She had forgotten the various performances of her orchestra and so she couldn’t judge whether it was better now than it had been before, but it sounded beautiful to her, so beautiful, very much what she had wanted it to be. At the end of the concert, when the last notes had died away, there was utter silence in the hall. Then, one by one, the orchestra stood up, and so did the audience. They stood up in complete silence. Nobody said a word, nobody coughed or shuffled feet; there was just silence. Then they went out. It seemed that everybody felt it was wrong to break the atmosphere of the moment by applauding, and so there was no clapping. Just silence.

La went outside and looked up at the sky, where there was still a glimmer of light. Feliks’s little boy was with her, but she had almost forgotten him. He does not understand, she thought, which was just as well.

15

She had put Feliks and his son in the spare room at the end of the corridor downstairs. When she awoke the next morning and went into the kitchen, she saw that the two of them were already up and out in the garden. Feliks was showing his son the shrubbery, which reminded her that he had planted some of those shrubs, still there after all those years.

He wanted to show his son where he had lived, and so he took him off after breakfast, in his car. She stayed behind. She was giving coffee to a number of members of the orchestra who had travelled down for the concert and would be leaving later that morning.

‘Well,’ one of them said, ‘I hope that helps. I doubt it, though. Isn’t it awful?’

‘Music helps,’ she said. ‘Even if … even if …’ But she could not bring herself to finish the sentence.

Then they heard the news. It came on the radio, in the kitchen, and it was shouted out. Somebody said, quite simply, peace. She sat down because she thought that she would pass out. She held her head in her hands. ‘Oh,’ she said. Just: ‘Oh.’

She wanted to find Feliks immediately and tell him, but she made herself wait until he came back. Then she went out to the driveway. He saw her through the window of his car, and she realised that she must smile or he would think that it was bad news. She smiled. Then, to underline the point, she waved her hands in the air.

He said, ‘Good news? Is it good news?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes.’

He turned round and embraced his young son and kissed him. The boy looked surprised, even embarrassed. Then Feliks took La’s hands in his. He did not kiss her, but squeezed her hands, as if sharing some secret good news.

‘Your orchestra, La,’ he said. ‘Your orchestra saved the world. Again.’

She thought about this later. He had said again, and then she knew what he meant.