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

had loyally persisted. She bent down to examine one of these and scrabbling in the earth beneath the foliage she retrieved a handful of small potatoes. She took these into the kitchen and dusted the earth from them; they would do for supper tonight, with the eggs that Mrs. Agg had brought. My first night in my new home, she thought; my first night. And then, sitting down on one of the chairs in the kitchen,she looked at the ceiling and thought:
Have I made a terrible mistake?
    There was a wireless in the sitting room, which she switched on after supper. There was still light in the evening sky, although it was now after nine o’clock. She turned on a table light, a single bulb under a cream-coloured shade. It provided a small pool of light, enough for comfort, but barely enough to read by. The wireless was comforting, too, another presence in the house, and a familiar presence as well: the national service of the BBC. There was a literary discussion: Mr. Isherwood and Mr. Auden had returned from China the previous month. Mr. Auden had written a number of poems and Mr. Isherwood had kept a diary. Literary London was waiting with bated breath; in New York,
Harper’s Bazaar
had already published a number of articles about their trip. Now people were wondering about the war that the Japanese had provoked with China. Was it true that normal life was going on in Shanghai even after the Japanese occupation? Mr. Isherwood had recorded some observations, which were broadcast in full. “You can buy anything in Shanghai,” he said. “And life proceeds as it always did, in spite of the Japanese occupation.” Did you see brutality? “We did. War is madness let loose. There is always brutality.”
    Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek? I gather that you met him. “And Madame Chiang as well—we met both of them. We went to tea with Madame Chiang, actually, and she saidto Wystan, ‘Please tell me, do poets like cake?’ Auden replied: ‘Yes. Very much indeed.’ ‘Oh, I am very glad to hear it,’ Madame Chiang said. ‘I thought they preferred only spiritual food.’”
    La thought she heard the interviewer laugh, but only briefly. She wondered how she would do if she went off somewhere, as Auden and Isherwood had done. She had known somebody who had gone to Spain, to drive an ambulance with the International Brigade, where he had witnessed a massacre by the Nationalists. Almost every adult male in a particular village had been shot, and the women and children had been made to watch. He had returned to England silent and withdrawn. His smile, which she remembered for its breadth and readiness, had disappeared, and now he looked away when you spoke to him. He never talked about it; no mention of the ambulance, nor the massacre, which had been reported by somebody else. He just nodded and said that he had been in Spain but that now he was back.
    People were talking of another war, and had been doing so more fervently since the Austrian
Anschluss
. But La thought that war was unlikely, if not impossible. Rational men, meeting around a table, could surely never sanction something like that again. They all knew—they had seen the newsreel footage—of the sheer hell of the trenches; the pitiless carnage. How could anybody with any grip of their senses envisage doing something like that again? It wasinconceivable, and Mr. Chamberlain obviously understood that very well. But did Mr. Hitler? What a buffoon that man was, thought La. With all his strutting and ridiculous bombast; an Austrian rabble-rouser pretending to be a statesman. Ridiculous.
    If war came, then what would she do? There would be no point in going back to London, as she would have nowhere to stay and she would just be another mouth to feed. It would be better to remain in the country; to grow vegetables and contribute to the war effort in whatever other way she could. But it would not come: war was an abomination, a sickness of the mind; at the last moment people would surely