A Song for Summer Page 4

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Ellen innocently. ‘That’s what comes of being new. Hurry along then.’

  Ten minutes later the west wing was bathed in silence and Ellen could go to her room. It was almost empty of furniture now; she would pull the bed under the window so that she could see the stars.

  ‘You were right, Henny,’ she said, leaning out to listen to the slow slurp of the water against the shore. ‘This is a lovely land.’

  Images crowded in on her. The first sight of Sophie running down the steps towards her; Bennet’s hand cupping the head of his beloved Shakespeare . . . the house martins skimming in and out of the boathouse roof. But the image that stayed with her longest was that of the tortoise, rollerskating with abandonment across the grass.

  There was so much to do here – so terrifyingly much – but she knew that Marek, when he came, would help her. Which made Bennet’s words when she had asked him who Marek was seem all the stranger.

  ‘That’s a good question, Ellen,’ the headmaster had said. ‘You could say that he works here as a groundsman, and that would be true. Or that he teaches fencing to the older boys, and that would be true also, and that at the moment he is acting as chauffeur to Professor Steiner across the lake. But when you have said that, I don’t know that you have said very much. I think,’ and he had turned to her with his friendly smile, ‘you will have to find out for yourself – and when you do I would be very interested to hear what you discover.’

  They had driven for the best part of the day, leaving Hallendorf by the road over the pass and turning north east along the river. The mountains became foothills with vineyards clinging to their slopes; the well-kept fields and quiet villages were tended by people who asked only to be left alone.

  Now the forest began. In an hour they would be at the border.

  The forest suited Marek; he settled into it as into a familiar overcoat – a large man, broad-shouldered with thick, straight hair, blunt, irregular features and reflective eyes. The road was straight here, a woodcutters’ road; his hands lay on the wheel almost without movement. The scents he had grown up with – resin, sawdust, leaf mould – came in through the open windows of the van.

  ‘The wind’s from the south,’ he said.

  He’d always known where the wind came from: in Vienna, in Berlin, in New York in the narrow tunnels between the skyscrapers. Women had teased him about it, thought of it as a parlour trick.

  ‘Are you missing the beautiful Tamara?’ asked the man sitting beside him.

  The uncharacteristic banter came with an effort from Professor Steiner. He was twice Marek’s age: a scholarly man with a face from a Dürer etching – the full grey beard, the wise, short-sighted blue eyes, the features worn by time and, in recent years, by grievous sorrow.

  Marek smiled. The relief of being away from the crazy school in which he had taken refuge made him feel almost light-hearted yet no emotion could be less appropriate. He had allowed an old man of delicate health and considerable eminence to accompany him on an adventure which was more than likely to end in disaster. What they faced was not the danger risked by those who pit themselves against mountains or the sea. There was no evil on the rock face or in a tempest, but the force within the men they were confronting in the hell that Nazi Germany had become was something other.

  ‘Could I once again ask you to wait for me this side of the checkpoint?’ Marek began. ‘I promise you –’

  ‘No.’

  The old man spoke quietly and with total authority. If anyone knew the risks they were taking it was this high-born Prussian whose family had been at the heart of German affairs for generations. Steiner had spent most of his life in Weimar, a town which seemed to stand for all that was finest in the country’s history. Schiller had lived there, and Goethe – the squares and statues resounded with the names of the great. The shopkeepers could set their clocks by Professor Steiner’s progress each day, his walking stick aloft behind his back, as he made his way to the university. Steiner’s work on the folk music of Eastern Europe was renowned; scholars and disciples came from all over the world to learn from him; his lectures were packed.

  In 1929 he had moved to Berlin as Head of the Institute of Musical Studies and continued to live the life of every decent German academic: lectures, concerts, music-making in his home and the constant care and support of his students.

  So why was it that when Hitler came to power it was he and not any of his colleagues – left-wingers and political activists – who had refused to dismiss his Jewish students? Why was it he and not Heinz Kestler, who had addressed so many meetings of the Left, who stood up for the social democrats on his staff? Why was it impossible to silence this elderly man who fell silent so easily during the interminable meetings of his faculty?

