A Song for Summer Page 8

  Ellen, busy with her plans for redesigning the dining room, found Marek unobtrusively helpful. She would be dragging trestle tables out of doors so that she could feed the children in the courtyard till the job was done, and he would appear at her side unexpectedly to lift and carry or – with a few words – show her an easier way to do something.

  He was helpful in other ways too, explaining things she had not completely understood.

  ‘Chomsky does swim a lot, doesn’t he?’ she said, as the metalwork teacher splashed past them once again. ‘I mean, three times a day.’

  ‘It’s because of the exceptional weight of his liver,’ said Marek. ‘Bartok swims a lot too.’

  ‘Bartok?’

  ‘A Hungarian composer. Probably the best one alive.’

  ‘Yes, I know. But is it something about Hungarians? That they have heavy livers and have their appendices taken out in the puszta?’

  ‘Chomsky’s appendix was taken out in the most expensive clinic in Budapest,’ said Marek, looking mildly offended, as though she had taken the name of Central Europe in vain. ‘His father is a high-ranking diplomat.’

  It was not only the children who followed Marek about as he worked.

  Tamara was creating a ballet called The Inner is the Outer, based on a poem by Rilke she had found in the library but perhaps not completely understood. It was a solo ballet, since the children had proved uncooperative, and its rehearsal, involving the kind of contortions to be expected of someone whose inside was outside, usually took place as close as possible to where Marek was.

  The way Marek coped with this was impressive. This man who noticed the smallest beetle on the trunk of a tree or picked the emerging, thumb-nail sized frogs from the path of his scythe, dealt with Tamara as if she did not exist. Once, finding her splayed sunbathing across his path as he was going to the village, he tipped his hat to her as to an acquaintance encountered on the Champs Elysées, and walked on. Only when she picked up her balalaika and began to sing did he instantly disappear, showing the same unexpected skill in flight that he showed when teaching fencing.

  Ellen’s own troubles with Tamara were horticultural. For it seemed that the girls of the Russian Ballet had gone about with flowers in their hair – large, mostly red flowers – and it was flowers such as these that Tamara plucked or tore up with her bony fingers and stuck into her hennaed locks.

  ‘I feel as though it’s me she’s picked and hung over her ear,’ Ellen admitted to Marek as the Little Cabbage yanked a perfect, double-petalled peony from its stem.

  Aware that she needed comfort, he said: ‘I think I’ve found a wheel. A farmer in the next valley’s got one in his shed. He isn’t sure yet whether he’ll let me have it but I’m working on him.’

  ‘Oh!’

  Ellen realised that her belief in storks was excessive. Storks would not necessarily make Sophie’s parents write to her or stop Janey wetting her bed. It was probably beyond their powers, too, to turn Tamara into a decent wife who would help Bennet run his school. But she felt so hopeful that Marek, seeing her face, was compelled to add: ‘A wheel doesn’t make storks come, necessarily.’

  ‘No,’ she said happily. ‘But it’s a beginning.’ And success going to her head she added: ‘Maybe we could have doves too – white ones? Fantails. There’s a dovecot up in the fields. They’d look beautiful.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because they breed and breed and people who own them are compelled to collect the fledglings in washing baskets and try to give them to their friends,’ said Marek bitterly, recalling his mother’s early and unsuccessful efforts to bestow her surplus on the landlords of Bohemia. ‘They are permanently in season,’ he said, making his point clear.

  ‘Like Tamara,’ said Ellen – and put her hand to her mouth, for she had sworn not to speak ill of the Little Cabbage who had suffered so much.

  The reopening of Hallendorf’s dining room turned out to be unexpectedly dramatic, indeed there were children who remembered it long after they had forgotten the expressionist plays and dance dramas in which they had taken part.

  For two days before, the dining room had been closed and they were served alfresco meals. Then on the third day a notice appeared in the hall asking everyone to assemble outside the dining room five minutes before the evening meal.

  Needless to say this created considerable anticipation and even Rollo, who preferred to go to the village for beer and pretzels, and Chomsky, whose constitution was delicate, were waiting.

