The Virtuoso Read Online Free

before the first anniversary of the concerts, on the seventh of September 1940, at five in the afternoon, the sound of air-raid sirens faded out into the buzz of aircraft engines. Above, in the grey skies, a squadron of fifty aircraft inched over us like migrating ducks, small flocks each in perfect diamond formation. They were low enough for us to see them rock from back to front in the wind, the sun glistening off their bellies as they opened their hatches and released their bombs, dropping them in clusters like handfuls of pebbles. My first thought before running to safety was that they seemed too meagre, those seed-like bombs that spiralled through the air, to cause that piercing whistle.
    We had been told on the wireless that the planes would be fired at, that we would be protected, but there was no defence, no retaliation. We just sat there while they bombed us, our shelters rocking like cradles. It sounded as if the whole city was being destroyed; it seemed impossible that we weren’t hit, that we could be still alive.
    The concerts continued without exception throughout the Blitz; air raids were viewed by the concert committee as mere inconveniences rather thanthreats. During the September daylight raids of the Battle of Britain, the concerts were moved downstairs, from the glass-roofed dome into the shelter-room, where they remained for the following nine months. Despite the suffocating stuffiness in there on warmer days, the pools of water that collected on the stone floor, and the icy draughts of winter (when I once saw a clarinettist warming her instrument over an oil-stove, trying to get it up to pitch), every day there they were, hundreds of people who’d made their way through glass-strewn streets and smouldering rubble to queue up for the concerts.
    One morning in mid-October, just after eleven o’clock, Myra apparently received a telephone call to say that a time bomb had fallen on the Gallery. When the audience started to arrive an hour later to see the Griller Quartet and Max Gilbert playing Mozart string quintets, a young boy standing at the front of the Gallery directed them across Trafalgar Square to the library at South Africa House, where the concert had been relocated.
    Several days later it was reported in the paper that a one-thousand-pound bomb had been discovered in the wrecked part of the Gallery, and that the concerts were to move to the furthermost room while the bomb-disposal squad disengaged the bomb. Days later, when the workmen were out at lunch and the Stratton Quartet was performing Beethoven’s F major Rasoumovsky quartet, the bomb went off right in the middle of the Scherzo. A loud explosion followed by arain of shattering glass. The musicians continued without missing a beat.
    It seemed everyone in London attended the Gallery concerts: people who’d never before heard a classical note mingling with those who dedicated their lives to music. As a young teenager in my grey-and-maroon school uniform, I could slip in amongst it all, as eligible to attend as the Queen.
    When I remember those days I find myself having to admit that there is an aspect to the war that I still miss. It’s the incandescence of a person, of a city, only visible in its darkest times. I knew that any day the Fifth Army could come knocking on our door, or I might return from school to find my entire street ablaze. But then I only had to walk through those arched wooden doors of the Gallery and glance up at Noël as he stood on the edge of the stage, tall and still as an obelisk, and I would know at that moment there was nothing that I wasn’t able to endure.
    We met because we shared the same birthday—it was as simple as that. So many years passed, so many days and nights daydreaming at the piano, designing our first encounter (it was usually in the green room after one of his recitals or maybe after one of mine, he’d approach me like a friend, his arms out wide, throwing them around me, more a rugby tackle