  The Nazis had not wanted to dismiss Professor Steiner. His family was eminent; he was exactly the kind of German, Aryan to his fingertips, they needed to endorse their cause. They gave him chance after chance, cautioned him, arrested him, let him go.

  In the end they lost patience. He was stripped of his post and his medals and told to leave the country. Others in his position went to France or America or Britain. Steiner only went over the border to Austria, still independent and free. His family had long owned a small wooden summer house on the Hallendorfer See. He had lived there for the past three years with his books and his manuscripts, needing almost nothing, looking with gentle irony across the lake at the antics of the strange school which now occupied the castle.

  Then, two months earlier, Marek had suddenly appeared. He had known Marek’s parents, but it was not the family connection which years ago had drawn Steiner to the boy. Even before Marek’s special gifts had become apparent there was something about him: a wholeness, a strength allied with gentleness which is sometimes found in those who as children have been given much.

  ‘I only want to borrow the van, Professor,’ Marek had said. ‘And the equipment. There’s no question of involving you. If I’m known to be one of your students and authorised to carry on your work, that’s quite enough.’

  ‘You can have the van, but I shall come too. I have to say you don’t look like the popular image of a folksong collector. You will do better as my driver and assistant.’

  They had argued and in the end Marek had agreed. It had cost him dear, allowing this frail and saintly man to risk his life, but he knew why Steiner had refused the posts he had been offered abroad and was still in Austria. He too had hostages to fortune in what had been his native land.

  They drew to a halt in a clearing. Marek got out and opened the door of the van. It was painted black with the letters INTERNATIONAL ETHNOLOGICAL FOLK SONG PROJECT written on it in white paint. Inside were the microphones, the turntables and wax discs, the piles of manuscript paper which they needed to record the ancient music of the countryside. And other things – food and blankets, because folk-song collectors frequently have to venture far off the beaten track, and a loaded rifle, for these woods were part of the great primeval forest which stretched across Eastern Europe as far as Poland and Russia. Bears had been seen here not long ago, and wolves; guns were a necessity, as were spades and sacking for getting the van out of a rut, and a torch . . .

  ‘We’d better find something nice for Anton,’ said Marek. It was not the first time they had crossed the border and the guards were becoming interested in their work.

  He put a needle on the turntable and an eerie, querulous wail broke the stillness.

  ‘Why are the wedding songs always so sad?’ asked Marek, remembering the tears streaming down the face of the old man, almost insensible on slivovitz, who had sung to them in a smoke-filled Ruthenian hut.

  ‘I don’t know why, but they always are. On the other hand, the funeral songs are always jolly – and the curses too.’

  ‘Well, one can understand that,’ said Marek. ‘We’d better get on then.’

  He shoved a driver’s cap on to his head and the van moved forward in the gathering dusk. />
  Both men were silent as they drove towards the place where the map makers, confused by the rise and fall of empires, had allowed the boundaries of Austria, Germany and the Czech Republic to converge. A hundred miles to the east was Marek’s home. The men would be coming in from the forest now and from the farm, unhitching the great horses from the wagons, and the westering sun would turn the long windows of the ochre house to gold. The storks on Pettovice’s roofs fell silent at this time, weary of their domestic clatter, and the snub-nosed little maid would be lighting the candles in the drawing room.

  But it was best not to think of Pettovice, which had once been Pettelsdorf. Marek’s home was out of bounds. Czechoslovakia was free still but there was dissent there too, Nazi sympathisers stirring up trouble, and he would not risk harm to those he loved.

