La's Orchestra Saves the World (24 page)

The hall was quiet as he read out three names. There was a young airman from Lancaster—still a boy, at eighteen, who had played the trombone, and who had been teased at the base because he admitted to never having had a girlfriend; there was a Canadian mechanic, a man from Nova Scotia, a quiet man who talked only of fishing; and a man from Des Moines, who had played the clarinet, and who had been shot down over Holland.

Tim sat down. La did not want to be thanked, but the audience was clapping her now, including those who were standing outside, listening through the door because there were not enough seats to be had. They all applauded. She looked out, over the heads of the players. She saw Feliks, who had laid his flute on his lap and was clapping, too.

It was not easy for her to get through the programme. At the end, when the orchestra played “Jerusalem” and people started to sing, La cried. She continued to conduct, though, and made it to the end, when she turned and faced the audience and bowed.

Afterwards, there was tea and cake served from tables at the side of the hall. The village had baked for days, and every sultana and cherry for miles around had been committed to the purpose. She found herself talking to Tim, and could tell from his eyes that he had cried, too.

“Dab’s here,” he said. “Did you see him?”

She looked through the milling crowd. The whole village, together with everyone from the surrounding farms,
was there. And there were at least thirty people from the air base, many in uniform. Where was Feliks?

She saw him near the door, talking to an airman. She slipped through the crowd until she was standing behind him.

“Feliks?”

He turned round slowly. She waited a moment, and then moved forward and put her arms round him.

“Thank you for coming,” she said. “I wish I had known.”

“I read about it in the paper,” he said. “I had to come.”

“Of course.”

She disengaged from the embrace and they stood facing one another.

“You don’t blame me, do you?” she asked.

He hesitated, but she knew from his expression that he knew what she was talking about. “I did. But not now.”

“I didn’t know what to do,” she said. “I was very confused.”

“It was a confusing time,” he said. “But all that’s over now.”

She saw him glance at his watch and she searched desperately for something to keep him. But she could not think of anything.

“Will you come and see me again?” she asked.

He pulled at the sleeves of his shirt. “One day, maybe. I don’t know where I’m going to be, though.”

“Of course you don’t. But you know how to get in touch with me.”

Tim had come over and was shaking hands with Feliks. La moved away. The friend of the man from Des Moines was standing not far away and she wanted to speak to him, as she imagined that he would be going off somewhere else now and there were things that she needed to say to him, even if there was nothing more she could say to Feliks.

T
IM LEFT THE BASE
two months later, when he was given early demobilisation to take up a job with a civilian aircraft manufacturer in Bristol. Nothing had been said explicitly about disbanding the orchestra, but somehow everybody had assumed that this was what would happen. With Tim’s departure, it was inevitable, and La wrote a short letter to everybody telling them that her orchestra had served its purpose. Tim came to see her the day before he left.

“We had a good innings,” he said. “But I suppose it’s time now, isn’t it? What are you going to do, La?”

She had not thought about that. The euphoria and the air of unreality of the previous few weeks had kept her from planning a future for herself, and there was an element of denial, too. Now, without thinking about it, she
replied, “Oh, I shall probably go and live in London for a while.”

“Lucky you. Theatre, and all that. Proper orchestras.”

“I imagine that it’ll take a bit of time to get used to it again.”

She had not entertained the idea of moving back to London—not since Valerie had put her off at the beginning of the war—but the idea must have been there, subconsciously, as it had popped up so readily. She could do it. Richard’s parents had died during the war, within a year of one another, and their house in Chiswick, along with a substantial part of their estate, had come to her. She had already been comfortably off financially, and the money made no real difference. But the house was empty, looked after by their housekeeper, and she could move in whenever she wished. She could keep the Suffolk house, of course, as a weekend place; people would start to do that sort of thing again, now that the war was over. She could get the garden under control again; she would not need to grow so many vegetables, and she would be released from the hens … That, in itself, was reason enough to go, she thought. And she could get a job—a real job this time—something that would allow her to use her mind.

The plan grew. She visited the house in Chiswick, passing through a London landscape that shocked her in its drabness and destruction. Entire streets had disappeared, others
had wide gaps in them where buildings had disappeared. After Suffolk, where at least there was the high sky and the air, London seemed pinched and run-down, battered by what had happened to it.

She was shown round the house by the housekeeper. It had been kept clean, but there was in it that coldness that comes when the inhabiting spirit leaves a building. She saw Richard’s room, which his mother had kept as a shrine to him, as parents will do. It was the room of a teenage boy; a cricket bat on the wall, school photographs, even a teddy-bear propped up on the shelf above the small fireplace. The housekeeper stood back, in sympathy, when she looked into this room, and when La came out of it she said, “I could clear that out for you, you know. It must be painful.”

La nodded. “Thank you.”

“And I could be out of my rooms in a week or two. I could go up north …”

“You don’t have to leave, Mrs. Eaton. You can stay. There’s so much room here. You can stay.”

She made arrangements, and two months later La moved from Suffolk to Chiswick. For a couple of weeks she organised the house, making it fresher and more habitable. Mrs. Eaton kept the kitchen, and proved to be a competent cook. She made evening meals for La, which she left in a warming oven with a note as to the menu. It was like living in a hotel, thought La, but she had a roof over her
head—a large one—and there were so many in London who were living in cramped and unsanitary conditions. And she was alive. As Tim had said, that was the important thing.