  At six-thirty, Bruno, who had been guarding the door, threw it open and everyone flocked in to find a transformation scene. Gone was the oil cloth with its institutional smell, gone the uncurtained windows, the crockery jumbled up in metal baskets. The pine tables shone with beeswax; on the centre of each was a posy of wild flowers in a blue and white pottery jar; the places were carefully set.

  And the serving hatch, in which Fräulein Waaltraut usually stood with her ladle, was shut. Next to it stood four children with napkins on their arms, ready to serve their peers.

  When everyone was seated, Sophie, standing at a side table, picked up a bell and rang it. It was a cow bell, sweet-toned and mellow, and reminded those children whose parents had managed to get together long enough to celebrate Christmas, of reindeers and presents and candles on a tree.

  At this signal the door of the hatch opened. There, instead of Fräulein Waaltraut looking harassed, stood Ellen. She wore a white overall, and a white coif concealed her hair so that she looked like a devout and dedicated nun.

  But when she spoke, her words were not nun-like in the least.

  ‘As you see,’ said Ellen – and her voice carried without difficulty to all corners of the hall, ‘we have tried to make the dining room more inviting – and we hope and intend to serve up more inviting food. You all know that the school is on a budget so we can’t perform miracles, but we will do everything we can to see that what you get to eat is fresh and well cooked, even if sometimes it has to be plain. But there is one thing I want to make absolutely clear and it concerns the proletariat.’ She paused, surveying her audience, who seemed to be suitably cowed. ‘I have heard a lot about the proletariat and the downtrodden workers of the world since I came here, and I think that to care about them is right and honourable and good. But I want to make it absolutely clear that the proletariat doesn’t only happen in far-off places. Not only in the sweatshops of Hong Kong or the factories of the American Midwest. The proletariat is also here in this kitchen. Lieselotte, who got up at five in the morning to bake the rolls you are about to eat, is the proletariat. Frau Tauber, who washes up for you, is the proletariat when she stands by the sink for hours on her aching, swollen legs. I am the proletariat,’ said Ellen, waving her ladle. ‘When you throw a piece of bread across the room you are destroying what a man spent the night making, even though his back ached, even though his wife was ill. When you jostle and shove and spill the milk, you are belittling a man who gets up on a freezing morning and blows on his hands and goes into his shed to milk the cows while you are sleeping in your beds. And if you understand this, then I and all of us in the kitchen will do everything to serve good food, but if you can’t then I swear it’s back to fishbone risotto and mango shards because that’s all you deserve!’

  A stunned silence followed this. Then from the back of the room a deep voice called ‘Bravo!’ Marek’s lead was one that was always followed. It was to an ovation that Ellen picked up her ladle and began to serve.

  ‘You know, I almost wish I hadn’t made it so clear that I didn’t want her to get involved with the plays in any way,’ said Bennet later that night. ‘She seems to have a real flair for presentation.’

  ‘That’s true,’ agreed Margaret Sinclair, who had come to his study with some letters for him to sign. ‘But mind you, I don’t know how much effect the speech would have had by itself. I think that it was the food she produced afterwards that did the trick. That sauce on the Würstl
and that delicious Kaiserschmarren.’

  ‘Well, you may be right. I’m just sorry I couldn’t oblige her by letting Juan teach pottery. But Marek seems to have found work for him in the garden.’ To have two people on his staff on whom he could rely so completely was a bonus, though Marek, he knew, would not stay.

  Now Bennet remembered his first interview with Tarnowsky. He had rowed himself across the lake from Professor Steiner’s house and asked for a job.

  ‘It won’t be long. A few months . . .’

  ‘What can you teach?’ Bennet had asked. It was not the way he engaged staff as a rule but he had no sooner seen the quiet, slow-moving man than he wanted him.

  ‘I thought I might work in the grounds,’ Marek had answered. ‘The orchard is in poor shape and the trees behind the jousting ground want thinning.’

  ‘Could you take fencing for the older boys?’ asked Bennet, following his hunch.

