A Song for Summer

Aware that he was enjoying himself, Ellen was caught quite unawares when he followed her into the kitchen one day as she was making coffee and forgetting Sophronia Ebenezer and Nell Gwyn and even Beethoven, seized one of her hands and said in a voice choked with emotion: "Oh Ellen, I love you so much. Won't you please, please marry me?"'

Too late did Ellen reproach herself and assure him that she did not love him, could not marry him, did not intend to marry anyone for a very long time. It would have been as well to try to deprive Sir Perceval of his quest for the Grail as persuade Kendrick that all was lost. He would wait, if need be for years, he would not trouble her, all he asked was to serve her family, address even more envelopes, attend even more meetings--and be allowed to glimpse her as she went about her work.

Ellen could hardly forbid him her mother's house; there was nothing to do except hope that he would grow out of so one-sided a passion. And during her last year at university something happened which put the erudite young man entirely out of her mind.

Henny fell ill. She had terminal cancer and Professor Carr, whom she had served with her life, proposed to send her to the geriatric ward of the local hospital to die.

Like many peasants, Henny was terrified of hospitals. Ellen now stopped trying to please her relatives.

She left college three months before her finals and told her grandfather that Henny would die in her own bed and she would nurse her.

She had help, of course, excellent local nurses who came by day, but most of the time they spent together, she and Henny, and they made their own world. Herr Hitler was eliminated, as was Mussolini, strutting and braying in Rome. Even the clamour of King George's Silver Jubilee scarcely reached them.

During this time which, strangely, was not unhappy, Henny went back to her own childhood in the lovely Austrian countryside in which she had grown up. She spoke of the wind in the pine trees, the cows with their great bells, about her brothers and sisters, and the Alpengl@uhen when in the hour of sunset the high peaks turned

to flame.

And again and again she spoke about the flowers. She spoke about the gentians and the edelweiss and the tiny saxifrages clinging to the rocks, but there was one flower she spoke of in a special voice. She called it a Kohlr@oserl--a little coal rose--but it was not a rose. It was a small black orchid with a tightly furled head.

"It didn't look much, but oh Ellie, the scent! You could smell it long before you found the flowers. In the books they tell you it smells like vanilla, but if so, it's like vanilla must smell in heaven. You must go, Liebling. You must go and put your face to them."

"I will, Henny. I'll bring back a root and--"'

But she didn't finish and Henny patted her hand and smiled, for they both knew that she was not a person who wanted things dug up and planted on her grave.

"Just find them and tell them ... thank you," said Henny.

A few days later she spoke of them again: "Ah yes, Kohlr@oserl," she said--and soon afterwards she died.

Ellen didn't go back to finish her degree. She enrolled at the Lucy Hatton School of Cookery and Household Management and Henny was right, she did have talent. She graduated summa cum laude and her mother and her aunts and Kendrick Frobisher watched her receive her diploma. As she came off the platform with her prizes, grace touched Dr Charlotte Carr, who was a good woman, and she threw her arms round her daughter and said: "We're all so proud of you, my darling. Really so very proud."

And three months later, in the spring of 1937, answering an advertisement in the Lady, Ellen set off for Austria to take up a domestic post in a school run by an Englishman and specialising in Music, Drama and the Dance.

It was listed in the guide books as an important castle and definitely worth a detour, but Schloss Hallendorf had nothing to do with drawbridges or slits for boiling oil.

Built by a Habsburg count for his mistress, its towers housed bedrooms and boudoirs, not emplacements for guns; pale blue shutters lay folded against pink walls, roses climbed towards the first-floor windows.

Carinthia is Austria's most southern province; anything and everything grows there. In the count's pleasure gardens, morning glory wreathed itself round oleander bushes, jasmine tumbled from pillars, stone urns frothed with geraniums and heliotrope. Behind the house, peaches and apricots ripened in the orchards and the rich flower-studded meadows sloped gently upwards towards forests of larch and pine.

And to the front, where stone steps descended to the water and black swans came to be fed, was a view which no one who saw it ever forgot: over the lake to the village and up ... up ... to the snowy zigzag of the high peaks.