A Song for Summer (21 page)

He'd made no headway either in getting them

to apply for emigration visas.

"You must see the way it's going," he'd said. "Please."

And he had repeated what he had told them already: that it was a Czech voice, issuing from a thug in a Nazi uniform, that had boasted of Isaac's murder.

"You go ahead," Milenka had said. "Knowing you're safe is the only thing that matters. If you go, and prepare the way for us, we'll follow."

He knew that she lied. His father would not leave, and while he stayed she would be with him. They were strung together on one bow, these two unlikely people; their lives together made the melody that was Pettelsdorf.

For Steiner the week of pain and grief for Isaac had been shot through with a strange joy.

He'd been thirty years old when he first saw Milenka at a poetry reading in Berlin. She was nineteen, a bird-thin girl whose soul one could enter without subterfuge, for she hid nothing. He fell terribly in love ...

and lost her to someone who should have been utterly unsuitable and turned out to be her other half--this man who shot too many animals and read too few books.

Since then he had seen her in Berlin or Prague, had taken her to concerts; laboriously, grindingly, turning love to friendship --but he had never dared to come to her home. Now, nearing the end of his life, he was enormously thankful that his image of her was complete. That he had seen her at her desk, pushing aside the cat that sat on her papers ... assuring herself that the goose they were to have for supper was not a goose she knew personally, but came from a neighbouring farm ... That he had stood beside her in the moonlit garden listening to the orioles and heard her read once more, the poem he had heard first in her deep, slightly husky voice:

"Not vanished, but transfigured are the things that were,

To come again by, Oh, what bliss attended ..."

Steiner played no games with himself. He did not pretend that Marek was the son they might have had; there was far too much of the Freiherr von Altenburg in the boy. But when Marek had come to him to ask for his van, and Steiner realised he could

share his adventure and his danger, he had been rewarded beyond his wildest dreams.

"We need some petrol," said Marek now. "And I'd like to check the oil."

"There's a garage about ten kilometres away; on the other side of the village."

Marek nodded and drove on.

The rain had stopped but the children in the bus had fallen silent. Sabine, her curls matted with sweat, was sitting beside Ellen; she had been sick three times and did not seem to be finished yet.

There was another hour at least to their destination. Sophie too felt sick. It was partly the motion of the bus, but mostly apprehension. Everything had gone wrong with this trip. If FitzAllan had been taking them Sophie wouldn't have minded what they were going to do so much, but it was Ellen. She'd had to step in at the last minute when FitzAllan developed a migraine, and the idea of getting Ellen into trouble was unbearable.

"I wish we hadn't come," she said to Leon. "I wish we could tell her and turn back."

"Well we can't," said Leon. "We promised Flix we'd help."

But Flix didn't look very good either. She too had had to stop once to be sick and Frank, whom she'd enlisted because he was supposed to be tough and fearless, was fidgeting and scowling, and now, in a throwback to his earlier schooling, he put up his hand and told Ellen that he needed to be excused.

Ellen nodded and asked Herr Tauber to stop at the next convenient place, but Frank's phraseology only confirmed her in the feeling that something strange was going on. Frank did not ask to be excused; he expressed the need to perform his bodily functions with Rabelaisian vigour. As she wiped Sabine's face with a damp flannel she looked down the bus, wondering what was wrong. Too many of the children had felt unwell. She'd been with them when they went by bus to the circus in Klagenfurt, and only Sabine and one other child had been sick.

Frank passed her and she saw that beneath his usual sullen expression there was something else; a kind of fear. He was sitting next to Flix and that was unexpected too; Flix usually had little use for him.

"There's no need for us to go on with this

expedition," she said, standing up to survey the children. "Absolutely no need. We can go back without the slightest difficulty."

For a moment the faces turned to her looked hopeful. Sophie half rose in her seat and was pulled down by Leon. Then Flix, still pale and puffy-eyed, said, "No. We want to go on. We have to."

Frank returned, they set off again. The road was steep now; they had left the lakes behind.

"I've got a headache," said Janey miserably, laying her head against the window.

