regret Richard very ill in France. Shall come to see you late afternoon. Car from Bury. Will leave again following morning. Gerald
.

She went back into the house and sat down on one of the kitchen chairs. Re-reading the telegram, she tried to extract further meaning from the sparse words. But she could not read anything more into the terse message: Richard was ill; his father was coming to see her and then leaving the next
day. She thought: Richard is dying. And then she spoke the words aloud, “Richard is dying.” Then, immediately, she told herself that this was not true. It was not something she could either believe or say. She had simply been mistaken. He was not dying.

She sat in silence. She watched the hands of the kitchen clock, an old railway timepiece rescued from a demolished waiting room somewhere, the minute-hand advancing jerkily around the dial. She closed her eyes and saw Richard standing before her, smiling as she remembered him smiling, the palms of his hands facing outwards in an ambiguous gesture somewhere between greeting and apology. Here I am, he said, without speaking. Here I am. Remember?

She went outside, intending to busy herself with some task that would take her mind off the wait for Gerald’s arrival. She had planted several rows of spinach in her newly cleared vegetable patch, and now she bent down and began to pluck the weeds from either side of the spinach plants. She felt the moisture of the soil against her knees; she was ruining a good skirt, which was not made for such tasks, but she did not want to go back into the house to change. She plucked at the weeds and flung them to the side; she wept, and she saw a tear fall on the dry soil, a tiny drop caught in a fragile meniscus. Why should she cry for a man who had let her down so badly? Who loved another woman rather than her? Because women did; they wept for the men who misused them and betrayed them; and
because La had wanted him, and still did; she wanted him with her, and because not an hour of her day went past, not an hour, but that she thought of him.

When Gerald arrived she was still in the garden.

“I’m a mess,” she said. “Just look at me.”

He seemed surprised, almost irritated, that she should say this. Perhaps he had imagined that this would be no time for small talk. He frowned at her remark. “There has been an accident,” he said. “He was in the
caves
and a structure holding a barrel collapsed. A large piece of wood …”

She could not imagine the scene. How high was this structure? Was it a shelf? And where did the wood come from? It all seemed unlikely; an incomprehensible, foreign accident—unreal.
Caves
, barrels; these things did not
injure
people.

He looked down, and as he did so she reached forward and took his hand.

He swallowed. It was an effort to speak. “A large piece of wood struck him on the head … apparently. It was a bit of a fluke. Had he been standing a few inches to the side nobody would have been hurt.”

She pressed his hand. This was a father talking about a son, his only son. “Oh, Gerald …”

“They took him off to hospital, but apparently the injury to the head is terribly serious and he … he’s unconscious. The brain, you see. They don’t think there’s much hope of his pulling through. That’s what they said to me.”

He looked up again and she saw the redness about his eyes. She moved forward and embraced him, feeling the large frame heave as he began to sob. She did not take in what he said; she had not heard the bit about not pulling through.

“My son. He was my boy. Just my boy.”

She hugged him. “Yes. Yes.”

“I’m going to go first thing tomorrow. La Rochelle, I think. Winifred is with her sisters. They don’t want her to make the trip. They say she couldn’t take the strain, with her heart being what it is. I don’t know.”

She hesitated, but only for a moment. “Well, I’ll come. I’ll come with you.”

He said nothing, but she knew that this is what he wanted; this is why he had come to her.

“We’ll go inside and I’ll make you some tea. Then I shall get my things ready. Perhaps we could even leave tonight and try to make it to Dover so that we can cross first thing.”

He pulled away from her, gently, and took a handkerchief out of the top pocket of his jacket. He wiped at his eyes.

“I shouldn’t,” he said. “It doesn’t make things any easier. I’m sorry.”

“But tears make things easier,” she said, taking his hand again. “They do.”

She did not believe that; but at that moment, she believed nothing. She did not believe that Richard was seriously injured. He would come back. He would come back
to her and they would be in London again, as they had been before all these unreal things purported to happen.

But when she woke up that night, and lay unmoving in her bed, the disorder of her thoughts dispelled itself. Richard was gravely ill in a French hospital. She was leaving the following morning to see him, to say good-bye. It was all very clear and unambiguous; quite unconfused.

T
HE HOSPITAL
was on the edge of Bordeaux, set in a large formal park where lines of cypress had been planted. The summer sun had turned the grass brown and now cast dark shadows beneath the trees. Here and there, in small bowers made by shrubs and pergolas, ambulatory patients in towelling dressing-gowns sat with one another or with relatives. Smoke rose from cigarettes; the sound of conversation; occasional laughter.

Gerald and La were dropped by the taxi-driver at the front door. Above this door was a large frieze: a nurse, angular in stone, ministered to a man lying on a stretcher; on his chest, grasped in both hands, a crucifix. Immediately within was a reception hall, a large square room, at the side of which was a glass booth. A man sat behind a desk in this booth, a telephone beside him, a newspaper spread out before him.

Yes, he was expecting them. He gestured to a row of seats against the wall; if they would care to sit there for a few minutes, a doctor would be with them shortly. Gerald held his hat in his hands; he was fingering the brim in his nervousness. La touched his forearm in reassurance.

“They’re being very kind, aren’t they?” she whispered. Gerald nodded. “We should sit down.”

They waited ten minutes or so before the doctor arrived. From time to time, La looked up, to catch the eye of the man in the booth. He smiled and pointed towards a door at the other end of the hall; the doctor would arrive, Madame should not be anxious. And then he was there, walking towards them, holding out a hand, initially towards Gerald and then, as if noticing her for the first time, to La.

La’s French was rusty, but good enough for the present task. When she began to speak to him in his own language, the doctor visibly relaxed.

“I’m sorry that we meet in these difficult circumstances,” he said. “I will take you and your father to his room.”

“I am the daughter-in-law,” said La. “I am married to Monsieur Stone.”

The doctor appeared confused. “But Madame …”

“We are in the process of divorcing one another,” said La. “Now …”
La veuve
, she thought.
La veuve Stone
.

He understood. “My apologies. I was not aware.”

“There is no reason why you should have known,” said
La. She paused. “Is … is Madame here?” How dare she, she thought. How dare she.

The doctor shook his head. “She said that she would return later. I think she knew that you were coming.”

La looked at him. “Can you tell us what the position is?”

“What does he say?” Gerald interjected.

“I’m asking him now. I’ll tell you.”

The doctor invited them to sit down again. He drew up a chair and sat facing them. “I’m afraid that the situation is very grave,” he began. “The coma is profound and his breathing is becoming very laboured. I do not think that he will recover consciousness. I am very sorry to have to tell you this.”

Gerald leaned forward. “No hope?” he said.

La looked down; Gerald knew.

“I can escort you to his room,” said the doctor. “In these cases there are things that one might wish to say. Sometimes the patient hears, you know. I’m personally convinced of that. Sometimes he may be aware that somebody is there. You never know.”

They followed the doctor along a corridor, then up a staircase that turned back upon itself. There was a second corridor, with a lingering hospital smell, the odour of strong disinfectant. It caught the back of La’s throat and made her stomach heave. Ammonia.

“Here,” said the doctor, gesturing to a half-open door. “I will return later. There is no hurry.”

They stood in uncertainty until La pushed the door open and led the way in. For a few moments she did not look at the figure in the bed, at the head lying on the pillow, half-turned; she did not dare. Gerald moved past her to the top of the bed. He reached for Richard’s hand, and held it. La felt the tears brim in her eyes and wiped them away. Now she looked at Richard’s face. There was nothing wrong with him. He was simply sleeping; it was that deceptive. The ante-chamber of death, she thought; the sleep that will become death.