La's Orchestra Saves the World

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “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 been heavily backed by her English teacher at school, a graduate of Girton. She knew the admissions tutor, she said; they had gone walking in France together as students, and she would make sure that any application would be sympathetically viewed. La wondered what that had to do with her; she did not want to be accepted because of some remote bond of friendship, the outcome of a walking tour.

  “I’m not saying that,” said the teacher. “But you’ll learn as you go through life that friendship, contacts, call it what you will, lies behind so many of the decisions that people make. It’s just the way the world is.”

  Girton accepted her, and she began the study of English literature in the autumn of 1929. It seemed that everybody in Cambridge was talking about Mr. Leavis, who was on the verge of publishing a great work of criticism, it was said. She met Leavis, and his new wife, Queenie Roth, who talked to her at a party about Jane Austen. It was just one of the heady experiences that Cambridge had in store for La, and it made the hill-top in Surrey seem irredeemably dull.

  Her tutor, Dr. Price, was ambitious for her. “You could do a further degree. There’s so much to choose from.”

  That was not how La saw it. In her view there was so little choice—if one was a woman. “It’s men who have all the opportunities,” she said. “Look at what they can do. At the most, we have their leavings, the crumbs from their table. It’s 1931 and that’s all we have. Still.”

  “That’s because women haven’t learned their lesson,” said the tutor.

  “Which is?”

  “To live their lives as if men did not exist.”

  That was easily said by a tutor in a women’s college. But La did not point this out.

  “It breaks my heart,” the tutor went on, “to see all these intelligent girls come to us and then leave, more or less promised to some man. And they go off and marry him and that’s the end. What a waste. What a criminal waste.”

  Seeing La’s reaction, the tutor offered a list of names. “Andrews last year; Paterson, too, such a brilliant person. Married. Buried away in some dim town somewhere, playing bridge and practising domestic economy. Is that what Cambridge is for?”

  La agreed with Dr. Price, on that, at least, if not on other matters. She had not come to Cambridge to find a husband; she found it astonishing that there were girls who did just that—she had met some of them, and they admitted it. Our best chance, one said. You’d have to be a fool not to take it. La said nothing; she had come, she believed, to be taught how to think. At school she had been subjected to rote-learning intended to enable her to recite the opinions of others; now she wanted to form her own views, but was finding it difficult. What would these views be, she wondered, once she had formed them?

  “Don’t you think it exciting, La, to be alive at a time of crisis?”

  The speaker was Janey Turner, a young woman who had befriended her at a poetry reading and invited her afterwards to a tea-room. The young men at the reading were hopeless, whispered Janey. “They’re interested only in themselves. Have you noticed that, La? They’re all trying to look poetic. All terribly narcissistic and intense. Except for that one who read out the bit about the man in the factory. He understood.”

  La wondered about the crisis. Everybody said there was a cultural crisis—that the old certainties had been so destabilised that they were no longer capable of providing any answers. But if that was so, then how were we to know what to believe in? Janey knew the answer, with a confident, complete certainty. The common man, she said. He’s the future. We must believe in what he believes in.

  “Which is what?”

  “The ending of oppression. Freedom from hunger. Freedom from the deception of the Church and the tricks of the ruling class. Flags. National glory. Militarism.”

  La pondered this. She agreed that freedom from hunger was an admirable goal—who could take a contrary view on that? And oppression was bad, too; of course it was. But the Church? She thought of the college chaplain, a mild man with a strong interest in Jane Austen and in Tennyson, who was distantly related to Beatrix Potter and who would never have engaged in deception, surely. Or was Janey talking about a different sort of religion altogether? A religion of saints and icons of saints; of relics and miracles? England, she thought, was not like that.

  “Is there a crisis in literature?” La asked Dr. Price.

  The tutor looked at her as if she had asked an egregiously naïve question. “Of course. We all know there’s a crisis. Everybody.”

  Except me, thought La. I’m prepared to accept that there’s a crisis—if only somebody would explain how the crisis had come about and just how it manifested itself.

  “Why?” she persisted. “Why is there a crisis?”

  Dr. Price waved a hand in the air. “Because of lies and rottenness. Simplicity and sincerity have been replaced by obfuscation and pretence. Men, of course. They love to create mystery where none exists. It’s the way they think.”

  “So simplicity is a literary virtue?”

  Dr. Price looked at her severely. “Yes, of course it is. And it is a virtue that is more assiduously practised by members of our own sex, if I may say so.” The severity of her expression slackened, and a smile began to play about her lips. “Do you know the story about Rupert Brooke’s mother? No? Well, let me tell you. She was shown a memoir of her son composed by some man—one Edward Marsh, I believe. He had written: ‘Rupert Brooke left Rugby in a blaze of glory.’ And she, the poet’s mother, had crossed out a blaze of glory and substituted July.”

  Dr. Price looked at La. “You see?” she said.

