La's Orchestra Saves the World by Alexander McCall Smith Page A

from time to time, but Lennie’s not very good with girls.”
    “I’m sure that he’ll find somebody.”
    La saw the appreciation in the look she received from Mrs. Agg. Nothing kind was ever said to her, thought La; she lived in a world of taciturn men, of hard work. “I hope so. But not every girl is going to want to marry a farmer, these days. Girls have ideas about living in town. The comforts. Our life here …” She looked about her, at the kitchen, with the bowls of shelled peas, and the stack of wood beside the range; at the blackened griddle; at the rush mats on the floor with their frayed edges.
    “Farmers’ daughters?” asked La.
    “Yes, that would be good. But Lennie, you see …” The sentence was not completed.
    It then occurred to La that it was Lennie she had seen in the garden the previous evening. And it further occurred to her that Mrs. Agg knew that, but could not bring herself to say as much. She was his mother, after all, and few mothers accept the truth about their sons, no matter how glaringly obvious that truth may be.
    OVER THE WEEKS THAT FOLLOWED , the second half of July, La saw no more of the intruder. She was now convinced that it had been Lennie, and that Mrs. Agg might by now have spoken to him. It was also possible that he had merely been curious, and that having met her in the farmhouse kitchen had somehow taken the mystery out of her presence. Whatever it was, she was not frightened of him; rather, she felt sorry for him, for this farm boy in whose life nothing had happened, who had probably never been to London, whose world began and ended with Ingoldsby Farm. She wondered what went on in his head. Did he listen to the news? Did he know where Germany was; who Hitler and Mussolini were? For such a young man, the arrival of a new neighbour must have been an event of tremendous import—enough to lure him into trying to find out more about her. Viewed in that way, Lennie was nothing to worry about. Indeed, when she saw him next she would try to reach out to him, to engage him in conversation, to find out more about his world.
    On a Thursday morning, a young man rode a bicycle up La’s drive. La spotted him from the kitchen. She saw him dismount, prop his bicycle against the sycamore sapling at the edge of the drive, and then take off his post office cap, wiping the sweat from his brow. It was warm work cycling in the summer heat and he must have come a fair distance—she had not seen him in the local post office. She dried her hands and went out to meet him.
    “Mrs. Stone?”
    She nodded. He had extracted a telegram from his pocket and she was going over in her mind which of her elderly relatives could have died. Her father, now in a nursing home in Brighton, was frail, but July was not a month for bronchitis and its mortal harvesting. There was an aunt in York who had been ill, but who had written to her recently and claimed to have been feeling much better, had even spoken of coming down to stay with her for a few days.
    She took the telegram and signed the small notebook that the young man produced from another pocket. She searched his face for a sign; they knew what was in these telegrams, these men, but affected ignorance. They avoided smiling, she had been told, when the news was bad. His face was expressionless.
    “Hot day, isn’t it?” he remarked, looking away.
    “Yes.” She thanked him and gave the notebook back. He nodded, and went back to his bicycle.
    She had not expected it to be Richard, and the bearer of this news to be his father.
    Regret Richard very ill in France. Shall come to see you late afternoon. Car from Bury. Will leave again following morning. Gerald
.
    She went back into the house and sat down on one of the kitchen chairs. Re-reading the telegram, she tried to extract further meaning from the sparse words. But she could not read anything more into the terse message: Richard was ill; his father was coming to see her and then leaving the nextday. She