A Song for Summer (29 page)

"Of course I shouldn't have hoped," he said wretchedly. "If it had been Roland or William, but--"'

"No, Kendrick, no!" said Ellen--and made a last effort before this horrendous evening could end in solitude and her bed. "It's not that at all. You sound much nicer than your brothers-- you're the nicest possible person but--"' and then with an impulse to comfort which was stronger than discretion and her inmost desire for privacy, she said: "It's just that ... I'm in love with someone else. He's not in love with me; he doesn't care about me at all but I can't help--"' And found to her horror that she had burst into tears.

But her chivalry achieved its aim. That Ellen was wretched made Kendrick's own misery bearable. Since his dreadful childhood, Kendrick had known that the world was a dark and threatening place; sadness was a country in which he felt entirely at home. That Ellen, so beautiful, so desirable, should also be unhappily in love was a profound consolation. To be allowed to put his arms round her in brotherly love, to let her cry on his shoulder, eased his own distress immeasurably. He murmured condolences, he promised always to be her friend, and of course to be there if ever she should change her mind. He even managed to make a kind of joke, for he had remembered now what the Viennese called the statue they were standing under: the Pestseule. "It's a monument to the Great Plague--about a hundred thousand people died in it, pretty horribly," he said, "so perhaps I didn't choose too well!"--and was rewarded by Ellen's smile, and her arm in his as they walked back to the hotel.

Marek was extraordinarily tired. The Feuerbach crisis had meant a day of incessant rehearsals and then four hours on the rostrum for the opera. Nothing had seemed quite real to him since the curtain went down, and now he realised how foolish he had been. It had seemed polite to escort Brigitta to her apartment, and now here it all was: the double doors open to reveal the ridiculous Swan Bed, the plumped up cushions, the clinging smell of her

scent. Brigitta had disappeared and reappeared in a cream lace peignoir, and was trying to snuggle up to him on the sofa.

He moved away.

"Brigitta, that's over, you know it is. I came to help with the opera. We're colleagues, that's all."

She lifted her face to his. The periwinkle-blue eyes filled with tears. "Darling, how can you say that?

When you know I love you."

"But I don't love you, Brigitta." God, how hard it was to say that to a woman. He pushed a hand through his hair, angry that she had put him in this position. "I respect you enormously as a musician; you gave a marvellous performance tonight, but our affair is over. I'm going to America and you have Stallenbach."

"Oh him!" She edged closer. The peignoir was wide open now; clearly he was supposed to be dazzled by her breasts, her stomach --and indeed if quantity were all this would have been no problem.

"Don't you remember, my darling, how marvellous it was?"'

Marek sighed. It had been good at times, but even then it was that she had always stood for something.

It was Mozart's lovelorn Countess or Violetta--doomed and dying with perfect breath control--that he had felt he was holding in his arms.

She had begun to cry now, but carefully, for she still wore make-up. "It's because I'm getting old. It's because I'm nearly forty."

She was forty-three and she was using blackmail. She was still playing the role she had played in the opera. "You're like Octavian," she stormed. "The first young thing you see and you're away."

"No, Brigitta, it isn't that; you're still a very beautiful woman."

It wasn't because she was young that he had wanted Ellen.

Brigitta was crying in earnest now. "I worked so hard for you. And now because my youth has gone ..."

She had worked hard. She had been as obedient as a child, this bullying, autocratic woman.

"Come, Brigitta; you'll be stopping all the clocks next."

She had played that scene superbly; the scene where the Marschallin describes the "unrelenting flow of time" and how sometimes she gets up in the night and stops the clocks in the palace. He could hear their soft chiming, evoked by the harps and the celeste, and her voice soaring above them. Did he have the right to deride her fear of ageing even if she was using it to get her way?

Never sleep with anyone out of pity. The maxim was engraved on his heart, as on the heart of everyone who wished to take and receive pleasure in the act of love.

"I'm leaving, Brigitta. I'm going to America, you know that."

"Then stay with me just one more time. Stay with me because of what we made tonight."

"All right, Brigitta. I'll stay for that."

