La's Orchestra Saves the World (11 page)

La folded her hands. “I have a degree,” she said. “I am a graduate of the university.” She said this because she felt that she was every bit as trainable, surely, as an eighteen-year-old fresh out of school.

He lowered his eyes to the paper, and she realised that she had antagonised him. An unpromoted major in this unglamorous work, at the tail end of a career, would not have a degree. “Which university?” he asked. He spoke in an offhand manner—as if he did not really expect, or want, an answer.

La looked out of the window. She could see the spires of King’s from where she sat; if he turned, he could, too.

“The one behind you,” she said, and smiled.

He did not seem to hear her answer. “I note from your
address that you live in the country, Mrs. Stone.” He articulated his words carefully. “We have any number of town girls, but how useful are they, do you think? We shall need people to work on farms. You will have noticed the introduction of rationing of bacon and butter. Sooner or later the authorities will have no alternative but to ration everything, I believe. We have to import so much …”

La was silent. War was not just the movement of troops, of tanks; it was the cutting of coal, the tilling of fields, the boxing of munitions; meetings like this one, boredom, long hours. She was scared of none of that.

“You think I should work on the land?”

The major nodded. “Suffolk is a richer county than people imagine. I’ve always said that. Reasonable soil. Rich clay.” He reached into a drawer and took out a blue folder. “I have a form here which I shall pass on to the Women’s Land Army. They know where the need is. When spring comes, they will be crying out for people—especially if more young men join up.”

He gave her the form, and she filled it in, there and then, leaning on the uneven surface of his metal desk. He watched her as she wrote, but his eyes moved away when she looked up. She saw the buttons on the sleeve of his jacket, with their crown motif. The King’s reach was a wide one—down to this officer’s buttons. Having the symbol of another on one’s buttons meant that the other owned you. A free
man—a really free man—could not carry the symbol of another on his clothing.

She finished filling in the form, and gave it to the major. The section on experience was thin: she had written
gardening
, and left it at that. As she handed the form back to him, she asked, “Do you think that we’ll win this?”

She could see the effect of her question on him. He stiffened. “Of course. There is no question about it.”

“I am not defeatist,” said La. “I hate everything that Hitler stands for. I want us to win.”

He relaxed. “I should hope so.”

“But I’m concerned. The ease with which the Germans have overtaken Poland …”

“Aided by their Russian allies,” interjected the major.

“Germany seems so strong. They have so many more tanks and planes than we do.”

The major looked at La pityingly. “I wouldn’t worry unduly about these things, Mrs. Stone. We have the General Staff to do our worrying for us.” He paused. “And as Voltaire said,
Il
faut cultiver son jardin
. One must cultivate one’s garden.”

He held her gaze.

IT WAS NOT UNTIL APRIL
that La was contacted by an official of the Women’s Land Army. They had heard she was available for work, and that she had offered to work without
pay. They could arrange something, they said: a farmer in her area was having difficulty coping with his chickens after the young man who had been helping him had joined up. The farmer was elderly, and his arthritis was getting worse. It would not be heavy work—a few hours a day of feeding the birds and cleaning out the coops, and the farm could be reached by bicycle from her home. Would she do it? La telephoned the official and accepted.

She went to tell Mrs. Agg. She was curious to find out if her neighbour knew the farmer for whom she would be working. She must do, she thought; Madder’s Farm, where she would be working, was only about four miles away.

Mrs. Agg smiled. “He’s a kind man,” she said. “Henry Madder. And all his difficulties.”

La raised an eyebrow. “His health? I heard that he had arthritis. Is there something else?”

She was talking to Mrs. Agg on the small drying green outside the farmhouse kitchen. A basket of damp laundry was at Mrs. Agg’s feet, and she reached into this to extract a pair of trousers. They were Agg’s trousers; La had seen him in them; grey trousers with large, roughly sewn outside pockets.

“I wasn’t talking about his health,” said Mrs. Agg. “Though it’s true he has arthritis. I was talking about the business with his son, and with his wife after that. It was all because of the son that Helen Madder went, I think.”

