Eva Ibbotson - A Song For Summer

He had finished his speech. Sniffing once more, pushing back his hair, he walked over to the radiogram. “I’m going to play a bit of the Ninth Symphony to end up with. At least I am if the blasted gramophone works,” he said, descending from the heights.

But as the triumphant strains of The Ode to Joy rang out across the hall, Ellen felt a momentary draught beside her.

The man at whom this strange assembly had been directed, was gone.

It was Ellen’s habit to get up early and make her way round the grounds before anyone else was up. The lake was at its loveliest then; the mist rising from the water; the birds beginning to stir.

But as she wandered, she garnered. Into a trug she kept for the purpose, she put the yo-yos she found tangled in fuchsia bushes, the roller skates left dangerously on the steps, the dew-sodden exercise books and half-knitted khaki balaclavas which (had they ever been finished) would have much reduced the chances of the International Brigade in their fight against Franco.

On the morning after Leon’s disquieting assembly, having collected a broken kite, a pair of braces and a damaged banana, she made her way towards the well in the cobbled courtyard behind the castle, to dredge up a gym shoe which she had noticed the night before.

But there was someone else who valued the peace of the early morning. Marek did not sleep in the castle itself. He had a room in the stable block reached by an outside staircase. It was furnished as simply as a monk’s cell-a bed, a table, a chair-and visitors were not encouraged.

Now he made his way down the steps, carefully locking the door behind him, and strode off across the cobbled courtyard on his way to the shed where the tools were kept.

The girl bent over the well did not at first see him, and he would have gone past, but at that moment she lifted her head and smiled and said “Hello”.

“Not a frog, I hope?”’ he asked, fishing his spectacles out of his pocket and going across to her, for her sleeve was wet and a small tuft of moss had caught in her hair.

She shook her head. “No. And if it was I wouldn’t kiss it, I promise you. I might kiss a prince if I could be sure he’d turn into a frog but not the other way round. What it is is a gym shoe, but I can’t get at it. It’s stuck on a ledge.”

“Let me have a look.”

She had the idea that if it was necessary he would have torn up the iron grille screwed into the ground, so marked was the impression he gave of power and strength. But he merely rolled up his shirt sleeve and presently he fished out the shoe which he laid on the rim beside her.

“I spend so much time picking gym shoes out of wells and yo-yos out of trees and sodden towels from the grass,” she said when she had thanked him. “I wanted to teach them to be tidy by showing, but there’s so many of them and there’s only one of me. I suppose some of them will never see.”

“But some will.”

He had sat down on the stone rim beside her and as she looked up at him, grateful for his encouragement, he found it necessary to correct the impression he had formed of her. As she swam out with her brood, she had seemed strong-willed and purposeful. Since then, Chomsky’s besotted ravings, Bennet’s praise and the legend of the icon corner had led him to expect a kind of St Joan wielding a bucket and mop. But she looked gentle and funny… and perhaps vulnerable with that wide mouth, those thoughtful eyes.

Ellen too found herself surprised. If Marek’s broad forehead and shaggy hair, his sojourn in the stable block, accorded well enough with the image of a solitary woodsman, his voice did not. He had spoken in English, in deference to the custom of the school, and his voice, nuanced and light, was that of a man very much at home in the world.

“There was something I wanted to ask you,” she said. “Bennet said you’d help me. I want us to have storks at Hallendorf. I want to know how to make them come.”

His face had changed; he was silent, withdrawn.

“Perhaps it’s silly,” she went on, “but I think the children here need storks.”

The silence continued. Then: “With storks it isn’t necessarily a question of needing them. It’s a question of deserving them.”

But she would not be snubbed.

“Sophie deserves them. And others too. Storks mate for life.”

“It’s too late this year, you know that.” “Yes. But there’s next year.”

“Ah, next year.” She had not deceived herself; somehow she had made him angry. “Of course. What a little islander you are, with your English Channel which makes everyone so seasick and you so safe. You think we shall still be here next year? You think the world will stay still for you?”’

“No,” she said, putting up her chin. “I don’t think that as a matter of fact. I came here because I wanted to find Kohlröserl and thought maybe I didn’t have very long, but it doesn’t matter; the storks would still—”’

“Kohlröserl? Those small black orchids?”’

“Yes, my grandmother spoke of them before she died, but never mind about that. I want storks because—”’ and she repeated the words she had spoken to Sophie, “because they bless a house.”

He had withdrawn again but she no longer felt his anger. “What exactly do you intend for this place?”’ he said presently.

It was her turn now to fall silent. She had tucked her feet under her skirt, still perched on the rim of the well.

“I can’t put it into words… not properly. It’s to do with those paintings of places where the lion lies down with the lamb… you know, those primitive painters who see things very simply: birds of Paradise and great leaves and everything blending with everything else. Or the Forest of Fontainebleau-I’ve never been there, but I saw a picture once where the stags had crucifixes between their antlers and even the animals who are probably going to be shot look happy. When I saw the castle from the lake that first time, I imagined it all. The rooms clean and clear and smelling of beeswax and flowers, and the roses still free and tangly but not choked… a sort of secret husbandry that made them flourish. I thought there might be hammocks under the trees where the children could lie and I imagined them running out when it rained so as to turn their faces to the sky-but not before they’d shut the windows so that the shutters wouldn’t bang. I thought there could be a place where everything was received with… hospitality: the lessons and the ideas… and the food that comes up from the kitchens. Of course the food wouldn’t be like it is now,” she said, smiling up at him. “There’d be the smell of fresh rolls in the morning and pats of yellow butter… and somewhere in the theatre which the count must have built with so much affection for his mistress, there’d be a marvellous play full of magic and laughter and great words to which people would come from everywhere… Even the villagers would come, setting sail for the castle in their boats-even the man who found Chomsky in his fishing nets would come.” She looked up, flushing. “I know there can’t be such a place, but—”’

“Yes, there can,” he said abruptly. “I could take you to a place that… feels like that. If times were different I would do so.”

“And it has storks?”’

“Yes, it has storks.”

He rose, dropped the gym shoe into her trug. Then he stood looking down at her-not smiling… considering… and she caught her breath, for she felt that she had been, in that moment, completely understood.

“I’ll look for a wheel,” he said-and walked away across the courtyard to begin his work.

But later, tending to the bonfire of lopped branches and hedge clippings, Marek wondered what had made him liken his home to this mad place. Pettelsdorf owed its existence-its wealth-to the forest which surrounded it, and those who are custodians of trees lead a life of rigorous discipline. To his father, and his father’s father before him, the two thousand hectares of his domain were wholly known. An architect coming to bespeak oak planks for the belfry of a church was led to one tree and one tree only in the seemingly limitless woods. There were trees of course which were sacrosanct: a five-hundred-year-old lime, with its squirrel nests and secret hollows, which Marek as a boy had claimed as his own, would never be cut, nor the elm by the house beneath which he’d lain on summer nights watching the stars tossed back and forth between branches. But in general there was no room for sentiment at Pettelsdorf; a forest of sweet chestnuts and pine, of walnut and alder and birch, is not something that looks after itself. Only a meticulous daily husbandry ensures the balance between new growth and ancient hallowed trees, between sun-filled clearings and dense plantations.