At three a.m. he woke in the opulent bed, hot and oppressed, and sat up suddenly.

"What's the matter?"' she asked sleepily.

He turned a blank face to her. "What?"'

"You said something. Did you have a nightmare?"' He pushed the hair out of his eyes, longing to leap out of bed, to go and walk and walk, away from this stifling place.

"What did I say?"'

"You said "I've forgotten the wheel!"" He stared at her, suddenly wide awake. "Did I say that? That's right.

It's true."

As the train slowed down at Hallendorf station, Ellen saw that the platform was full of children. They were piled on to the benches, draped round the wrought-iron pillars with their hanging baskets of geraniums or just hopping excitedly up and down. Sophie was there, of course, and Leon and Ursula ... Janey and Flix and Bruno too, but also Frank, swishing a stick through the air, and a handful of village children.

She had expected to have the journey across the lake still to gather herself together, but when they surged towards her she was unexpectedly pleased to be among them again.

"We got permission to come and meet you,"

shouted Leon.

"There's been a disaster," said Sophie. "No, it isn't a disaster," contradicted Ursula.

"Yes it is. It is for Bennet. It's awful for him when he's written to all the Toscanini Aunts. And it's a disgrace for the school." Flix's lovely face was creased with concern.

Ellen put down her suitcase. "Could you please tell me what's happened?"'

"It's Abattoir!" Sophie had come very close, trying to convey the bad news in a suitably serious voice, but overjoyed to see Ellen again. "It's finished. Kaput. We're not doing it!"

"What? But what about FitzAllan?"' "Some men came." To Ellen's surprise, Frank came and picked up her suitcase.

"They were solicitors. Lawyers anyway," said Janey.

All the children were talking at once, clustered round Ellen. Even the village children, though everyone was speaking English, seemed to be involved in breaking the extraordinary news.

"And they said they represented ... they worked for Bertolt Brecht and he'd never given permission for the play to be done at all!"

"They were absolutely furious. They told Bennet he was breaking the law of copyright and if one single scene was acted they'd sue him!"

"So Margaret got furious. She said it wasn't Bennet, it was FitzAllan who said he'd got permission, and they all trooped off to the theatre--"'

"We were just rehearsing the bit where all the workers go on strike and start to die in the snow," said Flix,

"and they marched up to the front--the men in the dark suits--and said: "Stop this at once!""

"They were as red as Turkey cocks. Absolutely gobbling. And Bennet said: "I assure you that Mr FitzAllan has permission from Bertolt Brecht to perform this play; you will hear it from him." He was very dignified," said Sophie.

"And then everyone looked at FitzAllan and he just turned a sort of yellow and started stammering and saying there must have been a misunderstanding."

"But there wasn't!" Leon's thin face was contorted with contempt. "He'd made the whole thing up! He'd never been near Brecht, he just thought he could get away with it. The men went away threatening all sorts of things ... libel actions and stuff like that. And the next morning Lieselotte put out his horrible nut cutlet and he never came down for breakfast!"

"He did a bunk in the night!"

"So now we haven't got anything to show the parents, not a thing," said Leon. "It's the first time the school hasn't had a proper play for the end of term, and with the music being hopeless too ..."

Ellen, walking with the excited, hopping children towards the landing stage, was as indignant as they were. So much work wasted, so much money too ... the masks for the animals over which Rollo had laboured, often far into the night ... Jean-Pierre's military searchlights ... yards and yards of muslin ... And poor Chomsky, felled by the three-tiered structure, all to no purpose.

In the staffroom that evening she heard the details. "One of the parents was at a party in Zurich and boasted about the coup the school had pulled off," said Freya, "and someone who knew Brecht was there."

"But why?"' Ellen couldn't understand it. "Why should he go to such lengths to cheat? It's only a school play."

Jean-Pierre put down his newspaper. "Not so "only" perhaps--after all, some of the parents here are very distinguished: Frank's father, and Bruno's ... the parents of the little Sabine who own half of Locarno Chemicals. And the director of the Festspielhaus in Bonn had promised to come: he's almost a Toscanini's Uncle, one could say. If FitzAllan had pulled it off it could have been quite a coup for him."

