A Song for Summer

As he made his way to his room to pick up his case, a sudden image came to him of a small pale boy cowering beside a radiator. A much bullied boy always trying to hide in a corner with a book. Yes, he was almost sure that was Frobisher.

Well, that was ridiculous; there was no possible way that Ellen could be going to marry him?

Or was there? Could he turn out to be another creature that needed to be fed--not with breadcrumbs or kitchen scraps this time, but with her pity and her love? In which case she was going to be most seriously unhappy.

But Ellen's concerns had nothing to do with him. His life at Hallendorf was over. He had said goodbye to Bennet and given in his keys. By the time the children came out of the dining room, Marek was gone.

Ellen, hurrying upstairs, found Leon sitting up in bed--and totally transformed.

"Marek came!" he said in a voice resonant with hero worship. "He came and it's all right, I don't have to be a great musician, I can just do ordinary things. I can do everything! Oh Ellen, isn't it marvellous? I think he must be the most marvellous person in the world."

She stared at Leon. His face was glowing, his restored and golden future lay before him. It was in defence of this child that she had attacked Marek and sent him away with the memory of her senseless and infantile rage.

"I'm going to get my parents to send me a proper cine camera--you can get them quite cheaply-- well, not very cheaply perhaps--and I'm going to write a script. Sophie can star in it and that will show her beastly mother--"'

Ellen let him babble on. Then he stopped. "Ellen, you always say we have to have handkerchiefs and it's you that's sniffing now."

She tried to smile, wiping her eyes. "It's all right. I quarrelled with Marek, that's all, and now he's gone."

"Oh, he won't bother with that. A man like that wouldn't even notice. Ellen, when I'm grown up I'm going to write Marek's biography-- if he'll let me. He's already had the most amazing life, what with throwing people out of windows and being a hero and having that opera singer in love with him. She's terribly famous too--Brigitta Seefeld--there was a lot about her in the sleeve notes to my record."

Leon had collected almost as much information about his idol as Kendrick Frobisher. "I'm going to be like Eckerman who wrote down everything that Goethe said, or that man Bennet told us about in English--Dr Johnson's friend Boswell. Do you think you could try and remember the things he said to you--because you were good friends, weren't you?"'

"Yes, I think we were."

Never let the sun go down on your wrath. But the sun had gone down; it was sinking spectacularly over the mountains, turning the rock face to crimson and amethyst and gold.

"Only where do you begin?"' asked Leon, pondering his biography.

"At the beginning, I suppose, Leon," she said wearily.

At the place in Bohemia where his mother had driven about with white doves in a washing basket ...

At the place where there were storks ...

The house had been a hunting lodge built of silvered aspen in the ancient forest preserved for their sport by the Hapsburg princes who ruled over the Bohemian lands. In the eighteenth century it was enlarged, became a manor, its windows shuttered, its stuccoed walls painted in the Sch@onbrunn yellow which Maria Theresa permitted to those who served her.

Marek's great-grandfather, the Freiherr Marcus von Altenburg, came there from Northern Germany, fell in love with the countryside--its ancient trees, its eagles and owls and unlimited game--and bought it. He cleared enough land round the house to make a small farm, dug a fish pond, and let the sun in on Pettelsdorfs roofs. It was then that the storks came.

For more than a hundred years the von Altenburgs were citizens of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Then in 1918 Austria collapsed and Pettelsdorf--now Pettovice--found itself part of the new Republic of Czechoslovakia.

No one at Pettelsdorf greatly cared. Frontiers had marched back and forward in this part of Europe for generations, but the same wind still blew through the fields of oats and rye, the geese still made their way in single file towards the water, the high-cruppered dray horses still pulled their loads along the dusty, rutted roads.

Marek's father, though keeping his German nationality, was happy to throw in his lot with the new republic: Czechoslovakia, under Masaryk, was a model of democratic government. He had in any case married a wife brought up in Prague, a bluestocking reared in a little medieval house behind the castle.

Milenka Tarnowsky's mother was English, her father Russian; she herself spoke five languages, had taken tea with Kafka and earned her living translating articles and poetry. To keep open house for all nationalities was as much a tradition of Marek's home as was the sheltering of wanderers by the monasteries that lined the pilgrim routes towards

the east.