A Song for Summer (13 page)

The man nodded and led them through the front room into the kitchen with an extension built over the garden. On a large table were a number of wooden trays lined with layers of greaseproof paper.

"Herr Fischer makes them to sell in Klagenfurt but I thought you'd like to see them."

But Ellen could scarcely speak; she was spellbound. The trays were full of rows and rows of little creatures made from marzipan. There were lions with wavy manes, and hedgehogs, each bristle as distinct as pins. There were squirrels crouching in the curve of their tails, and a dachshund, and piebald cows with tufts of grass held in their mouths. There was a frog with a golden chin and dark brown splodges, and a penguin, and a mouse with outsize whiskers ...

"Oh!" Ellen turned to Herr Fischer.

"I can't believe it! The colours ... the detail ... You must be so proud. I would give anything to be able to make those."

He flushed with pleasure, then shrugged. "It's just a question of time, Fr@aulein; patience and time."

"No it isn't. It's a skill. It's

art." She shook her head. "Is it the usual recipe--almond paste and egg white?"'

"Yes, but a softer mixture--and of course the colours are the difficulty. A good green dye ..."

"Oh yes--green is so difficult!" Marek listened, amused, as they became technical.

As Ellen turned back for a last look at the trays, he saw on her face an expression he had known in a number of women: a degree of longing that could only be described as lust. He had seen it on Brigitta Seefeld's face as she peered at a sable coat in a window in the K@arntnerstrasse, and on the face of the little Greek actress he had known in New York for a diamond brooch at Tiffany's. Now he saw it on Ellen's face as she gazed at Herr Fischer's handiwork.

"They're not for sale, I'm afraid," said Marek. "They all go to the patisserie in Klagenfurt."

"That's true," said the old man. "But I can spare one for the Fr@aulein. Not to buy, of course; a gift." He stepped aside to let Marek see clearly. "If Herr Tarnowsky will pick one out."

Marek moved forward. For a full minute he stood in silence. His hand hovered over a dementedly woolly lamb ... rested momentarily above a blond snail with sky-blue eyes ... and then came down with assured finality.

"This one, please," he said, and Herr Fischer nodded, for even before he caught Ellen's intake of breath he had known that she would want the smallest, the most unassuming, yet somehow the brightest of all the little creatures on the tray.

"When are you going to eat it?"' teased Marek as they came out into the street.

"Eat it! Eat it!" said Ellen, outraged. "I'd rather die!"

Back in her room that evening she took her gift out of its fluted twist of paper and stood holding it in her hand. She had always loved ladybirds especially: the guardians of roses, heroes of children's ditties and songs. If one flew up from your hand you could have a wish.

It had been a happy day. When she first came to Hallendorf she had been sure that Marek would help her and she had been right. He had helped her most truly and she was proud to have him for a friend.

These warming and uplifting sentiments ceased abruptly two days later when he threw one of her children into the lake.

It began with Leon's gramophone. Along with the other expensive presents with which Leon was showered, he had a blue portable gramophone which had arrived by special carrier at the beginning of term. New records packed in corrugated cardboard were added by his doting mother almost weekly. Half of them arrived broken, but enough of them survived to turn Leon into something of a hazard as he played them over and over again and was moved on from the steps of the terrace, the common room and the bedroom he shared with Bruno and a French boy called Daniel.

During the week in which FitzAllan came to direct Abattoir Leon received another batch of records, among which was a group of songs by a composer of whom Ursula instantly disapproved because he was still alive.

"People who are alive can never write tunes," she said.

And it was true that the Songs for Summer were unusual and strange. If they depicted summer it was not the voluptuousness of droning bees and heavy scents, but rather the disembodied season of clarity and light. The tunes carried by the solo violin which rose above the orchestra, and the silvery soprano voice, seemed to Ellen to be "almost tunes"--they appeared, stole into her ear, and vanished before she could grasp them.

But after a few hearings, she began to follow the piece with interest and then slowly with a pleasure that was the greater for not having been instantaneous.

