Eva Ibbotson - A Song For Summer

“What is your house like?”’ she asked him once, for he lived in a small bachelor flat in Pimlico and seldom went home.

“Wet,” he had answered sadly.

“Wetter than other houses?”’ she wanted to know.

Kendrick said yes. His home was in the Lake District, in Borrowdale, which had the highest rainfall in England. He went on to explain that as well as being wet it was red, being built of a particular kind of sandstone which became crimsoned in the rain.

Realising that it could not be easy to live in a wet red house with two successful older brothers and a mother who had delivered a camel on the way to church, Ellen was kind to him. She accompanied him to concerts and to art galleries and to plays without scenery, and smiled at him, her mind on other things, when he paid her compliments.

These were not the ordinary kind: they involved Kendrick in hours of pleasurable research in libraries and museums. Ellen’s hair had darkened to an unsensational light brown and she had, to her great relief, largely outgrown her dimples, but in finding painters and poets who had caught the way her curls fell across her brow, or the curve of her generous mouth, he was on fertile ground.

“Look, Ellen,” he would say, “here’s a portrait of Sophronia Ebenezer by Raphael. Or it may only be by the School of Raphael,” he would add conscientiously. “The attribution isn’t certain. But she’s tilting her head just like you tilt yours when you listen.”

In the delectable Nell Gwyn Kendrick discerned the curve of Ellen’s throat and her bestowing glance, and Wordsworth’s lines: “She was a phantom of delight” might have been penned with her in mind. Even music yielded its images: the Scherzo of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony seemed to him to mirror precisely her effervescent capacity for joy.

Aware that he was enjoying himself, Ellen was caught quite unawares when he followed her into the kitchen one day as she was making coffee and forgetting Sophronia Ebenezer and Nell Gwyn and even Beethoven, seized one of her hands and said in a voice choked with emotion: “Oh Ellen, I love you so much. Won’t you please, please marry me?”’

Too late did Ellen reproach herself and assure him that she did not love him, could not marry him, did not intend to marry anyone for a very long time. It would have been as well to try to deprive Sir Perceval of his quest for the Grail as persuade Kendrick that all was lost. He would wait, if need be for years, he would not trouble her, all he asked was to serve her family, address even more envelopes, attend even more meetings-and be allowed to glimpse her as she went about her work.

Ellen could hardly forbid him her mother’s house; there was nothing to do except hope that he would grow out of so one-sided a passion. And during her last year at university something happened which put the erudite young man entirely out of her mind.

Henny fell ill. She had terminal cancer and Professor Carr, whom she had served with her life, proposed to send her to the geriatric ward of the local hospital to die.

Like many peasants, Henny was terrified of hospitals. Ellen now stopped trying to please her relatives. She left college three months before her finals and told her grandfather that Henny would die in her own bed and she would nurse her.

She had help, of course, excellent local nurses who came by day, but most of the time they spent together, she and Henny, and they made their own world. Herr Hitler was eliminated, as was Mussolini, strutting and braying in Rome. Even the clamour of King George’s Silver Jubilee scarcely reached them.

During this time which, strangely, was not unhappy, Henny went back to her own childhood in the lovely Austrian countryside in which she had grown up. She spoke of the wind in the pine trees, the cows with their great bells, about her brothers and sisters, and the Alpenglühen when in the hour of sunset the high peaks turned to flame.

And again and again she spoke about the flowers. She spoke about the gentians and the edelweiss and the tiny saxifrages clinging to the rocks, but there was one flower she spoke of in a special voice. She called it a Kohlröserl — a little coal rose — but it was not a rose. It was a small black orchid with a tightly furled head.

“It didn’t look much, but oh Ellie, the scent! You could smell it long before you found the flowers. In the books they tell you it smells like vanilla, but if so, it’s like vanilla must smell in heaven. You must go, Liebling. You must go and put your face to them.”

“I will, Henny. I’ll bring back a root and—”’

But she didn’t finish and Henny patted her hand and smiled, for they both knew that she was not a person who wanted things dug up and planted on her grave.

“Just find them and tell them… thank you,” said Henny.

A few days later she spoke of them again: “Ah yes, Kohlröserl,” she said-and soon afterwards she died.

Ellen didn’t go back to finish her degree. She enrolled at the Lucy Hatton School of Cookery and Household Management and Henny was right, she did have talent. She graduated summa cum laude and her mother and her aunts and Kendrick Frobisher watched her receive her diploma. As she came off the platform with her prizes, grace touched Dr Charlotte Carr, who was a good woman, and she threw her arms round her daughter and said: “We’re all so proud of you, my darling. Really so very proud.”

And three months later, in the spring of 1937, answering an advertisement in the Lady, Ellen set off for Austria to take up a domestic post in a school run by an Englishman and specialising in Music, Drama and the Dance.

It was listed in the guide books as an important castle and definitely worth a detour, but Schloss Hallendorf had nothing to do with drawbridges or slits for boiling oil.

Built by a Habsburg count for his mistress, its towers housed bedrooms and boudoirs, not emplacements for guns; pale blue shutters lay folded against pink walls, roses climbed towards the first-floor windows.

Carinthia is Austria’s most southern province; anything and everything grows there. In the count’s pleasure gardens, morning glory wreathed itself round oleander bushes, jasmine tumbled from pillars, stone urns frothed with geraniums and heliotrope. Behind the house, peaches and apricots ripened in the orchards and the rich flower-studded meadows sloped gently upwards towards forests of larch and pine. And to the front, where stone steps descended to the water and black swans came to be fed, was a view which no one who saw it ever forgot: over the lake to the village and up… up… to the snowy zigzag of the high peaks.

But the Habsburg counts fell on hard times. The castle stood empty, housed wounded soldiers in the Great War… fell empty again. Then in the year 1928, an Englishman named Lucas Bennet took over the lease and started his school.

Ellen stood by the rails of the little steamer and looked back at the village with its wooden houses, the inn with its terrace and chestnut trees, the church on a small promontory.

It was a serious church; not onion domed but with a tall, straight spire.

In the fields above the village she could see piebald cows as distinct as wooden toys. were they feasting on Henny’s Kohlröserl, those fortunate Austrian cows?

There was still snow on the summits, but down on the lake the breeze was warm. It had been a moment of sheer magic, coming through the Mallnitz tunnel and finding herself suddenly in the south. She had left London in fog and drizzle; here it was spring. The hanging baskets in the stations were filled with hyacinths and narcissi, candles unfurled on the chestnut trees; she had seen lemon trees and mimosa.

The steamer which rounded the lake three times a day was steeped in self-importance. The maximum amount of bustle accompanied the loading and unloading of passengers, of crates, of chickens in hampers-and the captain was magnificently covered in gold braid.