  La found that this conversation, as was the case with many of her discussions with Dr. Price, left her dissatisfied. If it was a teacher’s role to bring enlightenment, then Dr. Price failed in her calling. She behaved as if she were the custodian of a body of knowledge to which her students might aspire, as might one who stumbles upon Eleusinian mysteries yearn to know what is going on. But she did not impart that knowledge willingly.

  La was happy enough at Girton, even if she found that the enlightenment she had hoped for was slow to arrive. When she returned after her first long summer vacation, a time spent travelling in Italy with a cousin, she decided that there would be no sudden moment of insight; at the most she would start to see things slightly differently, would understand the complexity that lay below the surface. She did not worry about that. At present she was free to read and to spend long hours in discussion with her fellow undergraduates, talking about what they had read. She joined a music society, and played the flute in a quartet. She had learned the instrument at school, where it had been something of a chore for her. Now she took it up without the pressure of practice and examinations, and found that she enjoyed it. They struggled through Haydn and Mozart, and gave a concert for the junior common room at the end of the term. A young man, Richard Stone, came to that, sitting in a group of young men, wearing a blue cravat that caught La’s eye. He was tall, with the confident bearing of an athlete. She looked up from her music at the end of the first piece and noticed him. He caught her eye and smiled. Then, at the end of the concert, when they went into a room where tea had been prepared, he came up to her and introduced himself. He was not embarrassed, as some of the men were, but spoke to her as if they already knew one another.

  After a few minutes he invited her to come with him and a group of his friends to a picnic at Grantchester. She hesitated for a moment, but only for a moment. She had that afternoon had a particularly unsatisfactory session with Dr. Price, who had criticised her essay and hinted that it was the sort of work that would attract, at best, a third. Dr. Price did not like men; this was a man asking her to go on a picni
c, and so she accepted.

  She learned more about Richard from a friend whose brother knew him. He did not have a reputation as a scholar, she was told, but was good-looking and effortlessly popular; he could row, although he would never make the college eight. Too lazy, somebody had said.

  “Are you keen on him?” asked the friend who had imparted the information about Richard. “He’s good-looking, isn’t he?”

  La felt flustered. Richard could be a friend, but she expected nothing more than that. “He’s nice enough. But that’s about it.”

  “Pity. Because he likes you. It’s obvious.”

  “Is it?”

  The friend laughed. “Have you seen the way he looks at you?”

  La had seen, but had put it down to something else, perhaps to what Dr. Price would have described as male arrogance. At the picnic in Grantchester, he had stared at her with a quiet solemnity, as if he had made up his mind about something. But now that her friend had spelled it out, she could hardly not think about it. It had not occurred to her that anybody could admire her in that way. She did not consider herself attractive; I am too tall, she thought. At school a spiteful girl had said to her: “Boys won’t look at you, La. Never. They don’t look at tall girls. Know that?”

  She had grown up with the assumption that this was true and had decided that if a boy came along, one she liked, she would have to do the pursuing. But that was not yet. That would be at some unspecified time in the future, when she was twenty-eight, thirty perhaps. I will not let it become anything more than what it is, she told herself. I have not come here to find a husband.

  They went to their picnic, and to another one after that.

  “I like sitting in fields,” said Richard, and laughed.

  He took her to tea, and started cycling out to see her every afternoon. Soon she came to expect him, just after four o’clock, even in the rain, to which he seemed indifferent. “Just water,” he said. “And you look nice when you’re bedraggled.”

  They talked to each other easily, as if they were old friends. In the cinema he took her hand and then kissed her. He tasted of tobacco, and she imagined, absurdly, that she might reveal this to Dr. Price in one of their uncomfortable meetings. “Do you know, Dr. Price, that men taste of tobacco? Did you know that?”

  Six weeks after their first meeting, he had told her that he hoped she would marry him; he would be honoured, he said. “I’ve never proposed to anybody before. I really haven’t.”

  She almost laughed. There was a seriousness about the way he spoke which made her think he was reciting lines that somebody had taught him; perhaps she might find the very play from which they were lifted. “It’s very sudden.” That was all she could think of to say, trite as it was.

  “Which means yes? Please tell me that this means yes. If you had wanted to say no, then you would have said it. Anything else must mean yes—it must.”

  She wanted to be firm, but it was difficult. There was something winning about his manner that made him hard to resist; he was like an eager schoolboy. “I don’t know. You can’t expect somebody to make up her mind just like that. It’s been five weeks.”

  “Six. Almost seven. And I knew immediately. I really did, you know. I was quite certain that you were the one. You have to marry me.”

  Now she laughed, and he had taken that as her answer. In her first private moment thereafter, she looked into a mirror, staring at herself, wide-eyed. You are a person to whom another person has proposed. It seemed absurd; risible. She had laughed earlier on, immediately after he had declared himself, but her laughter had been taken as some sort of assent. She would have to clear it up; she would have to sit Richard down and talk to him seriously. She would brush aside his persuasive banter and get to the essential point: she was not ready to get married. They could get to know one another better, and there was always the possibility that at some point their friendship might become something more, but not now.

  She tried that, but he seemed not to take her seriously. “Fine,” he said. “Fine. We can think about things. Plenty of time for that. But you and I know how we feel, don’t we?”

