A Song for Summer Read online

  There was one member of staff, however, who was conspicuous by her absence. The Little Cabbage did not come and when Ellen met her, two days after her return, the encounter was unfortunate.

  Ellen during those first days worked as she had not worked before. She scrubbed, she sewed on name tapes, she set up her ironing board in the laundry room, she brought pots of flowers upstairs and emptied washing baskets and mended curtains.

  Soon the words ‘Where’s Ellen?’ could be heard with increasing frequency as children came in with grazed knees, bruised foreheads or more complex bruising of the soul. They learnt by the state of her hair how much time she could give them: when it was screwed up on top of her head it was best to fall in behind her with a cloth; when it was in a plait over one shoulder she was bound for the garden; when it was loose she had time to talk. Her clean, starched aprons, pink or white or blue, became a kind of beacon. On the days that they were blue, Chomsky would make an excuse to leave the metalwork shop and tell her that she reminded him of his nursemaid, Katya, whom he had deeply loved.

  During that time, when she took almost no time off and did not even allow herself to think of Kohlröserl, Ellen began to feel that she was some way to accomplishing her task.

  But pride goes before a fall. Ellen’s fall came at the end of the first week when she was cleaning out a strange collection of debris she found in a small round room in the East Tower.

  She had noticed a painting hanging on a dark wall above a table full of unsavoury litter: an old tin of Cerebos salt, rusty round the rim, a candle-end burnt dangerously low, a dead bunch of marigolds with slimy stalks and a piece of bread covered in mouse droppings.

  Appalled by this health and safety hazard, Ellen got to work. She tipped the bread and salt into her dustpan, threw the dead flowers away, gathered up the frayed cloth with its mouse droppings and soaked it in disinfectant. Half an hour later the room was clean, the blinds rolled up to let in the light and the painting – which was of a number of little men in conical hats and underpants adrift on an ice floe – was left in possession of the field.

  Ellen had gathered up her dustpan and bucket and was turning to go when her way was blocked by a tall, thin woman with long strings of hennaed hair, a pinched nose and wild, navy-blue eyes. She wore a muslin dress with an uneven hem, her long feet with their prehensile-looking toes were bare and slightly yellow, and she was in a towering rage.

  ‘How dare you!’ she shrieked in a strange accent which Ellen could not place. ‘How dare you destroy my sanctuary – the only place where I can refresh my soul.’

  ‘Sanctuary?’ stammered Ellen, looking at the mouldy bread, the rusty salt tin in the waste bucket.

  ‘You ignorant English peasant!’ the woman shrieked. ‘Of course you know nothing of how the Russians worship. You have never heard of the icon corner which in every Russian household is the heart of the home.’

  Ellen could find no words. The woman’s wrath flowed out of her; her narrow nose was white with anger and to her own annoyance, tears came to Ellen’s eyes.

  ‘I didn’t realise . . . the bread was mouldy and –’

  ‘Oh yes, of course; that is all you care for, you little bourgeois housekeeper. I have heard how you have scrubbed everything . . . This picture,’ she pointed to the little men cowering in their shifts on the ice, ‘was given to me by Toussia Alexandrovna, the prima ballerina of the Diaghilev Ballet. These men are the martyred bishops of Tula – they died on an ice floe rather than renounce the Old Faith. Every day I light a candle here in this corner – the Krasny Ugol – and now you come here in one hour and destroy the atmosphere with your lower-class hygiene.’

  ‘I’m sorry; I really am. I didn’t know. But the flowers were dead and –’

  ‘Enough!’ The woman raised a hand as long and yellow as her feet. ‘Go! I shall speak to Bennet of this. It is possible you will be dismissed.’

  Though she could see the absurdity of the encounter, Ellen found it difficult to shake off the misery and embarrassment of having upset a fellow member of staff, and instead of going to the common room at tea time, she went to find Margaret Sinclair in her little office.

  ‘Oh there you are, dear,’ said the secretary. ‘I was meaning to have a word with you.’

  ‘Margaret, I have done this awful thing – but I didn’t know. I just thought it was . . . well, you know there are so many things lying around that have been forgotten and I’d simply never heard of the martyred bishops of –’

  ‘No, of course you hadn’t. It’s a disgusting place and we’re all absolutely delighted that you got rid of it.’