She found a job. A small music publisher wanted a person to assist its manager. They specialised in the publication of collections of traditional songs, and they needed somebody who could turn a hand to any of the tasks associated with that. At her interview, La was shown their latest project, a collection of folk songs from the British Isles. The page proofs fell open at “Brigg Fair.”

“We played that,” she remarked. “I had a little orchestra in Suffolk. Very amateurish. We played that during the war.” She turned the page. “And here’s ‘Scarborough Fair.’”

She glanced at the familiar words.
Remember me to one who lives there / She once was a true love of mine
.

The manager was looking at her across his desk. “Cambridge,” he said.

“You, too?”

“Yes. Do you remember Paulson’s Music Shop? We deal with him. He’s a stockist of ours.”

She said that she did. And she remembered the buying of the flute, and the way that Feliks held it when she first gave it to him.
I would have given you anything
, she said to herself.
Anything
.

The manager closed the file in front of him. “It seems to me that you would be just the person for this job, Mrs.
Stone,” he said. “Now, as to salary. I’m afraid that with conditions as they are …”

“That is not really a factor,” said La. “Please don’t worry about that.”

THE JOB WAS PERFECT.
When friends asked her, she described it as a “small job,” which it was, but it suited her ideally. The office, which was just off Russell Square, near the British Museum, was small and chaotic, filled with scores and proofs of scores and letters to arrangers and composers. La succeeded in bringing some order to it, and was promoted. She was given a new room, with a carpet, and a two-bar fire. From her window she looked out onto a small square of garden and a low wall on which pigeons settled and conducted their courtships. At weekends, she went to the house in Suffolk; Mrs. Agg would air it for her just before she arrived and make a fire in the range. Lennie cut the hedges and mowed the grass in summer. He talked to her now, and told her that he had somebody he called his “sweetheart,” a young woman from a neighbouring village. He would marry her one day, he said; maybe when he was forty or thereabouts.

“You should marry again, Mrs. Stone,” said Mrs. Agg. “I hope you don’t mind my saying that. But you’re an attractive woman and there must be men enough in London.”

La laughed. “I’m forty-one now, Mrs. Agg. Who wants a woman of forty-one?”

“A man of forty-two, I’d say. Are there any of them in London?”

FROM TIME TO TIME
, she heard from Tim, and even saw him on occasion, when he came to London on business, and they would go for lunch in a Soho restaurant. They talked about the war, and the orchestra, and he told her the news from the aviation world, which meant little to her. Then, on one of these occasions, he suddenly said to her, “You know, La, there’s something I feel really bad about. Looking back … all right, we were all doing a job and we did it to the best of our ability. Nothing to be ashamed of in that. But I feel bad about the Poles.”

She looked surprised. “But I always thought that you went out of your way to help them. Look what you did for Feliks.” He had been kind to him; she had seen that herself.

“Oh, it’s not me personally. No, it’s what we as a people did. We betrayed them.”

“Yalta?”

“Yes. Of course, there was that. I remember after the news got out, the Poles at the station just sat. They looked as if they’d been winded. And quite a few of us felt that we just couldn’t look them in the eye. We had to look the other way, because we knew what they were going through. We had just given their country to the very enemy who had joined in with the Germans in dismembering it. We gave it to the people who had been allies of Nazi Germany.”

La agreed. But she pointed out it had not been easy to deal with Stalin. Roosevelt had wanted them to join in the war against Japan; he had to give them something. She sighed; the world was rotten. “Yalta was a disaster. Yes, I know. But what else could they do? How could they …” She searched for words, but none came. At the heart of the machinations of statesmen were greed and fear and a seeking of advantage. But could one say that without sounding completely cynical?

Tim was watching her. “Yalta,” he said, “was the big sellout. But there were other things, too. Do you remember the Victory parade in London? Did you see it?”

La had. She had watched it alone, in the rain, and afterwards had walked into an unfamiliar tea-room and sat for an hour before she had gone home. She had thought about how it must seem to those who had lost somebody and who were watching the parade. How did they feel when they saw everybody else parading but their husband, their father, their son or daughter. She replied simply. “I did.”

Tim looked at her enquiringly. “And who wasn’t there?”

La knew. “The Poles.”

“Exactly. We didn’t let them—let those brave men—march alongside everybody else because Stalin had said they were not to be in the parade. Our parade—not his. Ours. And do you know something, La? I had a letter from one of them who said to me that he watched the parade in
tears. He had to stand on the pavement because there was no place for him or any of his fellow Poles in that parade.”

He watched the effect of his words. La looked down at the tablecloth.

“And do you know something else?” Tim continued. “Some of our politicians called the Poles fascists. They were so much in love with their hero Stalin and his beloved Soviet Union that they took their cue from the very Russians who had murdered all those Polish officers—lined them up and shot them. Or had carted people off to die in their labour camps.” He shook his head. “No wonder, La. No wonder the Poles felt betrayed. They fought for a country that they would never be able to return to. They lost everything. No pensions. Nothing. All gone.”

“But what makes me sick at heart, La, is the thought of those men watching the parade. They had fought in the Battle of Britain, with us, right beside us, and they were forbidden to take part in the parade. Because of some Russian butcher. That’s what sickens me—that more than anything else. The thought of those men standing there in tears. Attlee … well, but how could Churchill have allowed that?”

La thought: Doesn’t he remember? “He had no power.”

“Or the King?”

La shrugged. “Even less power.”

Tim looked away, and La reached out to lay her hand on his forearm. “I’m sure that Feliks would have understood.”