A Song for Summer (35 page)

Stepan and Janik had seen him near the house on the day before the fire; old Lenitschka, who had perished with the Captain and his wife, had warned them. Every servant at Pettelsdorf was looking out for him and every member of the resistance.

"But I want him alive," Marek said.

"I want him to know who kills him. And he is not to be shot. It will happen slowly ... very slowly."

During those days of convalescence when the specialists conferred and the nuns prayed over his bed, there were only two visitors Marek did not want to see.

The first was his grandmother, Nora Coutts. She had been going for one of her famous walks when the fire began and had survived unscathed. Nora had lost her only daughter, whom she adored, and her son-in-law. She looked ten years older and something had happened to her mouth, which had been set in a firm line and now, on occasion, had to be covered with her hand. But Marek's obsession with his vendetta, which grew with his returning strength, shocked her deeply.

"Your parents died together and almost instantly, I understand. What do you think they'd feel if they knew you were going to poison the rest of your life with this hatred? What do you think they would feel if they knew what you were doing to Ellen?"'

But Marek was deaf and blind. Ellen was a danger. Ellen, who came every day and sat quietly and patiently by his bed, waiting for him to become sane again ... Ellen, who was so beautiful and whole and true, would weaken him. Even less than his grandmother did she understand that nothing but hatred must now rule his life. To track down Schwachek, to kill him very slowly and carefully, explaining at each stage what was happening to him and why--nothing else existed. And when this was done, to face prison or hanging on his own account without regret, knowing that Ellen was out of it and safe.

"There will be no more love and no more weddings," he had said when she first came.

But she had not believed him. She thought as the nuns thought, that the shock had temporarily unhinged him. That he should wish to avenge his parents' murder was understandable perhaps, but to make this vendetta his only reason for existing seemed impossible. Surely somewhere the man who cared for every living thing could not be wholly and permanently dead?

But the weeks passed and Marek became steadily more hostile, more obsessed, more angry. Even so, it was not till the doctors who were treating him told her that she was making him worse and delaying his recovery, that she gave up.

He was standing by the window of his hospital room when she told him she was leaving. A tortoiseshell butterfly was beating its way against the window, and as he caught it in his hand she held her breath, for she expected him to crush it between his fingers, so mad had he become.

But he opened the window and released it carefully into the summer afternoon. That was her last memory of him: the killer with the scar on his forehead, gently freeing the butterfly--and then his bleak, toneless and unadorned: "Goodbye."

The betrayal of the Czechs at Munich came soon afterwards. Marek joined the Czech Air Force, flew his plane to Poland when the Germans overran his country, went on fighting with the Poles --and when they were beaten, with the French.

When the Germans advanced through Northern France, he was flying Potez 63's with a Reconnaissance Squadron of the French Air Force, never sure whether the airfield from which he took off would still be there when he returned, attacked both in the air and on the ground.

The occupation of Paris in mid-June put an end to these adventures. The crews were summoned, given rations and their pay, and told they were on their own. Marek was caught up in the demoralisation of the retreating troops, the fleeing refugees. Separated from his crew, he reached Brittany at last, found a fishing boat willing to take him across to Dover, and opened his eyes to the extraordinary sight of dozens of baying, quarantined dogs.

The slobbering, excited animals had given him his first glimmer of hope--for it struck him as possible that a nation mad enough to carry stray dogs on to the boats that took them off the beaches might --just might--be mad enough not to surrender simply because all hope was lost.

Closest to his stretcher was a pointer bitch with anguished eyes. Marek soothed her, was overheard by an exhausted sergeant who was trying to sort out the flotsam that still came over the Channel in the wake of the debacle--and presently found himself on the Isle of Man, watching Erich Unterhausen polish his boots and give the Nazi salute.

It had been Ellen's intention to get married quietly in the Bloomsbury Registry Office, invite a few friends back to Gowan Terrace, and go up to Crowthorpe the next day.