  ‘Yes, but she . . . Tamara was furious. She’s going to tell Bennet and she said she’d get me dismissed.’

  ‘Oh my dear . . . Come, I’ll make you a cup of tea. What nonsense! Bennet knows all about the work you’re doing; he wouldn’t dismiss you in a thousand years and he never takes the slightest notice of what Tamara says.’

  But Ellen was not so easily comforted. ‘Do you think I should go and explain to him and apologise all the same?’

  ‘Well, he’ll be happy to see you – he’s going through a bit of trouble with the new play at the minute. But it’s best not to talk to him about Tamara; it’s not easy for him. He never speaks against her, but of course she is a deeply unpleasant woman, and what he goes through –’

  She broke off her words and busied herself with the teapot. ‘But if she’s so awful . . . and I must say what she did to Janey . . . I mean, why doesn’t he get rid of her?’

  Margaret spun round, her kind, plain face amazed. ‘Good heavens – did no one tell you? I suppose they thought you knew, and it’s true we don’t mention her if we can help it. We’re all fond of Bennet – and the children too.’ She handed Ellen her cup. ‘She’s his wife, you see, Tamara is. He’s married to Tamara, only that isn’t her real name, of course.’

  ‘Oh!’ It seemed incredible and also unutterably sad. In the short time she had been here, Ellen had conceived a great admiration for the hardworking, scholarly little man who powered the whole place with his vision. ‘But how? I suppose one shouldn’t ask or pry, but –’

  ‘It happened in Paris. Bennet was there looking up some texts in the Sorbonne – he’s a fine classical scholar, as you may know. This was twelve years ago when he was still at Oxford. He was walking across the Pont Neuf; it was night time. Do you know Paris?’

  ‘Yes. I was there for a term learning French.’ Ellen could see it: the Seine, the lamps lit, the moonlight, the boats sliding under the bridge.

  ‘And he saw this girl, huddled under a lamp-post and weeping. She had long hair and a thin face . . . and all that,’ said Margaret, and paused, noting the bitterness in her voice. ‘You can imagine. He’s a chivalrous man. It turned out that she was a dancer from the Diaghilev Ballet who’d been dismissed because she was pregnant. Her lover had deserted her, her mother wouldn’t have her back, she had nowhere to go.’

  ‘Yes, I see. It would be difficult to resist that kind of despair. And she was Russian?’

  ‘Well, no – that’s what’s so ridiculous. She isn’t Russian at all. Her name is Beryl Smith and she comes from a mining village somewhere in the north of England. She had one of those ballet mums who pushed her through exams and she got taken on by Diaghilev for the Ballet Russe. They all had to have Russian names, so she became Tamara Tatriatova. I suppose it was her happiest time, being part of the troupe, all the warmth and the chatter and people lighting samovars and calling each other Little Pigeon and Little Cabbage and so on.’

  Margaret’s effort to be fair to Tamara was taking its toll. She had decided to give up sugar in her tea but now she reached for the bowl and spooned in a generous helping.

  ‘Actually I wondered about the cabbage thing,’ said Ellen. ‘Doesn’t Coucoushka mean Little Cuckoo? We read a lot of Chekhov at school and –’

  ‘Yes it does; you’re quite right. But the children are convinced it means cabbage, and I must say, I myself �
��’

  She broke off, not wanting to admit that being fond of birds she also preferred to think of Tamara as a vegetable. ‘Anyway, Bennet married her,’ she went on. ‘The baby was stillborn – apparently her grief was terrible. Bennet said he’d never seen anyone so distraught. He brought her here soon afterwards to regain her strength and she saw the castle and wanted to live in it and it was then that Bennet thought of the school. She said she’d like to be a mother to other children if she couldn’t have any of her own, but of course it hasn’t worked out like that. Not that one can blame her entirely,’ said Margaret, ‘for it is an unfortunate fact that the needier a child is the less attractive it is. I think she thought they would be smaller, like fairies in a ballet. Since then she has got sillier and sillier and clings more and more to the Russian fantasy. No one believes it; I don’t think she believes it herself. I suppose she is a little mad but that makes no difference. Bennet will never leave her; he is not that kind of man. He stops her teaching as much as possible but she’s convinced she has a mission about the Dance.’

  ‘Is it she who teaches Eurythmics?’ asked Ellen.

  ‘Yes it is.’

