A Song for Summer (7 page)

"Yes," said Ellen. "I see."

"For God's sake don't tell him I told you. Don't tell anyone. I only found out because I'm in the business.

Bennet knows, but no one else. He's run away from three schools because the kids found out and teased him."

"I promise I won't. Thanks,

Rollo." At the door she turned. "You know, I sort of pledged myself when I came here to love the children-

-all of them, however awful they seemed--and I think I might manage it. But to love the parents ... that's going to be the problem." She gave a shake of the head and was gone.

If no one had spoken of Tamara before her return, both children and staff spoke frequently and willingly of Marek Tarnowsky.

"He's got this amazing trick," said Frank. "If you blindfold him--really properly with layers and layers of stuff--and make him sit with his back to you and then you get a lot of twigs and swish them through the air he can tell you what they are."

"It's true," agreed Janey.

"He'll just say "oak" or "ash" or "birch" --he doesn't make a mistake once. He says they just sound different."

"And he dredged up the duck punt--it was a

complete wreck--and sawed some new planks and caulked it--"'

"He didn't do it by himself," one of the other boys put in. "We helped him."

"Yes, but he really knew what to do and it's afloat now and it's much the best boat."

Sophie said that Marek was a person who found things.

"What sort of things?"' asked Ellen. "Oh ... mouse's nests and fireflies ... and stars with their proper names. And when he shows you it's like getting a present."

A shy French boy, who spoke little English, said Marek had made him understand what fencing was about. "It is not ... that one only tries to hit others. It is a system of the body."

Ellen herself had seen Marek's spoor everywhere. In the prop he had made for the aged catalpa tree in the courtyard, in the rim of the fountain he had repaired, in the newly built frames in the kitchen garden.

So she was surprised that one child seemed to hate him. Leon did not only criticise Marek; he spoke of him with an anger which startled Ellen and alarmed her.

"He's not honest. He's a liar and a cheat."

"What on earth do you mean?"'

"He just is," said Leon. He had come from the practice rooms where she had heard him wrestling with a Beethoven sonata. "He absolutely hates music--he rushes away when the recorder group plays or they're rehearsing the choir. So what is he doing driving about the country collecting folk songs; just tell me that?"'

"He's only acting as Professor Steiner's chauffeur." And as Leon continued to glare and mutter: "No one could be a liar and do what he did for Achilles," said Ellen, for whom the tortoise had become a kind of talisman. "You'd have to practically become a tortoise to do that."

"Well, that's lying, isn't it? Pretending to be a tortoise," said Leon, and stalked off, swinging the monogrammed leather music case which he had not yet managed to reduce to the wrecked state he regarded as suitable for the proletariat.

By the end of Ellen's second week the weather became properly warm and not only Chomsky but others began to take to the lake. Ellen thus found herself acquainted not only with the Hungarian's appendix scar but with the thin white legs of the Biology teacher, David Langley, whose pursuit of the Carinthian frit fly did not seem to have affected his musculature, and the brilliantly orange curls covering both Rollo's chest and his stomach.

Beyond reflecting on the sad difference between the Naked and the Nude, Ellen was untroubled, confining herself to seeing that the children brought in their towels and did not drip water on to the freshly polished corridors.

Others were not so insouciant. Sophie said she couldn't swim because she had a mole on her shoulder, and Ursula said she wouldn't because swimming was silly. An Indian girl called Nandi also retired indoors, though what was supposed to be wrong with her perfect body was hard to imagine.

Ellen listened to these dissidents without comment. Then on a particularly fine afternoon she invited the girls to come to her room to admire her bathing costume. "It's nice, isn't it? It was terribly expensive."

"It's lovely," said Sophie. "But are you going to wear it?"'

"Yes, I am. It was a present from my mother."

"But is it all right? I mean, could one wear a bathing costume? Wouldn't people mind?"'

"Now Sophie, don't be absurd. What could freedom and self-expression possibly mean except that you can wear something to swim in or not exactly as you please? I'm going to try it out tomorrow afternoon."

