A Song for Summer (2 page)

Afterwards Henny always remembered the child's first words. She did not say "I want to help," or "Can I help?"' She said: "I have to help."

So it began. In Henny's kitchen with its scrubbed table and red and white checked curtains, its potted geranium and cuckoo clock, she spent the hours of her greatest happiness. Together she and Henny tended the little garden with its rockery of alpine flowers; they baked Krapfen and Buchteln and embroidered cross-stitch borders on the towels. Ellen learnt to hang up muslin to make Topfen and that cucumber salad could have a smell--and she learnt that it was all right to be pretty. Being pretty had worried her because she had noticed that when visitors came and praised her silky curls or big brown eyes, her mother and her aunts had not been pleased. But Henny laughed and said being pretty came from God and gave people pleasure and it meant one had to brush one's hair and buff one's nails just as one had to scour out the saucepans to keep them shining.

Henny held coloured stuffs against her face and said, look how it brings out the gold of your eyes, and without her saying a word about love, Ellen knew that Henny loved her, and loved the selfish old professor with his Greek fishes, and learnt that this much discussed emotion could be about doing and serving and not about what one said.

One day they were making Apfel Strudel.

The white cloth was spread on the table and they were lifting the paper-thin dough from below ... lifting it with spread fingers so slowly, so gently, making it thin and ever thinner without once letting it go into holes, and Henny stopped for a moment and said more seriously than she usually spoke: "You have a real talent, Hascherl. A proper one."

Even so, when the time came to choose her career, Ellen didn't have the heart to rebel; she took her Higher Certificate and went to Cambridge to read Modern Languages because she spoke German already and was extremely fond of chatting. As it happened, not much chatting went on during her tutorials and her supervisor found the Austrian dialect in which she recited Schiller's poetry singular in the extreme. But she liked Cambridge well enough--the river and the Backs, and the friendly young men who paid her compliments and took her punting and asked her to dances. She learnt to deflect their proposals of marriage and made good friends among her fellow students, the shopkeepers, and the ducks.

With Kendrick Frobisher she was less adroit. He was a blond, serious, painfully thin young man of twenty-eight with pale blue eyes, and belonged to her life in London where he assiduously attended the meetings at Gowan Terrace, addressed envelopes, and showed a proper concern for the Higher Education of Women.

Kendrick was the youngest son of a domineering mother who lived in Cumberland and had, when she was a young woman, personally delivered a camel on the way to church. This had happened in India where she grew up, the daughter of an army colonel stationed in Poona. The camel was pregnant and in difficulties and though she was only nineteen years old, Kendrick's mother had unhesitatingly plunged an arm into its interior and done what was necessary before passing on, indifferent to her blood-stained dress and ruined parasol, to worship God.

Returning to Britain to marry a landowner, this redoubtable woman had produced two sons, young men who hunted, shot, fished and would presently marry. Then came Kendrick who was a disappointment from the start--an unsporting, pale, nervous boy who was bullied at school and read books.

In the London Library, researching the minor metaphysical poets on whom he was planning a monograph, or at the many lectures, art exhibitions and concerts he attended, Kendrick was happy enough, but real people terrified him. It was causes that he espoused, and what more worthy cause than the education of women and the emancipation from slavery of the female sex?

So he started to attend the meetings in Gowan

Terrace and there found Ellen handing round sandwiches.

"The egg and cress ones are nice," she said--and that was that.

Because he was so obviously a person that one did not marry, Ellen was not careful as she was with the young men who kissed her in punts. It seemed to her sad to have a mother who had delivered a camel on the way to church, and Kendrick had other problems.

"What is your house like?"' she asked him once, for he lived in a small bachelor flat in Pimlico and seldom went home.

"Wet," he had answered sadly.

"Wetter than other houses?"' she wanted to know.

Kendrick said yes. His home was in the Lake District, in Borrowdale, which had the highest rainfall in England. He went on to explain that as well as being wet it was red, being built of a particular kind of sandstone which became crimsoned in the rain.

