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

completely sure?” she asked.
    “Yes. I suppose I am.”
    Janey frowned. “Not suppose. You shouldn’t say ‘suppose.’ People who are madly in love with another person never say ‘I suppose I love him.’ They just don’t.”
    La thought out loud. “I do love him. We laugh at the same things. He’s kind. What more could one ask for?”
    “Romance,” said Janey. “Passion. An aching for the other person. An emptiness in his absence. That sort of thing.”
    “Maybe,” said La. “Anyway, we’re getting married.”
    The marriage took place in the chapel of St. John’s, his college. La’s small family, her father, his brother and sister, a few distant cousins, filled a couple of pews; Richard’s list was much longer, and included numerous school friends. They gave him a party the night before and threw him in the river, ruining his blazer.
    La felt a strange, unaccustomed tenderness for himat the altar, noticing the nervous trembling of his hands as he slipped the ring onto her finger. “It’s all right,” she whispered.
    “I’m so happy,” he whispered back.
    After the honeymoon, they went to London, staying first in a flat in Fitzrovia that Richard’s father had rented for them. Then, a few months later, Richard paid a deposit for the purchase of a house in Maida Vale that was too large for them, but which had a long strip of garden that La started to cultivate. He was now working in the family firm, a job that allowed him to leave the office at four in the afternoon if he wished. La wanted to work, but received little encouragement from Richard.
    “Why?” he asked. “Why work when you don’t have to? We’ve got enough—more than enough. Why shut yourself up in an office with a lot of silly girls?”
    She looked at him. “Not all of them would be silly.”
    “Yes, of course.” He smiled. “Sorry.”
    “I don’t want to spend my life sitting about. I want to earn my keep.”
    “But that’s what I’m doing. I’m earning your keep.”
    She shook her head. “You know that’s not the same. I want to do something with my life.”
    He seemed genuinely puzzled. “But you are doing something. You’re my wife. That’s something, isn’t it?”
    She did not think that was enough, but did not say anything.
    “And there’ll be children,” he added, reaching out to touch her arm. “Soon enough.”
    They had not discussed this; nothing had been said. It would be something that just happened, and she was not sure how she felt about it. One part of her wanted to be a mother; another understood that that would really be the end of her hopes to do something more with her life. But as the months wore on and nothing happened, she began to wonder whether that would happen. Still nothing was said.
    They went to the theatre, to concerts, to the opera; Richard indulged her in all of these, although his tastes were not musical. “That part’s missing in my brain,” he said. “I hear the notes, but they don’t mean very much to me.”
    “Are you happy?” her father asked her on an occasion when they met for lunch in town. “You look happy, I must say.”
    “Of course I am,” said La.
    “And Richard, too?”
    “Very. He doesn’t talk about happiness, of course. Men tend not to. Men don’t talk about their feelings.”
    Her father nodded. “So true. And yet men have feelings, I think, in much the same way as …” He looked out of the restaurant, at the passers-by in the street outside. Some of them looked worn-out, ground down by what he called
general conditions
. “General conditions are so …” he said.
    La knew what he meant. She felt guilty that she shouldbe comfortable when others were suffering. “What can one do?” she asked her father.
    “Not much. If you gave your money away it would be gone in a puff of smoke and not make much difference to anybody. So just concentrate on small, immediate things. They make a difference to the world.”
    “But look what’s happening in