She held up the record sleeve so everyone could see. It was a blocky modern painting of a dove and candle floating among blue musical notes.

Wing Commander Cromwell recognized it.

“Johanna von Arnim’s first record!” he exclaimed. “Great Scott, that goes back a bit! I heard her sing in the flesh, Béatrice in Berlioz’s Béatrice et Bénédict. She must have been over fifty then. But still a sensational performer!”

Jane blessed him with a saintly smile. “You’re a fellow opera lover!”

“It’s my opinion that von Arnim must have been the greatest mezzo-soprano of the last century. I greatly regret I was too young to hear her Carmen.”

Jane stood for a moment staring down at the record balanced in her hands, glowing.

But she didn’t say anything else. She just placed the record on the turntable and moved the needle into the outer groove.

The record spun, and the room flooded with the waterfall ripple of Bach’s Prelude in C, which I know perfectly well because it is the easiest thing he ever wrote for the keyboard and the only Bach that I can play; and over top of it, in slow, ringing tones of strength and beauty, came a woman’s voice like a bell, singing Ave Maria, gratia plena.

Everyone turned toward the sound—all the young British airmen and soldiers and the German prisoners too.

I have lived with music all my life. I grew up with it—an ordinary thing, a way to earn a living, always there to be shared. Granny Adair plaiting my hair and caroling hymns on a Sunday morning. Hearing Daddy’s strong, deep voice coming up the dusty road singing “Good Evening, Caroline”—Mummy and I both giving a scream of excitement, then racing to meet him. Falling asleep in a strange garden under colored paper lanterns in the dark, listening to Mummy playing the harp at some navy officer’s wedding party. Turning pages for her at school-hall concerts, in Kingston and in London. Christmas songs at the piano and playing records for 648 Squadron’s B-Flight on sunny afternoons and stormy nights.

Ordinary.

But this was something else.

This music—this music was outside time.

It was just a recording, a sound coaxed from shellac through a thorn needle. But while the music played, we were not doing anything but listening. We were not at war. We were not enemies. We weren’t anybody special or different from each other—just people listening.

People listening to music together.

Jamie:

When the record ended I could hear the needle scratching in circles. We stood hushed.