Realising that it could not be easy to live in a wet red house with two successful older brothers and a mother who had delivered a camel on the way to church, Ellen was kind to him. She accompanied him to concerts and to art galleries and to plays without scenery, and smiled at him, her mind on other things, when he paid her compliments.

These were not the ordinary kind: they involved Kendrick in hours of pleasurable research in libraries and museums. Ellen's hair had darkened to an unsensational light brown and she had, to her great relief, largely outgrown her dimples, but in finding painters and poets who had caught the way her curls fell across her brow, or the curve of her generous mouth, he was on fertile ground.

"Look, Ellen," he would say, "here's a portrait of Sophronia Ebenezer by Raphael. Or it may only be by the School of Raphael," he would add conscientiously. "The attribution isn't certain. But she's tilting her head just like you tilt yours when you listen."

In the delectable Nell Gwyn Kendrick discerned the curve of Ellen's throat and her bestowing glance, and Wordsworth's lines: "She was a phantom of delight" might have been penned with her in mind. Even music yielded its images: the Scherzo of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony

seemed to him to mirror precisely her effervescent capacity for joy.

Aware that he was enjoying himself, Ellen was caught quite unawares when he followed her into the kitchen one day as she was making coffee and forgetting Sophronia Ebenezer and Nell Gwyn and even Beethoven, seized one of her hands and said in a voice choked with emotion: "Oh Ellen, I love you so much. Won't you please, please marry me?"'

Too late did Ellen reproach herself and assure him that she did not love him, could not marry him, did not intend to marry anyone for a very long time. It would have been as well to try to deprive Sir Perceval of his quest for the Grail as persuade Kendrick that all was lost. He would wait, if need be for years, he would not trouble her, all he asked was to serve her family, address even more envelopes, attend even more meetings--and be allowed to glimpse her as she went about her work.

Ellen could hardly forbid him her mother's house; there was nothing to do except hope that he would grow out of so one-sided a passion. And during her last year at university something happened which put the erudite young man entirely out of her mind.

Henny fell ill. She had terminal cancer and Professor Carr, whom she had served with her life, proposed to send her to the geriatric ward of the local hospital to die.

Like many peasants, Henny was terrified of hospitals. Ellen now stopped trying to please her relatives.

She left college three months before her finals and told her grandfather that Henny would die in her own bed and she would nurse her.

She had help, of course, excellent local nurses who came by day, but most of the time they spent together, she and Henny, and they made their own world. Herr Hitler was eliminated, as was Mussolini, strutting and braying in Rome. Even the clamour of King George's Silver Jubilee scarcely reached them.

During this time which, strangely, was not unhappy, Henny went back to her own childhood in the lovely Austrian countryside in which she had grown up. She spoke of the wind in the pine trees, the cows with their great bells, about her brothers and sisters, and the Alpengl@uhen when in the hour of sunset the high peaks turned

to flame.

And again and again she spoke about the flowers. She spoke about the gentians and the edelweiss and the tiny saxifrages clinging to the rocks, but there was one flower she spoke of in a special voice. She called it a Kohlr@oserl--a little coal rose--but it was not a rose. It was a small black orchid with a tightly furled head.

"It didn't look much, but oh Ellie, the scent! You could smell it long before you found the flowers. In the books they tell you it smells like vanilla, but if so, it's like vanilla must smell in heaven. You must go, Liebling. You must go and put your face to them."

"I will, Henny. I'll bring back a root and--"'

But she didn't finish and Henny patted her hand and smiled, for they both knew that she was not a person who wanted things dug up and planted on her grave.

"Just find them and tell them ... thank you," said Henny.

A few days later she spoke of them again: "Ah yes, Kohlr@oserl," she said--and soon afterwards she died.

Ellen didn't go back to finish her degree. She enrolled at the Lucy Hatton School of Cookery and Household Management and Henny was right, she did have talent. She graduated summa cum laude and her mother and her aunts and Kendrick Frobisher watched her receive her diploma. As she came off the platform with her prizes, grace touched Dr Charlotte Carr, who was a good woman, and she threw her arms round her daughter and said: "We're all so proud of you, my darling. Really so very proud."

