Eva Ibbotson - A Song For Summer

“They’d believe me if you told them,” said Leon. “I know you can’t now but one day, if you go back.”

Marek got up and went to the window. “Your romantic notions of me are mistaken. I am not at Heiligenstadt renouncing the world. Simply I need a few months in which I am not associated with my former life. But now you have—”’

“I wouldn’t say anything. Not ever. I’ve known you since you came because my mother was in Berlin when you defenestrated that Nazi and it was in all the papers and I saw your picture. But I can keep a secret.”

“If you cannot, the consequences would be very serious. I take it no one else knows?”’

Leon hung his head. “Ellen does. Now. Her fiancé sent her a programme of the concert where they played your songs. I sort of borrowed it and—”’

“Her fiancé?”’ asked Marek, momentarily diverted.

“Well, she says she isn’t going to marry him, but we think she will because he keeps on writing letters and she’s sorry for him because he lives in a wet house and his mother delivered a camel on the way to church.”

His house would not stay wet long if she married him, thought Marek, and saw Ellen with a red-and-white-checked tea towel on a ladder, carefully drying the chimneys.

“His name is Kendrick Frobisher,” said Leon, “and he was at school with you.”

“Really?”’ The name meant nothing to Marek. He came back to the bed. “You have a close and loving family, Leon,” he said. “Not many children are as fortunate. Trust them. Tell them the truth.”

As he made his way to his room to pick up his case, a sudden image came to him of a small pale boy cowering beside a radiator. A much bullied boy always trying to hide in a corner with a book. Yes, he was almost sure that was Frobisher.

Well, that was ridiculous; there was no possible way that Ellen could be going to marry him?

Or was there? Could he turn out to be another creature that needed to be fed-not with breadcrumbs or kitchen scraps this time, but with her pity and her love? In which case she was going to be most seriously unhappy.

But Ellen’s concerns had nothing to do with him. His life at Hallendorf was over. He had said goodbye to Bennet and given in his keys. By the time the children came out of the dining room, Marek was gone.

Ellen, hurrying upstairs, found Leon sitting up in bed-and totally transformed.

“Marek came!” he said in a voice resonant with hero worship. “He came and it’s all right, I don’t have to be a great musician, I can just do ordinary things. I can do everything! Oh Ellen, isn’t it marvellous? I think he must be the most marvellous person in the world.”

She stared at Leon. His face was glowing, his restored and golden future lay before him. It was in defence of this child that she had attacked Marek and sent him away with the memory of her senseless and infantile rage.

“I’m going to get my parents to send me a proper cine camera-you can get them quite cheaply- well, not very cheaply perhaps-and I’m going to write a script. Sophie can star in it and that will show her beastly mother—”’

Ellen let him babble on. Then he stopped. “Ellen, you always say we have to have handkerchiefs and it’s you that’s sniffing now.”

She tried to smile, wiping her eyes. “It’s all right. I quarrelled with Marek, that’s all, and now he’s gone.”

“Oh, he won’t bother with that. A man like that wouldn’t even notice. Ellen, when I’m grown up I’m going to write Marek’s biography- if he’ll let me. He’s already had the most amazing life, what with throwing people out of windows and being a hero and having that opera singer in love with him. She’s terribly famous too-Brigitta Seefeld-there was a lot about her in the sleeve notes to my record.”

Leon had collected almost as much information about his idol as Kendrick Frobisher. “I’m going to be like Eckerman who wrote down everything that Goethe said, or that man Bennet told us about in English-Dr Johnson’s friend Boswell. Do you think you could try and remember the things he said to you-because you were good friends, weren’t you?”’

“Yes, I think we were.”

Never let the sun go down on your wrath. But the sun had gone down; it was sinking spectacularly over the mountains, turning the rock face to crimson and amethyst and gold.

“Only where do you begin?”’ asked Leon, pondering his biography.

“At the beginning, I suppose, Leon,” she said wearily.

At the place in Bohemia where his mother had driven about with white doves in a washing basket…

At the place where there were storks…

The house had been a hunting lodge built of silvered aspen in the ancient forest preserved for their sport by the Hapsburg princes who ruled over the Bohemian lands. In the eighteenth century it was enlarged, became a manor, its windows shuttered, its stuccoed walls painted in the Schönbrunn yellow which Maria Theresa permitted to those who served her.

Marek’s great-grandfather, the Freiherr Marcus von Altenburg, came there from Northern Germany, fell in love with the countryside-its ancient trees, its eagles and owls and unlimited game-and bought it. He cleared enough land round the house to make a small farm, dug a fish pond, and let the sun in on Pettelsdorfs roofs. It was then that the storks came.

For more than a hundred years the von Altenburgs were citizens of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Then in 1918 Austria collapsed and Pettelsdorf-now Pettovice-found itself part of the new Republic of Czechoslovakia.

No one at Pettelsdorf greatly cared. Frontiers had marched back and forward in this part of Europe for generations, but the same wind still blew through the fields of oats and rye, the geese still made their way in single file towards the water, the high-cruppered dray horses still pulled their loads along the dusty, rutted roads.

Marek’s father, though keeping his German nationality, was happy to throw in his lot with the new republic: Czechoslovakia, under Masaryk, was a model of democratic government. He had in any case married a wife brought up in Prague, a bluestocking reared in a little medieval house behind the castle. Milenka Tarnowsky’s mother was English, her father Russian; she herself spoke five languages, had taken tea with Kafka and earned her living translating articles and poetry. To keep open house for all nationalities was as much a tradition of Marek’s home as was the sheltering of wanderers by the monasteries that lined the pilgrim routes towards the east.

It was an unexpected marriage-that of Captain von Altenburg who lived for his hunting and his trees, and the intellectual girl whose spare, honed poems celebrated a unique and inner vision-but it became a byword for happiness.

No wonder then that the son who was born to them should regard the world as created for his personal delight. There were no divisions at Pettelsdorf between the manor and the farm, the farm and the forest. Geese patrolled his mother’s hammock as she worked at her translations; his father’s hunting dogs tumbled with Milenka’s popeyed Tibetan terrier and the mongrels he rescued from the village. As soon as he could sit on a horse, Marek rode with his father on the neverending work of the land, sometimes staying away for days.

He was a person much addicted to abundance. “I don’t like either, I like and,” said the five-year-old Marek when the cook asked which kind of filling he wanted baked into his birthday beigli. “Apricots and poppy seed and walnuts,” he demanded-and got them.

But if the house servants spoilt him, the men in the fields did not. The woodcutters and charcoal burners and draymen who were his heroes knew better than to indulge the boy who would one day be the master, and thus the servant of their demesne. When he was overcome by one of his rare but devastating attacks of temper, it was in the hay barn or paddock that Marek took refuge, kicking and raging till old Stepan, the head forester, brought him back, tear-stained and purged.