"Do you suppose everything else was a lie too?"' asked Ellen. "I mean that he worked with Meyerhold and Stanislavsky?"'

"Probably." David Langley, who had wasted weeks of good summer weather, which could have been spent collecting frit fly, being a bloated stockyard owner or a carcass, was especially bitter. "Still, he wasn't so stupid; he got paid in advance."

Like the children, the staff were particularly upset for

Bennet, who blamed himself for being taken in and made it clear that the whole responsibility for the disaster was his and his alone.

"But that is not so," said Hermine. "If I had not permitted the Professor to overcome me in Hinterbruhl I could have produced a play as in the years before. It was to save me work that this Schweinkopf was engaged."

"What about Tamara? How has she taken it?"' asked Ellen.

Glances were exchanged, heads shaken. "Badly, as you can imagine. Very badly," said David. "I think she thought he fancied her. She's been storming about like a tragedy queen ever since he went."

But it was worse than that. Going down after she had put her children to bed to comfort Margaret, Ellen found the secretary standing at the open window of her office. She looked weary and wretched, but when Ellen came she managed to smile, for she had no secrets from her.

"Listen!" she said.

Ellen went to stand beside her. From the floor above, faint but unmistakable, came the sound of the Polovtsian Dances played on Tamara's gramophone.

"As though he hasn't enough to put up with," said Margaret bitterly. "The stockbrokers have written again; there's real doubt about whether we can go on even for another term--and he's so tired."

Ellen put her arm round the secretary's shoulders. "You love him, don't you?"' she said quietly. "I mean, really?"'

Margaret shrugged. "Yes, I think it probably is ... really." She shook her head. "Never mind; I'll get over it.

And you? Did you have a nice time in Vienna?"'

"Not very," said Ellen.

And then, because they were both Englishwomen and their hearts were somewhat broken, they turned back into the room and put on the kettle and made themselves a cup of tea.

The newspapers from Vienna arrived the following day. All of them carried the story of the gala and Marek's heroic rescue, and though the pictures of him which they had been able to get hold of were years out of date, there was no mistaking him. Both the Tageblatt and the Neue Zeitung concentrated on the musical aspects of the performance, but Wiener Leben carried the full gossip of Altenburg's relationship with Seefeld as well as a picture of the composer embracing the diva under the benevolent eyes of Richard Strauss.

"And yet one is not absolutely surprised," said Hermine as these revelations were discussed in the staffroom. "That he was someone one always felt ..."

"And from the way he ran from Tamara's balalaika one should have guessed that he was a musician,"

said Jean-Pierre.

"Did you hear anything about this in Vienna?"' they asked Ellen, and she shook her head. She could not bear to speak about the opera.

The children, like the staff, reacted with mixed feelings to the news. That it was an eminent composer who had healed their tortoise and hoed their garden paths was as exciting as anything in a film--but that he was going to America with Brigitta Seefeld, as the papers unequivocally stated, was sad. During her short tour of the school, the diva had not endeared herself to those whose path she had crossed.

Bennet, in order to allay speculation, made a short announcement in Assembly in which he said that Marek had wanted to spend some time incognito in order to rest and refresh himself, and implied that he had been gestating a composition of some importance in his room above the stables. If this contented most people, it did nothing to soothe Tamara's rage. That she had let an eminent musician slip through her fingers was almost more than she could bear.

"He could have created a ballet on me," she said peevishly. "I would not have prevented him. He is an idiot to have missed such a chance."

It was the only child who was not surprised by the news who was the most affected.

Looking for Leon at bed time, Ellen found him standing forlornly in Marek's old room. A spider had made a web across the window; Lieselotte had put some early windfalls to ripen on the sill and the tangy, wholesome smell seemed strangely to conjure up Marek in his blue work shirt.

"I keep thinking of what he wrote here, maybe," said Leon. "I looked in the chest to see if there were any fragments but there aren't."

Ellen was silent, coming to stand beside him. She remembered Marek packing up his papers the day she had shouted at him for throwing Leon into the lake.