But in September the Blitz began. Broken glass was swept from the streets along with the autumn leaves; the scent of smoke was seldom out of people's nostrils; nights spent in shelters or the basements of their houses left everyone exhausted--and a new band of heroes emerged: the pilots who went up each night to give battle to the bombers that came across to devastate the cities. Doris and Elsie and Joanie, who had crept back to their parents in London, were sent back to Cumberland, the cook general who had struggled on at Gowan Terrace left to make munitions and at the end of October, the Registry Office received a direct hit.

Under these circumstances it seemed sensible to have the wedding at Crowthorpe, and if the villagers were not to be upset, to make it a wedding in the local church--and this in turn meant Sophie and Ursula as bridesmaids and inviting the guests

to stay the night before, since travel on the blacked out trains was far too unreliable to make a day trip possible.

Announcing her engagement to the ladies with whom she made sandwiches, her fellow firewatchers and the women who bandaged her on Thursday afternoons, Ellen now became lucky. She knew she was lucky because everybody told her so.

"Lucky you, going to live in the country, away from it all," or "Lucky you, not having to worry about the rations; they say you can get butter and eggs and everything up there," or "I wish I was you, getting a good night's sleep."

Ellen's response to her great good fortune was unvarying; she instantly invited whoever had congratulated her to Crowthorpe: the milkman's sister who had taken over his round when he was called up, an old man who came to lick envelopes at Gowan Terrace, and an orderly at her mother's hospital. It was as though the provision of fresh air, birdsong and undisturbed nights was what made being so very lucky endurable.

But it was her family--her mother working too hard at the hospital, her Aunt Annie whose operation had been postponed as the wards filled up with the casualties of the Blitz, the aunt who ran a bookshop, and, of course, the Hallendorf children --for whom she particularly wanted to provide sanctuary.

"You will come, won't you?"' she begged them. "Not just for the wedding--you'll stay, won't you? There'll be log fires, it'll be really comfortable, you'll see,"--and they said, yes of course they would come, though Dr Carr pointed out that she could not leave her patients for long, and Aunt Phyllis and Aunt Annie, who were helping to organise petitions demanding the release of the interned "enemy aliens" as well as their other work, were not sure that they could take too much time off in the north.

"She is happy, isn't she?"' asked

Dr Carr of her sisters, who said they were sure she was, and anyway it was probably a mistake to start a marriage with too many expectations. "Better to build it up slowly," Phyllis said, a view which Ellen shared and propounded to Margaret Sinclair over pilchards on toast in Lyon's Corner House.

"People always used to get married for sensible reasons," she said--and Margaret, whose heart smote her, had perforce to remain silent, for her own existence was hardly a blueprint for a successful love life.

Immured in his secret hide-out in Surrey, reputedly breaking codes, Bennet had been compelled, when the air raids began, to send Tamara for safekeeping to her mother in the north, and Margaret, deprived of the hope that a bomb would instantly and painlessly destroy the Russian ballerina, spent her free time in her bedsitting room in case Bennet could get to London and needed a cup of tea.

Sophie and Ursula (for whom Ellen was making dresses out of parachute silk which scratched her hands) tried to cheer each other up, but without success.

"She reminds me of Sydney Carton," said Sophie. "You know, the man who said "It is a far, far better thing that I do now than I have ever done before and then went off to be executed." She sighed. "I wish they'd let Leon out; he could help with the music at least."

"You really miss him, don't you?"' said Ursula.

"Yes, I do. And his family. They've been incredibly good to me."

Kendrick was now officially released from the Ministry of Food, since farming--which he was believed to be about to do--was regarded as work of national importance, and went north to Cumberland, but could not be relied upon for practical arrangements. He was in a state of profound exaltation but slightly apprehensive. The Facts of Life had been told to Kendrick not by his mother, who had better things to do, or even by a kindly nursemaid, as is so often the case with the English upper classes--the maids engaged by Mrs Frobisher were seldom kindly--but by a boy called Preston Minor at his prep school.

Although the horrific information conveyed by this unpleasant child had been modified later by the reading of Great Literature, there was still a considerable gap between Kendrick's conception of Ellen as the Primavera or Rembrandt's Saskia crowned with flowers, and what was supposed to happen in his father's four-poster bed after the nuptials were complete.

