A Song for Summer (8 page)

But when Leon gave an assembly, Ellen found herself homesick for the boring, familiar routine of hymn singing and gabbled prayers she had known in England, for there was something disquieting about his performance.

She had come in at the last minute and stood at the back. The hall was full and silent, but Leon, seated at the piano, did not begin.

He was looking anxiously in Ellen's direction--not at her but at the door. Then it opened and a man entered quietly and stood beside Ellen. She had not met him yet but there could be no doubt about who he was--indeed it was strange how correctly she had imagined him: the size, the strength, the relaxed way he leant against the wall with folded arms. The warm greenish blue eyes fitted too, as did the thick light hair falling over his forehead. Only the large horn-rim spectacles covering part of his face surprised her. She had expected him to be keen-sighted, a forester out of a fable, and thought how absurd she had been.

As though Marek's entrance was a signal, Leon began to play. He played a movement from a Beethoven sonata and he played it well. Both staff and children were silent, for if Leon was difficult to like, his talent was undoubted.

When he finished, he rose and went to the front of the platform, commanding the hall as all these stage-trained children had learnt to do. He was very pale and surprisingly nervous for such an extroverted and bumptious boy.

"That was Beethoven's Opus 26--the one with the funeral march--and it's Beethoven I'm going to talk about. Only not all of his life--the part of it that happened in Heiligenstadt when he was thirty years old."

He cleared his throat, and once again he looked at the back of the hall, his gaze, which had something frantic about it, fixed on the man who stood unmoving beside Ellen.

"Heiligenstadt is a village outside Vienna. It's pretty with linden trees and brooks and all that, but that wasn't why Beethoven went there. He went because he didn't want to be

seen; he wanted to hide. He was terrified and wretched and trying to escape from the world. He was going deaf, you see, and it was there that he finally gave up hope that the doctors would be able to cure him.

"It's awful to read about the things he did to try and heal himself," Leon went on. "He poured yellow goo into his ears, he syringed them, he swallowed every kind of patent medicine, he stuck in hearing aids like torture instruments, but nothing made any difference. So he decided to die."

Leon paused and rubbed his nose with the back of his hand. No handkerchief, thought Ellen, blaming herself, and her heart smote her at the emotion generated by this unprepossessing boy.

"But he didn't," said Leon. "He didn't kill himself," and he threw that too intense, slightly hysterical look towards the place where Marek stood. "He wrote a thing called The Heiligenstadt Testament, which is famous. He started by telling people to be good and love one another and all that, but the part that matters is what he wrote about art. He said if you have a talent you had to use it to go further in to life and not escape from it. I'll read that bit to you."

He took a book from the top of the piano and first in English, then in German, read the words with which the unhappy composer had reconsecrated himself to music and to life.

"So you see," said Leon fiercely. "You see ..." and Ellen saw Bennet turn his head, frowning, to follow Leon's gaze as it travelled yet again to Marek, still standing with folded arms beside the door. "You have to go on. Beethoven went back to Vienna and he wrote another seven symphonies and the violin concerto and Fidelio. He wrote dozens more string quartets and the Missa Solemnis and the Hammerklavier

... All right he was grumpy and bad-tempered, he hammered pianos to death and the people who came to see him fell over his unemptied chamber pots, but he never gave up. And when he died, all the schools in Vienna were closed. Every single school was closed so that the children could go to the funeral. Our school would have been closed," said Leon, as if that clinched the matter.

He had finished his speech. Sniffing once more, pushing back his hair, he walked over to the radiogram.

"I'm going to play a bit of the

Ninth Symphony to end up with. At least

I am if the blasted gramophone works," he said, descending from the heights.

But as the triumphant strains of The Ode to Joy rang out across the hall, Ellen felt a momentary draught beside her.

The man at whom this strange assembly had been directed, was gone.

It was Ellen's habit to get up early and make her way round the grounds before anyone else was up. The lake was at its loveliest then; the mist rising from the water; the birds beginning to stir.