Marek sat on the wooden seat in front of Professor Steiner's little house drinking a glass of beer. His face was relaxed; the eyes quiet. Above the reeds on the edge of the lake, the swallows skimmed and swooped; the afternoon sun held the warmth of summer, not the uncertain promise of spring. Soon now he must row himself back to the castle; he had been away longer than he intended, but he was in no hurry to return to Hallendorf's fishbone risotto, the racket of the children and Tamara's embarrassing advances.

The journey had gone well. They had reached the border without mishap and found the man they had come for. A year in a concentration camp had not broken Heller. Beneath the emaciated body, the spirit of the debonair Reichstag delegate with his eyeglass and his bons mots was undimmed.

"It won't go on," he'd said, as they drove east through the Bohemian forest. "The rest of the world will wake up to what is going on. God forbid that I should hope for a war, but what else is there to hope for?"'

But he was angry with Marek, whom he had recognised at once, having known him in Berlin. "You shouldn't be doing this; you've other things to do. I was at--"'

Marek hushed him. He didn't want to hear what he heard continually from Steiner. Ten miles from the Polish border they left Steiner with the van and prepared for the last part of the journey on foot. As they crouched in the undergrowth waiting for the darkest part of the night, Marek asked if he had heard anything about Meierwitz.

"He's still alive," Heller had said.

"At least he was a month ago. A woman on a farm was hiding him. He's got guts, that little chap. He could have got out in '34, only--"'

"Don't," said Marek. "It's because of me that he stayed."

"Now that is nonsense," said Heller.

"I heard all about that and it was his choice to remain behind. He wanted the glory of--"'

The barking of a distant dog put an end to all further speech, even in the lowest of whispers. At three a.m. the moon went in and they took off their clothes and waded across the river, and a man rose silently from a field of rye and beckoned them to follow. Heller would be all right, thought Marek now. He had a forged residential permit allowing him to stay in Poland; his sister had married a Pole and would give him shelter. He had been a flyer in the war and intended to offer himself as an instructor in the Polish Air Force. They would take him; he had the Iron Cross.

From Steiner's living room came the cracked voice of the old crone he had found in the hamlet in which he had waited for Marek to return. He had led her into the van with the highest hopes: she was poor and toothless, her brown face seamed with dirt. If there was anyone who should have been a repository of ancient music it was Olga

Czernova, from whose black clothes there had come the smell of decay and leaf mould as if she had been dug up from the forest floor.

But the tune which now drifted out towards Marek was not a work song from a bygone age, not a funeral dirge. It was "Take a Pair of Sparkling Eyes" from The Pirates of Penzance and it was followed by "Lippen Schweigen" from The Merry Widow. For in the bosom of this old witch there dwelt a girl who had been to the city, escorted by a young man who swore he would marry her. The city was not Prague or Vienna, though Olga knew of them both: it was Olomouc, where once a Hapsburg emperor had been crowned.

And in Olomouc there had been music! And what music! Not the boring dirges she had been brought up with, but lovely, lifting tunes played by the town band and sung in the operettas by hussars in silver and blue, and gypsies in layers and layers of twirling skirts ... And in the cafes too there had been music!

The young man had left her--he was a wastrel --but the tunes of that magical time had stayed with her always. To the increasingly desperate Steiner she had sung the Champagne Aria from Fledermaus, Offenbach's Can Can and a duet--taking both parts--from a musical comedy called Prater Spring.

"Put it in," she kept saying, while Steiner begged uselessly for the old songs she had learnt in the forest.

"Go on. This is the part where he finds out she's really a princess."

And Steiner had done so, meaning to erase the disc later, for it was hardly suitable for despatch to Bartok's Ethnographical

Music Collection in Budapest. But now he decided to leave it, for he too had been young and sat in cafès, and Olga's final screechings reminded him of the moment when he had seen Marek return from the phalanx of trees and knew that he was safe. It got worse and worse, the waiting for the boy.

