La's Orchestra Saves the World Page 0,1

the driver. “It’s on the right. Just before …”

His brother looked at him. “Just before Ingoldsby’s Farm. Remember?”

The other man thought. A name came back to him, dredged up from a part of his memory he did not know he had. “The Aggs,” he said. “Mrs. Agg.”

SHE HAD BEEN WAITING FOR THEM, they thought, because she opened the door immediately after they rang the bell. She smiled, and gestured for them to come in, with the warmth, the eagerness of one who gets few callers.

“I just remember this house,” the driver said, looking about him. “Not very well, but just. Because when we were boys,” and he looked at his brother, “when we were boys we lived here. Until I was twelve. But you forget.”

His brother nodded in agreement. “Yes. You know how things look different when you’re young. They look much bigger.”

She laughed. “Because at that age one is looking at things from down there. Looking up. I was taken to see the Houses of Parliament when I was a little girl. I remember thinking that the tower of Big Ben was quite the biggest thing I had ever seen in my life—and it might have been, I suppose. But when I went back much later on, it seemed so much smaller. Rather disappointing, in fact.”

She ushered them through the hall into a sanctum beyond, a drawing room into which French windows let copious amounts of light. Beyond these windows, an expanse of grass stretched out to a high yew hedge, a dark green backdrop for the herbaceous beds lining the lawn. There was a hedge of lavender, too, grown woody through age.

“That was hers,” said the woman, pointing to the lavender hedge. “It needs cutting back, but I love it so much I can’t bring myself to do it.”

“La planted that?”

“I believe so,” said the woman.

“We played there,” said one of the brothers, looking out into the garden. “It’s odd to think that. But we played there. For hours and hours. Day after day.”

She left them and went to prepare tea. The brothers stood in front of the window.

“What I said about things looking bigger,” one said. “One might say the same about a person’s life, don’t you think? A life may look bigger when you’re a child, and then later on …”

“Narrower? Less impressive?”

“I think so.”

But the other thought that the opposite might be true, at least on occasion. “A friend told me about a teacher at school,” he said. “He was a very shy man. Timid. Ineffectual. And children mocked him—you know how quick they are to scent blood in the water. Then, later on, when he met him as an adult, he found out that this same teacher had been a well-known mountaineer and a difficult route had been named after him.”

“And La’s life?”

“I suspect that it was a very big one. A very big life led here …”

“In this out-of-the-way place.”

“Yes, in this sleepy little village.” He paused. “I suspect that our La was a real heroine.”

Their hostess had come back into the room, carrying a tray. She put it down on a table and gestured to the circle of chintzy sofa and chairs. She had heard the last remark, and agreed. “Yes. La was a heroine. Definitely a heroine.”

She poured the tea. “I assume that you know all about La. After all …” She hesitated. “But then she became ill, didn’t she, not so long after you all left this place. You can’t have been all that old when La died.”

One of the men stared out of the window. The other replied, “I was seventeen and my brother was nineteen. She was a big part of our lives. We remember her with …”

The older man, still looking out of the window, supplied, “Love. We remember her with love. And pride, too, I suppose. But you know how people fade. We wanted to hear what people here thought. That’s why we’ve come.”

“Of course.”

She looked at them over the rim of her tea-cup. “By the time I came to this part of the world you had all gone,” she said. “I lived over on the other side of the village. You might have seen the house as you came in. A bit of a Victorian mistake, now fortunately mostly covered with ivy. It hides such a multitude of sins, ivy. So forgiving.”

“I don’t remember …”

“Look for it on your way out. The person who bought this house from La—it was a Mrs. Dart—came to see