Eva Ibbotson - A Song For Summer

“Shall I get you a sandwich?”’ she asked. “They seem to have opened the canteen.”

Marek looked up and found himself staring straight at Ellen.

She had come down the day before for her mother’s fiftieth birthday, bringing butter and eggs from the farm and dahlias and chrysanthemums from the garden. Two of the windows of Gowan Terrace were boarded up, leaking sandbags surrounded the house, but the sisters saw nothing wrong; Holloway Prison had been far more uncomfortable.

Ellen had provided the kind of instant party she was famous for, and assured her mother, as she invariably did, that she was blissfully happy and leading exactly the life she would have chosen.

Then on the following day she went to the National Gallery to visit her sandwich ladies. It was meant to be a purely social visit, after which it was Ellen’s intention to go upstairs and hear the concert properly and not in the occasional snatches she had been permitted as a canteen worker when somebody opened a door.

But she was unlucky. The ladies who ran the canteen were members of the aristocracy and famous alike for the excellence of their sandwiches and the ferocity of their discipline. Ellen chanced to arrive on the day that the Honourable Mrs Framlington had been delayed by a time bomb on the District Line, and presently found herself behind the counter, slicing tomatoes and piling them on to wholemeal bread. But even the canteen ladies had to take shelter when the sirens went, moving across to the reinforced basement and setting up their trestle tables among the audience.

It was then that Ellen, finding herself opposite Marek, did something unexpected. She put down the plate of sandwiches, walked over to him and grasped his sleeve in a gesture in which desperation and possession were so strangely intermingled that the dark-haired girl vanished into the crowd. Only then, still grasping the cloth as though to let go would be to risk drowning, did she respond to his greeting, and speak his name.

An hour later they sat on a bench in St James’s Park, looking not at each other but at the ducks, waddling complacently up and down in front of them. The meat ration was down to eight ounces a week but the British would have eaten each other rather than the wildfowl in their parks. Ellen did not look at Marek because what she had experienced when she saw him had frightened her so badly that she had to search out neutral things to look at: the withered grass, the empty deck chairs and in the distance the gold railings of Buckingham Palace. Marek looked away because he was summoning up his last ounce of strength for what was to come and sensed already that it might not be enough.

The things they would normally have done to compose themselves were denied to them. Since his leg was still stiff and painful, they could not walk the streets, or find, later, somewhere to dance where they could hold each other with perfect propriety. They could not, in the middle of the afternoon, have dinner and sit in intimacy at a shaded table.

“I must get back to Gowan Terrace,” said Ellen presently, her voice hardly audible. “They’ll be expecting me.”

“So you’ve said,” said Marek. “Several times.” But when he turned he saw that her eyes were full of tears.

“We shall have tea,” decided Marek.

“Tea at the Dorchester. Tea is not threatening; we will drink it calmly.”

“Yes,” she said.

They found a taxi and it was calming to drink Lapsang Souchong and eat petits fours overlooking Hyde Park as though four years were not between them and there was no war. He had told her about Schwachek’s death. Now he told her that he was going to Canada; that this was the last time they would meet, and at once the intimacy of the tea room, the soupy music vanished and Ellen found herself trembling, plunged into a sudden hell.

“I have to go,” she said pitifully.

He nodded and limped to the reception desk. “Have you got one?”’ she asked when he returned.

“Got what?”’

“A taxi.”

He shook his head. “No. What I’ve got is a room for the night.”

She shrank back in her chair. “You can’t have done that. You can’t.” She was unable to believe that he could be so cruel.

“You don’t have to sleep with me. You don’t have to remove a single stitch of clothing. But before I go we must talk properly. I must know if you’re happy and if you can forgive me for what I did to us both.”

She was silent for long enough to make him very frightened. Then she lifted her head and said that sad thing that girls say when all is lost. She said: “I haven’t got a toothbrush.”

But for a long time no talking was done. There was a moment when she first lay in his arms, both of them perfectly still like children about to sleep, when she thought that maybe she could hold back what was to happen-when she thought that perhaps she did not have to know what was to be denied her for the rest of her life. Perhaps Marek also was afraid of the pain that knowledge would bring, for he too made himself very quiet as though to rest like this was enough to assuage his longing.

But of course it was not to be, and later, when it was over, she realised that it was as bad as she had feared-that it was worse… That to try and live without the love of this one man was going to destroy her — and yet that somehow it had to be done.

“All right,” said Marek. “Now talk.

I want to know everything about your life. Everything.”

Darkness had fallen; the sky was clear and full of stars; being able to see them, undazzled by the neon lights, had been one of the benisons of the war. Marek had gone to the window. Now he came back to bed, and kissed her chastely on the forehead to show her she could converse uninterrupted, and like a child she folded her hands and began.

“I have goats,” she said. “Nearly twenty of them. Angoras. They’re very beautiful animals. Kendrick doesn’t like the milk-no one likes the milk-but we make cheese, and they don’t smell at all, they’re very—”’

“Thank you,” said Marek. “I am acquainted with goats.”

“Yes.” She admitted this, her head bent. “And bantams; I have a flock of Silkies, they’re beautiful birds, white feathers and black legs. Of course the eggs they lay aren’t very large-you wouldn’t expect it-but they have a very good flavour. And we won first prize in the Village Show for our onions, and—”’

She babbled on, producing her strange agricultural litany, and Marek, afraid he would be given the milk yield per Jersey cow, gently turned her head towards him. “You were going to make Crowthorpe into a sanctuary,” he prompted, remembering Leon’s words in the internment camp.

“Yes.” She was silent, remembering her vow. “And I have. It’s just that when you have a sanctuary you can’t exactly choose. I mean, when people came and knocked at the door of a cathedral in the olden days, the priest couldn’t say “I’ll have you and you and the rest must go away”; he had to have everyone.” She paused, surveying in her mind the current population of Crowthorpe. “The land girls are all right, and so are the evacuees that came first, the little Cockney ones, but then we had two more lots from Coventry and Birmingham and they hate each other and their children make Molotov Cocktails in lemonade bottles and throw them out of the window, and the people I wanted like my mother and Sophie can’t get away; Sophie’s in Cambridge and Leon’s joined the pioneers, so I’m left with people like Tamara—”’

“Tamara! You’re not serious? The Little Cabbage?”’

She nodded. “She’s not there all the time but she doesn’t get on with her mother and I don’t mind her too much because she plays the gramophone with Kendrick and he tells her about Dostoevsky. Of course it would be nice if she brought her ration book and stopped stealing the flowers from the conservatory, but it’s not easy for Kendrick, me being so busy… and none of it matters because it’s wartime and compared to people all over the world—”’ She broke off and he saw her pass a finger along her lower eyelid, in the gesture he had seen her use at Hallendorf to stem the tears of a child.