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

landscape under banks of clouds, a hunting print of a line of horses launching themselves over a hedgerow.
    La stood quite still. It was a room without life, like one of those Dutch interiors from which the people had disappeared, paintings of emptiness. She moved to a window and looked out. This was her first glimpse of the garden, as it was concealed from the front and one could only guess at what lay behind the house. Somebody had cut the lawn—quite recently, it seemed, which would explain the smell of grass on the air outside, that sweet, promising scent. At the end of the lawn, a line of plane trees interspersed with chestnuts marched several hundred yards to a low stone wall, and beyond the trees were fields. It was a warm day, and there was a slight haze hanging above the horizon, a smudge of blue that could mislead one into thinking that there were hills. London was far away already; how quickly would one forget in a place like this, she wondered. Would her own world draw in just as the driver’s had? Suddenly it seemed perfectly possible that it might; that this was precisely the sort of place where one could cocoon oneself in a tiny world and forget about one’s previous life.
    She turned away from the window and continued her exploration of the house. Half-way down the corridor a steep wooden staircase, painted light grey, ascended to the floor above. La climbed this, the boards of the stair creaking beneath her, the only sound in the house. She looked into the bedrooms; there was a well-stocked linen cupboard, she had been told, but the beds were bare, the mattresses stripped of sheets. There was a bathroom with a claw-foot iron tub and a generous, shell-shaped porcelain basin. She turned a tap and water flowed, brown for the first few seconds, and then clear. A magazine,
Country Life
, a year old, lay on top of a laundry basket; a large cake of soap, cracked and ancient, had been left in a small china soap-dish by the side of the bath.
    She went out onto the landing, and that was where she was standing when she heard the sound of somebody downstairs, the sound of feet upon the floorboards of the corridor.

Five
    M RS. AGG EXPLAINED that she had come into the house because she had seen the front door open.
    “I didn’t mean to give you a fright,” she said. “I saw you coming, see. And I thought that’ll be the woman from London. Mrs. S wrote to me to tell me.”
    Mrs. S, thought La. Mrs. S and her husband, Mr. S and their son, R …
    “I had a bit of a fright,” she said. “But not much. I didn’t realise that I’d left the door open.”
    “Oh, it was closed. But not locked. We don’t lock our doors in the country.”
    La wondered whether there was reproach in the tone of voice, but decided that it was more a weariness at having to make what might be the first of many explanations. She felta momentary resentment; she was not going to be condescended to because she came from London.
    “Actually, I was brought up in the country myself,” said La. “Surrey.”
    Mrs. Agg shook her head vehemently—with the air of one to whom the idea of visiting Surrey was anathema. Then they looked at one another in appraising silence. La saw a woman in her fifties somewhere, a thin face under greying hair pulled back into a bun, dark eyes. And Mrs. Agg, for her part, saw a woman in her late twenties—much younger than she had expected—dressed in a London way, or what she thought they must be wearing in London. She glanced down at La’s shoes; they would not last long in the mud. The soles would peel off; Mrs. Agg had seen that before; people who came here and thought that they could wear London shoes; their soles peeled off quickly enough.
    “I didn’t tell you my name,” the older woman said. “Glenys Agg.”
    “And I’m La Stone.”
    Mrs. Agg frowned. “La is that Lah, with an
h
? Or Lar, with an
r
?”
    “La, with nothing. As in do-ray-me-fa-so.”
    Mrs. Agg looked puzzled. “It’s short for