Eva Ibbotson - A Song For Summer

“Someone else can take your place, I’m sure,” said the lieutenant.

“No, they can’t. They can’t!” Leon spoke for the first time. “Only Marek can do it.” He stepped forward, leaning towards the commandant. “And I want to stay too! I don’t want to be released till Marek is; I want to—”’

“No,” said Marek, at the same time as Herr Rosenheimer turned in fury on his son: “You will please to stop talking nonsense, Leon. You will come with me. Do you want to kill your mother with worry?”’

Frau Rosenheimer had been released three weeks earlier and it was likely that her lamentations, petitions and bribery had hurried her husband’s release.

Leon might have argued with his father, but Marek’s face made it clear that he would give no quarter.

“I’ll get in touch with the depot and see what they say,” said the commandant.

It was a defeat, but as the men returned to their houses, Captain Henley was not altogether sorry. He had rejoined the army hoping to be sent on active service, but they had told him he was too old and sent him here to do this uncongenial job. Yet sometimes there were rewards. He was not a musical man but now, without knowing that he knew it, he hummed the opening bars of the Sanctus with its soaring, ever ascending solo on the flute.

Then he picked up the telephone and asked for Cosford.

Outside a number of men were gathered, for rumours of a new batch of releases had come through.

“Is it true you’re going tomorrow, Marek?”’ said a thin, white-faced man with his collar turned up. He had dragged himself to rehearsals of the Mass day in day out, in spite of a weakness of the lungs.

“No.”

Marek said no more but Leon, in a white heat of hero worship, spoke for him. “They wanted to release him straight away but he won’t go till after the concert.”

“Is it true?”’

The news spread among the men, faces lightened, someone came and shook him by the hand.

“All right, that will do,” said Marek, getting irritated. “I’ll see you at two o’clock in the hall.”

Knocking on the door of Mon Repos that night, Leon shivered with apprehension and the cold wind from the sea. He had come to a resolution which took all his courage. Ever since Marek had appeared in the camp, he had made it clear that Hallendorf and Ellen were taboo subjects-but now Leon was leaving and he was going to speak.

“I’ve come to say goodbye and to give you my father’s address in London. He says you’ll be welcome at any time for as long as you like-but you know that. We’ve got a splendid air-raid shelter!”

“Thank you.”

Leon took a deep breath and plunged. “I’ve heard from Sophie,” he said.

Marek was silent, his eyes wary. “She’s going to be a bridesmaid at Ellen’s wedding.”

He did not expect Marek to reply, but he said: “To Kendrick Frobisher, I take it?”’

“Not exactly,” said Leon. “More to his kitchen garden and his cows and his evacuees. It’s supposed to be a sanctuary for us all, the wet house. She hasn’t asked us if we want to be there.”

Marek had reverted to silence, his eyes fixed on a sampler saying East West, Home’s Best which the departing landlady of Mon Repos had forgotten to take down.

“She’s getting married on the eighteenth of December, just a week before Christmas. The wedding is at Crowthorpe in the village church at two o’clock in the afternoon. Crowthorpe is where Kendrick lives, it’s between Keswick and Carlisle…”

He babbled on, repeating the time and place, the nearest railway station, till Marek turned his head.

“Shut up, Leon.” There was no feeling in his voice, only a great weariness.

“I could tell her you’re here. I could tell her you’re free. She doesn’t know you’re in England-Sophie didn’t know whether we should—”’

Now though Marek did show emotion. The onset of one of his instant and famous rages.

“You will say nothing about me to Ellen. You will not mention my name. I put you on your honour,” said Marek, reverting unexpectedly to his year at an English Public School. “You will-only hurt her,” he said presently.

Leon’s hero worship subsided momentarily. “I could hardly hurt her more than you have done,” he said.

“Oh darling, you look beautiful,” said Dr Carr, stepping back and smiling at her daughter. “You look quite lovely!”

This is always said to brides by their doting mothers-but as she turned from the mirror in her white dress, it had to be admitted that Ellen’s beauty was of an unexpected kind. Perhaps it was the sepulchral light of Crowthorpe in the mist and rain of December as it came through the stained-glass windows, but Ellen looked submerged, muted, like a bride found under the sea.

She had altered the dress she had worn to the opera in Vienna and covered it with a short jacket, and her curls were held in place by a circlet of pearls left to her by her august grandmother, Gussie Norchester. She wore no veil, and Sophie had gone to fetch the bouquet of Christmas roses which Ellen had made that morning. The Christmas roses had been a bonus; they had helped Ellen very much when she found them unexpectedly growing behind a potting shed in the dank and freezing garden, for it was not easy to remember her vision of Crowthorpe as she had first seen it on that summer day. But she would be faithful; she would do it all; everyone who came here should be fed and warm and comfortable-and the farm manager had suggested they keep goats, whose milk was not rationed.

Thinking of goats, of whom she was extremely fond, Ellen began to make her way downstairs.

Sophie and Ursula, shawls over their bridesmaid’s dresses, were on the landing, talking to Leon. The lights had had to be turned on by midday, but only a faint glow, cast by a lamp in the shape of a Pre-Raphaelite maiden, illumined the stairs and they were too absorbed to notice her.

“Janey’s absolutely sure,” Leon was saying. “He wasn’t on the train. She waited till every single person had got off; and there isn’t another one today.”

“He doesn’t have to come by train. Pilots get petrol, I’ll bet. He could come up by car even now.” Sophie, usually so inclined to fear the worst, had all along been convinced that Marek would come-that he would stride in at the last minute and carry Ellen off.

“Can’t we do something to slow her up?”’ They thought of Aniella in her swagged boat, the draperies trailing in the water. Crowthorpe was wet enough, God knew, but Ellen was doing the short drive to the church in the estate’s old Morris.

“We could put sugar in the carburettor,” suggested Ursula, who had become addicted to gangster films.

But sugar was rationed, and the wedding was in half an hour.

“He might still come,” said Sophie obstinately. “Marek’s just the sort of person to burst into the church and if he does I’ll tug at Ellen’s dress or tell her to faint or something.”

From upstairs they heard the rustle of silk, a sharp intake of breath-then Ellen came down the stairs towards them.

“Marek is here?”’ she said very quietly. “He’s in England?”’

All three turned to her, consternation in their faces.

“Yes,” said Leon, “I was with him in the internment camp.”

“And he knows that I’m getting married today?”’ Silently they nodded.

“I see.”

Anguished, waiting, they looked at her. But she did not crumple up, nor weep. She straightened her shoulders and they saw pride cover her face like a film of ice.

“I’ll have my flowers, please, Sophie.” And then: “It’s time to go.”

Kendrick was waiting at the altar beside his best man, a Cambridge acquaintance whom no one had met before. Pausing inside the church, Ellen surveyed the guests as they turned their heads. The Crowthorpe retainers in their dark heavy overcoats fared best, accustomed as they were to the hardship of the Frobisher regime and the freezing church. Margaret Sinclair was there, giving her a heartening smile, but not Bennet, who was still breaking his codes… Janey beside Frank, in the uniform of a private… a whole bevy of gallant aunts, real ones and honorary ones, in hats they had dusted out specially-and, sitting a little apart and looking not at all like Beryl Smith but entirely like Tamara Tatriatova, (and wearing-Ellen had time to notice-coma pilfered geranium from the conservatory in her turban), the Russian ballerina. Yet it was the detestable Tamara who had made the previous night endurable, taking Kendrick into his study to listen to Stravinsky and leaving Ellen free to help the maids with preparations for the wedding lunch.