Free La's Orchestra Saves the World by Alexander McCall Smith

Clothing left out in the garden there came in slightly grey, with that vaguely stale smell that could linger in the atmosphere for days when the winds were sluggish.
    She held the cotton of the blouse against her cheeks, and breathed in. She looked about her, her eyes gradually becoming accustomed to the dark. The shapes became more defined now; the woody lavender emerged, the line of box, the large pieris at the edge of the lawn. She took a few steps deeper into the darkness, looking up as she did so, up at the stars, fields of them, it seemed, stretching above in the chambered sky above. As a girl she had known the names and position of the constellations, and some of these were still lodged in memory: Ursa Major, Andromeda, Cassiopeia. She would renew her acquaintance with them now that she was here in a place where the sky was not spoiled by light.
    Suddenly she thought of Richard. She still thought of him every day, but for shorter periods now; he was still there, a stubborn presence, like a scar. Now, at this moment, she missed him sorely. She would give anything, shethought, to have him here beside her; to be with him right now, under this sky, in this place. Without him she had nobody to share this with; the experience was half what it could be.
    She put the thought out of her mind. Shortly after Richard had left, a friend in London, to whom the same thing had happened—at the hands of a charming womaniser—had said to her that the trick was to forget the man. “If they’re not there, then we feel much better, you know. So banish him.”
    “But how? How do you stop thinking of somebody when they keep coming back to you? When that person is the only person you want to think about?”
    “You do what monks do when they think about women. You train yourself to think of something else. In their case, the Holy Ghost, I suppose. Or the Devil, I suppose, if they wish to frighten themselves.” She made a face, which indicated that she did not believe in the Devil.
    She had decided to do that; every time he came to mind, she would think of something else, of something very far from Richard. Dr. Price, perhaps, her Cambridge tutor, about whose person there was not the faintest whiff of sulphur, but who could stand in for the Devil. She conjured up an image of Dr. Price, even though her old tutor was no Old English expert, expounding to her on
Beowulf
in a drowsy supervision, neither of them enjoying the experience, both wanting to talk about Eliot, who was much more to
the
pointthan any Scandinavian hero. The dissonance between her memories and
Beowulf was
sufficient to banish the thought of Richard. And now, out in the garden at night, she thought of
Beowulf
, and vaguely of Dr. Price, and Richard was gone.
    She walked round towards the front of the house, enjoying the cool evening air. The lawn stretched before her, a dark sward, beyond which the plane trees were a black expanse reaching up to the rather lighter sky. She decided to walk in the direction of the trees; the conquering of her fear made her feel almost giddy and for a few moments she felt as if she might break into song. Once on the lawn, she slipped off her shoes, and felt the grass soft beneath her feet. Somewhere in the distance an owl cried, a sharp sound that she remembered from her childhood; there had been owls in the barn beside the house in Surrey and they were forever screeching.
    She reached the plane trees and stood beneath them for a couple of minutes, relishing the sound of their leaves in the slight breeze that had blown up. Within moments the breeze dropped and the trees were silent again. A leaf dropped, and touched her gently on the cheek as it fell, like the wing of a tiny bird.
    Then she saw the movement. A dark shape on the other side of the lawn detached itself from a shadow and moved, to become another dark shape closer to the house. La caught her breath and stared into the darkness, straining tomake out the form of what she had seen.