A Song for Summer

Aunt Annie--the one who was a mycologist --continued to feel that it was unwise to encourage the poor young man, but Dr Carr was not sorry to think that her daughter might be having a break in that most beautiful of cities. In her last letter Ellen had sounded a little tired. It occurred to her that Ellen had not mentioned the groundsman recently--the one who had put the tortoise on wheels. She hoped he was still there; he had sounded sensible, and not many of the staff at Hallendorf sounded that.

As for Aunt Phyllis--she was having a thought which when it came to the surface of her mind upset her deeply, for it was a throwback to the days when she was Gussie Norchester's biddable daughter and leading a life of stifling conventionality. She had caught herself thinking that there were worse places than a large house in rural Cumberland, in the event of war, for her beloved niece.

As they drove down the winding road towards the first of the lakes, it began to rain. Marek wound down the window of his father's old Talbot and switched on the windscreen wipers which fibrillated uncertainly and then stuck. The car was used only on the farm; an ancient pick-up. He had refused to borrow the Captain's Buick.

Beside him Steiner sat silent, his arm in its sling supported on the cushion that Marek's mother had arranged for him when they set off. He was angry with Marek.

"There's no need for you to do this," he'd said. "I can easily make my own way back by train."

Marek had taken no notice, but now, as he drove through the prim, uncaring villages towards Steiner's house, there was little they could say to each other. Their long quest for Isaac had ended in tragedy; Steiner was hurt; the van had had to be left, hidden in a shed at Pettovice, to be dismantled and refitted as an ordinary lorry. Steiner's folk song collecting days were over.

"You must get back to work,

Marek," the old man said eventually. "You must book your passage to America. I shall stay and edit my papers and if you get in my way I shall be extremely cross. My house is too small for the two of us."

Marek managed a smile. "I won't stay long. Just long enough to see that your arm is healed."

The bullet fired through the windscreen by the Nazi louts who had ambushed Steiner had only grazed the skin, but there were splinters of glass more deeply lodged.

"My arm is healed," said the Professor angrily. "Let me tell you, Marek, I will not endure being fussed over." Dear God, he thought, what will make this obstinate man understand where his true destiny lies?

"There's nothing more you can do for Meierwitz."

"I should like to have buried him," said Marek grimly.

There had been no choice but to take the injured Steiner to Pettelsdorf. The van could only limp along at a snail's pace, the glass was shattered; there was no possibility of crossing the border and bringing him home. Remembering the fearless way his people had come forward, Marek could hardly bear to think that he had endangered them. He had scarcely brought the van to a standstill than it was removed, hidden.

No one asked any questions--not Janik or Stepan, not Andras in the mill; everyone was instantly alert, everyone understood. Lenitschka, usually so voluble, took Steiner upstairs in silence while the maids fetched bandages ...

But with his mother he had quarrelled straight away. "You had no right to keep your work a secret. We want to help, all of us. We want to fight this evil. We could have sheltered your fugitives and made everything easier."

She had always been politically aware, reared among intellectuals. From the day Hitler burnt the books in front of the university, Milenka was implacably engaged against the Nazis. Nor was his grandmother an ally.

"Your mother is perfectly right," said Nora Coutts, emerging from her room to interfere with Lenitschka as she dressed Steiner's wound. "You have always been in danger of patronising women. I've told you before."

He'd made no headway either in getting them

to apply for emigration visas.

"You must see the way it's going," he'd said. "Please."

And he had repeated what he had told them already: that it was a Czech voice, issuing from a thug in a Nazi uniform, that had boasted of Isaac's murder.

"You go ahead," Milenka had said. "Knowing you're safe is the only thing that matters. If you go, and prepare the way for us, we'll follow."

He knew that she lied. His father would not leave, and while he stayed she would be with him. They were strung together on one bow, these two unlikely people; their lives together made the melody that was Pettelsdorf.

For Steiner the week of pain and grief for Isaac had been shot through with a strange joy.

He'd been thirty years old when he first saw Milenka at a poetry reading in Berlin. She was nineteen, a bird-thin girl whose soul one could enter without subterfuge, for she hid nothing. He fell terribly in love ...