Together in Another Place Read Free Page B

to perform, swirling his
cap as he did so, went un-noticed.
    It
was just as well for he tripped on something that had gone unseen. He crashed
to the floor and recognised soon enough what it was, someone’s pathetic
bundled-up possessions – perhaps those of a detainee who had been transported
and had had no time to gather all that remained to them. He was relieved not to
have dropped his cap; finding it in the gloom and on this dusty floor would not
have been easy.
    ‘‘Do you remember...do you
remember, ’ he
began to sing, confident that no-one would hear him, ‘do you remember how I told the stars...that I loved you?’’
    The
rest of the words to the song didn’t come easily to mind, but the tune did, so
he hummed   and then lapsed into
Harriette’s soft refrains... tralala...tralala ...as
best as he could. It didn’t sound so believable coming from his lips.
    ‘I’ll
make something for you,’ he now decided as an idea came to mind.
    He
said it wondrously for the door at the end of the short passage where he stood
had opened and there she was, his lady Harriette. She still wore her costume, a
long frilly, flouncy dress along with her bonnet that had been partly tied with
a ribbon at her throat.
    He
hoped that she hadn’t heard him trying to sing or the gasp of amazement to see
her silhouetted in the doorway.
    ‘Is
that you, Simon?’ she asked querulously.
    ‘Yes...I
couldn’t keep away.’
    ‘Can’t
this wait, please?’
    Simon
took in her dismay on finding him here.
    ‘I
guess it can,’ he replied easily, ‘but I wanted to tell you how much I loved
the song, the solo you’ve sung. I wanted to ask...may I see you afterwards?’
    ‘There’s
roll call....then lock up...there’s so little time.’ She made it sound as if
her words would persuade him that she was right to point out the obstacles to
meeting again.
    ‘It’ll
only be for a moment...’
    ‘Very
well,’ she answered hesitantly. ‘Come back...meet me here. And now I have to
go...I’m sorry.’
    ‘Your
audience awaits you...’
    ‘As
you seem to do,’ she dared to admit, touching his arm as she did so, and before
she was lost once more to his view. The door closed and he had to adjust to the
semi-darkness once more.
    ‘You’d
better be off,’ a familiar voice, that of the orderly, instructed from behind
some props.
    ‘No
one’s ever alone here,’ Simon muttered but his comment elicited no reply as the
orderly drew closer.
    He
knew this to be the case only on account of the man’s foul breath; it reeked of
some ersatz substance that he chose to smoke and that passed for tobacco.
    Obediently,
Simon left the building and decided to linger by the hall’s entrance. The
concert would soon be over, in fifteen minutes or so; he wouldn’t have long to
wait.
    Above
him, somewhere beyond the patchy cloud that drifted on the freshening breeze, a
concert of a different kind beat out its droning rhythm. Another bombing raid
was in progress. He knew well enough that he, along with so many others, would
soon be taken somewhere to break up the charred and mangled wreckage that had
fallen from the sky and to salvage some metals for reuse by their captors.
    ‘Go to
it,’ he encouraged on a whisper. ‘ An eye
for an eye... so, do anything and everything necessary to end this nightmare
for us here below.’
    ●
    ‘I
could never tire of you doing that,’ he said with evident pleasure.
    Harriette
had responded to his first tentative kiss. She had gripped Simon’s hands as if
to do so would exercise some restraint upon their actions. Conceding to his
gentle entreaties had been enough. To be courted so carefully in the
surroundings of a detention camp was an affront to all reason. She had dared to
concede, in the days since the concert when Simon had appeared so unexpectedly
back stage and in a show of his touching devotion, that she was enamoured of him. Mother had even been
told of it, how her emotions and rational ways of thinking had