Eva Ibbotson - A Song For Summer

“I’m leaving in the morning,” he said. “Yes, I know.”

“But not for America.”

“Oh? Why not?”’

He shrugged. “I don’t really know. I suppose you could say that I have decided to stay and share the fate of my countrymen.”

She took a steadying breath. “Where to, then?”’

“To Pettelsdorf,” he said, using the old name for his home. “And I want you to come.”

Mozart’s sister vanished into the shadows; Van Gogh’s brother dematerialised. Joy exploded and the night stars sang.

“To see the storks?”’ she asked. “That also,” said Marek-and pulled her to her feet.

Tamara, alone of those at Hallendorf, had had a frustrating and unpleasant day. Not one of the Toscanini Aunts had noticed her or asked about her career. She had been presented simply as the headmaster’s wife and then ignored.

Well, now Bennet should make it up to her; he should make her feel special and wanted again. In the bedroom, with its windows over the courtyard, she took the record of the Polovtsian dances out of the sleeve, sharpened the fibre needle of the gramophone, took off her dress.

Bennet turned from the window to find the proceedings well under way. But this time he did not view them with his usual mixture of dread and resignation. Instead he smiled pleasantly at his wife and said: “Not tonight, dear. I’m rather tired.”

He did not, however, show any particular signs of fatigue. Instead he walked past Tamara, who was in the act of unstoppering the Bessarabian Body Oil, and made his way downstairs.

It seemed to him to be his duty as well as his pleasure to be the first to congratulate the two people he had seen embracing so closely and passionately by the well.

“A consummation devoutly to be wished,” he murmured, thinking of Marek and Ellen sharing a life.

There could have been no better ending to this happy day.

It was as lovely as she had expected, the famous Forest of Bohemia. Pools of light between ancient trees, new-minted streams tumbling over glistening stones… Squirrels ran along the branches of great limes; woodpeckers hammered at the trunks of oaks that had stood “from everlasting to everlasting”.

Bennet had insisted on lending them his car for the few days he could spare Ellen. It was an open Morris Minor; they drove along the lanes as if in a beneficent perambulator, at one with the birdsong and the sky.

“Are you hungry?”’ Marek said. “Would you like to stop somewhere for lunch?”’, and she wondered how soon it would be before just seeing him turn his head would no longer send her heart leaping. It would stop, this joy, she told herself; she had watched married couples on the Underground, in tea shops, and it was clear they didn’t feel like this, but at the moment it was impossible to imagine.

She shook her head. “I’m fine.”

But he decided to stop the car just the same. “It seems I need to kiss you,” he explained. “If you have no objection.”

They drove on, past a tiny chapel with silvered aspen tiles on the roof and water wheels which seemed as much a part of the forest as the trees. No wonder, she thought, that Marek growing up in this had such assurance, such strength-and the gift of silence which came from it.

The assurance, too, to state his plans without embarrassment.

“I am going to take Ellen home to meet my parents,” he had said to the children and the staff. “And when term is over, I’m going to marry her.”

“Can we come to the wedding?”’ the children asked: Flix and Janey, Bruno and Ursula… and Sophie, trying to be happy for Ellen, trying to fight down her fear of loss.

“Of course.”

Later he had asked her if she wanted to be married from Gowan Terrace. “Your mother would like it, I imagine?”’

Ellen did not mind “where” or even “whether”. She lived in a Blake-ian world of now; if God had arrived she would have asked him to dinner, unsurprised.

Marek too had shrugged off his restless concern for his country’s future and his own. He would stay at Pettelsdorf, write the symphony that for some time now had declared its intention to be composed, and fetch Ellen when the term was done.

They had been so kind at Hallendorf, so happy for her, thought Ellen gratefully: Freya and Lieselotte offering to do her work, Hermine hugging her… Chomsky had been surprised, understandably, that anyone could be preferred to him, but if he had to lose he was content to lose to Marek. Now she remembered Leon’s face as Marek handed him two sheets of music-a Serenade he had written as a boy and found in Steiner’s trunk.

“For my biographer,” Marek had said, teasing him, and the boy had flushed with pleasure and for once been silent.

Only Tamara had not been there to see them off. “She’s got a migraine,” Margaret had whispered. “It’s a good one-Toussia Alexandrovna was an expert!”

But it was Steiner Ellen thought of now, fingering the silver filigree cross she wore round her neck. He had come across the lake to say goodbye and taken her aside.

“I bought this for Marek’s mother many years ago… before she was engaged. I’d like you to have it,” he’d said.

She’d made no attempt to refuse. There were no games to be played with this old man. She only kissed him and wiped her eyes and asked no more questions, for his lifelong love for Milenka was obvious in the way he opened the box and took out the beautiful thing he had chosen with such care, and never proffered.

In the early afternoon they stopped at an inn and sat outside at a wooden table beside a stone trough where the dray horses came to drink. They ate rye bread and cheese and drank the famous beer of Marek’s country-and she asked again those questions which are the best of all because the answers are waited for, and known. Will Nora Coutts still be in her room drinking Earl Grey from Harrods? Will Lenitschka have baked a beigli for you and will it contain apricots and hazelnuts? Will the geese be patrolling your mother’s hammock and is it honestly true that your father goes hunting with Albanian Indigestion Pills? She found she knew the name of Marek’s wolfhound but not of his mother’s Tibetan terrier, and now too she wanted to know what the old man was called, the one who kept bees and said: “Pity; pity about the music,” whenever Marek went away.

“Tell it again,” she begged, asking about the spare doves that had to be driven away in washing baskets, and the grandfather who had outlived Chekhov and was buried with his fishing flies-and he would begin to do so and then decide it was more urgent to hold her and kiss her and learn the exact disposition of the freckles on her nose.

“The light will be right,” he said as they got back into the car. “The house faces west.” She would see it with the ochre walls bathed in the sleepy gold of early evening. “It’s just a house,” he said, trying to rein back, but it was useless. Her love for Pettelsdorf, before she had ever set foot in it, was ineradicable.

Oh Henny, if only you were here, she thought; if only you knew. But Henny did know. It was Henny who had taught her not to fear happiness. “It takes courage to be happy,” Henny had said. But I have it, thought Ellen, and looked at Marek’s hands on the steering wheel and vowed she would give him space to work and time to be alone, but not perhaps at this second when it was necessary to touch one of his knuckles carefully with her fingertips in case it went away.

“I’d like to go to the well first,” she said, “the one you told me about in Kalun… where the girls go after their betrothal and draw a glass of water and bring it to their lovers.” She looked at him a shade anxiously. “You will drink it, won’t you-even though water is for the feet?”’