Read La's Orchestra Saves the World for Free Online Page A

and brings on rust. She’ll ease up once you’re using her. A spot of oil, too—that helps.”
    He pulled the door towards him and twisted the key in the lock at the same time. The door opened, and at that moment, in headlong flight towards the light, a bird flew past them, out into the air. La screamed; the driver turned round and looked at the disappearing bird. “A magpie,” he said. “They get down the chimney. That one can’t have been trapped for long—still plenty of energy in him.”
    They entered the hall. There were white bird droppings like lime on the floorboards.
    La looked about her. “Poor bird. What a nightmare to be imprisoned.”
    “Put a cowl on the chimney,” said the driver. He thought of further perils. “And you could get bats, you know. They like to get in under the eaves; swoop around at night. Dive-bomb you.”
    La wondered whether he was trying to scare her, as country people might do with somebody from the city. She thought she would tell him. “I grew up in the country,” she said. “In Surrey. I know about bats.”
    He put a suitcase down and went out to collect another from just outside the door. Once he had brought them all in, he took a step back and smiled at her. “People will help you,” he said. “I expect that they’ll already know you’re here. Mrs. Agg at the farm. Mrs. Wilson in the village. They’ll be round soon enough.”
    He left, promising to bring the car a few days later—after he had attended to one or two little problems it had. “Nothing big, mind. Small things. Spark plugs and the like.”
    Alone, she closed the front door behind her. It was summer, and yet the air inside had that coldness that one finds in a house that has been shut up too long and not lived in; coldness and dankness. But these would be dispelled once the windows were open. The air outside had been warm and scented with grass, a sweet scent that would quickly pervade the house once it was admitted.
    She moved through the hall, a square room on each side of which there were closed doors, panelled and painted in the same stark white that had been used on the walls. At thefar end of the hall, a not-quite-straight corridor led off to the back of the house; light, a bright square of it, flooded through a window at the end of the corridor, yellow as butter. A pane was missing—she could see that from where she stood—that was what had provided ingress for the magpie, and could be more easily remedied than the lack of a cowl on the chimney.
    La opened the door to her left. Richard’s mother had told her about the sitting room, that it enjoyed the sun in the mornings and that they had taken breakfast in there as the kitchen, on the other side of the house, was cold until the late afternoon. Now, at midday, the sitting room seemed warmer than the rest of the house.
    “It’s not a grand place,” she had been warned by her mother-in-law. “It’s a farm house, really, nothing more, but over the years it has been added to. There’s some panelling—of a sort—in the sitting room. That’s its sole distinction, I’m afraid.”
    She saw the panelling, wainscot high, left unpainted; it had been faded by the sun, which, through the unusually large windows, must have reached into every corner of the room; now the wood was almost white, all colour drained from it. There was an attempt at a cornice on the ceiling, a strip of plaster relief running round the room, and, in the centre, a half-hearted plaster rose from which the ceiling light descended. The floor was made of broad oak boards, faded and uneven, but with a sheen to them, as if polish hadbeen applied. A large russet-coloured carpet, almost perfectly square, of the sort that La’s parents called a Turkey, dominated the centre of the room. Armchairs, shrouded with dust sheets, had been moved against the walls, watched over by paintings of country subjects: a still-life of a hare and pheasant shot for the pot, a watercolour of a flat