And three months later, in the spring of 1937, answering an advertisement in the Lady, Ellen set off for Austria to take up a domestic post in a school run by an Englishman and specialising in Music, Drama and the Dance.

It was listed in the guide books as an important castle and definitely worth a detour, but Schloss Hallendorf had nothing to do with drawbridges or slits for boiling oil.

Built by a Habsburg count for his mistress, its towers housed bedrooms and boudoirs, not emplacements for guns; pale blue shutters lay folded against pink walls, roses climbed towards the first-floor windows.

Carinthia is Austria's most southern province; anything and everything grows there. In the count's pleasure gardens, morning glory wreathed itself round oleander bushes, jasmine tumbled from pillars, stone urns frothed with geraniums and heliotrope. Behind the house, peaches and apricots ripened in the orchards and the rich flower-studded meadows sloped gently upwards towards forests of larch and pine.

And to the front, where stone steps descended to the water and black swans came to be fed, was a view which no one who saw it ever forgot: over the lake to the village and up ... up ... to the snowy zigzag of the high peaks.

But the Habsburg counts fell on hard times. The castle stood empty, housed wounded soldiers in the Great War ... fell empty again. Then in the year 1928, an Englishman named Lucas Bennet took over the lease and started his school.

Ellen stood by the rails of the little steamer and looked back at the village with its wooden houses, the inn with its terrace and chestnut trees, the church on a small promontory.

It was a serious church; not onion domed but with a tall, straight spire.

In the fields above the village she could see piebald cows as distinct as wooden toys. were they feasting on Henny's Kohlr@oserl, those fortunate Austrian cows?

There was still snow on the summits, but down on the lake the breeze was warm. It had been a moment of sheer magic, coming through the Mallnitz tunnel and finding herself suddenly in the south. She had left London in fog and drizzle; here it was spring. The hanging baskets in the stations were filled with hyacinths and narcissi, candles unfurled on the chestnut trees; she had seen lemon trees and mimosa.

The steamer which rounded the lake three times a day was steeped in self-importance. The maximum amount of bustle accompanied the loading and unloading of passengers, of crates, of chickens in hampers--and the captain was magnificently covered in gold braid.

They stopped at a convent where two nuns came out with wheelbarrows to fetch their provisions, passed a small wooded island and stopped again by a group of holiday houses.

"That's where Professor Steiner lives," said an old peasant woman in a black kerchief, pointing to a small house with green shutters standing alone by the water's edge. "He didn't get on with the Nazis so he lives here now." The boat drew away again and she moved closer to Ellen. "You're bound for the school then?"' she asked.

Ellen turned and smiled. "Yes." "Visiting someone?"'

"No. I'm going to work there."

A rustle of consternation spread from the old woman to her neighbours. They drew closer.

"You don't want to go there. It's a bad place. It's evil. Godless."

"Devilish," agreed another crone. "It's the devil that rules there."

Ellen did not answer. They had rounded the point and suddenly Schloss Hallendorf lay before her, its windows bathed in afternoon light, and it seemed to her that she had never seen a place so beautiful. The sun caressed the rose walls, the faded shutters ... greening willows trailed their tendrils at the water's edge; a magnificent cypress sheltered the lower terrace.

But oh so neglected, so shabby! A tangle of creepers seemed to be all that held up the boathouse; a shutter flapped on its hinges on an upstairs window; the yew hedges were fuzzy and overgrown. And this of course only made it lovelier, for who could help thinking of the Sleeping Beauty and a castle in a fairy tale? Except that, as they came in to land, Ellen saw the words EURYTHMICS IS CRAP painted on the walls of a small Greek temple by the water's edge.

"The children are wild," hissed the old woman into her ear. "They're like wild animals."

The steamer gave an imperious hoot. A boy came forward with a rope.

"You can always come back," called a youth in lederhosen. "They'll find room for you at the inn."

Ellen made her way down the gangway, left her suitcase and walked slowly along the wooden jetty.

There was a scent of

heliotrope. Two house martins darted in and out of the broken roof of the boathouse with its tangle of clematis and ivy--and in the water beside it she saw, among the bulrushes, a round black head.