Eva Ibbotson - A Song For Summer

Marek was extraordinarily tired. The Feuerbach crisis had meant a day of incessant rehearsals and then four hours on the rostrum for the opera. Nothing had seemed quite real to him since the curtain went down, and now he realised how foolish he had been. It had seemed polite to escort Brigitta to her apartment, and now here it all was: the double doors open to reveal the ridiculous Swan Bed, the plumped up cushions, the clinging smell of her scent. Brigitta had disappeared and reappeared in a cream lace peignoir, and was trying to snuggle up to him on the sofa.

He moved away.

“Brigitta, that’s over, you know it is. I came to help with the opera. We’re colleagues, that’s all.”

She lifted her face to his. The periwinkle-blue eyes filled with tears. “Darling, how can you say that? When you know I love you.”

“But I don’t love you, Brigitta.” God, how hard it was to say that to a woman. He pushed a hand through his hair, angry that she had put him in this position. “I respect you enormously as a musician; you gave a marvellous performance tonight, but our affair is over. I’m going to America and you have Stallenbach.”

“Oh him!” She edged closer. The peignoir was wide open now; clearly he was supposed to be dazzled by her breasts, her stomach — and indeed if quantity were all this would have been no problem.

“Don’t you remember, my darling, how marvellous it was?”’

Marek sighed. It had been good at times, but even then it was that she had always stood for something. It was Mozart’s lovelorn Countess or Violetta-doomed and dying with perfect breath control-that he had felt he was holding in his arms.

She had begun to cry now, but carefully, for she still wore make-up. “It’s because I’m getting old. It’s because I’m nearly forty.”

She was forty-three and she was using blackmail. She was still playing the role she had played in the opera. “You’re like Octavian,” she stormed. “The first young thing you see and you’re away.”

“No, Brigitta, it isn’t that; you’re still a very beautiful woman.”

It wasn’t because she was young that he had wanted Ellen.

Brigitta was crying in earnest now. “I worked so hard for you. And now because my youth has gone…”

She had worked hard. She had been as obedient as a child, this bullying, autocratic woman.

“Come, Brigitta; you’ll be stopping all the clocks next.”

She had played that scene superbly; the scene where the Marschallin describes the “unrelenting flow of time” and how sometimes she gets up in the night and stops the clocks in the palace. He could hear their soft chiming, evoked by the harps and the celeste, and her voice soaring above them. Did he have the right to deride her fear of ageing even if she was using it to get her way?

Never sleep with anyone out of pity. The maxim was engraved on his heart, as on the heart of everyone who wished to take and receive pleasure in the act of love.

“I’m leaving, Brigitta. I’m going to America, you know that.”

“Then stay with me just one more time. Stay with me because of what we made tonight.”

“All right, Brigitta. I’ll stay for that.”

At three a.m. he woke in the opulent bed, hot and oppressed, and sat up suddenly.

“What’s the matter?”’ she asked sleepily.

He turned a blank face to her. “What?”’

“You said something. Did you have a nightmare?”’ He pushed the hair out of his eyes, longing to leap out of bed, to go and walk and walk, away from this stifling place.

“What did I say?”’

“You said ‘I’ve forgotten the wheel!’” He stared at her, suddenly wide awake. “Did I say that? That’s right. It’s true.”

As the train slowed down at Hallendorf station, Ellen saw that the platform was full of children. They were piled on to the benches, draped round the wrought-iron pillars with their hanging baskets of geraniums or just hopping excitedly up and down. Sophie was there, of course, and Leon and Ursula… Janey and Flix and Bruno too, but also Frank, swishing a stick through the air, and a handful of village children.

She had expected to have the journey across the lake still to gather herself together, but when they surged towards her she was unexpectedly pleased to be among them again.

“We got permission to come and meet you,” shouted Leon.

“There’s been a disaster,” said Sophie. “No, it isn’t a disaster,” contradicted Ursula.

“Yes it is. It is for Bennet. It’s awful for him when he’s written to all the Toscanini Aunts. And it’s a disgrace for the school.” Flix’s lovely face was creased with concern.

Ellen put down her suitcase. “Could you please tell me what’s happened?”’

“It’s Abattoir!” Sophie had come very close, trying to convey the bad news in a suitably serious voice, but overjoyed to see Ellen again. “It’s finished. Kaput. We’re not doing it!”

“What? But what about FitzAllan?”’ “Some men came.” To Ellen’s surprise, Frank came and picked up her suitcase.

“They were solicitors. Lawyers anyway,” said Janey.

All the children were talking at once, clustered round Ellen. Even the village children, though everyone was speaking English, seemed to be involved in breaking the extraordinary news.

“And they said they represented… they worked for Bertolt Brecht and he’d never given permission for the play to be done at all!”

“They were absolutely furious. They told Bennet he was breaking the law of copyright and if one single scene was acted they’d sue him!”

“So Margaret got furious. She said it wasn’t Bennet, it was FitzAllan who said he’d got permission, and they all trooped off to the theatre—”’

“We were just rehearsing the bit where all the workers go on strike and start to die in the snow,” said Flix, “and they marched up to the front-the men in the dark suits-and said: ‘Stop this at once!’”

“They were as red as Turkey cocks. Absolutely gobbling. And Bennet said: “I assure you that Mr FitzAllan has permission from Bertolt Brecht to perform this play; you will hear it from him.” He was very dignified,” said Sophie.

“And then everyone looked at FitzAllan and he just turned a sort of yellow and started stammering and saying there must have been a misunderstanding.”

“But there wasn’t!” Leon’s thin face was contorted with contempt. “He’d made the whole thing up! He’d never been near Brecht, he just thought he could get away with it. The men went away threatening all sorts of things… libel actions and stuff like that. And the next morning Lieselotte put out his horrible nut cutlet and he never came down for breakfast!”

“He did a bunk in the night!”

“So now we haven’t got anything to show the parents, not a thing,” said Leon. “It’s the first time the school hasn’t had a proper play for the end of term, and with the music being hopeless too…”

Ellen, walking with the excited, hopping children towards the landing stage, was as indignant as they were. So much work wasted, so much money too… the masks for the animals over which Rollo had laboured, often far into the night… Jean-Pierre’s military searchlights… yards and yards of muslin… And poor Chomsky, felled by the three-tiered structure, all to no purpose.

In the staffroom that evening she heard the details. “One of the parents was at a party in Zurich and boasted about the coup the school had pulled off,” said Freya, “and someone who knew Brecht was there.”

“But why?”’ Ellen couldn’t understand it. “Why should he go to such lengths to cheat? It’s only a school play.”

Jean-Pierre put down his newspaper. “Not so “only” perhaps-after all, some of the parents here are very distinguished: Frank’s father, and Bruno’s… the parents of the little Sabine who own half of Locarno Chemicals. And the director of the Festspielhaus in Bonn had promised to come: he’s almost a Toscanini’s Uncle, one could say. If FitzAllan had pulled it off it could have been quite a coup for him.”