Leon, however, being Leon, could not leave well alone. He played the Songs for Summer inside the castle and outside it. He took his gramophone into the rowing boat, and he was winding up the gramophone yet again, sitting on the steps of the jetty, when Marek came past, carrying a hoe, and told him to stop.

Leon looked up, his thin face set in a look of obstinacy.

"I don't want to stop it. I like it. It's beautiful and the man who plays the violin obligato is fantastic. His name is Isaac

Meierwitz and--"'

Marek's hand came down and removed the needle.

In the ensuing silence, the boy got to his feet. "You can't do that. You can't be horrid to me, because I'm Jewish. You may not care what happens to the Jews but--"'

Watching Marek one would have seen only a slight tightening of the muscles round his mouth, but Janik and Stepan, the woodsmen whose job it had been to carry the infant Marek out into the fields until his devastating temper attacks had spent themselves, would have recognised the signs at once.

Then he put down his hoe, moved slowly forward and pitched Leon out into the lake.

Sophie and Ursula, running excitedly upstairs, brought the news to Ellen.

"It serves him right," said Ursula. "He was following Marek about again--and he was playing his beastly gramophone right by the jetty."

"But Marek waited to see if he came up again. He wouldn't have let him drown." Sophie was torn between pity for Leon and concern for her hero, Marek, who had certainly behaved oddly.

Leon himself, wrapped in a towel and shivering theatrically, now arrived escorted by Freya who had been closest to the scene of the accident.

"He's had a shock, of course, but I don't think any harm's been done." Her kind face was as puzzled and troubled as Sophie's. "I don't know why ..."

Ellen put her arms around Leon. "Go and run a hot bath, Sophie," she ordered. "And Ursula, go and ask Lieselotte to bring up a hot-water bottle."

"At least he didn't defenestrate me," said Leon as she stripped off his wet clothes. "That's what he usually does."

"What do you mean, Leon?"'

"Nothing." Still sniffing and gulping down tears, Leon turned his head away. "I don't mean anything."

When she had dried him and put on clean pyjamas she found Lieselotte by his bed, plumping up his pillows.

"Could you stay with him a minute, Lieselotte? I won't be long."

Ellen had no recollection of how she got to the door of Marek's room in the stable block. The rage she had suppressed while helping

Leon now consumed her utterly.

"How dare you!" she shouted, before she was even across the threshold. "How dare you use violence on any of my children?"'

Marek looked up briefly from the drawer he was emptying into a battered pigskin case, then resumed his packing.

"No child here gets physically assaulted. It is the law of the school and it is my law."

He took absolutely no notice. He had begun to take documents from a wooden chest-- among them sheaves of manuscript paper.

His indifference incensed her to fever point. "I have spent the whole term trying to calm Leon and now you have undone any good anyone might have done. If he gets pneumonia and dies--"'

"Unlikely," said Marek indifferently. "You must be completely mad! It's all very well for you to amuse yourself here pretending to wear spectacles you don't need and parting your hair in a way that anyone can see it doesn't go. But when it causes you to brutalise the children--"'

But she could not get him to react. She had the feeling that he was already somewhere where she and Hallendorf did not exist.

"I'm leaving," he said. "As you see." "Good!" Leon's pinched face, his running nose and shivering, scrawny limbs kept her anger at burning point. "You can't go too soon for any of us."

He did look at her then. For a moment she remembered what she had felt when she first saw him by the well: that she had been, for a moment, completely understood. This look was its opposite: she was obliterated; a nothing.

But her rage sustained her, and she turned and left him, slamming the door like a child.

When she got back she found Leon dozing, his colour restored. Lieselotte had remade his bed. Bending down to make sure he was tucked in properly, Ellen saw the corner of a white folder protruding from under the mattress and drew it out.

"I only borrowed it," muttered Leon.

"I was going to give it back."

"That's all right, Leon. Go to sleep." Examining what she held in her hand she found it was a concert programme--and pinned to it a number of sheets of paper covered in Kendrick's handwriting.

An hour later, Marek knocked at the door of Leon's room. The children and Ellen were in the dining room; the boy, as he'd expected, was alone.