  Ellen nodded. ‘You’ve been extremely kind to tell me all this.’

  She sent Ellen away comforted, but Margaret had not comforted herself. Why did I leave my peaceful plum-coloured girls? she wondered, rinsing the teacups. What am I doing here, eating my heart out for a small, bald man who’s shackled to a cabbage?

  The morning after Margaret’s revelations, Ellen got up early and went down to the store rooms and fetched a tin of white paint, two large paintbrushes and a bottle of turpentine.

  She had told Bruno what she was going to do and had left it to him whether he accompanied her or not. She did not really expect him to – Bruno liked his sleep. She had been determined to make Bruno undo his handiwork – her vision for Hallendorf did not include the defacement of Greek temples; but now that she had met Tamara, Ellen felt different. Tamara had stood over an empty cradle and wept, and whenever Ellen wanted to hit her, which she suspected would be often, she would think of this and refrain.

  But however careful she intended to be about Tamara, Ellen considered that any lesson she gave, whether it was Eurythmics (about which Ellen was still hazy) or anything else, would be hard for anyone to bear, and certainly for a boy like Bruno who had set himself up as a muscle man destined for the army. So she was prepared to paint out what he had written on her own account.

  But when she reached the little temple, set so romantically on the edge of the lake, she found Bruno waiting on the steps.

  ‘What have you got?’ he said, coming over to inspect the paint pot and brushes. ‘Seems OK. I’ll have the bigger one.’

  He took the bigger brush, added a small amount of turps to the paint in the tin, nodded. He seemed to have forgotten about the punitive aspects of the expedition and to be interested technically in the job in hand. As he began to sweep the paint across the letters on the wall, Ellen stood for a moment, watching. He was handling the paint easily, in sweeping broad brush-strokes but covering evenly. She had expected to do the bulk of the work herself, but soon found herself in the role of assistant. It occurred to her also that the letters they were eliminating were not scrawled on in the usual way of graffiti; they were stylishly painted and with a considerable panache.

  ‘It’s a mess,’ said Bruno when they’d finished. ‘The rest of it will have to be done over. You leave the paint here, I’ll see to it.’

  Ellen, about to argue, decided to obey. It was Sunday – Bruno would not miss any lessons. ‘I’ll bring you some breakfast,’ she said.

  But later that afternoon she went to find Rollo, the Art and Design master, who was making frames in the studio.

  ‘I wanted to ask you about Bruno.’ She told him about the morning’s work. ‘He seems so good at painting, so assured.’

  ‘Don’t talk to me about that blasted child,’ said Rollo, a red-haired Welshman with a wide grin and a beer paunch. ‘I could kill him.’ He walked over to his cluttered bench, opened a drawer. ‘Look at this!’

  He pulled out a tattered exercise book, filled with sums, most of which had been marked wrong by Jean-Pierre in red ink. ‘Look at the cover.’

  Ellen looked. Scrawled in pencil were kittens that leapt from baskets, were folded hands, were Jean-Pierre’s head in profile and the unfurled ends of Sophie’s pigtails as she leant over her desk.

  ‘He can draw anything but he won’t. If you catch him unaware he’ll doodle like this but I can’t make him do anything in the classes. Just glares and acts dumb sullen. When we’re doing designs for the plays he’ll put on glue or hammer the flats, but if you try and make him create something original he just pushes off.’ ‘But why?’

  ‘Have you ever heard of Klaus Feuermann?’

  Ellen screwed up her forehead. ‘Is he a painter?’

  ‘Yes. A fashionable one; quite talented but an idiot: goes round in a cape and a great hat pretending to be Augustus John. Bruno’s his son and the poor little brat spent the first six years of his life being a putto. You know, those fat things with dimpled bums they have on painted ceilings. All Feuermann’s kids were used as models, and he had plenty, by plenty of women. You can see Bruno on the ceiling of the Zurich Odeon and in the Guildhall in Rotterdam and God knows where else. When he wasn’t a putto he was slapped on the knee of some woman, having to be the Baby Jesus, or hung from the top of a four-poster being Cupid shooting his arrows. By the time he was ten he wouldn’t go near a picture and all he did when the kids teased him was to fight them. That’s why he wants to be a soldier and acts the tough. But I can tell you, Ellen, it’s bloody frustrating. This place needs talent.’

  ‘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 hone
st. 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.’