A Song for Summer (26 page)

It was when she had been back for a week that Ellen realised that her ability to cope and comfort others had had an underlying cause. That somehow, against all reason and sense, she believed that she would see Marek again. That the time she had spent with him in the garden at Kalun had meant to him, perhaps not what it had meant to her--he was after all an experienced man with many affairs to his credit--but something. It was as though she was unable to conceive that this sense of total belonging, this mingling of utter peace and overwhelming excitement, was something she had felt all by herself.

As the days passed and she realised he must have returned from Poland she found herself waiting in the morning for the post bus--not now to console Freya if there was no news from Mats, or Sophie vainly awaiting a letter from her parents, but on her own account, and beneath the longing--a longing the depth of which she could not have imagined--there was anger. For she remembered very well what she had said to Bennet during her first interview when he asked her what she was afraid of. "Not seeing," she had said. "Being obsessed by something that blots out the world. That awful kind of love that makes leaves and birds and cherry blossom invisible because it's not the face of some man."

Now, when she had a rare moment to herself, it was Marek's face that she saw again and again as he paused in front of her door in the hotel corridor and said: "Ellen, if I were to ask you--"'

And then the door of Isaac's room had burst open and poor Isaac came out trussed up in bandages and by the time she had helped him, Marek was gone.

What had he been going to say? Sometimes, deliriously, she thought it was "If I were to ask you, would you come to America?"' or "If I asked you, would you stay with me tonight?"', and to both those questions she would have answered "Yes" with every cell and

fibre in her body.

But as the days went by and she heard nothing, she knew it could have been neither of those things. At the most perhaps he wanted her to look after the tortoise or see to Steiner's bandages.

She did in fact go and see Steiner whenever she could; she had become extremely fond of the old man, but he too had heard nothing.

Then, about ten days after her return, she was coming off the steamer with a basket full of shopping, when Sophie ran towards her, waving a letter.

"It's just come for you! It's Express and Special Delivery and everything!"

Ellen put down her basket. For a moment she experienced a joy so pervasive and complete that she was surprised she had not been borne aloft by angels. Then she took the letter.

The joy died more gradually than she expected. Though she saw almost at once that the letter was from Kendrick, the message reached her brain only slowly. She was still smiling when she opened it, though the tears already stung her eyes.

"I'm awfully sorry to bother you again, Ellen," Kendrick had written, "but it would be so lovely if you could come to Vienna and I still haven't heard. Even if you'd just come for the weekend--I've got a surprise for you on Saturday night as I told you; something at which you could wear the amazing dress you made for your graduation. It would make me so happy and there is so much to see."

"Is it from the man in the wet house?"' asked Sophie, who seemed to be developing second sight.

Ellen nodded and handed her the letter. She still couldn't trust herself to speak. Sophie obediently read through Kendrick's hopes and his expectations of the cultural life in Vienna, but when she lifted her head again she had to draw a deep and unexpected breath. Ellen had always looked after them; now, suddenly, she had an intimation of a different state; a state in which she and her friends might have to look after Ellen.

And growing up a little, she said briskly: "Lieselotte's waiting for the icing sugar,"-- and saw Ellen bend to pick up her basket--and her life.

The letter Ellen had been waiting for came the next day--not to her but to Professor Steiner.

"He wrote it from Pettelsdorf," said the

old man gently and put it in her hand.

This time she was forewarned. There was no hope, no expectation of angels bearing her aloft.

"Isaac got away safely down river," Marek had scrawled. "I've confirmed my passage and am sailing on the tenth from Genoa. Please say goodbye to Ellen for me once again and thank her for me. I shall always be in her debt and in yours. Marek."

The following morning Bennet sent for her. "The children tell me you've been invited to Vienna."

"Yes."

Damn, thought the headmaster. Damn, damn, damn. He had seen it happening but he had hoped somehow that she would be spared. She will get over it; she will light her lamp again, he told himself--but it had been the brightest, loveliest lamp he had seen in years.

"I think you should go," he said. "It's only a weekend, and you'd be back for the play."

"I've just been away."