La waited for her to explain. From the trousers, only half-wrung, fell a few small drops of water.

“It all started when Henry Madder ran over his young son,” said Mrs. Agg. “In his cart. He still has a cart and an old Percheron to pull it. The boy was about five or six, as I recall. He was doing something or other in the farmyard and Henry just did not see him. The wheel crushed his skull.

“Helen Madder would not forgive him. She turned quiet on him, staying inside, keeping him out of her room, locking herself away. Then, about six months after the tragedy, she put on her fanciest dress and went off to Bury to get herself a man. She found one soon enough, and people talked. Henry knew, but put up with it because he thought that the boy’s death had been his fault. It wasn’t, but nobody could persuade him otherwise. He thought that he deserved the punishment that she was doling out to him.

“Then she went off altogether and never came back. They say that she moved to Ipswich, but there were those who saw her in Newmarket—with the new man, who was some sort of market trader. Henry pretty much stopped talking to people after that. Stopped going to church. Stopped going to the pub. So that’s Henry Madder—a good man ruined by one little bit of carelessness. If he had moved his head just a few inches, just for a moment, he would have seen his boy and the accident wouldn’t have taken place. But that’s the same for everything, isn’t it? If things were
just a little bit different, then life would have worked out differently.

“Take that Mr. Hitler. Just think what would have happened had his mother dropped him when she picked him up for his feed. And he had hit his head on the floor. Or had he been strangled by the cord when he was born. That happens to other babies; it could have happened to him. What a difference. We wouldn’t be at war as we are right now. Wouldn’t be in this pickle. Have you thought of that?”

La had not, and shook her head. “Of course there could have been somebody else.”

“Other than Hitler? Somebody other than Hitler?”

“Yes. There could have been somebody else who would have had the same idea of whipping people up; who had the same madness within them. People are the products of their time, Mrs. Agg.”

Mrs. Agg glanced at her.

“What I mean, Mrs. Agg, is that the times throw up their man. If there hadn’t been a Nelson, there would have been another sailor like him. There would have been plenty of small, nasty people like Hitler, even if he had never existed.”

She let Mrs. Agg think about this as she attached several pairs of socks to the line with large wooden clothes-pegs. She returned, though, to the subject of Madder’s Farm. “Who was he, this boy who was helping him. The boy whose job I’m taking on?”

Mrs. Agg, who had been holding a clothes-peg in her mouth while she attended to the socks, took the peg out of her mouth to answer. “A nice boy. A really nice boy called Neil. The son of Mrs. Howarth who used to work in the post office. He went off and volunteered. Who can blame him? That’s what all young men want to do.”

La thought for a moment. All young men? What about Lennie? She tried to imagine Lennie in a uniform, but she could not. Mrs. Agg glanced at her. She had guessed what her visitor was thinking.

“Lennie can’t,” she said. “Or, rather, I don’t think he should.”

“But what if he wanted to? What if he wanted to join his friends?”

Mrs. Agg give the socks a final, almost affectionate squeeze. “Lennie can’t be doing with friends, you know. He’s a loner. He doesn’t …”

She left the sentence unfinished, reaching for the last of her washing. Then, quietly, she said, “Lennie doesn’t trouble you, I hope.”

La looked up at the sky. After the incident in the garden, Lennie had not troubled her. In fact, she could barely remember when she had last seen him; it must have been months before, when she had driven past him on the road to Bury. He had been walking in the same direction, and she had slowed down, thinking that she might offer to drive him
to wherever he was going, but he had pointedly looked over the hedge to his side, as if absorbed by something he saw in the field. She had driven on.

“Lennie doesn’t trouble me, Mrs. Agg. You needn’t worry.”

Mrs. Agg finished hanging up the rest of the washing and dried her hands on her apron. “Good. You see, Mrs. Stone … You see, Lennie is not all that easy. A lot of men aren’t. But we get by.” She turned and smiled at La. “Which is all that we can hope for in this life, don’t you think? To get by?”

