Eva Ibbotson - A Song For Summer

The director smoothed his brilliantined hair. “I think there must be some mistake. Meierwitz has been taken… Meierwitz has left. He refused the chance of emigration. He made difficulties and this is something that the Third Reich cannot allow. I assure you no harm will come to him, and Herr Kessler is an excellent musician. Please, Kessler, show Herr Altenburg.”

The blond young man moved to the front of the platform and the theme which had come to Marek out there by the Hudson River sang out over the hall. He played well.

“Stop,” said Marek.

Now he looked around the hall more carefully. Other faces were missing: the first horn, a man called Cohen, the second flautist…

“You will be kind enough to tell me where they have taken Meierwitz?”’ said Marek quietly.

“I’m afraid I haven’t the slightest idea.” The director was becoming ruffled. “You must agree yourself that German music needed purging from foreign influences and in particular from—”’

Marek could never describe the onset of his rages; those first moments were out of time. When he came to himself, he was holding the portly, squealing little man out of the first-floor window by one pin-striped trouser leg.

“Where is he, you little toady? Where have they taken him?”’

“Stop it, stop it! I’ll be killed-pull me in, damn you. Help! Help!”

Marek lowered his grip so that he was holding only one ankle. Down in the street a crowd was gathering; a man hurried out of the house opposite with a camera…

“You heard what I said. Where is he? You’ve got exactly one minute.”

“He’s in a camp… Weichenberg… near the Czech border. It is for resettlement.”

Overcome by disgust, Marek hauled him in and hung him over the sill. Then he turned to the orchestra.

“There will be no performance of this concerto, gentlemen. Nor of any of my music while the present regime is in power,” he said-and left the hall.

He went back to Pettelsdorf. His determination to find and rescue Meierwitz had been instantaneous and it seemed to him that he could do it better from somewhere familiar whose every hiding place he knew well.

But even his own country was not free from evil. Not all the Sudeten Germans were making trouble, not all of them wanted to belong to the German Reich, but there were enough hotheads, egged on by the Nazis in Berlin, to make life perilous for those who wished only to live in peace. Marek’s father was insulted because he was content to be part of the Czech Republic; some of his workmen were beaten up when they went into the market town; and Marek’s action in withdrawing his work from the Reich was seen by many as treachery. He found himself watched and visited by high-ranking Nazis trying to make him change his mind, and it soon became clear that he was making trouble for his family and that as Marcus Altenburg, the avowed friend of Jewish musicians and other “Enemies of the Reich”, he could not go unobserved.

It was then that he came to Hallendorf to find Professor Steiner, meaning only to borrow his van-and found a man as obstinately determined as he was himself to put right the wrongs that his homeland had perpetrated.

Kendrick Frobisher had his faults but he was a truthful young man. When he said that his mother had delivered a camel on the way to church he was reporting facts that were well known in the district, and when he said that Crowthorpe Hall was both wet and red, he did not exaggerate.

What he had perhaps not made clear to Ellen-for he was, in his own way, a modest person-was that it was also large. The house had fourteen bedrooms, only some of which were so mildewed and damp that they were virtually unusable. It had a drawing room, a billiard room, a library (some distant ancestor having gathered together the most unreadable collection of books ever assembled), a dining room lined in peeling Morocco leather and a gallery which ran round the vast and draughty hall.

The size of Crowthorpe was augmented by an eruption of turrets, gables and other protuberances, for the house had been extensively rebuilt in Victorian times, and stained-glass windows and heavily swathed curtains managed to reduce the light which came in from the melancholy, sheep-ridden countryside to the point where the lamps had to be lit by three o’clock in the afternoon, even in summer. Inside too the heavy, convoluted furniture, the claw-footed tables and blood-red Turkey carpets created an ambience in which Queen Victoria, not noted for her joie de vivre, would have been entirely at home.

The significance of Crowthorpe, however, lay not in the house, but in the land which surrounded it. The estate comprised nearly four thousand acres, and though much of it was in the same melancholy and largely useless vein that characterised the house-a lake full of ill-tempered pike, a bosom-shaped hill on which (despite its relatively low stature) two hikers had perished in a blizzard, a derelict gravel pit-there was also, in the fertile river valley which the mansion overlooked, a large and profitable farm which had been managed frugally and effectively by the farm manager, a Cumbrian born and bred, for many years.

That the estate should go entire and unencumbered to the eldest son had been Mrs Kendrick’s intention, as it was the intention of every landowner in this self-contained and rural district. Since her husband’s death she had been in charge of Crowthorpe’s affairs, and that Roland meant to leave the Indian Army and come home to Britain was a source of great satisfaction. Roland had been a pleasure to her from the moment of his birth; a handsome, outgoing, tough little boy who seldom cried, was good at sport, and went off to his prep school at seven with a brave smile.

Roland would make a good master for Crowthorpe and as he had had the sense to marry out there, there might soon be a son.

And if anything happened to Roland there was William. William was not quite as steady as Roland-there had been a few debts during his young days and rumours of trouble with a girl who was undoubtedly common and had had to be paid off. But he had steadied down a lot; he was handsome and popular with the county, and no doubt would soon get himself engaged to someone suitable.

So the succession was secure and normally Mrs Frobisher would not have given a second thought to poor Kendrick, that unfortunate afterthought which had resulted from her permitting her husband what she had virtually ceased to Dermit after her elder sons were born. Kendrick had been a disaster from the first, embarrassing and distressing her with his inability to fit in; his asthma, his fear of horses, his shame-making crying fits when it was time to return to school… and, later, the way he buried himself in his room listening to obscure and depressing music and ruining his eyes with endless reading.

But that morning, in The Times, she had read that it was the intention of the Government to issue gas masks to the populace. Mrs Frobisher had not been very interested in the policies of Herr Hitler. She had no particular quarrel with him — indeed, with his attempts to clear away Jews, homosexuals, communists and gypsies she had a certain sympathy-but he was making a lot of noise about Lebensraum and colonies and that was a different matter. The art of colonisation was one that was only understood by the British, who knew how to deal with inferior races with justice and sternness. So it might after all be necessary to fight a war, and Mrs Frobisher, suppressing with an iron effort of will the panic that the memory of the last war and its hideous decimation of the nation’s youth brought to her, had decided that Kendrick must be sent forand instructed to marry. Kendrick would survive whatever happened; with his asthma and his astigmatism, not to mention the slight curvature of his spine, there was no question of his being called up for military service. Horrible as it was to imagine him as master of Crowthorpe, it would be better than letting the estate go out of the family.