La's Orchestra Saves the World Read online

  “But look what’s happening in Spain and Germany.”

  He did not think that there was too much cause to worry. “Spain’s Spain, and always has been. They’re cruel. They’ve always been cruel—and not just to those unfortunate bulls. Germany is full of militaristic bravado,” he added. “But they’re weak. Our Empire is so much bigger, so much more solid. They’ve got nothing really. No wonder they go on about Lebensraum …”

  La had never taken a very close interest in politics, but she read the newspapers and now it was impossible to be indifferent to what was happening. She took to attending lectures on economics and unemployment, and she felt the sense of outrage that gripped the audience. It was intolerable that people should be deprived of the fundamental dignity of being able to work for a living. Everybody was suffering, she read, but she did not think this was true. She and Richard were still well-off; it was something to do with not having too much invested in the stock exchange, Richard said, and in the continued demand for good wine.

  She volunteered to teach a course in literature for the Workers’ Educational Association. Richard did not like her going off to the East End alone, but she did nonetheless, and became involved in a parish soup kitchen and in a team that assisted a nurse to inspect the heads of children for lice and to shave their hair. The children were dirty, and her hands would smell after the smaller ones had taken them and clasped them. They wanted affection, these children, and she embraced them. “Careful,” said the nurse. “Check your own hair, Mrs. Stone.”

  “We are at the centre of the greatest empire the world has ever known, Sister Edwards. And yet there’s all this want. Look at it.”

  “It’s always been like that, Mrs. Stone. Nothing’s changed, has it?”

  Richard said: “I’m not happy about all this, La. You have everything you need. I know that things are bad for some, but there’s not much we can do, is there? You don’t have to spend so much time trying to change things, you know.”

  They disagreed on this, but La’s view prevailed. Her feelings for Richard had changed over the first year of their marriage; she was used to him now, and the fondness she felt for him had deepened. She began to worry about him, to feel anxious if he was late home. She took his hand at odd moments and held it to her breast. “I do love you, you know,” she said. “So much. You know that, don’t you?”

  He smiled. “Strange woman.”

  “Strange that I should love you?”

  He winked. “Maybe.”

  She went to a doctor, discreetly, without telling him that she had made the appointment. The doctor said, “It’s difficult to tell. People can wait for years, you know, and then suddenly a child comes along. We can do some investigation, of course. But it may not reveal anything.”

  But it did. The doctor, who understood these things, who knew that the wife might not want the husband to know, did not write her a letter, but waited for her to telephone back for an appointment.

  “It’s not good news, I’m afraid, Mrs. Stone.”

  She left his surgery and walked back along the street, past the underground station where she should have caught her train. She walked on, along unfamiliar pavements in the hinterland of Harley Street. One future had closed to her with the doctor‘s few words.

  She told Richard. He seemed surprised that she had consulted the doctor without telling him.

  “You should have spoken to me about it, La,” he said. “I’m your husband, for God’s sake.”

  “We never spoke,” she said. “I always felt it was a subject you didn’t want to address. I’m sorry if I was wrong about that.”

  He spoke angrily. “You were.”

  “I’m very sorry. And it’s my fault that we can’t have children.”

  He softened. “It’s not your fault. It’s not.”

  “Well, put it this way—I’m the reason.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Come here.” He put his arms around her. “I have you and you have me. That’s enough, isn’t it?”

  She wept, and he comforted her. This whole experience, painful though it was, brought them closer together, and she thought, I am truly in love with him. Truly. I know it now.

  Now it seemed that Richard provoked a far more profound need within her. She wanted to be with him; she wanted all his attention; she wanted him to feel about her what she found herself feeling about him. He had suddenly become so important to her that even his possessions seemed to have gathered an aura about them; his handkerchiefs—his—his leather key wallet, his jacket; simple, everyday things, but now endowed with a mystical weight beyond their ordinary function. She asked herself how other people—people who came into contact with him at the office, for instance—could not feel the same way about him. Could they not sense it? Surely everyone, all of humanity, must succumb to his charms as she had; must understand how completely special he was.

  She marvelled at her discovery. It was the most universal of human emotions—love—but now, for the first time, she knew what it meant. It imbued everything with value and a sort of rare excitement; made each day into something precious, a gift.

  She could not tell him how she felt; she had no words for it. She could say I love you so much, but what would that convey? People said that all the time—she herself had said it—but they could not possibly be feeling what she felt, or feeling it with the same intensity. And so she used simple words, the formality of which somehow seemed more fitting. “Thank you for marrying me,” she said.

  And he replied: “I am the one who should thank you. I am the fortunate one.”

  She smiled. “Can you imagine what it must be like to be unhappy? To live with somebody whom you can’t stand any more? Imagine that?”

  He closed his eyes for a moment as he thought of this; then opened them and smiled his disarming smile. “Difficult,” he said quietly.

  Three

  RICHARD EXPLAINED to her what he did at the office. “It’s not very complicated,” he said. “It’s exactly what my father did and my grandfather, too, when they were my age. We have agents over in Bordeaux who buy the wine for us. We arrange to ship it and put it in our cellars here in London. Then we sell it to smaller merchants. To hotels. To people who buy directly from us for their own cellars. That’s all. My job is to see that it’s looked after once it’s landed here. I also check the inventories and arrange the tastings.”

