A Song for Summer

"I could put ground glass into his nut cutlet?"' suggested Lieselotte, who had taken against the director from the start. She was particularly incensed when she compared the demands FitzAllan was making with the cheeseparing that went on in the village about Aniella's name day celebrations. "Every year we say we will do something really nice for her and every year people are too lazy or too tired or too poor."

FitzAllan had of course rung the slaughterhouse to check about the foot and mouth disease and found out the truth, and what he regarded as Ellen's collusion with Marek in tricking him, and had scarcely spoken to her since.

Fortunately Chomsky, when she visited him, was improving. Not to the extent of returning to school but to the point where there was no longer any question of anyone taking him to a foreign place and asking her for his passport.

It was when she had been back for a week that Ellen realised that her ability to cope and comfort others had had an underlying cause. That somehow, against all reason and sense, she believed that she would see Marek again. That the time she had spent with him in the garden at Kalun had meant to him, perhaps not what it had meant to her--he was after all an experienced man with many affairs to his credit--but something. It was as though she was unable to conceive that this sense of total belonging, this mingling of utter peace and overwhelming excitement, was something she had felt all by herself.

As the days passed and she realised he must have returned from Poland she found herself waiting in the morning for the post bus--not now to console Freya if there was no news from Mats, or Sophie vainly awaiting a letter from her parents, but on her own account, and beneath the longing--a longing the depth of which she could not have imagined--there was anger. For she remembered very well what she had said to Bennet during her first interview when he asked her what she was afraid of. "Not seeing," she had said. "Being obsessed by something that blots out the world. That awful kind of love that makes leaves and birds and cherry blossom invisible because it's not the face of some man."

Now, when she had a rare moment to herself, it was Marek's face that she saw again and again as he paused in front of her door in the hotel corridor and said: "Ellen, if I were to ask you--"'

And then the door of Isaac's room had burst open and poor Isaac came out trussed up in bandages and by the time she had helped him, Marek was gone.

What had he been going to say? Sometimes, deliriously, she thought it was "If I were to ask you, would you come to America?"' or "If I asked you, would you stay with me tonight?"', and to both those questions she would have answered "Yes" with every cell and

fibre in her body.

But as the days went by and she heard nothing, she knew it could have been neither of those things. At the most perhaps he wanted her to look after the tortoise or see to Steiner's bandages.

She did in fact go and see Steiner whenever she could; she had become extremely fond of the old man, but he too had heard nothing.

Then, about ten days after her return, she was coming off the steamer with a basket full of shopping, when Sophie ran towards her, waving a letter.

"It's just come for you! It's Express and Special Delivery and everything!"

Ellen put down her basket. For a moment she experienced a joy so pervasive and complete that she was surprised she had not been borne aloft by angels. Then she took the letter.

The joy died more gradually than she expected. Though she saw almost at once that the letter was from Kendrick, the message reached her brain only slowly. She was still smiling when she opened it, though the tears already stung her eyes.

"I'm awfully sorry to bother you again, Ellen," Kendrick had written, "but it would be so lovely if you could come to Vienna and I still haven't heard. Even if you'd just come for the weekend--I've got a surprise for you on Saturday night as I told you; something at which you could wear the amazing dress you made for your graduation. It would make me so happy and there is so much to see."

"Is it from the man in the wet house?"' asked Sophie, who seemed to be developing second sight.

Ellen nodded and handed her the letter. She still couldn't trust herself to speak. Sophie obediently read through Kendrick's hopes and his expectations of the cultural life in Vienna, but when she lifted her head again she had to draw a deep and unexpected breath. Ellen had always looked after them; now, suddenly, she had an intimation of a different state; a state in which she and her friends might have to look after Ellen.

And growing up a little, she said briskly: "Lieselotte's waiting for the icing sugar,"-- and saw Ellen bend to pick up her basket--and her life.

The letter Ellen had been waiting for came the next day--not to her but to Professor Steiner.

"He wrote it from Pettelsdorf," said the

old man gently and put it in her hand.