A Song for Summer

seen; he wanted to hide. He was terrified and wretched and trying to escape from the world. He was going deaf, you see, and it was there that he finally gave up hope that the doctors would be able to cure him.

"It's awful to read about the things he did to try and heal himself," Leon went on. "He poured yellow goo into his ears, he syringed them, he swallowed every kind of patent medicine, he stuck in hearing aids like torture instruments, but nothing made any difference. So he decided to die."

Leon paused and rubbed his nose with the back of his hand. No handkerchief, thought Ellen, blaming herself, and her heart smote her at the emotion generated by this unprepossessing boy.

"But he didn't," said Leon. "He didn't kill himself," and he threw that too intense, slightly hysterical look towards the place where Marek stood. "He wrote a thing called The Heiligenstadt Testament, which is famous. He started by telling people to be good and love one another and all that, but the part that matters is what he wrote about art. He said if you have a talent you had to use it to go further in to life and not escape from it. I'll read that bit to you."

He took a book from the top of the piano and first in English, then in German, read the words with which the unhappy composer had reconsecrated himself to music and to life.

"So you see," said Leon fiercely. "You see ..." and Ellen saw Bennet turn his head, frowning, to follow Leon's gaze as it travelled yet again to Marek, still standing with folded arms beside the door. "You have to go on. Beethoven went back to Vienna and he wrote another seven symphonies and the violin concerto and Fidelio. He wrote dozens more string quartets and the Missa Solemnis and the Hammerklavier

... All right he was grumpy and bad-tempered, he hammered pianos to death and the people who came to see him fell over his unemptied chamber pots, but he never gave up. And when he died, all the schools in Vienna were closed. Every single school was closed so that the children could go to the funeral. Our school would have been closed," said Leon, as if that clinched the matter.

He had finished his speech. Sniffing once more, pushing back his hair, he walked over to the radiogram.

"I'm going to play a bit of the

Ninth Symphony to end up with. At least

I am if the blasted gramophone works," he said, descending from the heights.

But as the triumphant strains of The Ode to Joy rang out across the hall, Ellen felt a momentary draught beside her.

The man at whom this strange assembly had been directed, was gone.

It was Ellen's habit to get up early and make her way round the grounds before anyone else was up. The lake was at its loveliest then; the mist rising from the water; the birds beginning to stir.

But as she wandered, she garnered. Into a trug she kept for the purpose, she put the yo-yos she found tangled in fuchsia bushes, the roller skates left dangerously on the steps, the dew-sodden exercise books and half-knitted khaki balaclavas which (had they ever been finished) would have much reduced the chances of the International Brigade in their fight against Franco.

On the morning after Leon's disquieting assembly, having collected a broken kite, a pair of braces and a damaged banana, she made her way towards the well in the cobbled courtyard behind the castle, to dredge up a gym shoe which she had noticed the night before.

But there was someone else who valued the peace of the early morning. Marek did not sleep in the castle itself. He had a room in the stable block reached by an outside staircase. It was furnished as simply as a monk's cell--a bed, a table, a chair--and visitors were not encouraged.

Now he made his way down the steps, carefully locking the door behind him, and strode off across the cobbled courtyard on his way to the shed where the tools were kept.

The girl bent over the well did not at first see him, and he would have gone past, but at that moment she lifted her head and smiled and said "Hello".

"Not a frog, I hope?"' he asked, fishing his spectacles out of his pocket and going across to her, for her sleeve was wet and a small tuft of moss had caught in her hair.

She shook her head. "No. And if it was I wouldn't kiss it, I promise you. I might kiss a prince if I could be sure he'd turn into a frog but not the other way round. What it is

is a gym shoe, but I can't get at it.

It's stuck on a ledge."

"Let me have a look."

She had the idea that if it was necessary he would have torn up the iron grille screwed into the ground, so marked was the impression he gave of power and strength. But he merely rolled up his shirt sleeve and presently he fished out the shoe which he laid on the rim beside her.

"I spend so much time picking gym shoes out of wells and yo-yos out of trees and sodden towels from the grass," she said when she had thanked him. "I wanted to teach them to be tidy by showing, but there's so many of them and there's only one of me. I suppose some of them will never see."

"But some will."