That was quite true, thought La, reductionist though the sentiment might be. In a way, all our human systems, our culture, music, literature, painting—all of that—was effectively an attempt to make life more bearable, to enable us to get by. She got by. She had got by, in this quiet corner of England, for two years now, and was happy enough where she was. She had stopped thinking of Richard every day, and she found it harder to bring up a mental image of the man who had been her husband. There was a face, certainly, but it was fading, as an old photograph will fade. What had his voice sounded like? He used to sing in the bath—she remembered that—but what were the words of the songs that he sang? She could not bring them to mind, and she no longer dreamed of him, or only did so very occasionally.

She was getting by quite well without him, as a widow. And the country was trying to get by in the face of a terrifying
nightmare that was about to get much more vivid and more frightening.

“They’re coming,” said the butcher in the village. “They’re coming over, Mrs. Stone. God help us, so he must.”

“There’s the RAF,” said La. “They’ll have to get past them.”

“Have you seen the boys they’re using?” asked the butcher. There was a base nearby, at Stradishall, where the clay soil made good, hard runways for heavy bombers. “Some of them not shaving yet, I think.”

“Boys have quick reactions,” said La. It was a glib remark, of the sort that came from inner conviction; but La felt despair. The strutting demagogue, with his insane shouting, had fixed his eyes on them, and he was coming.

P
OOR HENRY MADDER
, she thought; look at him. His hands had twisted, as if they had been placed in a vice and wrenched off true. And he could not bend his knees, which seemed to have locked at a forty-degree angle, giving him a curious, deliberate-looking gait, as if he were walking through a bed of treacle. But he did not complain and impatiently brushed off La’s concern.

“Don’t worry about me,” he said. “As long as I can hook Tommy up to the plough, I’m all right. I’m not an old man yet.”

He was somewhere in his forties, La thought, but the crippling disease had aged him prematurely.

“I could do more here,” she said. “It’s much easier than I thought—looking after your chickens. There must be other things.”

He shook his head. “I have to do something, and they’ve
promised me a man, full-time. When they find one—whenever that will be.” He smiled. “Heaven knows what I’ll get. Somebody from Timbuktu maybe. Or a chap let out of prison on condition that he works on the land. Old Billy Stevens got somebody like that. A car thief from London, would you believe it? A Cockney spiv. He found him selling his eggs down at the pub.”

La’s work was light. The chickens were kept on the edge of a field in two large coops. They were elongated, flimsily built structures with tin roofs. Inside there were rows of nesting boxes and high, roughly hewn perches on which the hens could take refuge at night from predators. There was also a fence that had been designed to protect the birds from the fox, but he could burrow his way under that, as the wire did not always reach far enough down. One of La’s jobs was to pick up the feathers where the fox had made a kill; feathers that, with their occasional flecked blood stains, told the story of the sharp and one-sided little conflict. For La it was like attending a scene of the crime; the feathers on the ground, the hens clucking away in disapproval of what had happened—
move along please, madam, there is nothing to be seen here
—the place where the fox had pushed up the fence wire from its anchoring. There was always only one suspect.

La made her way up to Madder’s Farm shortly after breakfast every day. She had to ride there; fuel was in short supply and she wanted to husband the small amount she
could get. Cycling kept her fit, and it was pleasant enough, too, in the mild April weather; of course, it would be different in winter, with those dark mornings and the cold wind which in that part of England swept straight across the North Sea, from Siberia, it seemed. I shall be tougher then, she told herself, and if the war was over, then she would no longer have to work on Madder’s Farm and could lie in bed on winter’s mornings, as she had done last winter, watching her breath make white mist in the unheated air. Wars did not last forever; one hundred years at the most.

On arrival at the farm she reported to Henry if he was in the farmyard, or went directly about her duties if he was not. She collected the eggs first, making her way along the nesting boxes, taking out the eggs and placing them carefully in the large baskets that Henry provided. If a hen was still in the box, she would feel under her for eggs, amongst the soft, belly feathers, warm and downy, and the hens would occasionally peck at her, quite hard. She started to use gloves—an old pair of gardening gloves that she had found in the house, that Gerald must have used; the hens ineffectively pecked at the leather, and La would blow in their faces to distract them.