Eva Ibbotson - A Song For Summer

But after a few hearings, she began to follow the piece with interest and then slowly with a pleasure that was the greater for not having been instantaneous.

Leon, however, being Leon, could not leave well alone. He played the Songs for Summer inside the castle and outside it. He took his gramophone into the rowing boat, and he was winding up the gramophone yet again, sitting on the steps of the jetty, when Marek came past, carrying a hoe, and told him to stop.

Leon looked up, his thin face set in a look of obstinacy.

“I don’t want to stop it. I like it. It’s beautiful and the man who plays the violin obligato is fantastic. His name is Isaac Meierwitz and—”’

Marek’s hand came down and removed the needle.

In the ensuing silence, the boy got to his feet. “You can’t do that. You can’t be horrid to me, because I’m Jewish. You may not care what happens to the Jews but—”’

Watching Marek one would have seen only a slight tightening of the muscles round his mouth, but Janik and Stepan, the woodsmen whose job it had been to carry the infant Marek out into the fields until his devastating temper attacks had spent themselves, would have recognised the signs at once.

Then he put down his hoe, moved slowly forward and pitched Leon out into the lake.

Sophie and Ursula, running excitedly upstairs, brought the news to Ellen.

“It serves him right,” said Ursula. “He was following Marek about again-and he was playing his beastly gramophone right by the jetty.”

“But Marek waited to see if he came up again. He wouldn’t have let him drown.” Sophie was torn between pity for Leon and concern for her hero, Marek, who had certainly behaved oddly.

Leon himself, wrapped in a towel and shivering theatrically, now arrived escorted by Freya who had been closest to the scene of the accident.

“He’s had a shock, of course, but I don’t think any harm’s been done.” Her kind face was as puzzled and troubled as Sophie’s. “I don’t know why…”

Ellen put her arms around Leon. “Go and run a hot bath, Sophie,” she ordered. “And Ursula, go and ask Lieselotte to bring up a hot-water bottle.”

“At least he didn’t defenestrate me,” said Leon as she stripped off his wet clothes. “That’s what he usually does.”

“What do you mean, Leon?”’

“Nothing.” Still sniffing and gulping down tears, Leon turned his head away. “I don’t mean anything.”

When she had dried him and put on clean pyjamas she found Lieselotte by his bed, plumping up his pillows.

“Could you stay with him a minute, Lieselotte? I won’t be long.”

Ellen had no recollection of how she got to the door of Marek’s room in the stable block. The rage she had suppressed while helping Leon now consumed her utterly.

“How dare you!” she shouted, before she was even across the threshold. “How dare you use violence on any of my children?”’

Marek looked up briefly from the drawer he was emptying into a battered pigskin case, then resumed his packing.

“No child here gets physically assaulted. It is the law of the school and it is my law.”

He took absolutely no notice. He had begun to take documents from a wooden chest- among them sheaves of manuscript paper.

His indifference incensed her to fever point. “I have spent the whole term trying to calm Leon and now you have undone any good anyone might have done. If he gets pneumonia and dies—”’

“Unlikely,” said Marek indifferently. “You must be completely mad! It’s all very well for you to amuse yourself here pretending to wear spectacles you don’t need and parting your hair in a way that anyone can see it doesn’t go. But when it causes you to brutalise the children—”’

But she could not get him to react. She had the feeling that he was already somewhere where she and Hallendorf did not exist.

“I’m leaving,” he said. “As you see.” “Good!” Leon’s pinched face, his running nose and shivering, scrawny limbs kept her anger at burning point. “You can’t go too soon for any of us.”

He did look at her then. For a moment she remembered what she had felt when she first saw him by the well: that she had been, for a moment, completely understood. This look was its opposite: she was obliterated; a nothing.

But her rage sustained her, and she turned and left him, slamming the door like a child.

When she got back she found Leon dozing, his colour restored. Lieselotte had remade his bed. Bending down to make sure he was tucked in properly, Ellen saw the corner of a white folder protruding from under the mattress and drew it out.

“I only borrowed it,” muttered Leon.

“I was going to give it back.”

“That’s all right, Leon. Go to sleep.” Examining what she held in her hand she found it was a concert programme-and pinned to it a number of sheets of paper covered in Kendrick’s handwriting.

An hour later, Marek knocked at the door of Leon’s room. The children and Ellen were in the dining room; the boy, as he’d expected, was alone.

“Now then, Leon,” he said, sitting down on the bed beside him, “what exactly is it that you want?”’

The tears started to flow again then; the twitchy face screwed itself into a grimace. “I just want you to help me,” he sobbed. “That’s all I want. I want you to help.”

“How?”’

“I don’t know anything… I can’t work out the fingering of my Beethoven sonata and I don’t know if the quartet I’ve written is any good. My parents want me to be a musician-my mother’s desperate for it, and my sisters too. They help me and help me, but I want someone to tell me if I’ve got any talent.”

“No one else can tell you that.”

“But how does one know if it’s worth going on? I don’t know whether I have any true creativity or—”’

“Good God, Leon, why do you always turn back on yourself? If you feel the need to write music, or play it, then do so, but believe me your creativity is of no interest to anyone. Write something-then it’s there. If it’s what you wanted to write, if it exists, then leave it. If it doesn’t, throw it away. Your beautiful state of mind is totally irrelevant.”

“But you—”’

“What happened to me has nothing to do with it. As it happens I was not at all keen on my so-called creativity. I fought it hard and long because I saw that it would take me away from the place I wanted to spend my life in, and the work I thought I had been born to do. If I wrote music it was because I didn’t know how to stop. But you—”’

“My mother loves music so much. And my sisters, and my father is a businessman but he’d have liked to be a pianist-he’s very good. So I thought… I wanted. It’s not that they force me, but—”’

“Yes; I see.” For the first time, Marek felt pity and affection for the boy. “Tell me, Leon, if I asked you what you wanted to do when you grow up, what would you say? Just answer quickly.”

“Make films,” said Leon in an instant.

Marek smiled. “That has the ring of truth.” He sat in silence for a moment, then decided to give the boy what he had asked for-help. “I said no one can judge another person’s vocation and I meant that, but… I think that you are genuinely musical; you will make an excellent amateur-and remember please the meaning of the word. An amateur is a lover of music. You will be a fine facilitator, a person who can make music happen. It is because of people like you and your family that music is heard, that orchestras are formed, and paid for, and that’s something to be proud of. But if you ask me whether you have the original spark, well then, I have to say I think probably not.”

He watched the boy carefully and saw the screwed up look gradually vanish from his face. Then he leant back on the pillow and smiled-a slow smile of relief and happiness. Released from his burden, he looked like a child again, not a wizened old man.