A Song for Summer

His gaze turned inwards to the terrors of the past.

"We'll change the pictures tomorrow," promised Ellen--but the idea that anything connected with his mother could be changed seemed to frighten Kendrick even more.

She lay back on the pillow, stifling a yawn, and waited to see if Kendrick had any idea of how to proceed-

-he might after all have read a book. When this did not seem to be the case, she stretched out her arms and drew her trembling husband towards her, letting his head rest on her breast, where he continued, though short of air, to proclaim his worship and to liken her to various people whose names she did not catch.

"I think we should get undressed properly," said Ellen, trying to repress the school-mistressy note in her voice.

She slipped off her night-dress, but the sight of her naked, fire-lit body affected him so strongly that he became hopelessly entangled in his pyjama cord.

Ellen freed him, glad that her time at Cambridge had given her some experience. "Don't worry, darling,"

she said.

"We've lots of time." And: "Everything's all right," she said at intervals during the long night, wondering what exactly she meant by this, while Kendrick shivered and stuttered out his admiration and said he was no good to anyone and never had been but he loved her more than anyone had ever loved before.

"Do you think you would be better in another room, Kendrick?"' she asked towards dawn. "Somewhere that doesn't have these associations?"'

For a moment, Kendrick brightened. "There's the old nursery at the top of the house. I slept there when I was little with my nanny." Kendrick's face had relaxed; clearly he was remembering a golden age. "It's quite a big room and it clears the trees so you can see the river."

"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 Gruppenf@uhrer 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?"'