Ellen, comforting her, could have said the same. She also blamed herself very much for not having aborted this expedition from the start.

"It's a perfectly ridiculous idea," she'd said to Bennet, when he told her of FitzAllan's determination to show the children a proper slaughterhouse. "A man who eats nothing but nut cutlets wanting to expose them to all that."

Bennet agreed. "I told him in any case that hiring a bus would be far too expensive."

But here he had been undermined by Herr Tauber, who was married to Lieselotte's aunt and had come to work in the grounds after Marek left. The beneficial mafia operated by Lieselotte's relatives was growing, and Herr Tauber now offered his bus for the price of the petrol only, if it would help the school.

Even so, the headmaster would not have given his consent, but to his amazement a number of the children-- apparently led by the tender-hearted Flix--came to him and said they wanted to go.

"It would help us in understanding our parts in the play," they said, echoing what had seemed to be FitzAllan's idiocy.

So it was agreed and then of course just before they were due to go, FitzAllan succumbed to a frightful migraine--or so he said.

Ellen had not intended to pull FitzAllan's irons out of the fire for him but for some reason the children had been very disappointed at the idea of cancelling the trip--and the truth was that she herself felt guilty about her reluctance to visit the Carinthian Municipal Abattoir. She was after all not a vegetarian--quite the contrary: her Boeuf en Daube had won first prize at the Lucy

Hatton School of Household Management--yet she had never seen how the wretched beasts she cooked so readily were dispatched.

So she had agreed to go and now was bitterly regretting it.

They had passed Klagenfurt and the sanatorium where chomsky still lay surrounded by devoted relatives. The last time Ellen had visited him they were debating whether to take Laszlo off to a spa to recuperate and had asked her if she would like to accompany him on the journey as his nurse.

If only she could trust Isaac to be sensible. She had left him with Lieselotte, determined to venture into Kartoffelpuffer, but he had begun to give up hope of Marek and was talking about getting away on his own.

Sophie, sitting in the row in front, turned around.

"Have you got a sick bag, Ellen?"' she asked, and Ellen handed her the last one in her basket.

What was the matter with everyone?

As so often with Sophie, she was trying to reconcile her warring sides. In England she read school-girl stories in which sneaking and telling tales was the worst thing that could be done, but in Vienna with her father, it was breaking the law that was unforgivable. What if they caused Ellen to be put in prison? They didn't put children in prison but they put them in awful places-- borstal and worse. Should she tell Ellen what was hidden in Flix's basket beneath the picnic food and her rolled up raincoat, or in Frank's? All of them had pliers and wire cutters but Flix and Frank had great files, and a handsaw.

Flix had planned it all. She was going to release the Judas sheep and shoo it away into the forest. "Then the other sheep will follow," she'd said, "and while the men are chasing them the rest of you can free the animals in the trucks and in the pens."

Sophie had wanted to help--one simply had to after FitzAllan had explained about the way the steers were stunned and had their throats cut while their hearts were still beating because that way the blood drained away better, as though animals were a kind of sewage. But she couldn't help wondering if it was going to be as simple as that: the stampeding beasts, the furious men, the blood ... Oh God, what shall I do? thought Sophie, and was angry with Ursula who had said from the start that it was silly and wouldn't work. She'd come along, but she wouldn't help in any way and she seemed to be the only person who wasn't feeling ill.

Another child put up his hand.

"Herr Tauber, I think we'd better have a break," said Ellen. "Do you know a suitable place to stop?"'

He nodded. "There's a garage at the bottom of the hill with a place to park. They have a fruit stall and toilets."

"Then we'll pull in there if you'll be so kind."

They drove into the forecourt.

"You can all get out and stretch your legs," said Ellen. "But five minutes only--we have to get on. Anyone who wants to go to the toilets--"'

But the children, for once, were not heeding her. Leon had given a shout and tumbled down the steps, Sophie followed and then all of them were rushing headlong towards the petrol pump in the far corner where a tall man was standing talking to the attendant.