  Professor Steiner too was thinking of the past: of his formidable grandfather, the Prussian Freiherr in his doeskin breeches and lynx cape, who had turned Jewish pedlars from the gates of his home with a string of curses. That they had plucked von Einigen and his friends from their guards and led them to safety might have amused him: highborn hotheads who had tried to blow up Hitler might have been to his taste. Even the man they were hoping to meet today might have passed muster; a former Reichstag councillor, impeccably Aryan, who had spoken out against the Nazis. But what would the old bigot have thought if he’d known that his grandson was plunging into a Bohemian forest on account of a small man with sideburns named Meierwitz? It was Marek’s determination to rescue his friend that had made them throw in their lot with the partisans who helped to lead victims of the Nazis across the border. There had been no news yet of Isaac Meierwitz, who had escaped from a camp and was in hiding, but till he was out of Germany there would be no safety for Marek, and no rest.

  The old often welcome adventure, having little to lose. But Marek, thought the Professor, had everything to lose. He took the greatest risk, leading the fugitives east along the hidden pilgrim routes he had known since childhood while Steiner waited with the van. And it was wrong. The world needed what Marek had to offer; needed it desperately.

  Yet how could I have stopped him? thought Steiner – and he remembered what Marek’s mother had told him once as they walked back from a concert.

  ‘When Marek was three years old I took him to the sea,’ she’d said. ‘He’d never been out of the forest before but friends lent us a villa near Trieste. He just stood there looking at all that water and then he said: “Mama, is that the sea?” And when I said yes he turned to me very seriously and he said: “Mama, I’m going to drink it all up. I’m going to drink up every single drop!”’

  Well, he had not done badly in his twenty-nine years, thought Steiner, looking at Marek’s face, set and absorbed now that they were coming close to their destination. He had drunk his fill – but what he was doing now was madness. This man more than any he had known had no right to throw away his life.

  Perhaps I’m wrong, thought Steiner. Perhaps he is not what I think he is.

  But he knew he was not wrong.

  By the end of the first week, Ellen had settled into her work. She had begun with her own room, for she wanted the children to feel that they could come to her whenever they wanted, and this had involved her in some creative ‘borrowing’, for by the time she had disposed of the archaeological remains of previous housemothers she was left with bare boards and a bed.

  In refurnishing the room, she called on the help of Margaret Sinclair, the school secretary, to whom she had taken an instant liking. Margaret trotted round the picturesque confusion of Hallendorf in a neat two-piece, lace-up shoes and a crisp white blouse. She had been perfectly happy as a secretary in Sunny Hill School, Brighton, where the girls wore plum-coloured gym slips, addressed the teachers as ‘Ma’am’ and charged round frozen hockey fields shouting, ‘Well played, Daphne!’ – and she was perfectly happy at Hallendorf. Chomsky’s sun-dappled appendix scar troubled her not at all, nor the oaths of the noisier children, and for Lucas Bennet, who had founded, and now carried selflessly the burden of running, this idealistic madhouse, she had a respect which bordered on veneration. That she would have carried the portly little headmaster between her teeth to safety if the school ever caught fire, was the opinion of most members of staff. Certainly Hallendorf would have run into the ground pretty soon without her.

  ‘I should just take anything you find, dear,’ she’d said to Ellen, in whom she recognised a kindred spirit. ‘If anyone comes looking for it, I’ll give you warning.’

  So Ellen borrowed two beaten-down mattresses from the gym and made them into floor cushions, which she covered with an Indian cotton tablecloth she had found scrunched up in a dressing-up trunk. She took an armchair which had suffered enough from a common room, stripped the covers and polished the arms. She ‘borrowed’ a kitchen trolley and painted it. . . and decided that a small lime tree in an earthenware pot would be in less danger with her than in the courtyard.

  But what Sophie saw, after she knocked timidly on the door, was mostly light.

  ‘Oh!’ she said. ‘How did it get like that? What did you do?’

  ‘It was like that already. So is your room. Rooms tell you what they want, you just have to listen!’

  Sophie’s life had so far been devoid of certainties. The marriage of her beautiful English mother to an austere scientist in the University of Vienna was a mistake both partners quickly put right. Carla wanted to be an actress, have parties, have fun; Professor Rakassy needed routine, silence and respect for his work. The only thing they had in common was an ego the size of a house and an apparent indifference to the happiness of their little daughter.

