For it was this indomitable woman who had coaxed the best musicians in the land to play in the emptied gallery for a pittance and bullied the authorities again and again to repair the bomb-damaged building, making these lunch hours into an oasis for all those who cared for music. Marek, who knew her and loved her, had come early, knowing that on the days that she herself played the piano, the queue stretched round Trafalgar Square. He had every reason to be grateful to her; a protégé of hers had played his violin sonata here, and he had heard the finest quartets in the country here on his leaves, but today, probably his last time here, he wanted to sit quietly as a member of the audience, for he knew that the sight of the tired housewives, the sailors and office workers listening rapt to her playing would be one of the memories he would take with him overseas.
He was in London for a few days, waiting to hear the time and place of his departure, which was always a secret till the last minute. He wore uniform and his stick was on the floor under his chair. He walked with a limp still but his leg was almost healed.
The dark-haired girl next to him had come in late and moved in deliberately beside the distinguished-looking Flight Lieutenant. She was a dedicated intellectual and tended to pick up men in places where their intelligence was guaranteed — art galleries, concerts, serious plays. Marek, well aware of her intentions, was disinclined to take the encounter further than the remarks they exchanged in the interval… and yet it was a long time since he had had a woman.
But Myra Hess was returning; she had begun to play the Mozart A Minor Sonata and Marek closed his eyes, savouring the directness and simplicity of her playing. Then in the middle of the slow movement, the sirens went.
Attempts by performers and audiences alike to carry on during air raids as though nothing had happened had long since been frustrated. Gallery curators appeared from all sides, shepherding the audience down into the basement shelter — and Marek, who had hoped to escape from the building, found himself leaning against a wall, the dark-haired girl still pinned to his side.
“Shall I get you a sandwich?”’ she asked. “They seem to have opened the canteen.”
Marek looked up and found himself staring straight at Ellen.
She had come down the day before for her mother’s fiftieth birthday, bringing butter and eggs from the farm and dahlias and chrysanthemums from the garden. Two of the windows of Gowan Terrace were boarded up, leaking sandbags surrounded the house, but the sisters saw nothing wrong; Holloway Prison had been far more uncomfortable.
Ellen had provided the kind of instant party she was famous for, and assured her mother, as she invariably did, that she was blissfully happy and leading exactly the life she would have chosen.
Then on the following day she went to the National Gallery to visit her sandwich ladies. It was meant to be a purely social visit, after which it was Ellen’s intention to go upstairs and hear the concert properly and not in the occasional snatches she had been permitted as a canteen worker when somebody opened a door.
But she was unlucky. The ladies who ran the canteen were members of the aristocracy and famous alike for the excellence of their sandwiches and the ferocity of their discipline. Ellen chanced to arrive on the day that the Honourable Mrs Framlington had been delayed by a time bomb on the District Line, and presently found herself behind the counter, slicing tomatoes and piling them on to wholemeal bread. But even the canteen ladies had to take shelter when the sirens went, moving across to the reinforced basement and setting up their trestle tables among the audience.
It was then that Ellen, finding herself opposite Marek, did something unexpected. She put down the plate of sandwiches, walked over to him and grasped his sleeve in a gesture in which desperation and possession were so strangely intermingled that the dark-haired girl vanished into the crowd. Only then, still grasping the cloth as though to let go would be to risk drowning, did she respond to his greeting, and speak his name.
An hour later they sat on a bench in St James’s Park, looking not at each other but at the ducks, waddling complacently up and down in front of them. The meat ration was down to eight ounces a week but the British would have eaten each other rather than the wildfowl in their parks. Ellen did not look at Marek because what she had experienced when she saw him had frightened her so badly that she had to search out neutral things to look at: the withered grass, the empty deck chairs and in the distance the gold railings of Buckingham Palace. Marek looked away because he was summoning up his last ounce of strength for what was to come and sensed already that it might not be enough.
The things they would normally have done to compose themselves were denied to them. Since his leg was still stiff and painful, they could not walk the streets, or find, later, somewhere to dance where they could hold each other with perfect propriety. They could not, in the middle of the afternoon, have dinner and sit in intimacy at a shaded table.
“I must get back to Gowan Terrace,” said Ellen presently, her voice hardly audible. “They’ll be expecting me.”
“So you’ve said,” said Marek. “Several times.” But when he turned he saw that her eyes were full of tears.
“We shall have tea,” decided Marek.
“Tea at the Dorchester. Tea is not threatening; we will drink it calmly.”
“Yes,” she said.
They found a taxi and it was calming to drink Lapsang Souchong and eat petits fours overlooking Hyde Park as though four years were not between them and there was no war. He had told her about Schwachek’s death. Now he told her that he was going to Canada; that this was the last time they would meet, and at once the intimacy of the tea room, the soupy music vanished and Ellen found herself trembling, plunged into a sudden hell.
“I have to go,” she said pitifully.
He nodded and limped to the reception desk. “Have you got one?”’ she asked when he returned.
“Got what?”’
“A taxi.”
He shook his head. “No. What I’ve got is a room for the night.”
She shrank back in her chair. “You can’t have done that. You can’t.” She was unable to believe that he could be so cruel.
“You don’t have to sleep with me. You don’t have to remove a single stitch of clothing. But before I go we must talk properly. I must know if you’re happy and if you can forgive me for what I did to us both.”
She was silent for long enough to make him very frightened. Then she lifted her head and said that sad thing that girls say when all is lost. She said: “I haven’t got a toothbrush.”
But for a long time no talking was done. There was a moment when she first lay in his arms, both of them perfectly still like children about to sleep, when she thought that maybe she could hold back what was to happen-when she thought that perhaps she did not have to know what was to be denied her for the rest of her life. Perhaps Marek also was afraid of the pain that knowledge would bring, for he too made himself very quiet as though to rest like this was enough to assuage his longing.
But of course it was not to be, and later, when it was over, she realised that it was as bad as she had feared-that it was worse… That to try and live without the love of this one man was going to destroy her — and yet that somehow it had to be done.
“All right,” said Marek. “Now talk.