A Song for Summer

But later, tending to the bonfire of lopped branches and hedge clippings, Marek wondered what had made him liken his home to this mad place. Pettelsdorf owed its existence--its wealth--to the forest which surrounded it, and those who are custodians of trees lead a life of rigorous discipline. To his father, and his father's father before him, the two thousand hectares of his domain were wholly known. An architect coming to bespeak oak planks for the belfry of a church was led to one tree and one tree only in the seemingly limitless woods. There were trees of course which were sacrosanct: a five-hundred-year-old lime, with its squirrel nests and secret hollows, which Marek as a boy had claimed as his own, would never be cut, nor the elm by the house beneath which he'd lain on summer nights watching the stars tossed back and forth between branches. But in general there was no room for sentiment at Pettelsdorf; a forest of sweet chestnuts and pine, of walnut and alder and birch, is not something that looks after itself.

Only a meticulous daily husbandry ensures the balance between new growth and ancient hallowed trees, between sun-filled clearings and dense plantations.

But Ellen had used the same word: husbandry. She saw the children (he had realised this at once) as his father, and he himself, had learnt to see their trees: those that needed pruning, those that grew aslant, those that required only light and air.

She was like those girls one sees in genre paintings: girls labelled Lacemaker or Water Carrier or Seamstress. Quiet girls to whom the artists had not bothered to give names, for it was clear that without them the essentials of life would cease.

Oh damn, he thought, having promised storks, having opened the door to a place he had never meant to leave and that was lost to him until his wearisome task was done. For it was strange how easily, had things been different, he could have taken her to Pettelsdorf. She would precede him up the verandah steps; the wolfhound would nuzzle her skirt; his mother would give the little nod she gave when she found the right word for one of her translations and his father would put down the gun he was cleaning and take out the 1904 Imperial Tokay he kept for special guests. While in the brook behind the house, the storks she craved would solemnly perambulate, searching for frogs ...

Which was nonsense, of course, for the work he had to do must involve no one, and even if he did what he set out to do he would still not be free, for incredible as it seemed, it looked as though there was going to be another war.

It was not till the beginning of her second week that Ellen was able to devote herself to the kitchen and its staff.

The kitchens, which had once supplied the Hapsburg counts with roast venison and casseroles of grouse, and had sent sucking pigs and flagons of Napoleon Brandy upstairs, had not changed substantially since the days when the last of Hallendorf's owners had feted Franz Joseph after a week of hunting. An electric cooker had replaced the huge bread ovens and the range, and there was a frigidaire stuck with revolutionary slogans proclaiming the need for the overthrow of the Costa Rican government.

But the vast wooden kitchen table was the same, the long passages which separated kitchen and larder and the stone steps down to the cellars.

Nevertheless, Ellen, entering to begin her supervisory duties, looked at the room with pleasure. It was not dark; the windows at the back looked on to the courtyard and the catalpa tree, and everything was solid and clean.

The cleanliness surprised her because the food which had hitherto been served up was dire. Lumpy brown rice risottos to which spikes of bony fish adhered; strange salads devoid of dressing but rich in small pieces of gravel and slimy tropical fruits which had come from far away in tins.

Ellen's arrival, in her crispest apron, was not greeted with enthusiasm either by the persecuted Costa Rican, Juan, or by Fr@aulein Waaltraut Nussbaum-Eisenberg, an impoverished aristocrat whose nephew was mayor of Klagenfurt.

Juan cooked for his keep and a vestigial salary and expected any day, he said, to hear a knock at the door and to be taken away by the secret police of his country, and Fr@aulein Waaltraut disapproved of meat, eggs and fish and would have fed the school entirely on borage and bilberries if Bennet had let her.

"Well, of course we must have salads," said Ellen, "but not with gravel, and stinging nettles must be picked young. Also these children are growing so we must make sure that there is plenty of protein."

She laid her cookery books on the table and asked if she could see the larder. This went down badly, Fr@aulein Waaltraut pointing out that she wasn't used to being inspected and Juan waving his arms and declaring that it was a Thursday, and it was on Friday that the boat came with fresh supplies.