  They separated and Sophie began her travels across the continent of Europe: on the Train Bleu to Paris, on the Nordwest Express to Berlin when Carla got a walk-on part at the UFA studios . . . on the Golden Arrow to London and back again . . . always trying to please, to change identities as she arrived . . . To be charming and prettily dressed and witty for her mother; to be serious and enquiring with securely plaited pigtails for her father . . .

  Then suddenly the tug of war stopped. Both parents dropped the rope and she was packed off to a school that was unlike any she had known. That it was the beginning of a permanent abandonment, Sophie was sure.

  But now there was Ellen. Ellen had kept her promise about ringing Czernowitz and she kept other promises. Sophie attended lessons assiduously; she endured eurythmics and did her stint being a bunch of keys or a fork, but when there was a spare moment in her day she came back to her base, trotting behind Ellen with laundry baskets or piles of blankets and curling up in the evening on the floor of Ellen’s room.

  And with Sophie came Ursula, bringing the red exercise book in which she was chronicling the brutalities the American Army had inflicted on the Red Indians, still scowling, still committed to hatred – but sometimes turning over what Ellen had said that first night. She had said it was sensible to go to Wounded Knee, and the calm word dropped into Ursula’s turbulent soul like a benison.

  Others came, of course: Janey, and Ellen’s bodyguard, Bruno and Frank, and a long-legged American girl called Flix who was said to be a brilliant actress but wanted only to be a vet and kept a plaster of Paris ant nest under her bed.

  And a dark, irritating, handsome boy called Leon who used his origins to secure sympathy.

  ‘You have to be nice to me because I’m Jewish,’ he would say, which drove Ursula into one of her frequent rages.

  ‘You’re only half Jewish,’ she said. ‘And I bet it’s the bottom half so I’ll be nice to that but not to your horrible top.’

  Leon was a committed Marxist and filled his room with posters of Lenin rallying the proletariat, but the carefully unravelled jerseys he wore were made of purest cashmere and his underclothes were silk. Leon’s father (whom he referred to as a ‘fascist beast’) was a wealthy industrialist who had transferred his business interests from Berlin to London when Hitler came to power, and his devoted mot
her and sisters sent him innumerable parcels of chocolate and delicatessen from Harrods which he despised, but ate. But if it was difficult to like the boy, no one could dispute his gift; he was intensely and unmistakably musical.

  Ellen had expected the children to come, but she hadn’t quite bargained for the staff, abandoning their cluttered bedsitting rooms to eat her Bath Oliver biscuits and drink her Lapsang Souchong tea. Hermine Ritter came with her love child in its herring box and sat with her grey-flannelled legs apart and spoke of the historic conference in Hinterbruhl where she had been overcome, virtually in her sleep, by a professor of Vocal Rehabilitation who had drunk too much gentian brandy and left her with Andromeda, who was being brought up to be self-regulating but always seemed to be in a temper.

  ‘I will be glad to mind her for you sometimes,’ Ellen said. ‘But you must get her some proper nappies.’

  ‘Oh surely not? In the book by Natalie Goldberger –’

  But Ellen, watching the puce, distempered baby flaying about inside Hermine’s tabard like Donald Duck in a tent, said she thought nappies would be nice for Andromeda.

  Jean-Pierre came, with his boudoir eyes and practised cynicism; a brilliant mathematician who professed to loathe children and could send them out of his classes reeling with excitement about the calculus, and Freya, a sweet-natured Norwegian who taught History and PE and was in love with a hard-hearted Swede called Mats who lived in a hut in Lapland and did not write.

  David Langley came, the bony-kneed Biology teacher who was busy identifying the entire frit fly population of Carinthia, and Chomsky of course, fixing his congenitally despairing eyes on Ellen, and eating a quite remarkable number of biscuits.