A Song for Summer (9 page)

The kitchens, which had once supplied the Hapsburg counts with roast venison and casseroles of grouse, and had sent sucking pigs and flagons of Napoleon Brandy upstairs, had not changed substantially since the days when the last of Hallendorf's owners had feted Franz Joseph after a week of hunting. An electric cooker had replaced the huge bread ovens and the range, and there was a frigidaire stuck with revolutionary slogans proclaiming the need for the overthrow of the Costa Rican government.

But the vast wooden kitchen table was the same, the long passages which separated kitchen and larder and the stone steps down to the cellars.

Nevertheless, Ellen, entering to begin her supervisory duties, looked at the room with pleasure. It was not dark; the windows at the back looked on to the courtyard and the catalpa tree, and everything was solid and clean.

The cleanliness surprised her because the food which had hitherto been served up was dire. Lumpy brown rice risottos to which spikes of bony fish adhered; strange salads devoid of dressing but rich in small pieces of gravel and slimy tropical fruits which had come from far away in tins.

Ellen's arrival, in her crispest apron, was not greeted with enthusiasm either by the persecuted Costa Rican, Juan, or by Fr@aulein Waaltraut Nussbaum-Eisenberg, an impoverished aristocrat whose nephew was mayor of Klagenfurt.

Juan cooked for his keep and a vestigial salary and expected any day, he said, to hear a knock at the door and to be taken away by the secret police of his country, and Fr@aulein Waaltraut disapproved of meat, eggs and fish and would have fed the school entirely on borage and bilberries if Bennet had let her.

"Well, of course we must have salads," said Ellen, "but not with gravel, and stinging nettles must be picked young. Also these children are growing so we must make sure that there is plenty of protein."

She laid her cookery books on the table and asked if she could see the larder. This went down badly, Fr@aulein Waaltraut pointing out that she wasn't used to being inspected and Juan waving his arms and declaring that it was a Thursday, and it was on Friday that the boat came with fresh supplies.

Since it was obvious that both Juan and Fr@aulein Waaltraut, like the tinned mango shards from impoverished African countries, belonged to Hallendorf's tradition of succoring the needy irrespective of worth, Ellen continued to be surprised by the wooden table scrubbed to whiteness and the pots and pans scoured and neatly stacked. Clearly there was someone else working down here and presently she found her; not in the kitchen itself but in the scullery, washing up the breakfast things.

Ellen came on her unobserved and as she watched, her spirits rose. The girl was very young--not more than eighteen--and dressed in a spotless dirndl: a blue sprigged skirt, a pink bodice, a white blouse. Her blonde hair was pinned neatly round her head, she was small and sturdy and she worked with a steady rhythm and concentration, as though what she was doing was ... what she was doing, and nothing else.

"Grass Gott," said Ellen, holding

out her hand. "I'm the new supervisor --my name is Ellen."

The girl turned, wiped her hands. "I'm Lieselotte," she said--but as she dropped a curtsy Ellen had to restrain herself from rushing forward and taking the girl into her arms. For this might have been Henny, come back from the dead: Henny as she had been in her own country, wholesome, giving and good.

"Tell me, Lieselotte, was it you who boiled the eggs and made the poppy seed rolls on Sunday?"'

Lieselotte nodded. "Yes. I am not supposed to cook, I'm just here to clean and wash up, but on Sundays Fr@aulein Waaltraut isn't here and--"' She flushed. "It's difficult. I am thinking of giving in my notice."

"Oh no!" Ellen shook her head with vehemence. "You can't possibly do that. Don't even think of it. From now on it is you and I who are going to do the cooking."

The girl's face lit up. "Oh, I love to cook. Everyone thinks Austrian food is heavy and greasy, but that's only bad Austrian cooking. My mother's omelettes are like feathers and her buttermilk is so fresh and good."

"Your mother taught you to cook, then?"' "Yes."

"And do you have any brothers and sisters? We shall need some help because I have to work upstairs as well."

"I have two sisters. They wanted to come but my mother thought it wouldn't be good ... they're young--

and sometimes the children behave so badly."

"Well, anyone would behave badly if they had to eat fishbone risotto," said Ellen. "I tell you, Lieselotte, we're going to transform this place."

"But," the girl looked towards the kitchens where an altercation was beginning between Juan and Fr@aulein Waaltraut, "how will you ...? He has nowhere to go and she is related to the mayor."

"I think perhaps Juan could teach pottery. And --well, I shall think of something. Now, here are the menus I thought offor next week--but I'd like to use as much local produce as possible. I expect you know people who would supply us?"'

"Oh yes. Yes." She smiled.

"But they do not live in Abyssinia."

In Gowan Terrace, Ellen's mother and her aunts missed her more than they could possibly have believed. The house without her seemed empty, silent and cold. If Dr Carr had scarcely noticed, in her busy life, the flowers Ellen had brought in and arranged, she noticed their absence. Below stairs, the cook reverted to boiled fish and virulently coloured table jellies, and the man who came to help in the garden dug up Ellen's peonies and destroyed the clematis.

Not that the sisters didn't keep busy. There were more meetings than ever: meetings about the disenfranchised women of Mesopotamia, about mathematics teaching in communes and free contraception for prostitutes. But even the meetings were not quite what they had been--they were briefer, there were fewer young men, and the sandwiches sent up by the cook were so unappetising that they abandoned them and settled for digestive biscuits.

It was different, however, when one of Ellen's letters arrived from Hallendorf. Then Dr Carr and her sisters allowed special people to stay behind after the chairs were cleared and the lantern slides put away, and the letter was read not only to initiates like the "aunt" who ran the Left Book Club Shop or the former headmistress of Ellen's school, but to others--even men--who had a record of good work for the causes. And among these was Kendrick Frobisher.

