A Song for Summer Read online

  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 Alpenglühen 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 Kohlröserl – 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, Kohlröserl,’ 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 Kohlröserl, 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 s
pring. 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.

  An otter? An inland seal?

  The head rose, emerged and turned out to be attached to the somewhat undernourished body of a small and naked man.

  It was too late to look away. Ellen stared and found unexpected feelings rise in her breast. She could feed him up, whoever he was; help him, perhaps to cut his hair – but nothing now could be done about the manic zigzag which ran like disordered lightning across his lower abdomen.

  ‘Chomsky,’ said the dripping figure suddenly. ‘Laszlo Chomsky. Metalwork,’ – and with extreme formality, he clicked his heels together and bowed.

  Which at least explained what had happened. A Hungarian, born perhaps in the wildness of the puszta; a place abundantly supplied with horses, geese and windmills, but lacking entirely the skilled doctors who could deal competently with an inflamed appendix.

  Moving up the shallow stone steps which lifted themselves in tiers between the terraces towards the house, she saw a girl of about twelve come running down towards her.

  ‘I’m late,’ said the child anxiously. ‘We forgot the steamer’s on the summer schedule now. I’m supposed to be meeting the new matron but she hasn’t come.’

  Ellen smiled at the first of the ‘wild’ children to come her way. She had long dark hair worn in pigtails which were coming unfurled, and a sensitive, narrow face with big grey eyes. Her white ankle socks were not a pair and she looked tired.

  Ellen put out her hand. ‘Yes she has; I’m her,’ she said. ‘I’m Ellen Carr.’

  The wild child shook it. ‘I’m Sophie,’ she said, and put one foot behind the other and bobbed a curtsy. The next minute she blushed a fiery red. ‘Oh I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that.’

  ‘Done what?’

  ‘Curtsied. No one does it here like they don’t go to bed much and they don’t wear white socks, but I haven’t been here very long and in Vienna in my convent it was all different.’

  ‘I liked it,’ said Ellen, ‘but I won’t give you away. However I have to tell you that now I’m here people will go to bed and if they want to wear white socks they will wear them and they’ll match and be clean.’

  The child turned to her, transfigured. ‘Will you do that? Can you really?’ Then her face fell; the look of anxiety returned. For Ellen Carr had shoulder-length tumbled hair and gentle eyes; she wore a green jacket the colour of moss and a skirt that made you want to touch it, it looked so soft. And that meant lovers – lots of lovers – as it had meant with Sophie’s mother, who was beautiful too and had left Vienna for Paris and Paris for London because of lovers and was now in Ireland making a film and did not write. ‘No,’ she said. ‘You’ll fall in love and go away.’

  ‘No I won’t,’ said Ellen.

  She put her arm round Sophie’s shoulders but their progress towards the house was slow. A pink camellia detained Ellen and a white snail, fragile as a snowflake, swaying on a blade of grass.

  Then suddenly she stopped. ‘Sophie, what on earth is that?’

  They had reached the first of the level terraces. Coming across a patch of grass towards them at an amazing speed was a tortoise. It looked much as tortoises do, its neck extended, its demeanour purposeful – but fastened to its back end was a small platform with two wheels on which it scooted as if on roller skates.

  ‘It’s Achilles,’ said Sophie. ‘His back legs were paralysed and he was dragging himself along. We thought we’d have to have him destroyed and then Marek came and made him those wheels.’

  Ellen bent down to the tortoise and picked him up. Retreating only briefly into his shell, Achilles submitted to being turned upside down. The contraption supporting his withered legs was unbelievably ingenious: a little trolley screwed to his shell and supporting two highly oiled metal wheels.

  She put him down again and the tortoise scooted away over the grass like greased lightning.

  ‘It took Marek hours to do. He shut himself up in the workshop and wouldn’t let anyone come near.’

  ‘Who’s Marek?’ Ellen asked – but before Sophie could answer, a stentorian and guttural voice somewhere to their right cried: ‘No, no, no! You are not being rigid, you are not being steel. You are not being pronged. You must feel it in your spine, the metal, or you cannot become a fork!’

  Deeply curious, Ellen crossed the terrace. A second, smaller set of steps led down on to an old bowling green surrounded by a yew hedge. On it stood a large woman with cropped hair wearing a hessian tabard and a pair of men’s flannel trousers, shouting instructions to a dozen or so children lying on their backs on the lawn.

  ‘Now open the fingers . . . open them but not with softness. With these fingers you will spear . . . you will jab . . . you will pierce into the meat.’

  ‘That’s Hermine. Dr Ritter,’ whispered Sophie. ‘She’s terribly clever – she’s got a PhD in Dramatic Movement from Berlin University. She makes us be bunches of keys and forks and sometimes we have to give birth to ourselves.’

  But before the children could exhibit proper fork-dom there was a fierce, mewing cry from what seemed to be a kind of herring box under the yew hedge and Dr Ritter strode over to it, extracted a small pink baby, and inserted it under her tabard.

  ‘That’s her Natural Daughter. She’s called Andromeda. Hermine got her at a conference but no one knows who the father is.’

  �
��Perhaps we should show her how to make an opening down the front of her smock,’ said Ellen, for the baby had vanished without trace into the hessian folds. ‘And I didn’t see any nappies?’

  ‘She doesn’t wear any,’ Sophie explained. ‘She’s a self-regulating baby.’

  ‘What a good thing I like to be busy,’ said Ellen, ‘for I can see that there’s going to be a lot to do.’

  She followed Sophie into the castle. The rooms, with their high ceilings, gilded cornices and white tiled stoves, were as beautiful and neglected as the grounds. But when she reached the top floor and Sophie said: ‘This is your room,’ Ellen could only draw in her breath and say: ‘Oh Sophie, how absolutely wonderful!’

  The child looked round, her brow furrowed. The room contained a broken spinning wheel, a rolled up scroll painting of the Buddha (partly eaten by mice) and a pile of mouldering Left Book Club paperbacks – all left behind by various housemothers who had not felt equal to the job.

  But Ellen had gone straight to the window.

  She was part of the sky, inhabiting it. One could ride these not very serious clouds, touch angels or birds, meet witches. White ones, of course, with functional broomsticks, who felt as she did about the world.

  Lost in the light, the infinity of space that would be hers each day, she lowered her eyes only gradually to the famous view: the serrated snow peaks on the other shore, the climbing fir trees above the village, the blue oblong of water, with its solitary island, across which the steamer was chugging, returning to its base.

  Sophie waited. Her own view was the same – the room she shared with two other girls was only just down the corridor – but when she looked out of the window something always got in the way: images of her warring parents, the terror of abandonment, the letters that did not come. Now for a moment she saw what Ellen saw.

  When Ellen spoke again it was to ask a question. ‘Are there storks here, Sophie? Do you have them at Hallendorf?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’