A Song for Summer

During the week in which FitzAllan came to direct Abattoir Leon received another batch of records, among which was a group of songs by a composer of whom Ursula instantly disapproved because he was still alive.

"People who are alive can never write tunes," she said.

And it was true that the Songs for Summer were unusual and strange. If they depicted summer it was not the voluptuousness of droning bees and heavy scents, but rather the disembodied season of clarity and light. The tunes carried by the solo violin which rose above the orchestra, and the silvery soprano voice, seemed to Ellen to be "almost tunes"--they appeared, stole into her ear, and vanished before she could grasp them.

But after a few hearings, she began to follow the piece with interest and then slowly with a pleasure that was the greater for not having been instantaneous.

Leon, however, being Leon, could not leave well alone. He played the Songs for Summer inside the castle and outside it. He took his gramophone into the rowing boat, and he was winding up the gramophone yet again, sitting on the steps of the jetty, when Marek came past, carrying a hoe, and told him to stop.

Leon looked up, his thin face set in a look of obstinacy.

"I don't want to stop it. I like it. It's beautiful and the man who plays the violin obligato is fantastic. His name is Isaac

Meierwitz and--"'

Marek's hand came down and removed the needle.

In the ensuing silence, the boy got to his feet. "You can't do that. You can't be horrid to me, because I'm Jewish. You may not care what happens to the Jews but--"'

Watching Marek one would have seen only a slight tightening of the muscles round his mouth, but Janik and Stepan, the woodsmen whose job it had been to carry the infant Marek out into the fields until his devastating temper attacks had spent themselves, would have recognised the signs at once.

Then he put down his hoe, moved slowly forward and pitched Leon out into the lake.

Sophie and Ursula, running excitedly upstairs, brought the news to Ellen.

"It serves him right," said Ursula. "He was following Marek about again--and he was playing his beastly gramophone right by the jetty."

"But Marek waited to see if he came up again. He wouldn't have let him drown." Sophie was torn between pity for Leon and concern for her hero, Marek, who had certainly behaved oddly.

Leon himself, wrapped in a towel and shivering theatrically, now arrived escorted by Freya who had been closest to the scene of the accident.

"He's had a shock, of course, but I don't think any harm's been done." Her kind face was as puzzled and troubled as Sophie's. "I don't know why ..."

Ellen put her arms around Leon. "Go and run a hot bath, Sophie," she ordered. "And Ursula, go and ask Lieselotte to bring up a hot-water bottle."

"At least he didn't defenestrate me," said Leon as she stripped off his wet clothes. "That's what he usually does."

"What do you mean, Leon?"'

"Nothing." Still sniffing and gulping down tears, Leon turned his head away. "I don't mean anything."

When she had dried him and put on clean pyjamas she found Lieselotte by his bed, plumping up his pillows.

"Could you stay with him a minute, Lieselotte? I won't be long."

Ellen had no recollection of how she got to the door of Marek's room in the stable block. The rage she had suppressed while helping

Leon now consumed her utterly.

"How dare you!" she shouted, before she was even across the threshold. "How dare you use violence on any of my children?"'

Marek looked up briefly from the drawer he was emptying into a battered pigskin case, then resumed his packing.

"No child here gets physically assaulted. It is the law of the school and it is my law."

He took absolutely no notice. He had begun to take documents from a wooden chest-- among them sheaves of manuscript paper.

His indifference incensed her to fever point. "I have spent the whole term trying to calm Leon and now you have undone any good anyone might have done. If he gets pneumonia and dies--"'

"Unlikely," said Marek indifferently. "You must be completely mad! It's all very well for you to amuse yourself here pretending to wear spectacles you don't need and parting your hair in a way that anyone can see it doesn't go. But when it causes you to brutalise the children--"'

But she could not get him to react. She had the feeling that he was already somewhere where she and Hallendorf did not exist.

"I'm leaving," he said. "As you see." "Good!" Leon's pinched face, his running nose and shivering, scrawny limbs kept her anger at burning point. "You can't go too soon for any of us."

He did look at her then. For a moment she remembered what she had felt when she first saw him by the well: that she had been, for a moment, completely understood. This look was its opposite: she was obliterated; a nothing.

But her rage sustained her, and she turned and left him, slamming the door like a child.