Marek was not pleased to see them come. He had finished with the school, and the events of last week had shown him how important it was that he involved no one in his concerns. But as more and more children ran towards him, he found himself smiling at their affection and enthusiasm.

"Where are you off to?"' he asked, and they told him, excitedly, confusedly. Something fell from Frank's pocket and the boy picked it up quickly but not before Marek had seen what it was.

"Ellen's taking us," said Sophie, and the worried look returned to her face. "It was meant to be FitzAllan but now it's her."

Marek looked across at the bus and saw Ellen standing on the steps. He had forgotten the way her hair fell asymetrically, more of it to the left side of her face. Remembering how she had yelled at him the last time he saw her, he waited--but she came down and walked towards him and said, "Could I speak to you alone? Just for a moment?"'

"Of course."

He shooed away the children and together they walked to where they could not be overheard.

Then: "I have him," she said very quietly. "I have your friend."

Marek gave a half shake of the head. Her words made no sense to him.

"I have Meierwitz," she repeated.

"He's with me, working in the kitchen." But the transition was too sudden. He had left Isaac in his mind, shot down in the forest; he could not believe her.

"I left him with Lieselotte. She's teaching him to make Kartoffelpuffer."

The Kartoffelpuffer achieved what her assurance had been unable to do--no one invented that unnecessary way of dealing with potatoes--and now at last Marek heard her words and believed her, and understood that the impossible had happened and his friend was safe.

"Oh Ellen," he said.

Then he took a step towards her and, uncaring of the watching children, took her in his arms.

FitzAllan lay back on the pillows and covered his forehead with a languid hand. He had drawn the curtains, but enough light came through to hurt his eyes whenever he opened them. The purple zigzag stage of his migraine had passed but his head ached unbearably and he felt sick.

It was the strain, of course: the strain of pitting his will against the staff and children who balked him at every turn as he tried to put into practice his ideas. Strain always brought on one of his attacks, and Tamara's tantrum when he had felt compelled to shorten her ballet once again had made him worse.

But at least he had prevailed in the matter of the slaughterhouse visit. Bennet had opposed him--

everyone had opposed him, but he had won. Even now the children were being shown around the Carinthian Municipal Abattoir and perhaps that would get them to give some decent performances.

The castle was wonderfully quiet. They wouldn't be back till the evening and if he could get some sleep now he might be fit for work again tomorrow. He drifted off in a day dream of acclaim in which theatre producers congratulated him on what he had achieved with inferior material, and offered him work in Paris, London and New

York. "The risks you took were entirely justified," they said.

He was woken by a door slamming; the sound of excitable voices. The corridors had filled once more with children. It must be the ones who had not gone on the trip--the bus couldn't possibly have returned yet. But he thought he heard Frank shouting, and then Bruno ... and both of them had signed on to go.

Flinching as he turned on the bedside light, FitzAllan looked at his watch. Half past five. They must have run round the slaughterhouse in record time. There was a brief knock at the door, and Ellen entered.

Even in his feeble condition, FitzAllan noticed that she looked cheerful. She looked, in point of fact, radiant, and the director, who did not like her, felt unaccountably nervous.

"I've brought you a present!" she announced. "Shut your eyes and put out your hand."

"I can hardly bear not to shut them," said FitzAllan in a failing voice. But he put out his hand and felt a small, softish object placed in his palm.

"What is it?"'

"It's a boa constrictor," said Ellen tenderly.

In spite of himself he gave a scream and dropped it, and Ellen reproachfully put it back in his fingers. "I'll open the curtains so you can see it properly. It's made of marzipan."

"No!"

"Well, I'll describe it to you. I don't know if it's authentic--I think Herr Fischer hasn't seen a real one, but it's better than authentic. It's curled round on itself and has green zigzags and yellow diamonds and you can see its split tongue as clear as anything. All of us bought marzipan animals in Klagenfurt from Herr Fischer's shop. Marek gave every single child some money to do it and it's really interesting what they chose. Sophie has a crocodile and Leon chose a snail--not at all what I'd have expected, and--"'