A Song for Summer

"This is an honour indeed," he said in excellent German, bowing over her hand, and led her towards the footlights. "Carry on," he shouted to the increasingly confused children, and a disorientated slaughterhouse worker crashed into a dimly lit side of beef, was sworn at, and veered off at an angle. "As you see, we are still feeling our way a little," said FitzAllan.

Brigitta said she did indeed see this. She made however one last attempt before making her escape.

"Who does the music--presumably there is music?"'

FitzAllan gave a modest smile. "I have endeavoured to fill the gap left by the departure of Franz Lerner.

Perhaps you'd like to hear one of the workers' songs? I've adapted it myself from one I found in a Communist manifesto."

He clapped his hands and those of the children who heard him came to the front of the stage. "We're going straight into the Song of Starvation at the end of Act Two. I'll give you the note.

Ready?"'

Brigitta listened and the last of her doubts were laid to rest. Not in a hundred years could Marcus have countenanced a noise like that. Turning, she found the dark, intense boy who had met her at the landing stage standing beside her.

"If Herr von Altenburg could hear that, he'd turn in his grave, wouldn't you say?"' he whispered.

Much as she wanted to snub the child, she could only agree.

"The premiere is at the end of July. If you happened to be in the district we should be most honoured,"

said Bennet.

"Thank you, but my calendar for July is very full," she said.

She found Ufra and Puppchen already in the launch. Puppchen was passionately chewing a large leather gardening glove. "He found it in one of the sheds," said Ufra. "It belonged to the handyman. He's left now, so I thought he might as well have it."

"It's disgusting," said Brigitta, as the

object became covered in the little dog's saliva. "Take it away and throw it into the lake."

But Puppchen wouldn't be parted from his treasure. He growled and showed his crooked teeth and he was still slobbering over it when the boat arrived in the village, and the local taxi bore Brigitta off to the villa so kindly provided by the count.

Ellen waited till the theatre was empty and dark before she made her way back stage.

"It's all right," she said. "You can come out now. She's been gone for ages."

The ox carcass in its muslin wrapping swayed; the papier-màchè stump representing its severed neck was lifted.

"Goodness, you do look green! There's no need to be afraid; she's miles away."

"It isn't fear, it's seasickness," said Isaac Meierwitz, and climbed out of the bag.

By day Isaac could forget the terror in the forest; the moment when Marek had disappeared in the direction of the river, the second shot. He could forget the hours he had stumbled through the mist, trying to find Steiner's van, the baying of the guard dogs which had sent him crawling under barbed wire, to find himself in Austria ... the long journey, footsore and starving, to Hallendorf, hoping against hope that Steiner and Marek were there.

But at night he played back the nightmare again and again, and then there was nothing to do except get up and go outside and sit on the steps of the little temple, looking out across the lake to Steiner's house, praying that a light would show in the windows ... that the men who had risked their lives for him were safely back.

There Ellen found him the night after Brigitta's visit, wearing a coat over her nightdress, and bringing a blanket for him, for the night was cool.

"You should sleep, Ellen; you work so hard." "Flix woke me," she said. "She had a dream about the Judas sheep."

She sat down beside him, wrapping the blanket round them both, and her closeness gave him a stab of something he did not recognise at first because it had become so unfamiliar. Happiness? thought Isaac--

is that possible still? And answered himself: Where she is, it is possible.

The moment of panic by Steiner's door when he had tried to pull the intruder down on to the grass had not lasted long. The softness of her body, the way she crumpled in his arms and then stiffened, ready to fight, had overwhelmed him. He let her go, and then the dizziness he had been fighting overcame him, and he lost consciousness.

When he came round again his victim was kneeling beside him, opening a suitcase. "I'm afraid I can't offer you a balanced diet," she had said, shining a pocket torch on to a salami in a lattice of gold, a packet of Karlsbad plums, a cluster of grapes. "You must eat very slowly," she had instructed him in her gentle voice, with its very slight English accent, "otherwise you'll be sick."

He was famished, but he reached out not for the strange foods she was proffering from her magic suitcase but for her hair, touching it once where it clustered on the nape of her neck. She existed then; she was real.