Kendrick had made himself so useful in Gowan Terrace, addressing envelopes, sorting slides and fetching leaflets from the printers, that he could not really be left out of anything as enjoyable as reading the next instalment of life at Hallendorf. It was true that Annie (the one who was a Professor of Mycology and therefore saw things dispassionately) had voiced her doubts about the advisability of this.

"He's very much in love with Ellen; don't you think it might encourage him to hope if we invite him to what are, in a sense, family occasions?"'

But advisable or not, no one had the heart to exclude Kendrick, who had been compelled to visit the wet house in Cumberland for a family reunion in which his oldest brother, a major in the Indian Army, had told him about pig sticking, and his other brother, a stockbroker who was learning to fly his own plane, had given an account of looping the loop.

So Kendrick sat with Charlotte and

Phyllis and Annie and heard about the strange behaviour of the Little Cabbage (for whose eurythmics classes the children drew lots) and the play chosen for the end of the year performance which was set in a slaughterhouse and was politically sound but sad. They heard about the discovery of Lieselotte in the kitchen, about Ellen's rage with parents who did not write to their children, and her triumph in weaning Andromeda from sphagnum moss to Turkish towelling. And they heard--though briefly--about someone called Marek who had put a tortoise on wheels and was going to help her find storks. Sometimes Ellen would add: "Please give my love to Kendrick and tell him I'll write properly soon," and this would send the young man out into the night walking on air, and more determined than ever to fulfil what he saw as his mission.

And his mission was no less than to bring to Ellen, through his letters, all the cultural activities of her native city. Now, when Kendrick went to an exhibition of Mexican funeral urns, or saw a Greek play in a basement in Pimlico, he went not only for Ellen, but in a mystical sense with her. He invariably bought two programmes and made careful notes throughout the performance so that he could share his experiences, and these he added with his comments and impressions to the weekly letter.

Thus it was that when he attended a concert of contemporary music at the Wigmore Hall, Ellen was treated to a complete breakdown of the music played, an annotated copy of the programme and two sheets of comments stapled to the back in Kendrick's handwriting.

"Curiously enough, I think I know the man who wrote the songs I have marked, the ones which were encored. As you see, his name is Altenburg.

He was becoming well known in Germany before Hitler came to power but now he has withdrawn all his music from performance in the Third Reich--he won't even allow his compositions to be printed there.

There was a boy at school with the same name-- he had a German father, or maybe it was Austrian--and he stood out from the others because he was so good at music but also because he was so strong and unafraid. He was expelled after a year for hanging one of the housemasters out of a first-floor window. He didn't drop him but he held him out over the shrubbery by his ankles. It was a big scandal, because the master could have fallen and been killed, but we were all glad because the master was a sadist and he'd been beating small boys in the most appalling way, so Altenburg was a hero, but he left straight away. The school said they expelled him but we thought he just went. He didn't seem at all bothered about what he'd done. He just said defenestration was quite common in Prague where his mother came from."

Kendrick paused, wondering whether to explain about the defenestration of Prague, which was a famous event in the history of Czechoslovakia. He was a person who could spell Czechoslovakia without recourse to a dictionary and was quite conversant with the religious disputations of the Bohemian capital which had resulted in two Catholics being thrown out of the window by irate Protestants who believed themselves betrayed. But there was no more room on the programme, and Ellen sometimes looked tired when he explained things at length, so he put the notes to one side and returned to his letter, telling her once more that he would always love her and that if she could ever bear to think of him as a husband he would be unutterably happy.

He then signed the letter, put in the theatre programme of the Greek play, the reviews cut out of The Times, two exhibition catalogues, and the annotated programme of the Altenburg concert, and took them to the letter box.

These all arrived safely, delivered on the yellow post bus with its Schubertian horn which careered round the lake at dawn. Ellen read the letter, for she continued to feel sorry for Kendrick, but she left the catalogues and the concert programme on her work table to look at later, for she was planning a complete refurbishment of Hallendorf's dining room and the cultural life of the metropolis would have to wait.

On the same morning as Ellen heard from Kendrick and Sophie once again turned away empty-handed from her pigeonhole, Marek received

a postcard which he pocketed with satisfaction. The picture showed a pretty Polish village complete with smiling peasants and the text read simply: "Tante Tilda's operation a success. She sends her love."

Heller was safe then. Marek could imagine him, his monocle restored, holding forth in the officers' mess of the Flying Corps. So now there was nothing to do till he got news of Meierwitz: the enquiries he had set in train as the result of Heller's disclosures would take time. And this rescue would be the last. He had promised Steiner, and he himself was aware that the time for lone adventures was past. Hitler's defeat now could only come from the other countries waking up to their responsibilities, not, as he had once hoped, from within.

Marek therefore turned his attention once more to Hallendorf's neglected grounds, spraying the trees in the orchard, repairing the frames in the kitchen garden, staking the roses. Wherever he worked, boys congregated to watch but they did not watch for long. One either left Marek alone, or one helped, and the

"helping" was not of the kind that involved self-expression or ceased when the novelty of the task had worn off.

Most of the children were genuinely useful, but Leon's desire to "help" was different.

This quicksilver, twitchy child wanted something from Marek; his apparent affection was a kind of persecution. Marek was aware of this. He sent him to work as far away as possible: hoeing a path on the lower terrace, or wheelbarrowing logs from a distant wood pile, but it was impossible for the boy to stay away for long.

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.