  “It must be interesting,” she said. “You must have to keep a lot of figures in your head.”

  He looked at her. He raised an eyebrow. “Hardly. But yes, it has its moments, like any job, I suppose.”

  He showed her an album of photographs that his father had built up. There was a photograph of their office in Bordeaux itself—a building with the family name painted on the front and a staff of six or seven men, formally dressed, standing outside. They looked hot in their dark suits and waistcoats in the bright sunlight, but were smiling dutifully. At the edge of the picture, under the shade of a tree, two small boys were playing what looked like a game of marbles, unconcerned by the world of adults. Her eye took in the small details: the boys at their game, the pollarded tree beside the office building, the short shadows which told her that the photograph had been taken around noon.

  Then there were the photographs of the châteaux. The name of each, or of their place, was written in ink under the photograph, and she took pleasure in uttering them: d’Yquem, Bel-Air, Phélan-Ségur, de Sours. Richard knew most of them. He had spent the last few summers there, working with the agents. He knew a lot of the people in the photographs, and he named them or pointed things out. “That man has a wooden leg. Blessé de guerre, you know. That fellow, they say, has the best palate in the Médoc. That man there is the brother of a bishop.”

  “Could we go there?” she asked.

  He seemed hesitant; almost as if the world they were looking at was a private one, something just for him. But then he said, “Of course we can. One of these days.”

  THEY HAD BEEN MARRIED
TWO YEARS, when his father, Gerald, one afternoon came to the house. When she answered the door and saw him standing there, his expression grave, she knew immediately that Richard was dead—there could be no other explanation for such a call. There had been an accident, and Richard was dead.

  She felt her legs give way underneath her, and she cried out. Gerald, who had been carrying his umbrella, dropped it and reached out, managing to catch her under the arms as she sagged forward. There was a rending of material as her blouse tore.

  “My dear,” he said. “My dear.”

  “He’s dead.”

  “No, my dear. No. No.”

  He helped her to a chair in the hall. She had taken in his denial and looked up at him as one who has been reprieved.

  “Why have you come here?”

  He knelt beside her so that his face was at her level. He was always impeccably groomed, his thick, dark hair swept neatly to each side of a railroad-straight parting. There was the smell of the pomade that he always used, something with bay rum in it.

  “I’m afraid that something has indeed happened,” he said. “But there has not been an accident. Richard is not dead.”

  She stared at him mutely. He looked down at the floor, and rose back to his feet; a joint clicked somewhere. His hand was resting upon her shoulder.

  “What has happened, my dear, is that my son …” He paused. There was pain in his voice. “My son, I’m sorry to say, has let us all down. He has left the country and gone to France. On the boat train. This morning. I am very, very sorry to have to tell you this.”

  She tried to make sense of what he was saying. Richard had said something about the Médoc. The Médoc? Had he gone there?

  “He’s gone to the office over there? Is that it?” Gerald sighed. “I’m afraid that it’s not that innocent. I wish to God it were. He has gone to France, but I’m sorry to say that he has gone because there is a woman there. He informed me this morning, presented me with a fait accompli. He did not have the courage to tell you and left me to do it. My son did that. He did that.”

  RICHARD’S MOTHER APPEARED half an hour later. She had been weeping and her eyes were red. She insisted that La should go home with them; they could not countenance her staying by herself. La said nothing, but packed a bag mutely, automatically. It was as if somebody else was going through the physical motions; she felt completely numb, as if she had been disembodied.

  She found it difficult to say very much, and did not want to talk. But the following day, tired to the point of exhaustion through lack of sleep, she started to ask them questions. Where had he gone? They believed that it was Margaux. And the woman? She was somebody he had met when he had worked in the office in Bordeaux. She was the daughter of a business acquaintance, the owner of a vineyard there, who had interests in La Rochelle as well. Shipping, they thought. We shall never deal with them again; never.

  “You had no idea that there was somebody else?” This was from his mother.

  “Of course not? How could I?”

  “She had been coming to London on and off. He confessed that to me,” said Gerald.

  That silenced her. There had been nights when he had had late meetings—or so he said—and had stayed in his club. And she recalled that weekend when he had gone to watch a rugby game in Cardiff; he would have had the opportunity.

  “He took long lunch breaks,” Gerald began. “Perhaps …” But he was silenced by a look from his wife, who glanced anxiously at La.

  “I’m going to France,” announced Gerald. “I’m going to bring him back. I’ll drag him back if necessary.”

  La shook her head. “I don’t think that you can,” she said. “And if he doesn’t want to be with me, then I wouldn’t want him brought back.”

  Gerald looked awkward. “Do you want to divorce him?”

  “I suppose I’ll have to,” La replied.

  “We’ll support you in every way,” said Gerald. “His share in the business will be made over to you. I’ve already informed our solicitors. They know what the position is. I still control everything.”

  “All in good time,” said Richard’s mother. “He might change his mind. We can hope.”