But as she wandered, she garnered. Into a trug she kept for the purpose, she put the yo-yos she found tangled in fuchsia bushes, the roller skates left dangerously on the steps, the dew-sodden exercise books and half-knitted khaki balaclavas which (had they ever been finished) would have much reduced the chances of the International Brigade in their fight against Franco.

On the morning after Leon's disquieting assembly, having collected a broken kite, a pair of braces and a damaged banana, she made her way towards the well in the cobbled courtyard behind the castle, to dredge up a gym shoe which she had noticed the night before.

But there was someone else who valued the peace of the early morning. Marek did not sleep in the castle itself. He had a room in the stable block reached by an outside staircase. It was furnished as simply as a monk's cell--a bed, a table, a chair--and visitors were not encouraged.

Now he made his way down the steps, carefully locking the door behind him, and strode off across the cobbled courtyard on his way to the shed where the tools were kept.

The girl bent over the well did not at first see him, and he would have gone past, but at that moment she lifted her head and smiled and said "Hello".

"Not a frog, I hope?"' he asked, fishing his spectacles out of his pocket and going across to her, for her sleeve was wet and a small tuft of moss had caught in her hair.

She shook her head. "No. And if it was I wouldn't kiss it, I promise you. I might kiss a prince if I could be sure he'd turn into a frog but not the other way round. What it is

is a gym shoe, but I can't get at it.

It's stuck on a ledge."

"Let me have a look."

She had the idea that if it was necessary he would have torn up the iron grille screwed into the ground, so marked was the impression he gave of power and strength. But he merely rolled up his shirt sleeve and presently he fished out the shoe which he laid on the rim beside her.

"I spend so much time picking gym shoes out of wells and yo-yos out of trees and sodden towels from the grass," she said when she had thanked him. "I wanted to teach them to be tidy by showing, but there's so many of them and there's only one of me. I suppose some of them will never see."

"But some will."

He had sat down on the stone rim beside her and as she looked up at him, grateful for his encouragement, he found it necessary to correct the impression he had formed of her. As she swam out with her brood, she had seemed strong-willed and purposeful. Since then, Chomsky's besotted ravings, Bennet's praise and the legend of the icon corner had led him to expect a kind of St Joan wielding a bucket and mop. But she looked gentle and funny ... and perhaps vulnerable with that wide mouth, those thoughtful eyes.

Ellen too found herself surprised. If Marek's broad forehead and shaggy hair, his sojourn in the stable block, accorded well enough with the image of a solitary woodsman, his voice did not. He had spoken in English, in deference to the custom of the school, and his voice, nuanced and light, was that of a man very much at home in the world.

"There was something I wanted to ask you," she said. "Bennet said you'd help me. I want us to have storks at Hallendorf. I want to know how to make them come."

His face had changed; he was silent, withdrawn.

"Perhaps it's silly," she went on, "but I think the children here need storks."

The silence continued. Then: "With storks it isn't necessarily a question of needing them. It's a question of deserving them."

But she would not be snubbed.

"Sophie deserves them. And others too. Storks mate for life."

"It's too late this year, you know that." "Yes. But there's next year."

"Ah, next year." She had not deceived herself; somehow she had made him angry. "Of course. W hat a little islander you are, with your English Channel which makes everyone so seasick and you so safe. You think we shall still be here next year? You think the world will stay still for you?"'

"No," she said, putting up her chin. "I don't think that as a matter of fact. I came here because I wanted to find Kohlr@oserl and thought maybe I didn't have very long, but it doesn't matter; the storks would still--"'

"Kohlr@oserl? Those small black orchids?"'

"Yes, my grandmother spoke of them before she died, but never mind about that. I want storks because--

"' and she repeated the words she had spoken to Sophie, "because they bless a house."

He had withdrawn again but she no longer felt his anger. "What exactly do you intend for this place?"' he said presently.

