Eva Ibbotson - A Song For Summer

But it was the woman who led them who held his gaze. Ellen now had dropped her towel, and brought one arm up to gather in the masses of her light brown hair and skewer it on to her head-and what Steiner had suspected was correct. She wore a blue one-piece bathing costume which entirely covered all those places that such a garment is structured to conceal.

As if on a string, the little girls dropped their towels also and copied her movements, trying to scoop up and tether their hair as best they could- and, yes, they too were wearing bathing suits.

“I’ve never seen that before,” said Steiner. “Nor I,” said Marek, thinking of the hollows and sinews of Tamara’s body as she lay splayed across his path, the white limbs of the Biology teacher and Chomsky’s notorious appendix scar.

Still watching the young woman, he saw her nod to the little girls, and then she dived neatly into the lake and one by one the children followed her: some jumping in, some diving, and the cross English girl going down the wooden steps.

In the water she turned to see that all of them were safe and then she struck out into the lake, swimming strongly, but several times looking back to see that all was well-and behind her came her brood, fanned out in a V exactly like the ducklings that nested in the reeds.

He stood aside to let Steiner have another look.

“How seemly,” said the old man, and Marek nodded.

It was the right word for the behaviour of this concerned and purposeful young woman. For a moment Marek let his mind dwell on Nausicaa, the golden girl at the heart of the Odyssey, who had left her maidens to bring help and succour to the weary Ulysses as he came from the sea. But the high-minded analogy was replaced by a different thought: that it was a little bizarre that the first person he had come across in that strange place whom he would have enjoyed seeing naked, was so resolutely clothed.

Ellen had not expected that there would be Morning Assemblies at Hallendorf, but there were. Three times a week the whole school met in the Great Hall which ran along most of the first floor of the castle. Instead of pictures of school governors, the Royal Family and shields embossed with the names of prize winners, the hall was decorated with posters bearing rallying slogans and a frieze painted by Rollo’s art class showing workers getting in the harvest, for the proletariat, of whom most of the children at Hallendorf knew remarkably little, were very dear to their hearts.

On the platform at the far end of the hall was a piano and a large radiogram attached to an amplification system which had been about to be renewed when yet another letter came from Bennet’s stockbroker. There was also a screen and a magic lantern.

In the absence of prayers and hymns-and indeed of God-the assemblies, taken by members of staff in rotation and by any children who volunteered, were hard work, but Ellen found them genuinely moving, for in their own way they concerned themselves with the struggles of transcendence, uplift, and the soul. There was one in which Bennet read from The Freeman’s Worship by Bertrand Russell, a philosopher whose unsavoury private life did not prevent him from penning some discerning thoughts about the human condition. Rollo gave one about Goya, who had emerged from illness and despair to become one of the most compassionate painters of human suffering the world had ever known. Jean-Pierre, abandoning his cynicism, told them what the early manifestos of the French Revolution had meant to the huddled poor of Paris-and an American boy projected slides of Thoreau’s Walden, that unassuming segment of Massachusetts which for so many became a touchstone for what is good and gentle on this earth.

But when Leon gave an assembly, Ellen found herself homesick for the boring, familiar routine of hymn singing and gabbled prayers she had known in England, for there was something disquieting about his performance.

She had come in at the last minute and stood at the back. The hall was full and silent, but Leon, seated at the piano, did not begin.

He was looking anxiously in Ellen’s direction-not at her but at the door. Then it opened and a man entered quietly and stood beside Ellen. She had not met him yet but there could be no doubt about who he was-indeed it was strange how correctly she had imagined him: the size, the strength, the relaxed way he leant against the wall with folded arms. The warm greenish blue eyes fitted too, as did the thick light hair falling over his forehead. Only the large horn-rim spectacles covering part of his face surprised her. She had expected him to be keen-sighted, a forester out of a fable, and thought how absurd she had been.

As though Marek’s entrance was a signal, Leon began to play. He played a movement from a Beethoven sonata and he played it well. Both staff and children were silent, for if Leon was difficult to like, his talent was undoubted.

When he finished, he rose and went to the front of the platform, commanding the hall as all these stage-trained children had learnt to do. He was very pale and surprisingly nervous for such an extroverted and bumptious boy.

“That was Beethoven’s Opus 26-the one with the funeral march-and it’s Beethoven I’m going to talk about. Only not all of his life-the part of it that happened in Heiligenstadt when he was thirty years old.”

He cleared his throat, and once again he looked at the back of the hall, his gaze, which had something frantic about it, fixed on the man who stood unmoving beside Ellen.

“Heiligenstadt is a village outside Vienna. It’s pretty with linden trees and brooks and all that, but that wasn’t why Beethoven went there. He went because he didn’t want to be seen; he wanted to hide. He was terrified and wretched and trying to escape from the world. He was going deaf, you see, and it was there that he finally gave up hope that the doctors would be able to cure him.

“It’s awful to read about the things he did to try and heal himself,” Leon went on. “He poured yellow goo into his ears, he syringed them, he swallowed every kind of patent medicine, he stuck in hearing aids like torture instruments, but nothing made any difference. So he decided to die.”

Leon paused and rubbed his nose with the back of his hand. No handkerchief, thought Ellen, blaming herself, and her heart smote her at the emotion generated by this unprepossessing boy.

“But he didn’t,” said Leon. “He didn’t kill himself,” and he threw that too intense, slightly hysterical look towards the place where Marek stood. “He wrote a thing called The Heiligenstadt Testament, which is famous. He started by telling people to be good and love one another and all that, but the part that matters is what he wrote about art. He said if you have a talent you had to use it to go further in to life and not escape from it. I’ll read that bit to you.”

He took a book from the top of the piano and first in English, then in German, read the words with which the unhappy composer had reconsecrated himself to music and to life.

“So you see,” said Leon fiercely. “You see…” and Ellen saw Bennet turn his head, frowning, to follow Leon’s gaze as it travelled yet again to Marek, still standing with folded arms beside the door. “You have to go on. Beethoven went back to Vienna and he wrote another seven symphonies and the violin concerto and Fidelio. He wrote dozens more string quartets and the Missa Solemnis and the Hammerklavier

… All right he was grumpy and bad-tempered, he hammered pianos to death and the people who came to see him fell over his unemptied chamber pots, but he never gave up. And when he died, all the schools in Vienna were closed. Every single school was closed so that the children could go to the funeral. Our school would have been closed,” said Leon, as if that clinched the matter.