La's Orchestra Saves the World Page 0,3

He did not think that anything had been painted recently, perhaps not since La’s time.

“If you’ve seen enough,” she said. “Perhaps we should go back.”

She locked the door behind them, and they walked back in silence, until they had almost reached the house.

“Could you tell me more?” the driver asked. “About the orchestra?”

He looked up at the sky, which was wide and empty. High above them a line of stratus moved quickly in the air-stream. She followed his gaze. She loved the skies of East Anglia; she loved this flat landscape, which she thought of, in a curious way, as a holy place.

“A bit. Not very much. If you don’t mind my being a bit vague.”

“Not at all.” He paused. “If you have the time.”

She smiled at him. “In this village, there’s not a great deal to do. But remembering is something we’re rather good at in these places. Have you noticed that? Go to any small village anywhere in the world, and see what they remember. Everything. It’s all there—passed on like a precious piece of information, some secret imparted from one who knew to one who yearns to know. Taken good care of.”

They walked towards the house. The driver touched the Bristol as he passed it, let his fingers brush against the cool of the metal, in a gesture of appreciation that came close, he thought, to talismanic. He had rebuilt the Bristol, part by part, and now he loved it with that very intensity a man might feel for a machine he created himself out of metal, and the things that bind metal.

Two

LA’S CHILDHOOD WAS SPENT in the shadow of Death. He was an uninvited guest at their table, sitting patiently, watching La’s mother, his target, bemused, perhaps, that such courage and determination could keep an illness at bay for so long. But he was in no hurry, and would make his move when every one of the expensive treatments had been tried, and failed. The last of these involved a trip to Switzerland, to a sanatorium near Gstaad, where optimistic doctors prescribed Alpine air and light, but Death accompanied her there, too; he was no respecter of altitude and had business with some of the other patients lying on their extended deck chairs. When, shortly after her return to England, the end came, La was just fifteen and at boarding school. The news was broken by a housemistress who found such blows almost impossible to convey, choking with emotion as she spoke, just as La, who had long since realised that this moment was inevitable, and who remained calm, sought to comfort her.

La’s father did his best to fill the gap, but it was difficult for him. He was not a demonstrative man, and he simply could not express the love and concern he felt for the child who was the living reminder of his wife in all her gestures and looks. A female child, he felt, needed a woman to look after her, to say and do the things a woman could do. For this reason, he hired a housekeeper who doubled up as mother and, as La realised with shock, as wife. She heard conversation from behind the closed door of her father’s bedroom, lowered voices, but in an unmistakeable emotional register. He could not marry her—no, it was impossible. Nobody knew, he said; and even if they did it was none of their business. And why was it impossible? Silence. Was he ashamed of her, of her very ordinary origins? More silence. That’s it, isn’t it? Ashamed.

The house they lived in was in Surrey, on the brow of a hill. London, or its very fringes, might be seen through the darkness from that vantage point—a low line of lights—and in the day, if conditions were right, it was there as a distant smudge against the horizon. La liked the fact that they lived on a hill, and would introduce herself as one who came from the top of a hill in Surrey.

“I am going to university in a very flat place,” she said to her father. “You’re sending me down from my hill to a very flat place.”

“Cambridge is indeed flat,” he said. “And …” She waited for him to say more, but he often failed to complete these utterances. She asked him once what he was thinking of when his sentences petered out, and he had replied, “Oh, various things, things that …”

Cambridge had been La’s choice, even if one that had