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

have you and you have me. That’s enough, isn’t it?”
    She wept, and he comforted her. This whole experience, painful though it was, brought them closer together, and she thought,
I am truly in love with him. Truly. I know it now
.
    Now it seemed that Richard provoked a far more profound need within her. She wanted to be with him; she wanted all his attention; she wanted him to feel about her what she found herself feeling about him. He had suddenly become so important to her that even his possessions seemed to have gathered an aura about them; his handkerchiefs—
his
—his leather key wallet, his jacket; simple, everyday things, but now endowed with a mystical weight beyond their ordinary function. She asked herself how other people—people who came into contact with him at the office, for instance—could not feel the same way about him. Could they not
sense
it? Surely everyone, all of humanity, must succumb to his charms as she had; must understand how completely special he was.
    She marvelled at her discovery. It was the most universal of human emotions—love—but now, for the first time, she knew what it meant. It imbued everything with value and a sort of rare excitement; made each day into something precious, a gift.
    She could not tell him how she felt; she had no words for it. She could say
I love you so much
, but what would that convey? People said that all the time—she herself had said it—but they could not possibly be feeling what she felt, or feeling it with the same intensity. And so she used simple words, the formality of which somehow seemed more fitting. “Thank you for marrying me,” she said.
    And he replied: “I am the one who should thank you. I am the fortunate one.”
    She smiled. “Can you imagine what it must be like to be unhappy? To live with somebody whom you can’t stand any more? Imagine that?”
    He closed his eyes for a moment as he thought of this; then opened them and smiled his disarming smile. “Difficult,” he said quietly.

Three
    R ICHARD EXPLAINED to her what he did at the office. “It’s not very complicated,” he said. “It’s exactly what my father did and my grandfather, too, when they were my age. We have agents over in Bordeaux who buy the wine for us. We arrange to ship it and put it in our cellars here in London. Then we sell it to smaller merchants. To hotels. To people who buy directly from us for their own cellars. That’s all. My job is to see that it’s looked after once it’s landed here. I also check the inventories and arrange the tastings.”
    “It must be interesting,” she said. “You must have to keep a lot of figures in your head.”
    He looked at her. He raised an eyebrow. “Hardly. But yes, it has its moments, like any job, I suppose.”
    He showed her an album of photographs that his father had built up. There was a photograph of their office in Bordeauxitself—a building with the family name painted on the front and a staff of six or seven men, formally dressed, standing outside. They looked hot in their dark suits and waistcoats in the bright sunlight, but were smiling dutifully. At the edge of the picture, under the shade of a tree, two small boys were playing what looked like a game of marbles, unconcerned by the world of adults. Her eye took in the small details: the boys at their game, the pollarded tree beside the office building, the short shadows which told her that the photograph had been taken around noon.
    Then there were the photographs of the
châteaux
. The name of each, or of their place, was written in ink under the photograph, and she took pleasure in uttering them: d’Yquem, Bel-Air, Phélan-Ségur, de Sours. Richard knew most of them. He had spent the last few summers there, working with the agents. He knew a lot of the people in the photographs, and he named them or pointed things out. “That man has a wooden leg.
Blessé de guerre
, you know. That fellow, they say, has the best palate in the Médoc. That