  “Well, frankly, Richard, I’m not sure that you know how I feel. If only you would listen to me …”

  But as the months went past, and they still saw one another every day, meeting in that small tea-shop off King’s Parade, where the waitresses, who seemed fond of him, addressed him as “Dickie,” she found that her feelings were changing. She looked forward to their meetings now; counted the hours and minutes before they would be together again. Was this what it meant to fall for somebody? She believed it was. And if she had to marry someone—and she mostly assumed that she did—then would she ever find anybody quite as charming as Richard? He would be kind to her. They would have fun together. Could one ever really expect anything more than that out of marriage?

  Her father approved of Richard; approved of what he described as his prospects. Richard was going into the family firm of wine merchants—not just any wine merchants, but substantial ones, with connections to the port trade as well. They had their own warehouse in Bordeaux and a share in another one on the Douro. And Richard charmed him, as he could charm anybody, simply by smiling. He did not have to say anything; he merely allowed his smile to work for him. It disarmed.

  “I’m so happy for you, my dear,” her father said. “After all that sadness, the business with your mother, and all that …”

  “I’m glad that you like him. He’s a nice boy, isn’t he?”

  His father waved a hand in the air. “Of course. But you never would …”

  She waited. What would she never do? Choose the wrong sort of man?

  Richard was not that; she was sure of it. He was gentle, and amusing, and so she said yes, she would marry him. Later.

  He looked at her earnestly. “After we leave Cambridge?”

  “Of course.”

  “June, then.”

  She had not meant it to be that soon, but he was impossible to argue with. She acquiesced. What difference did it make, now that her future was to be with him.

  Her friend Janey, the one who had taken her to the poetry reading, quizzed her. “Are you completely sure?” she asked.

  “Yes. I suppose I am.”

  Janey frowned. “Not suppose. You shouldn’t say ‘suppose.’ People who are madly in love with another person never say ‘I suppose I love him.’ They just don’t.”

  La thought out loud. “I do love him. We laugh at the same things. He’s kind. What more could one ask for?”

  “Romance,” said Janey. “Passion. An aching for the other person. An emptiness in his absence. That sort of thing.”

  “Maybe,” said La. “Anyway, we’re getting married.”

  The marriage took place in the chapel of St. John’s, his college. La’s small family, her father, his brother and sister, a few distant cousins, filled a couple of pews; Richard’s list was much longer, and included numerous school friends. They gave him a party the night before and threw him in the river, ruining his blazer.

  La felt a strange, unaccustomed tenderness for him at the altar, noticing the nervous trembling of his hands as he slipped the ring onto her finger. “It’s all right,” she whispered.

  “I’m so happy,” he whispered back.

  After the honeymoon, they went to London, staying first in a flat in Fitzrovia that Richard’s father had rented for them. Then, a few months later, Richard paid a deposit for the purchase of a house in Maida Vale that was too large for them, but which had a long strip of garden that La started to cultivate. He was now working in the family firm, a job that allowed him to leave the office at four in the afternoon if he wished. La wanted to work, but received little encouragement from Richard.

  “Why?” he asked. “Why work when you don’t have to? We’ve got enough—more than enough. Why shut yourself up in an office with a lot of silly girls?”

  She looked at him. “Not all of them would be silly.”

 
; “Yes, of course.” He smiled. “Sorry.”

  “I don’t want to spend my life sitting about. I want to earn my keep.”

  “But that’s what I’m doing. I’m earning your keep.”

  She shook her head. “You know that’s not the same. I want to do something with my life.”

  He seemed genuinely puzzled. “But you are doing something. You’re my wife. That’s something, isn’t it?”

  She did not think that was enough, but did not say anything.

  “And there’ll be children,” he added, reaching out to touch her arm. “Soon enough.”

  They had not discussed this; nothing had been said. It would be something that just happened, and she was not sure how she felt about it. One part of her wanted to be a mother; another understood that that would really be the end of her hopes to do something more with her life. But as the months wore on and nothing happened, she began to wonder whether that would happen. Still nothing was said.

  They went to the theatre, to concerts, to the opera; Richard indulged her in all of these, although his tastes were not musical. “That part’s missing in my brain,” he said. “I hear the notes, but they don’t mean very much to me.”

  “Are you happy?” her father asked her on an occasion when they met for lunch in town. “You look happy, I must say.”

  “Of course I am,” said La.

  “And Richard, too?”

  “Very. He doesn’t talk about happiness, of course. Men tend not to. Men don’t talk about their feelings.”

  Her father nodded. “So true. And yet men have feelings, I think, in much the same way as …” He looked out of the restaurant, at the passers-by in the street outside. Some of them looked worn-out, ground down by what he called general conditions. “General conditions are so …” he said.

  La knew what he meant. She felt guilty that she should be comfortable when others were suffering. “What can one do?” she asked her father.

  “Not much. If you gave your money away it would be gone in a puff of smoke and not make much difference to anybody. So just concentrate on small, immediate things. They make a difference to the world.”