Nocturne with Bonus Material by Deborah Crombie

Nocturne
A Short Story
    â€œTell me about the piano.” Kit McClellan sat in the chair nearest the gas fire in his friend Erika Rosenthal’s red-walled sitting room, cradling a cup of hot cocoa. Erika always insisted on serving their drinks in her best gold-rimmed porcelain—she said there was no point in having nice things if you didn’t use them. The elegant china suited Erika, tiny as a bird, with her snow-white hair and sparkling dark eyes, but the delicate cup looked fragile in Kit’s hands.
    â€œYou’re going to have your father’s hands, I think,” said Erika, as if she, too, had noticed the contrast. At fourteen, Kit’s hands and feet seemed to be growing faster than the rest of him, but he was shooting up in height as well.
    Since Kit’s daily route from his school to his home near the top of Notting Hill took him along Ladbroke Grove, Erika’s flat in Arundel Gardens made a perfect stop along the way—and then there was the lure of the German brownsugar cookies that Erika made especially for him. The cocoa, Erika had assured him, was just the thing for this cold October afternoon, and he hadn’t protested when she’d added shavings of the bittersweet German chocolate she loved.
    Now that Gemma was home during the day, looking after little Charlotte until she was ready to start nursery school, Kit didn’t need to hurry back to mind his six-year-old step-brother, Toby.
    Gemma and his dad, Toby and Charlotte, and him. They were what the magazines called a “blended” family now, he supposed, as if someone had given them a whir in a kitchen mixer. A bit weird, but he was okay with it. And Erika had been an unexpected bonus.
    Erika had been Gemma’s friend first—they’d met when Gemma was investigating a case--but now Kit couldn’t imagine a time when she hadn’t been in his life. There wasn’t any reason for him to hide his afternoon visits, except he found he liked having a bit of a secret. And God forbid if it somehow got round school that he chose to spend his time with an old lady.
    Just exactly how old, Erika never said. But Kit knew she’d been just out of her teens, newly married, when she’d escaped from Berlin in 1939, and he could do the maths. She’d only been a few years older than he was now, he suddenly realized, and he tried to imagine himself doing what she had done.
    â€œYou’ve heard about the piano a dozen times,” said Erika when he’d finished his cookie. She set her cup—the chocolate barely tasted, he noticed—in its saucer with a precise little clink.
    â€œAll you’ve told me is that you found it during the war.” Kit settled more comfortably in his chair, stretching his long legs until the tip of his shoe just touched the leg of the grand piano that took pride of place in the sitting room. “You said it was in 1944, and it was right here in Notting Hill. You were living in this house.”
    Erika nodded. “We were housed in this flat, yes, by one of the Jewish refugee committees. We were fortunate to get it.” She had long since bought the entire house but lived in the basement flat and let the upper floors as separate apartments. “I volunteered as an air raid warden. At first, the others were unfriendly because I was German. But there were other Jews here, some German, some Polish, some Czech, and after a while people got used to us.
    â€œAnd then, when the bombing escalated, it didn’t matter any longer. We all did what we could.” She fell silent for a moment, toying with the handle of her cup, then looked up at him with a twinkle in her eyes. “Every night, the people from the upper flats would come down with their mattresses and their thermos flasks, because this flat was the safest. Sometimes a little whisky was passed round, but mostly we were lucky to have tea. It was quite jolly when the bombs weren’t