A Song for Summer

Express to Berlin when Carla got a walk-on part at the UFA studios ... on the Golden Arrow to London and back again ... always trying to please, to change identities as she arrived ... To be charming and prettily dressed and witty for her mother; to be serious and enquiring with securely plaited pigtails for her father ...

Then suddenly the tug of war stopped. Both parents dropped the rope and she was packed off to a school that was unlike any she had known. That it was the beginning of a permanent abandonment, Sophie was sure.

But now there was Ellen. Ellen had kept her promise about ringing Czernowitz and she kept other promises. Sophie attended lessons assiduously; she endured eurythmics and did her stint being a bunch of keys or a fork, but when there was a spare moment in her day she came back to her base, trotting behind Ellen with laundry baskets or piles of blankets and curling up in the evening on the floor of Ellen's room.

And with Sophie came Ursula, bringing the red exercise book in which she was chronicling the brutalities the American Army had inflicted on the Red Indians, still scowling, still committed to hatred--but sometimes turning over what Ellen had said that first night. She had said it was sensible to go to Wounded Knee, and the calm word dropped into Ursula's turbulent soul like a benison.

Others came, of course: Janey, and

Ellen's bodyguard, Bruno and Frank, and a long-legged American girl called Flix who was said to be a brilliant actress but wanted only to be a vet and kept a plaster of Paris ant nest under her bed.

And a dark, irritating, handsome boy called Leon who used his origins to secure sympathy.

"You have to be nice to me because I'm Jewish," he would say, which drove Ursula into one of her frequent rages.

"You're only half Jewish," she said.

"And I bet it's the bottom half so I'll be nice to that but not to your horrible top."

Leon was a committed Marxist and filled his room with posters of Lenin rallying the proletariat, but the carefully unravelled jerseys he wore were made of purest cashmere and his underclothes were silk.

Leon's father (whom he referred to as a "fascist beast") was a wealthy industrialist who had transferred his business interests from

Berlin to London when Hitler came to power, and his devoted mother and sisters sent him innumerable parcels of chocolate and delicatessen from Harrods which he despised, but ate. But if it was difficult to like the boy, no one could dispute his gift; he was intensely and unmistakably musical.

Ellen had expected the children to come, but she hadn't quite bargained for the staff, abandoning their cluttered bedsitting rooms to eat her Bath Oliver biscuits and drink her Lapsang Souchong tea. Hermine Ritter came with her love child in its herring box and sat with her grey-flannelled legs apart and spoke of the historic conference in Hinterbruhl where she had been overcome, virtually in her sleep, by a Professor of Vocal Rehabilitation who had drunk too much gentian brandy and left her with Andromeda, who was being brought up to be self-regulating but always seemed to be in a temper.

"I will be glad to mind her for you sometimes," Ellen said. "But you must get her some proper nappies."

"Oh surely not? In the book by Natalie Goldberger--"'

But Ellen, watching the puce, distempered baby flaying about inside Hermine's tabard like Donald Duck in a tent, said she thought nappies would be nice for Andromeda.

Jean-Pierre came, with his boudoir eyes and practised cynicism; a brilliant mathematician who professed to loathe children and could send them out of his classes reeling with excitement about the calculus, and Freya, a sweet-natured Norwegian who taught history and PE and was in love with a hard-hearted Swede called Mats who lived in a hut in Lapland and did not write.

David Langley came, the bony-kneed biology teacher who was busy identifying the entire frit fly population of Carinthia, and Chomsky of course, fixing his congenitally despairing eyes on Ellen, and eating a quite remarkable number of biscuits.

There was one member of staff, however, who was conspicuous by her absence. The Little Cabbage did not come and when Ellen met her, two days after her return, the encounter was unfortunate.

Ellen during those first days worked as she had not

worked before. She scrubbed, she sewed on name tapes, she set up her ironing board in the laundry room, she brought pots of flowers upstairs and emptied washing baskets and mended curtains.