  “No,” said Gerald. “We can’t.”

  La watched them. Of the two, she thought, I feel sorrier for her. A man can divorce his son if pushed to that extreme; a mother could never do that.

  SHE WENT BACK to the house in Maida Vale. A friend from school days, Valerie, a woman who had married a banker and who lived in a flat in Chelsea, came and stayed for a few days. It was a help to have somebody with her, especially an old friend. Valerie talked when she wanted to talk, and was silent when she wanted to be silent. She made no attempts at reassurance, but was direct and pragmatic. “Bad choice,” she said. “Bad luck. It could happen to anybody. It’s not your fault at all. It’s men. That’s what they do. All the time. He’s not going to come back—not after doing this. So you’ll have to forget him, I’m afraid.”

  “I suppose you’re right.”

  “Of course I’m right.”

  Valerie lit a cigarette. “And now?”

  “I want to get out of this place. I don’t want to live here.”

  Valerie looked thoughtful. “You could stay with us if you like,” she said. “We’ve got a spare room. I don’t see why you couldn’t stay with us … for a while. Eventually we’d get on one another’s nerves, I suppose, but you could stay with us.”

  La laughed. It was the first time that she had laughed since it happened, ten days ago, and it felt strange; as if her face was cracking. “It would be like being back at school,” she said. “But different. There’d be a man drifting around.”

  “I mean the invitation. I really do.”

  “I know.” She stretched out and put a hand on her friend’s arm. “I’m very grateful. But no, I don’t think it would be a good idea. They … Richard’s parents, have offered me something, and I think I’m going to accept. They have a house they never use. It’s in the family. They said that I could have it if I wished.”

  Valerie blew smoke into the air. “Here in London?”

  “No. It’s in the country. In Suffolk. In a village there.”

  Valerie frowned. “You can’t go and live in the country. You can’t go and bury yourself out there. Suffolk. It’s miles away. For God’s sake, La!”

  “Perhaps I want to be miles away,” said La. “Perhaps that’s exactly what I want … now.”

  “What will you do?”

  “I’ll find something,” she said. “Go for walks. Listen to music. Talk to people.”

  “But everybody will be ancient.”

  La smiled. “There are people our age in the country. Bags of them.”

  Valerie was not impressed with the argument. “Yes, but will you understand anything of what they say? Will you?”

  “You forget that I come from a hill-top in Surrey,” said La. “From the top of a hill.”

  Valerie laughed. La had always entertained her, with her dry sense of humour. She loved her. She would go and stay with her wherever she was, she decided; on the top of a hill, in a valley somewhere, in a sleepy village with incomprehensible locals. Anywhere.

  Four

  STANDING BEFORE her new front door, with its peeling paint—it looked as if it had been olive green once, but had declined to grey—La thought, as might anybody who had made a precipitate move, What have I done? The answer was simple, of course; she had left London behind her, city and friends, without thinking of the implications. In a sense that was what she wanted: even if she still thought of Richard, and, curiously, still missed him—his absence was an ache within her—she did not wish to live in the physical space that her ruined marriage had occupied, and had turned her back on that. Now that the reality was upon her, she thought of ways in which what she had done might seem less extreme. Suffolk was not the end of the world, nor was London the world’s centre, no matter that a good number of its inhabitants thought just that. The village,
in fact, was only eighty miles from London—a couple of hours on the train and then not much more than twenty minutes in a car along these winding lanes. In three hours she could be back in town meeting her friends for lunch in some hotel, playing bridge; she could be back on the tennis court; it was not as if she had gone to Australia. But it might have been, as she stood there at the doorway, the taxi-driver helpfully bringing her suitcases down the path.

  “The Stones never came here very much,” he said, huffing from the exertion of carrying La’s heavy luggage. “Only once or twice, I think, after the old lady died. So how long are you going to be staying?”

  How long was she going to be staying? Forever? Until she was seventy, or even beyond? She would be seventy in 1981, but she could imagine neither being that age nor what the world would be like in 1981. “I’m going to live here,” she said quietly. “Permanently.”

  The driver put down a case and extracted a handkerchief from his pocket. “You’ll be needing my services then,” he said. “Getting you to the station. Into Bury. That sort of thing. I’m always available.”

  “Thank you. But I think I shall buy a car.” She had not thought about it before this, but it was obvious now that this was what she would have to do. She would buy a small car—one of those open-topped ones that looked such fun in the summer, but that could be battened down for the winter.

  “A car? I can sell you a car,” said the driver. “I have the local garage, you see. I have reliable cars for sale.”

  “Thank you.”

  “So what sort do you want?”

  “An open-topped one.”

  The driver smiled. “I have just the car for you. Just the job. I’ll bring her round.”

  She wondered whether this was the way things were done in the country. She had not asked about the colour, which was more important to her than any mechanical detail. But it seemed reasonable enough; she was going to live here, among these people, and she should give them such custom as she could. There would be other local tradesmen, no doubt, who would see her as a new customer; a butcher, grocers, fishmongers; a roofer perhaps to attend to the tiles. It was very quiet, she thought, and there would not be much doing by way of commerce.