Eva Ibbotson - A Song For Summer

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.”