A Song for Summer

The wild child shook it. "I'm Sophie," she said, and put one foot behind the other and bobbed a curtsy.

The next minute she blushed a fiery red. "Oh I'm sorry. I shouldn't have done that."

"Done what?"'

"Curtsied. No one does it here like they don't go to bed much and they don't wear white socks, but I haven't been here very long and in

Vienna in my convent it was all different."

"I liked it," said Ellen, "but I won't give you away. However I have to tell you that now I'm here people will go to bed and if they want to wear white socks they will wear them and they'll match and be clean."

The child turned to her, transfigured. "Will you do that? Can you really?"' Then her face fell; the look of anxiety returned. For Ellen Carr had shoulder-length tumbled hair and gentle eyes; she wore a green jacket the colour of moss and a skirt that made you want to touch it, it looked so soft. And that meant lovers--lots of lovers-- as it had meant with Sophie's mother, who was beautiful too and had left Vienna for Paris and Paris for London because of lovers and was now in Ireland making a film and did not write.

"No," she said. "You'll fall in love and go away."

"No I won't," said Ellen.

She put her arm round Sophie's shoulders but their progress towards the house was slow. A pink camellia detained Ellen and a white snail, fragile as a snowflake, swaying on a blade of grass.

Then suddenly she stopped. "Sophie, what on earth is that?"'

They had reached the first of the level terraces. Coming across a patch of grass towards them at an amazing speed was a tortoise. It looked much as tortoises do, its neck extended, its demeanour purposeful--but fastened to its back end was a small platform with two wheels on which it scooted as if on roller skates.

"It's Achilles," said Sophie.

"His back legs were paralysed and he was dragging himself along. We thought we'd have to have him destroyed and then Marek came and made him those wheels."

Ellen bent down to the tortoise and picked him up. Retreating only briefly into his shell, Achilles submitted to being turned upside down. The contraption supporting his withered legs was unbelievably ingenious: a little trolley screwed to his shell and supporting two highly oiled metal wheels.

She put him down again and the tortoise scooted away over the grass like greased lightning.

"It took Marek hours to do. He shut himself

up in the workshop and wouldn't let anyone come near."

"Who's Marek?"' Ellen asked--but before Sophie could answer, a stentorian and guttural voice somewhere to their right cried: "No, no, no! You are not being rigid, you are not being steel. You are not being pronged. You must feel it in your spine, the metal, or you cannot become a fork!"

Deeply curious, Ellen crossed the terrace. A second, smaller set of steps led down on to an old bowling green surrounded by a yew hedge. On it stood a large woman with cropped hair wearing a hessian tabard and a pair of men's flannel trousers, shouting instructions to a dozen or so children lying on their backs on the lawn.

"Now open the fingers ... open them but not with softness. With these fingers you will spear ... you will jab

... you will pierce into the meat."

"That's Hermine. Dr Ritter," whispered Sophie. "She's terribly clever--she's got a PhDo in Dramatic Movement from Berlin University. She makes us be bunches of keys and forks and sometimes we have to give birth to ourselves."

But before the children could exhibit proper forkdom there was a fierce, mewing cry from what seemed to be a kind of herring box under the yew hedge and Dr Ritter strode over to it, extracted a small pink baby, and inserted it under her tabard.

"That's her Natural Daughter. She's called Andromeda. Hermine got her at a conference but no one knows who the father is."

"Perhaps we should show her how to make an opening down the front of her smock," said Ellen, for the baby had vanished without trace into the hessian folds. "And I didn't see any nappies?"'

"She doesn't wear any," Sophie explained. "She's a self-regulating baby."

"What a good thing I like to be busy," said Ellen, "for I can see that there's going to be a lot to do."

She followed Sophie into the castle. The rooms, with their high ceilings, gilded cornices and white tiled stoves, were as beautiful and neglected as the grounds. But when she reached the top floor and Sophie said: "This is your

room," Ellen could only draw in her breath and say: "Oh Sophie, how absolutely wonderful!"

The child looked round, her brow furrowed. The room contained a broken spinning wheel, a rolled up scroll painting of the Buddha (partly eaten by mice) and a pile of mouldering Left Book Club paperbacks--

all left behind by various housemothers who had not felt equal to the job.

But Ellen had gone straight to the window. She was part of the sky, inhabiting it. One could ride these not very serious clouds, touch angels or birds, meet witches. White ones, of course, with functional broomsticks, who felt as she did about the world.