The wedding was planned for the eighteenth of December, and now the submarine menace came to the rescue of the bridegroom and the bride. Patricia Frobisher was unable to secure a place on any of the convoys sailing from Africa and would not be able to attend.

Ellen, navigating with meticulous concentration the route to the day which would make her so happy and so fortunate, saw in this the hand of Providence. Her plans for Crowthorpe could now go ahead without battles: the proper housing of the evacuees, the installation of land girls (a move opposed by Patricia) and the removal of the green lines which Mrs Frobisher, glorying in the restrictions of wartime, had painted round the bath to show the limits of hot water which might be used.

Both the recent bereavement in the Frobisher family and the bride's own inclinations made a small wedding desirable. In addition to the immediate families, they invited only a few university friends, those of the Hallendorf children who could get away, Margaret Sinclair--and Bennet, whose kindness to her after her return from Prague Ellen had never forgotten. Since it was unlikely that Bennet would get leave, Ellen had hoped to be spared Tamara, but fate decreed otherwise.

On a visit to Carlisle not long before the wedding, Ellen saw a sight which no one could have beheld unmoved. Two women were plodding wearily along the rain-washed pavement. Both carried string bags of heavy groceries, both wore raincoats and unbecoming sou'westers, both had noses reddened by the cold. One was considerably older than the other, but their resemblance was marked: mother and daughter, clearly bored with each other's company, on the weekly and wearisome shopping trip.

It was only when the younger woman stopped and greeted her that Ellen realised she was in the presence of the Russian ballerina who had been Diaghilev's inspiration and the confidante of Toussia Alexandrovna, now returned for wartime safekeeping to her mother, and demoted most pitiably to Mrs Smith's daughter Beryl.

"Ellen--how lovely to see you!"

Tamara's pleasure in the meeting was unfeigned. Her mother's colliery village on the bleak coastal plain was only thirty miles from Crowthorpe; she knew of the Frobishers' importance and Crowthorpe's size.

She wanted

an invitation to the wedding, and she got it. Appalled by the reduction of the sinewy sun worshipper and maker of icon corners to Mrs Smith's Beryl, Ellen invited her not only to the wedding but--since there were no buses from Tamara's village--to the house party on the night before.

On a morning in late November a number of men were pulled out of the routine roll call in the camp and told to report to the commandant. From Sunnydene, an elderly lawyer named Koblitzer who walked with a stick, and a journalist named Klaus Fischer; from Resthaven, Herr Rosenheimer and his son Leon; and from Mon Repos (from which the defenestrated Unterhausen had been taken to Brixton Jail), Marcus von Altenburg.

Wondering what they had done, they made their way down the grey rain-washed streets towards the hotel by the gates which housed Captain Henley's office.

"We'll need a chair for Koblitzer," said Marek when they were assembled, and a chair was brought.

In spite of this request, an air of cheerfulness prevailed. The commandant had shown himself a good friend to the inmates; conditions in the camp had improved considerably in the last two months. Even the disagreeable lieutenant looked relaxed.

"I have good news for you," said the commandant. "The order has come through for your release. You're to collect your belongings and be ready for the transport at seven in the morning. The ferry for Liverpool sails at ten, and tickets will be issued for your chosen destination."

The men looked at each other, hardly taking it in at first.

"On what grounds, as a matter of curiosity?"' asked Leon's father. "To whom do we owe our freedom?"'

Captain Henley looked down at his papers. "You, Rosenheimer, on the grounds that you are employing nearly five hundred British workers in your business, and your son on the grounds that he is under age.

Klaus Fischer has been spoken for by the Society of Authors, who say he's been writing anti-Nazi books since 1933,

and Koblitzer on grounds of ill health."

Not one of them pointed out that all this information was available at the time they were arrested. Yet their joy was not unalloyed; they had made friendships of great intensity, had started enterprises which must be left undone. Fischer ran a poetry class, Rosenheimer had started a business school--and all of them sang in Marek's choir.