"Now then, Leon," he said, sitting down on the bed beside him, "what exactly is it that you want?"'

The tears started to flow again then; the twitchy face screwed itself into a grimace. "I just want you to help me," he sobbed. "That's all I want. I want you to help."

"How?"'

"I don't know anything ... I can't work out the fingering of my Beethoven sonata and I don't know if the quartet I've written is any good. My parents want me to be a musician--my mother's desperate for it, and my sisters too. They help me and help me, but I want someone to tell me if I've got any talent."

"No one else can tell you that."

"But how does one know if it's worth going on? I don't know whether I have any true creativity or--"'

"Good God, Leon, why do you always turn back on yourself? If you feel the need to write music, or play it, then do so, but believe me your creativity is of no interest to anyone. Write something--then it's there. If it's what you wanted to write, if it exists, then leave it. If it doesn't, throw it away. Your beautiful state of mind is totally irrelevant."

"But you--"'

"What happened to me has nothing to do with it. As it happens I was not at all keen on my so-called creativity. I fought it hard and long because I saw that it would take me away from the place I wanted to spend my life in, and the work I thought I had been born to do. If I wrote music it was because I didn't know how to stop. But you--"'

"My mother loves music so much. And my sisters, and my father is a businessman but he'd have liked to be a pianist--he's very good. So I thought ... I wanted. It's not that they force me, but--"'

"Yes; I see." For the first time, Marek felt pity and affection for the boy. "Tell me, Leon, if I asked you what you wanted to do when you grow up, what would you say? Just answer quickly."

"Make films," said Leon in an instant.

Marek smiled. "That has the ring of truth." He sat in silence for a moment, then decided to give the boy what he had asked for--help. "I said no one can judge another person's vocation and I meant that, but ... I think that you are genuinely musical; you will make an excellent amateur--and remember please the meaning of the word. An amateur is a lover of music. You will be a fine facilitator, a person who can make music happen. It is because of people like you and your family that music is heard, that orchestras are formed, and paid for, and that's something to be proud of. But if you ask me whether you have the original spark, well then, I have to say I think probably not."

He watched the boy carefully and saw the screwed up look gradually vanish from his face. Then he leant back on the pillow and smiled--a slow smile of relief and happiness. Released from his burden, he looked like a child again, not a wizened old man.

"They'd believe me if you told them," said Leon. "I know you can't now but one day, if you go back."

Marek got up and went to the window. "Your romantic notions of me are mistaken. I am not at Heiligenstadt renouncing the world. Simply I need a few months in which I am not associated with my former life. But now you have--"'

"I wouldn't say anything. Not ever. I've known you since you came because my mother was in Berlin when you defenestrated that Nazi and it was in all the papers and I saw your picture. But I can keep a secret."

"If you cannot, the consequences would be very serious. I take it no one else knows?"'

Leon hung his head. "Ellen does. Now. Her fiancè sent her a programme of the concert where they played your songs. I sort of borrowed it and--"'

"Her fiancè?"' asked Marek, momentarily diverted.

"Well, she says she isn't going to marry him, but we think she will because he keeps on writing letters and she's sorry for him because he lives in a wet house and his mother delivered a camel on the way to church."

His house would not stay wet long if she married him, thought Marek, and saw Ellen with a red-and-white-checked tea towel on a ladder, carefully drying the chimneys.

"His name is Kendrick Frobisher," said Leon, "and he was at school with you."

"Really?"' The name meant nothing to Marek. He came back to the bed. "You have a close and loving family, Leon," he said. "Not many children are as fortunate. Trust them. Tell them the truth."

As he made his way to his room to pick up his case, a sudden image came to him of a small pale boy cowering beside a radiator. A much bullied boy always trying to hide in a corner with a book. Yes, he was almost sure that was Frobisher.

Well, that was ridiculous; there was no possible way that Ellen could be going to marry him?

Or was there? Could he turn out to be another creature that needed to be fed--not with breadcrumbs or kitchen scraps this time, but with her pity and her love? In which case she was going to be most seriously unhappy.