La's Orchestra Saves the World by Alexander McCall Smith Read Free Book Online

something, is it?”
    La sighed. “Lavender, I’m afraid.”
    “No reason to be afraid of that,” said Mrs. Agg. “Plenty oflavender round here. And they could call you Lav, couldn’t they, which would never do, would it?”
    La wanted to talk about something other than names. She asked about the farm.
    “It’s on the other side of your place,” said Mrs. Agg. “Ingoldsby Farm. Ingoldsby was my husband’s great uncle on his mother’s side. His son died in the war, and so when old Ingoldsby himself passed on five years back we got the farm.”
    La nodded towards the kitchen. She assumed there were chairs there and she could invite Mrs. Agg to sit down.
    “I can’t stop,” said Mrs. Agg. “Not now. But I’ve brought you some things to tide you over. It’s never easy moving into a new place. You never have any food in the house.”
    La saw that there was a basket at Mrs. Agg’s feet. Her eye took in the contents: a few eggs, a handful of green beans, a loaf of bread wrapped in a thin muslin cloth; a small jar of butter; some tea. “That’s very thoughtful of you,” she said. “I brought a few provisions with me, but it’s never enough, is it?”
    They went through to the kitchen and unpacked the basket. There was a meat-safe in the wall, a wooden cupboard that vented out through gauze into the open air outside. She put the bread and eggs in there, and placed the rest of the foodstuffs on the kitchen table.
    Mrs. Agg pointed to the range on the far side of the road.“There’s coal outside,” she said. “I had them drop some by when they brought our load the other day. Two shillings’ worth. You’ll need to get the range going if you’re going to have tea today. Do you know how to do it?”
    La thought that her visitor already knew the answer. It was not the sort of thing one learned in London, she would think; nor in Surrey for that matter. But she did not want to admit, to Mrs. Agg at least, that she had never fired up a range. “I’ll cope.”
    Mrs. Agg looked doubtful. “If there’s anything else you need, I’m at the farm. All the time.”
    La thanked her, and the other woman left. She was curious to find out more, but had not felt that this was the time to ask. What was Mr. Agg’s name? Was there a post-bus to Bury? Where was the nearest butcher’s, and when was it open? There would be an opportunity for that later; there would be time for her to learn everything about this place in the days and months to come.
    By herself again, she completed her exploration of the house, finding the linen cupboards and making a bed for herself in the bedroom at the back of the house, the airiest of the rooms she had found. The linen was clean, and smelled fresh, with small sachets of lavender laid upon it. Mrs. Agg kept an eye on the house, she had been told, and cleaned it thoroughly every month. La thought of the broken pane and the magpie; the pane must have been recentlybroken, or Mrs. Agg would have noticed it. How did a pane of glass break like that? Perhaps a bird had flown into it, or boys playing in the garden had thrown a stone.
    She investigated the garden. In the summer afternoon the plane trees cast long shadows across the lawn and against one side of the house. An unruly hedge of elder bushes, twelve feet high or so, shielded the garden from the lane. The bushes were in flower, and she picked a head from one of them as she walked past. She could make elder-flower wine, perhaps, or fry the flowers in sugar to make an old-fashioned sweet. Or simply weave elder branches about the kitchen door to ward off flies; her mother had sworn by that remedy.
    She stood still for a moment and looked at her garden. Cutting the grass had given it a not altogether deserted look, but at all the edges it was unkempt. The lavender that Mrs. Agg had mentioned was there, but had grown woody. What had been a vegetable patch was almost entirely overgrown by weeds, although La spotted a ridge of potato plants that