"But you still have time off owing to you. Freya will look after your children."

"Very well," she said listlessly. "Sophie tells me that you have a dress?"'

She managed a smile then. "Yes," she said. "Sophie is right." She lifted her head, and the smile became a proper one. "I definitely have a dress."

Brigitta's persuasions in the cafè at St Polzen had been ineffectual. The intrigues of the gala interested Marek not at all and he felt no obligation to involve himself in her affairs.

Yet less than a week after their encounter, he found himself in Vienna, having decided to break his journey there on the way to Genoa. The person who had effected this change of plan was not the diva but a quiet, grey-haired, bespectacled man; the head of Universal Editions who had been Marek's music publishers for the past ten years. Herr Jaeger ran the firm from a dusty office in the Kohlmarkt; a place of hallowed associations for all those who cared for music, and it was his letter to Pettovice which had brought Marek to town.

Marek booked in at the Imperial, feeling in the mood for luxury after his week in the forest, telephoned Herr Jaeger, and went to have his hair cut in the Graben where the barber was displeased with the way his client's thick, springy hair formed itself into unexpected whorls.

"I don't know what you've been doing to it, sir," he grumbled. "It looks as though you've been sleeping in a hedge."

Marek did not enlighten him and the conversation turned inevitably to the gala. "You'll have seen the paper," said the barber. "She's threatening to cancel."

"She?"' asked Marek, but already he knew. "Seefeld," said the barber. "She's fallen out with the conductor: chap called Feuerbach. He's a stopgap because Weingartner's abroad."

"She's got no business to carry on like that," said a burly man in working clothes, the driver of a petrol tanker, having a trim in the neighbouring chair. "Tantrums the whole time. They ought to give the role to Baumberger."

"No, they oughtn't," said a fat man with a shiny red face, waiting his turn. He spoke in the thickest of dialects and wore the blue overalls of a meat porter. "Tantrums or not, she's the best. My mother's seen every Rosenkavalier they've done since 1911 and she swears there's no one to touch Seefeld."

"I didn't say she wasn't good," said the lorry driver. "I didn't say she wasn't great. But she's got the whole cast at sixes and sevens, and once you get on the wrong side of the Vienna Philharmonic, God help you."

"It's not the orchestra she's got the wrong side of, it's Feuerbach, and she's quite right. I heard him conduct Bruckner's Seventh in Linz and he was crap," said the meat porter, wiping his face with a spotted handkerchief.

Marek took the newspaper the barber handed him. That day there had been a massacre in Peking, the city of Bilbao fell to Franco and Moscow had executed another thirty intellectuals on the grounds of

"spying", but the headline of the Wiener Tageblatt said "Seefeld Threatens Cancellation. Gala in Jeopardy." Coming out into the street, Marek thought with exasperation of the Viennese, to whom nothing mattered except what was going on at their opera house.

And yet ... perhaps it was because he knew this was goodbye, because he foresaw much suffering for this absurd city, that he felt himself able to surrender to the sheer beauty of the Biedermeier houses, the compact and companionable streets, the domes of green and gold. If the Viennese fiddled while Rome burnt perhaps there were worse occupations, and when it was over--the catastrophe he saw so clearly--

they would still quarrel at the barbers about the high C of some soprano not yet born, or argue over the tessitura of a newly imported tenor.

Herr Jaeger was waiting in his dark little office.

"Herr Altenburg!" he said, rising to shake hands. "This is a pleasure. It was good of you to come in person."

"Not at all," said Marek, dropping his hat and gloves on to a bust of Mahler. "I see you share my view of what is to come."

"I'm afraid I do. We're transferring our business to London as I told you. We're hoping to be able to forge some transatlantic links too from there. It was a hard decision--as you know, our traditions go back three hundred years."

Marek nodded. He had dealt with Universal Editions since his student days; they had proved competent and fair, but it was more than that: under glass in a corner of the office was the facsimile of the Schubert Quartetsatz. The first edition of Berg's Wozzeck, heavily annotated, lay in another case.

"We were hoping of course that you would stay with us, but--"'

"I have decided to do so. I'm leaving for America very soon, but if you're setting up links with the United States, London could be a convenient halfway house."

