La's Orchestra Saves the World Read Free Page B

moment of insight; at the most she would start to see things slightly differently, would understand the complexity that lay below the surface. She did not worry about that. At present she was free to read and to spend long hours in discussion with her fellow undergraduates, talking about what they had read. She joined a music society, and played the flute in a quartet. She had learned the instrument at school, where it had been something of a chore for her. Now she took it up without thepressure of practice and examinations, and found that she enjoyed it. They struggled through Haydn and Mozart, and gave a concert for the junior common room at the end of the term. A young man, Richard Stone, came to that, sitting in a group of young men, wearing a blue cravat that caught La’s eye. He was tall, with the confident bearing of an athlete. She looked up from her music at the end of the first piece and noticed him. He caught her eye and smiled. Then, at the end of the concert, when they went into a room where tea had been prepared, he came up to her and introduced himself. He was not embarrassed, as some of the men were, but spoke to her as if they already knew one another.
    After a few minutes he invited her to come with him and a group of his friends to a picnic at Grantchester. She hesitated for a moment, but only for a moment. She had that afternoon had a particularly unsatisfactory session with Dr. Price, who had criticised her essay and hinted that it was the sort of work that would attract, at best, a third. Dr. Price did not like men; this was a man asking her to go on a picnic, and so she accepted.
    She learned more about Richard from a friend whose brother knew him. He did not have a reputation as a scholar, she was told, but was good-looking and effortlessly popular; he could row, although he would never make the college eight. Too lazy, somebody had said.
    “Are you keen on him?” asked the friend who had imparted the information about Richard. “He’s good-looking, isn’t he?”
    La felt flustered. Richard could be a friend, but she expected nothing more than that. “He’s nice enough. But that’s about it.”
    “Pity. Because he likes you. It’s obvious.”
    “Is it?”
    The friend laughed. “Have you seen the way he looks at you?”
    La had seen, but had put it down to something else, perhaps to what Dr. Price would have described as male arrogance. At the picnic in Grantchester, he had stared at her with a quiet solemnity, as if he had made up his mind about something. But now that her friend had spelled it out, she could hardly not think about it. It had not occurred to her that anybody could admire her in that way. She did not consider herself attractive; I am too tall, she thought. At school a spiteful girl had said to her: “Boys won’t look at you, La. Never. They don’t look at tall girls. Know that?”
    She had grown up with the assumption that this was true and had decided that if a boy came along, one she liked, she would have to do the pursuing. But that was not yet. That would be at some unspecified time in the future, when she was twenty-eight, thirty perhaps. I will not let it become anything more than what it is, she told herself. I have not come here to find a husband.
    They went to their picnic, and to another one after that.
    “I like sitting in fields,” said Richard, and laughed.
    He took her to tea, and started cycling out to see her every afternoon. Soon she came to expect him, just after four o’clock, even in the rain, to which he seemed indifferent. “Just water,” he said. “And you look nice when you’re bedraggled.”
    They talked to each other easily, as if they were old friends. In the cinema he took her hand and then kissed her. He tasted of tobacco, and she imagined, absurdly, that she might reveal this to Dr. Price in one of their uncomfortable meetings. “Do you know, Dr. Price, that men taste of
tobacco?
Did you know that?”
    Six weeks after their first