Eva Ibbotson - A Song For Summer

“Good. We’ll try that as soon as I can make some blackout curtains. Now don’t worry any more, darling. We’ll be fine up there. Just go to sleep.”

But Kendrick had sat up, in the grip of a terrible panic: “You won’t leave me, Ellen, will you? You won’t go away and leave me alone? I’ve always been alone and I couldn’t—”’

He began to weep and Ellen, fighting a weariness so profound that she thought it must pull her down to the centre of the earth, managed to take him into her arms.

“No, Kendrick, I won’t leave you alone, I promise. I’ll never leave you alone.”

He became calm then, and slept, and snored (but not unpleasantly), while Ellen lay awake till the image of the dead shepherd in the snow became visible and she had achieved the dawn.

“That’s extraordinary,” said Jan Chopek, looking at Marek stretched out on his iron bed in the Air Force Barrack at Cosford. “I’ve never seen him drunk. Not like this. Not incapable. God knows he drank all right with the Poles, and with those idiots from the Foreign Legion in France-but I’ve never known him pass out.”

“Well, he’s passed out now. Thank God he’s not on duty for the next forty-eight hours.”

“If he had been he wouldn’t have done it,” said Jan, and the British Pilot Officer shrugged. He’d already noticed that Marek was hero-worshipped by his fellow Czechs.

Marek had approached his blackout systematically, retiring to his room, loosening his tunic, and tilting the vodka bottle into his mouth so that no one would have to drag him to his bed. He had not even been sick, but all efforts to rouse him were unavailing.

Between his locker and Jan’s was a picture of a pneumatic blonde left behind by the previous occupant who had not returned from a night raid on Bremen, and a calendar. Under the date-December the eighteenth-was the motto: No Man Can Bathe Twice In The Same River.

“Something went wrong,” said Jan. “He tried to get leave for the weekend-he was going up north to the Lake District for something. He got it, too-and then Phillips pranged his car and he had to go up instead of him. He didn’t say much, but he was very upset, I think.”

Marek, when things went wrong, became extremely silent, but he had not often resorted to the standard panacea for disappointment.

“Well, there’s nothing we can do except wait till he comes round,” said the Pilot Officer.

This Marek did some six hours later, about the time that Ellen was rising from her nuptial bed. He had a shower, changed and decided that Fate had spoken. He was not certain now if he would have gone north and interrupted the wedding like someone in an opera. Certainly he had intended to. But the war had intervened-while Ellen was being married he was turning back over the Channel-and it was for the best. For Oskar Schwachek, now Gruppenführer Schwachek, still lived, and while he did so, Ellen must be protected from whatever was to come.

It wasn’t only Goethe who said beware of what you wish for in youth in case in later years it is granted to you.

He did say it-in the course of his long life Goethe said almost everything-but others said it too, among them Nora Coutts, Marek’s formidable grandmother, who now sat by his bed and said: “Did you expect to be pleased then, when you heard?”’

Eighteen months had passed since Ellen’s marriage. In the summer of 1941 Hitler’s madness had caused him to attack Russia, but even if the danger of invasion had ceased, the British, their cities ceaselessly bombed, their Air Force stretched beyond its limits, were experiencing total war as never before.

Marek had flown Wellingtons with the Czech Squadron of Bomber Command since his release from the Isle of Man and always returned safely, but the previous week a hit to his port engine had forced him to bail out with his crew before he could land. His leg was in plaster and in traction, and now, to his fury, he was being taken out of active service and sent to Canada as an instructor.

“I’ll be fit in another month,” he’d raged, but without avail.

“We need first-class people to train the younger men,” the Station Commander had said, not liking to point out that two years of solid flying were enough for a man well into his thirties and one who had been through hell before he ever reached Great Britain.

But it was not this news to which Nora Coutts was referring. As next of kin she had been summoned when Marek was injured, and now she sat at the head of his bed, knitting comforts for the troops. The balaclavas and mittens she made bore no resemblance to the misshapen artefacts which Ellen had garnered from the gardens at Hallendorf: Nora was a champion knitter as she was a champion roller of bandages and provider of meals-on-wheels, and since her return to her native land just before the outbreak of war had been the mainstay of the WVS.

“What did you expect?”’ she repeated.

“To be pleased. To be relieved… to feel that a weight had dropped from my mind,” said Marek, and wondered why he had been so stupid as to share with his grandmother the news he had received three days before from Europe. If he hadn’t been feeling so groggy and confused after they set his leg he would have had more sense.

“You ordered a man to be killed and to know who was responsible. Your orders have been carried out, Schwachek is dead-and you expect to be pleased? You?”’

“Yes.”

But looking into her face, whose implacable sanity reminded him somehow of Ellen, he began to realise how mad he had been. “I should have done it myself. I wanted them to find him but it was for me to do.”

“It’s done now; there was no choice.”

But she said no more, for the fracture in his leg was a multiple one and he had a dislocated shoulder — and now he was to be separated from his comrades and the work he loved.

Lying back on the pillows, weary and in pain, Marek reached out once more for the triumph that should have been his-and once again it eluded him. Schwachek had been bound for Russia. That horrific campaign in which the Germans were dying like flies might well have done Marek’s work for him. His grandmother was right; he had been mad.

“Do you ever think of Ellen?”’ she asked suddenly.

Marek turned his head on the pillow and smiled.

“What do you think?”’ he said.

After she left Marek, Nora Coutts did something she did very seldom; she hesitated.

She had not hesitated when she told the Russian anarchist not to be silly, and she had not hesitated when she left all her possessions behind and walked to the Czech border, arriving there an hour before the Germans invaded, but she hesitated now.

“Do you ever think of Ellen?”’ she had asked Marek, and got her answer.

But Ellen was married. In the world into which Nora had been born that would have been the end of the matter. But in the world as it was now, where human beings were shot out of the sky, or torpedoed or gunned down, was it perhaps important that people should part without misunderstanding, with the air clear between them? She did not for a moment consider that Ellen would leave her husband, and would have been shocked if anyone had suggested it-but would it comfort Ellen to know that Marek was aware now of his madness? That it would console Marek to see her before he sailed, she was certain.

In the end she decided to do nothing, but a month after her visit to the hospital, a troop ship en route from Canada was torpedoed.

Two days later, she set off for the north.

Nora walked from the station; at eighty-two she would have scorned to take a taxi for a distance of two miles. Marek had been discharged from hospital and was waiting for his orders to sail. Glad though she was that he was no longer flying, she would miss him badly when he went overseas. He talked of her joining him in Canada, but she would stay now and die here.