It was her turn now to fall silent. She had tucked her feet under her skirt, still perched on the rim of the well.

"I can't put it into words ... not properly. It's to do with those paintings of places where the lion lies down with the lamb ... you know, those primitive painters who see things very simply: birds of Paradise and great leaves and everything blending with everything else. Or the Forest of Fontainebleau--I've never been there, but I saw a picture once where the stags had crucifixes between their antlers and even the animals who are probably going to be shot look happy. When I saw the castle from the lake that first time, I imagined it all. The rooms clean and clear and smelling of beeswax and flowers, and the roses still free and tangly but not choked ... a sort of secret husbandry that made them flourish. I thought there might be hammocks under the trees where the children could lie and I imagined them running out when it rained so as to turn their faces to the sky--but not before they'd shut the windows so that the shutters wouldn't bang.

I thought there could be a place where everything was received with ... hospitality: the lessons and the ideas ... and the food that comes up from the kitchens. Of course the food wouldn't be like it is now," she said, smiling up at him. "There'd be the smell of fresh rolls in the morning and pats of yellow butter ... and somewhere in the theatre which the count must

have built with so much affection for his mistress, there'd be a marvellous play full of magic and laughter and great words to which people would come from everywhere ... Even the villagers would come, setting sail for the castle in their boats--even the man who found Chomsky in his fishing nets would come." She looked up, flushing. "I know there can't be such a place, but--"'

"Yes, there can," he said abruptly. "I could take you to a place that ... feels like that. If times were different I would do so."

"And it has storks?"'

"Yes, it has storks."

He rose, dropped the gym shoe into her trug. Then he stood looking down at her--not smiling ...

considering ... and she caught her breath, for she felt that she had been, in that moment, completely understood.

"I'll look for a wheel," he said--and walked away across the courtyard to begin his work.

But later, tending to the bonfire of lopped branches and hedge clippings, Marek wondered what had made him liken his home to this mad place. Pettelsdorf owed its existence--its wealth--to the forest which surrounded it, and those who are custodians of trees lead a life of rigorous discipline. To his father, and his father's father before him, the two thousand hectares of his domain were wholly known. An architect coming to bespeak oak planks for the belfry of a church was led to one tree and one tree only in the seemingly limitless woods. There were trees of course which were sacrosanct: a five-hundred-year-old lime, with its squirrel nests and secret hollows, which Marek as a boy had claimed as his own, would never be cut, nor the elm by the house beneath which he'd lain on summer nights watching the stars tossed back and forth between branches. But in general there was no room for sentiment at Pettelsdorf; a forest of sweet chestnuts and pine, of walnut and alder and birch, is not something that looks after itself.

Only a meticulous daily husbandry ensures the balance between new growth and ancient hallowed trees, between sun-filled clearings and dense plantations.

But Ellen had used the same word: husbandry. She saw the children (he had realised this at once) as his father, and he himself, had learnt to see their trees: those that needed pruning, those that grew aslant, those that required only light and air.

She was like those girls one sees in genre paintings: girls labelled Lacemaker or Water Carrier or Seamstress. Quiet girls to whom the artists had not bothered to give names, for it was clear that without them the essentials of life would cease.

Oh damn, he thought, having promised storks, having opened the door to a place he had never meant to leave and that was lost to him until his wearisome task was done. For it was strange how easily, had things been different, he could have taken her to Pettelsdorf. She would precede him up the verandah steps; the wolfhound would nuzzle her skirt; his mother would give the little nod she gave when she found the right word for one of her translations and his father would put down the gun he was cleaning and take out the 1904 Imperial Tokay he kept for special guests. While in the brook behind the house, the storks she craved would solemnly perambulate, searching for frogs ...

Which was nonsense, of course, for the work he had to do must involve no one, and even if he did what he set out to do he would still not be free, for incredible as it seemed, it looked as though there was going to be another war.

It was not till the beginning of her second week that Ellen was able to devote herself to the kitchen and its staff.