Eva Ibbotson - A Song For Summer

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, thumbnail 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 Élysées, 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.