Eva Ibbotson - A Song For Summer

“Isn’t that where the massacre was?”’ asked Ellen.

“Yes. I’m going to go there when I’m grown up. To Wounded Knee.”

“That seems sensible,” said Ellen. Then she went over to Sophie. “What is it? What’s the matter?”’

“She’s lost her parents. I can’t think it’s anything to make a fuss about-I lost my parents years ago. I killed my mother because my arm stuck out when I was born and I killed my father because he went off to shoot tigers to cure his grief and died of a fever. But Sophie gets in a state,” Ursula explained.

Ellen sat down on the bed and smoothed Sophie’s long dark hair. “When you say “lost”, Sophie, what exactly do you mean?”’

But what Sophie meant was not something she could put into words. She had been shunted backwards and forwards between her warring parents since she was two years old, never knowing who would meet her or where she belonged. Her homesickness was of that devastating kind experienced by children who have no home.

“I’ve lost my father’s address. He’s not in Vienna, he’s lecturing in America and I don’t know where he is. And my mother’s making a film somewhere in Ireland and I don’t know where she is either.”

Ellen considered the problem. “Is there someone who’s connected with your father’s work in Vienna? Has he got a secretary?”’

“He’s got Czernowitz.” Sophie was sitting up now. “He’s my father’s lab assistant. He looks after the rats. He gave me a rat once for myself. It was beautiful with a brown ear but it died.”

“It died of old age,” Ursula put in. “So there’s nothing to make a fuss about.”

“Well look, have you got Czernowitz’s address?”’

“Yes, I have.”

“Then it’s perfectly simple. We’ll ask Bennet if you can telephone to Vienna and then he’ll tell you about your father.”

Sophie’s sobs grew less. “Would that be all right? Could I do that?”’

“Of course you could. Now, where’s Janey, because I’m going to put the lights out.”

“She doesn’t come to bed. She sleeps in the bathroom.”

“What?”’

“She wets her bed though she’s quite old. Older than us. And the Coucoushka said she wouldn’t deal with her sheets any longer. She was supposed to look after us when the last housemother left, till you came. Bennet doesn’t know she said it-he’d be furious, because Janey’s mother keeps trying to commit suicide and—”’

Ellen interrupted them. “Who is this Coucoushka person?”’

“She’s a ballet dancer. Her name’s Tamara. She pretends to be Russian and she likes people to call her Coucoushka because it means Little Cabbage, at least we think it does, and the Russians call people that. It’s an endear-, it’s something you call people when you like them, like the French calling people petit choux. But it doesn’t work in English.”

“No, it certainly doesn’t,” said Ellen.

She found Janey, a pale girl with wi/l blue eyes, sitting beside the bath wrapped in a blanket and reading a book.

“Come to bed, Janey, the others are ready to go to sleep.”

“I don’t go to bed. I sleep here at the minute.”

“No you don’t. You sleep in your bed and if you wet it I shall wash the sheets in the morning because that is my job.”

Janey shook her head. “The Coucoushka said—”’

“Janey, I am not interested in what the cabbage person said. I am now your housemother and you will sleep warmly and comfortably in your bed. Eventually you will grow out of the whole business, because people do, and till then it’s not of the slightest consequence. Now hurry up, you’re getting cold.”

“Yes, but—”’

Ellen glanced at the cover of Janey’s book which showed a jolly girl in jodhpurs taking her pony over a jump. “Did you know that Fenella Finch-Delderton used to wet her bed when she was young?”’

Janey stared at her. “The one that got second prize in the Olympics? Honestly?”’

“Honestly,” said Ellen, whose morality, though fervent, was her own. “I was at school with her sister.”

Which left Bruno and Frank. She found them crashing about in the corridor but not, had she known it, with quite their usual energy.

“Ah good,” she said. “I’m glad you’re not in bed yet. I thought you might be kind enough to roll up the rug in my room and take it down to the cellar; I shall do better with bare boards. And there’s the footstool; it seems to have a leg missing, so that can go down too.”

She kept them at work, going up and down the three flights of stairs to the cellar till Frank stopped, looking mulish. “It’s past our bed time,” he said. “We’re supposed to be in bed by nine-thirty.”

“Oh dear,” said Ellen innocently.

“That’s what comes of being new. Hurry along then.”

Ten minutes later the west wing was bathed in silence and Ellen could go to her room. It was almost empty of furniture now; she would pull the bed under the window so that she could see the stars.

“You were right, Henny,” she said, leaning out to listen to the slow slurp of the water against the shore. “This is a lovely land.”

Images crowded in on her. The first sight of Sophie running down the steps towards her; Bennet’s hand cupping the head of his beloved Shakespeare… the house martins skimming in and out of the boathouse roof. But the image that stayed with her longest was that of the tortoise, rollerskating with abandonment across the grass.

There was so much to do here-so terrifyingly much-but she knew that Marek, when he came, would help her. Which made Bennet’s words when she had asked him who Marek was seem all the stranger.

“That’s a good question, Ellen,” the headmaster had said. “You could say that he works here as a groundsman, and that would be true. Or that he teaches fencing to the older boys, and that would be true also, and that at the moment he is acting as chauffeur to Professor Steiner across the lake. But when you have said that, I don’t know that you have said very much. I think,” and he had turned to her with his friendly smile, “you will have to find out for yourself-and when you do I would be very interested to hear what you discover.”

They had driven for the best part of the day, leaving Hallendorf by the road over the pass and turning north east along the river. The mountains became foothills with vineyards clinging to their slopes; the well-kept fields and quiet villages were tended by people who asked only to be left alone.

Now the forest began. In an hour they would be at the border.

The forest suited Marek; he settled into it as into a familiar overcoat-a large man, broad-shouldered with thick, straight hair, blunt, irregular features and reflective eyes. The road was straight here, a woodcutters’ road; his hands lay on the wheel almost without movement. The scents he had grown up with-resin, sawdust, leaf mould-came in through the open windows of the van.

“The wind’s from the south,” he said.

He’d always known where the wind came from: in Vienna, in Berlin, in New York in the narrow tunnels between the skyscrapers. Women had teased him about it, thought of it as a parlour trick.

“Are you missing the beautiful Tamara?”’ asked the man sitting beside him.

The uncharacteristic banter came with an effort from Professor Steiner. He was twice Marek’s age: a scholarly man with a face from a Dürer etching-the full grey beard, the wise, short-sighted blue eyes, the features worn by time and, in recent years, by grievous sorrow.

Marek smiled. The relief of being away from the crazy school in which he had taken refuge made him feel almost light-hearted yet no emotion could be less appropriate. He had allowed an old man of delicate health and considerable eminence to accompany him on an adventure which was more than likely to end in disaster. What they faced was not the danger risked by those who pit themselves against mountains or the sea. There was no evil on the rock face or in a tempest, but the force within the men they were confronting in the hell that Nazi Germany had become was something other.