  ‘If you like. And carpentry, I suppose.’

  Bennet had tried pottery – he had a much prized heap of clay in the cellar moistened periodically by trusted children awaiting someone worthy – but Marek disclaimed all knowledge of pottery.

  ‘There’s a book,’ said Bennet, looking at the man’s large, reassuringly ‘unartistic’ hands.

  ‘I’ll think about it.’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t offer you much in the way of pay,’ Bennet had said.

  ‘I don’t want any pay. But I tell you what I do want.’

  He had wanted leave of absence to go with Professor Steiner on his folk-song-collecting expeditions whenever the Professor heard of a promising singer. As he reached the door, Bennet tried again. ‘What about music? Could you take the choir?’

  Marek turned, shook his head. ‘Definitely not music,’ he said.

  Now it struck Bennet as singular that the three people on whom he could let his mind rest, certain that they would give of their best, were all of them uninterested in the ideas which for him empowered his school. Ellen, Marek and Margaret (who had come in at ten at night to help with his letters), did not seem to be concerned with freedom and self-expression – nor had they shown the slightest interest in the end of year play which everyone, though that was not its title, was calling Abattoir.

  Ellen’s friendship with Lieselotte grew day by day. Her promotion from kitchen maid to cook brought a glow to Lieselotte’s eyes; her pride in her work, her skill, were a joy to behold. Within a week she had brought her Cousin Gretl to help out, and with Juan working in the gardens and Fräulein Waaltraut ensconced in the library to prepare a report on culinary herbs, the kitchen became a haven of cleanliness and skill.

  Not only that, but in befriending Lieselotte, Ellen had acquired the goodwill of the Hallendorf tradesmen, who had hitherto held disapprovingly aloof from the school. The butcher was Lieselotte’s uncle, the baker was her mother’s brother-in-law, and a farmer at whose apricot orchards Ellen had cast longing glances, was married to her aunt. Assured that the castle no longer meant to import corned beef from deserving stockyards in Ecuador or brown rice with weevils from a distant cooperative, they promised to supply the Hallendorf kitchens with fresh meat and fruit – and at prices that were reasonable and fair.

  All the same, when Ellen announced that she was accompanying Lieselotte to church the following Sunday, her remark was greeted with consternation. Swimming in a bathing costume was one thing, but this was courage taken to dangerous lengths.

  ‘Can one?’ asked Sophie, her eyes wide. ‘Can one really do that?’

  ‘Of course one can,’ said Ellen. ‘If one can worship Beethoven and Goya and Dostoevsky, why shouldn’t one worship God? After all, who gave Beethoven and the others their vision? It might well have been God, don’t you think?’

  ‘It can’t be, because God doesn’t exist,’ said Leon. ‘And anyway religion is the opium of the people.’

  ‘I used to go to church sometimes in Vienna,’ said Sophie wistfully. ‘The housekeeper took me. It was lovely – the incense and the music.’

  Ellen, steeling herself, said nothing. She had taken no Sundays off since she came and had reached the stage, so familiar to those who work in schools, when she wanted to speak to no one under the age of twenty, and thirty would have been better.

  ‘The steamer doesn’t go till the afternoon on Sundays, does it?’ she asked Lieselotte.

  ‘No. There’s a bus very early – but usually when he’s here Marek takes us over in his boat: me and Frau Tauber and anyone else who wants to go. He has friends in the village. He’s so kind and such a gentleman.’

  And this of course was Ellen’s undoing. Making her way down to the jetty soon after seven, she found Sophie sitting on the steps, her arms around her knees.

  If she had begged to be taken Ellen would have been firm, promising to take her some other time with her friends. But of course Sophie did not beg. She knew she was not wanted, and sat quietly on the jetty, and looked.

  ‘Would you like to come?’ Ellen said, and saw the spectacular change that happiness made in the thin face.

  ‘Am I tidy enough?’ she asked – and of course she was; the only child in Hallendorf who could have got into a punt then and there and rowed to church.

  Leon was another matter. He liked Sophie, Ellen knew that even if Sophie didn’t. Now he appeared and said he wanted to come too.

