A Song for Summer

As they made their way across the square, he heard the little train for Hallendorf come chugging in.

Fate had spoken and it had spoken rightly. For after all, what bound him was not just loyalty to a friend who had suffered. It was not the mark branded on Isaac's arm; it was the moment when Issac had turned to him in the hut, his face alight for the first time in weeks, and said: "I told you, didn't I? I told you I'd play the premiere!"

He had played only the theme of the slow movement, but was enough.

From this man, whose musicality and dedication had somehow survived through so much hardship, one did not snatch what he believed was his fulfillment and his future.

Two days after Ellen returned from Kalun, Bennet gave an assembly which she found a little disquieting.

It was about a Greek warrier called Philoctetes who was bitten in the foot by a serpent and abandoned by his friends on a lonely island because they couldn't stand the stench from his wound. True, the story ended happily: finding they needed him to fight the Trojan War, his companions returned and after much grovelling persuaded him to sail with them to Troy where he dispatched Paris with his bow and arrow, thus bringing the whole sorry business to an end.

But the somewhat lachrymose way in which the headmaster dwelt on the abandoned hero's wounds and his friends' ingratitude was not at all in Bennet's usual style and Ellen was not surprised, when she spoke to Margaret, to hear that the secretary was getting very worried.

"It's that wretched FitzAllan and his play," she said. "He carries on as though there's nothing else in the world and asks for more and more. Everyone's told him the money just isn't there. And Tamara's chasing after him in the most blatant manner, trying to save her stupid ballet."

"Surely he wouldn't--"'

"Oh no, not him. He's far too selfish to notice anyone else, but really her sunbathing is getting perfectly ridiculous. She went and laid herself down right in the middle of David Langley's fruit fly experiment, even though he labelled it quite clearly."

"I tell you one thing, Margaret, if I ever catch her sunbathing on Kohlr@oserl I won't answer for the consequences," said Ellen.

"I wish Bennet wouldn't worry about the play so much. His own workshop on The Winter's Tale is what they'll come for anyway in the Summer School." She looked admiringly at Ellen. "I must say, your fringe is quite enchanting. What a strange boy Bruno is."

"Yes, indeed."

Coming into her room on the night she got back, Bruno had found Ellen trying to repair the damage done by the cr@epe suzette. He had watched for a moment as she tried to level out the mangled curls and then shaken his head.

"You want to cut more off. A lot more." "What do you mean?"'

Words were not Bruno's coinage. He took the scissors from her and told her to shut her eyes. It was not easy sitting still while this badly behaved boy cut off what felt like large chunks of her hair but she did it, while the other children watched in silence.

But when he had finished and Ellen went to the mirror, she found herself smiling with surprise and pleasure. He had reduced her damaged curls to little half-moons and brought more hair in to make a tousled, tentative fringe which lapped her brows and echoed the gold-brown of her eyes. If she looked like a courtesan who had just got out of bed, she looked like a very expensive one.

Marek would like it, thought Ellen, while the children exclaimed. Except that Marek will never see it, she told herself--but the smile persisted, as though the memory of that kiss in the garden could not be set aside. She could not hear from him till he was back from Poland but after that ... Surely before he sailed he would write to her once, or even come, if only to give her news of Issac. It seemed impossible that the whispered pre-dawn farewell for the three of them could be the last goodbye.

Meanwhile, as always, there was work and the need to console others. Bruno, her hair sorted, retreated into his usual uncooperative state, denying the slightest artistic ability and refusing to help poor Rollo who had been informed by FitzAllan that the masks he had made for the animals were not suitably monolithic and drab.

"If you've ever seen a monolithic and drab piglet I'd like to see it," said Rollo angrily.

Hermine had been told by the director not to feed her baby in the theatre. "I think he does not like my bosom," said Hermine, coming tearfully to Ellen. "And this I understand. I do not like it myself," she said mournfully, looking down at her cleavage, "but I cannot leave Andromeda so far away. Of course I should not have let the Professor overcome me--"' But at this point Ellen changed the subject, for she could not bear Hermine's remorse over her seduction by the Vocal Rehabilitation expert who had drunk too much gentian brandy at the conference in Hinterbruhl.