He had come to one of the concerts, and that was how she had met and recruited him. The concert had been in the hall of a school, and at the interval they had served tea from one of the school’s large urns. La had been serving, along with two other women who helped her with these tasks. She had not noticed Feliks in the queue, but suddenly he was before her, holding out the tuppence that they charged for the tea and a small, rather tasteless biscuit.

She had poured his tea and passed it to him. He had taken the cup and it was then that she noticed his hand was shaking. The cup rattled in its saucer.

He saw her looking at his hand, and the shaking stopped. He moved away, but when La had finished serving tea she looked up and saw him standing by himself at the end of the room.

She folded up her apron and went up to him. ‘I haven’t seen you at our concerts before,’ she said.

‘No,’ he said. ‘This is the first time.’

He smiled at her as he spoke, and she smiled back. He was a foreigner, obviously, although his English was quite good. She asked him where he was from. He told her.

She thought: I would have said he was French, from the way he looks, but no, that would have been a mistake. The French were more self-confident than this man; he was shy and retiring in his manner.

‘You obviously enjoy music,’ she said.

He reached to put his cup down on a table at the side of the room. Somebody walked past him and bumped him slightly, and he blushed, as if he was embarrassed at being in the way.

‘I do. Yes, I do.’

‘We might play some Chopin again,’ La said. ‘We played a piece by him at the last concert.’

‘That would be very nice.’

She noticed that he shifted his weight from foot to foot, as if in discomfort. Poor man.

Then he said, ‘I play the flute, or I used to. I have not played for a year now. No, it’s longer than that.’

This interested La. She said, ‘You must tell me your name.’

5

La went to Cambridge by train one morning, leaving shortly after ten. It was summer but the day, which had started with sun and warmth, had become rainy. Great grey clouds had built up to the west, and she could see the rain in the distance, over the fields of Suffolk and Cambridgeshire, falling in shifting veils, like curtains. From the window of her train, through drops of rain on the glass, she watched an aeroplane flying in circles, lazily. A woman seated opposite her saw her watching and said: ‘They’ll be training. Just boys, you know. Mere boys. Eighteen, if that.’ She shook her head in what could have been disapproval, or regret; La could not tell.

La said: ‘Thank heavens for them.’