A Song for Summer

A man leaving wartime London, perhaps for ever, will say goodbye to a number of places. To St Martin-in-the-Fields to hear the Blind Choir sing Evensong; to Joe's All Night Stall near Westminster Bridge where Wordsworth's famous view can be combined with the best jellied eels in London; to the grill room of the Cafè

Royal ...

And to the Lunchtime Concerts at the National Gallery, possibly the best loved institution to come out of the war. If the British had heroines during these gruelling years--the Queen, tottering in her high heels through the rubble to bring comfort to those bombed from their homes, the Red Cross nurses accompanying the soldiers to the front--there was no one they loved more than Dame Myra Hess with her frumpish clothes, her grey hair rolled in a hausfrau bun, her musicality and her smile.

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 prot@egè 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.