"I'm very pleased to hear it and my partner will be too. He's going ahead; he's Jewish and we feel ..."

"Yes, you may feel that."

"You don't have anything ready now? To arrive in London with a piece by Altenburg would be a certain triumph."

"Soon," said Marek. "I've been doing other things."

"But you'll be staying for the gala?"' "I doubt it. I gather there have been ructions."

Herr Jaeger smiled. "Yes, you could say that. You could certainly say that. Now, as to the contracts; I wonder if you could glance at these ..."

Leaving the office, making his way towards the Hofburg, Marek saw a group of tourists outside the Stallburg waiting for the Lipizzaners to be led from the Spanish Riding School back to their princely stable. This was how they had waited--and probably waited still--for Brigitta to come out of her apartment and make her way to the Opera, and that was reasonable enough. She was after all a kind of human Lipizzaner, richly caparisoned, adored and nobly housed, and knowing perhaps at some level that he had meant to do this all along, he made his way past the Augustiner Kirche and the Albertina, and found himself by the small unobtrusive door which said simply: "Zur B@uhne."

Outside, on an upright chair sat an old man, still wearing the uniform of the stage doorkeeper though he had been retired for many years. His son was the doorkeeper now but Josef was an institution, allowed to watch the great and the good come through that small entrance into the opera.

"Good afternoon, Josef."

The old man looked up, blinked--and recognised him. "Herr Altenburg," he said. "You're back in Vienna.

Well, well --wait till I tell my son."

Nothing could stop him getting to his feet and leading Marek into the cluttered office. "Here's Herr Altenburg, Wenzel; you'll remember him."

His son nodded. "There's a bit of a to-do in there, sir. It's the gala--they're doing Act One and well ... I expect you've heard. No one's to be admitted, but as it's you ..."

Both father and son could remember the time when Herr Altenburg had accompanied the diva to rehearsals. A golden age, he'd heard it referred to, when she'd behaved herself and sung like an angel.

"They're in the auditorium, sir. It's the first rehearsal with the full orchestra."

Marek nodded, made his way down the familiar corridors, pushed open the heavy door--and stood quietly at the back.

"I shall cancel!" cried Brigitta. "I

tell you, I shall cancel. You can go now, you can tell the papers, you can tell anyone! I cannot sing at this tempo, it is an insult to me and an impossibility for my voice. Either you fetch Weingartner or I cancel."

"Now Brigitta, please ..." The voice coach came out of the wings and tried to mollify her. The music director, sitting in the front row, groaned. Nothing but tantrums and tempers from the wretched woman.

There was a week to go to the gala and he was sick of it. He didn't just want her to cancel, he wanted her to be run over by a tram or eaten by rats or both. But who could they get at the last minute? The gala had been set up with her in mind.

"Perhaps we could try again, Herr Feuerbach," said the director. He detested Brigitta, but it had to be admitted that Feuerbach was a disappointment: an arrogant little man who had got on the wrong side of the orchestra. Once that venerable body of men despised a conductor they were implacable. If the Vienna Philharmonic could ever be said to play badly they were doing it now.

"I gather you want it played like a funeral march," sneered Feuerbach.

"No. Just a little more andante. It is after all a lament for the passing of time," said the director, wondering why it was necessary to explain the score of Richard Strauss's most famous opera to the man who was conducting it.

Feuerbach curled his lip and raised his baton. Brigitta moved forward.

They were rehearsing the first of the famous monologues on the mystery of time and its inexplicable passing. The Marschallin is alone on the stage; so far she has been presented as a grande dame voluptuously loved, or as the centre of a melee of courtiers. Now the mood changes: the orchestra is reduced to solo strings and clarinets as she goes to the mirror and evokes the young girl she has once been, coming fresh from the convent--and then, in a moment of terror, the old woman she will one day be, mocked and pointed out, her beauty gone. Yet it has to be endured, she muses--and the oboe (now coming in magnificently in spite of Feuerbach) echoes her bewildered question: "Only how? Wie? ... How does one endure it?"'