  ‘We’re going to church, Leon. As an atheist and a Marxist and a person to whom people have to be nice because he is a Jew, I don’t think this is the place for you.’

  ‘I don’t mind.’

  ‘They, however, will mind if you turn up with a dirty face and unbrushed hair. If you can clean yourself up in five minutes and behave yourself properly, you can come. And if you do, you will please leave Marek alone.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You know exactly what I mean. Now hurry.’

  Ellen had expected Marek to leave them at the door of the church, but to her surprise he followed them in and saw them bestowed in the pew behind Lieselotte’s family before taking his place at the end of the row.

  Their arrival caused a considerable stir. Marek was greeted by a surprising number of people, and Ellen’s virtues had been proclaimed by Lieselotte, but no one had seen Hallendorf children in church before, and the old woman who had warned Ellen on the steamer could be seen whispering agitatedly to her friends.

  Ellen’s thoughts always wandered in church, but they wandered well. Now she allowed herself to admire the blond heads of Lieselotte’s little brothers and sisters in the row in front, and to admit that Marek (who did not seem to need his spectacles to read the hymn book) was looking extremely seigniorial in the loden jacket which had replaced his working clothes.

  But mostly her thoughts wandered to Henny, for whose soul she prayed though she had no right to do so, not being a Catholic, and certainly no need, since Henny’s soul, if any soul on earth, could look after itself in the hereafter.

  When the service was over, Ellen said she would like to look round the church and this was approved of in every way but it was not apparently a thing that one did alone. Lieselotte’s mother, Frau Becker, in particular expected to attend, as did her uncle and the old woman who had warned Ellen on the boat. Nor did Marek’s suggestion that he wait for them on the terrace of the inn prove to be popular. Herr Tarnowsky, who had helped Lieselotte’s mother mend her roof and chopped down the baker’s diseased pear tree, was expected to be present at this treat.

  But if there was a claque of villagers, it was Lieselotte who was allowed to be the spokesman, for in Hallendorf Church there was a star, a local celebrity; a saint to whom the church was consecrated but of whom they spoke as of any girl who had lived among them and in her own way done extremely well.

  ‘Her name was Aniella,’ said Lieselotte. ‘And look; here are the pictures which show you her life.’

  She pointed to a row of oil paintings hanging on the chancel wall.

  ‘This is one of her with her family; she live
d up on the alp underneath the Kugelspitze quite close to here. You can see all the animals she cared for too.’

  The painting contained all the loving detail with which eighteenth-century artists depicted simple things. Aniella’s house had window boxes of petunias and French marigolds; a morning glory climbed the wall. She herself was sitting on a bench and bending down to an injured creature who had placed his head in her lap – not a lamb; there were lambs as in all holy paintings, but further away in the meadow. No, Aniella was tending the broken leg of a St Bernard dog – one could see the keg of brandy around his neck. He was holding his paw up trustingly and beside him, jostling for a place, was a goat with a broken horn. Surrounding the girl, with her calm face and long dark hair, was a host of other animals: some were wounded – a cat with a bandaged ear, a calf with a sore on its flank – but there were others who seemed to be there more for company: a salamander walking over her foot; a grass snake curled up around a stone. It was a place where Marek’s tortoise would have been very much at home.

  ‘She was a healer,’ said Lieselotte. ‘She healed everything; she didn’t mind what it was. Cripples and grass snakes and people, and she never harmed a creature in her life.’

  ‘Are those her children?’ asked Sophie.

  ‘No, she was very young, only eighteen. They’re her brothers and sisters. They were orphans; their parents died and she looked after them even though she wasn’t much older herself.’

  The little peasant children in their dirndls and kerchiefs might have been Lieselotte’s own siblings, they looked so wholesome and so good. They were helping, trained to work as peasant children are: a small boy with yellow hair was tending goats higher up on the mountain; another, a girl, sat close to Aniella, stirring something in a wooden bowl; two more were forking hay into a barn and one – a frail child with long hair – leant adoringly over Aniella’s shoulder.