Marek, sitting sleepily in the sunshine, heard Steiner moving about in his kitchen, preparing the evening meal. He made no attempt to help him: Steiner's kitchen, like his house, was tiny--it was this which had made Marek refuse the Professor's offer of hospitality and go to work in the school. Then he heard himself called.

"Marek, come here a minute!"

Steiner's only luxury in his exile was a large and very powerful telescope through which he watched the stars. But not only the stars ... He was the least voyeuristic of men but it amused him to watch the people on the steamer, the animals wandering on the high pastures, the holiday-makers picnicking on the island.

Now though the telescope was trained on the castle and as Marek put his eye to it he could see, as if to touch it, the grass at the foot of the steps, the punt drawn up beside the boathouse ... and the wooden jelly along which there walked, with a purposeful grace, a young woman whose shoulders were draped in a snowy towel.

And behind her, in single file like a brood of intent ducklings, came four ... no ... five little girls. They too moved with a look of purpose, they too were draped in snowy towels. Marek could make out Sophie with her long plaits and the bad-tempered English girl with a passion for Red Indians.

But it was the woman who led them who held his gaze. Ellen now had dropped her towel, and brought one arm up to gather in the masses of her light brown hair and skewer it on to her head--and what Steiner had suspected was correct. She wore a blue one-piece bathing costume which entirely covered all those places that such a garment is structured to conceal.

As if on a string, the little girls dropped their towels also and copied her movements, trying to scoop up and tether their hair as best they could-- and, yes, they too were wearing bathing suits.

"I've never seen that before," said Steiner. "Nor I," said Marek, thinking of the hollows and sinews of Tamara's body as she lay splayed across his path, the white limbs of the Biology teacher and Chomsky's notorious appendix scar.

Still watching the young woman, he saw her nod to the little girls, and then she dived neatly into the lake and one by one the children followed her: some jumping in, some diving, and the cross English girl going down the wooden steps.

In the water she turned to see that all of them were safe and then she struck out into the lake, swimming strongly, but several times looking back to see that all was well--and behind her came her brood, fanned out in a V exactly like the ducklings that nested in the reeds.

He stood aside to let Steiner have another look.

"How seemly," said the old man, and

Marek nodded.

It was the right word for the behaviour of this concerned and purposeful young woman. For a moment Marek let his mind dwell on Nausicaa, the golden girl at the heart of the Odyssey, who had left her maidens to bring help and succour to the weary Ulysses as he came from the sea. But the high-minded analogy was replaced by a different thought: that it was a little bizarre that the first person he had come across in that strange place whom he would have enjoyed seeing naked, was so resolutely clothed.

Ellen had not expected that there would be Morning Assemblies at Hallendorf, but there were. Three times a week the whole school met in the Great Hall which ran along most of the first floor of the castle.

Instead of pictures of school governors, the Royal Family and shields embossed with the names of prize winners, the hall was decorated with posters bearing rallying slogans and a frieze painted by Rollo's art class showing workers getting in the harvest, for the proletariat, of whom most of the children at Hallendorf knew remarkably little, were very dear to their hearts.

On the platform at the far end of the hall was a piano and a large radiogram attached to an amplification system which had been about to be renewed when yet another letter came from Bennet's stockbroker.

There was also a screen and a magic lantern.

In the absence of prayers and hymns--and indeed of God--the assemblies, taken by members of staff in rotation and by any children who volunteered, were hard work, but Ellen found them genuinely moving, for in their own way they concerned themselves with the struggles of transcendence, uplift, and the soul.

There was one in which Bennet read from The Freeman's

Worship by Bertrand Russell, a philosopher whose unsavoury private life did not prevent him from penning some discerning thoughts about the human condition. Rollo gave one about Goya, who had emerged from illness and despair to become one of the most compassionate painters of human suffering the world had ever known. Jean-Pierre, abandoning his cynicism, told them what the early manifestos of the French Revolution had meant to the huddled poor of

Paris--and an American boy projected slides of Thoreau's Walden, that unassuming segment of Massachusetts which for so many became a touchstone for what is good and gentle on this earth.