“Felix Baer is here,” I told her. “He asked for music.” I screwed the pieces of the flute together. The case was cracked and battered, but my flute was all right. Like me: jarred but undamaged. I stood up, took a deep breath, and played an F scale. Still warming up, I started “Jane and Louisa.”

Jane hadn’t forgotten the words. She sang in harmony with the flute, a third below the melody. “Jane and Louisa will soon come home.…”

She broke off.

“Are they going to arrest me again?” she asked.

A chatty police inspector had come round in the afternoon yesterday, and he hadn’t said anything about arresting her. But he hadn’t let her off, either. Sorry about your fall, I expect you are quite dazed—you must have a doctor in to look at your arm! Don’t be careless with the gas fire.

I wondered if she was hoping that they would arrest her.

“I don’t know,” I admitted.

I stood halfway down the stairs, exactly between Felix Baer in the public bar and Jane Warner in the best double room. What can I play for them both? I wondered, feeling self-conscious and awkward.

Put your shoulders back, Lula, I imagined Mummy saying. Make your daddy proud.

Mendelssohn.

But I couldn’t remember the intricacies of the middle part of the Hebrides Overture. “Rhapsody in Blue”? I wouldn’t make it the whole way through that, either; not without reading music.

And then I remembered the Bach “Ave Maria,” whose glorious long slow tones were easier to pick out and linger over: Johanna von Arnim’s first record.

And as I played, I wondered if there had been music on Daddy’s sinking ship, a bugle playing “Reveille” or “The Last Post.” Or had he sung hymns in his deep, rolling voice, the way we’d sung in the storm-tossed rowboat at Lime Cay? I wondered if Mummy had been humming to herself when the bomb fell, one of her students’ exam pieces, or a hymn for someone’s wedding. Music, right till the end.

I’d never know. I hadn’t been with them.

I thought of Jamie in the moonlight over the North Sea last night, with Silver next to him and Chip Wingate alone in the back.

I didn’t finish the Bach. In the hall below me, the telephone rang, and Ellen ran to answer it.

Ellen:

“The Limehouse, Volunteer McEwen speaking,” I croaked into the receiver.

“Hello, Ellen, pet, it’s Phyllis.” She was hoarse too. “I thought Mrs. C. should know the latest.”

Dread clung like a strangling rope around my throat and I didn’t ask her to go on. But she did anyway.