A Song for Summer

"No, Kendrick, no!" said Ellen--and made a last effort before this horrendous evening could end in solitude and her bed. "It's not that at all. You sound much nicer than your brothers-- you're the nicest possible person but--"' and then with an impulse to comfort which was stronger than discretion and her inmost desire for privacy, she said: "It's just that ... I'm in love with someone else. He's not in love with me; he doesn't care about me at all but I can't help--"' And found to her horror that she had burst into tears.

But her chivalry achieved its aim. That Ellen was wretched made Kendrick's own misery bearable. Since his dreadful childhood, Kendrick had known that the world was a dark and threatening place; sadness was a country in which he felt entirely at home. That Ellen, so beautiful, so desirable, should also be unhappily in love was a profound consolation. To be allowed to put his arms round her in brotherly love, to let her cry on his shoulder, eased his own distress immeasurably. He murmured condolences, he promised always to be her friend, and of course to be there if ever she should change her mind. He even managed to make a kind of joke, for he had remembered now what the Viennese called the statue they were standing under: the Pestseule. "It's a monument to the Great Plague--about a hundred thousand people died in it, pretty horribly," he said, "so perhaps I didn't choose too well!"--and was rewarded by Ellen's smile, and her arm in his as they walked back to the hotel.

Marek was extraordinarily tired. The Feuerbach crisis had meant a day of incessant rehearsals and then four hours on the rostrum for the opera. Nothing had seemed quite real to him since the curtain went down, and now he realised how foolish he had been. It had seemed polite to escort Brigitta to her apartment, and now here it all was: the double doors open to reveal the ridiculous Swan Bed, the plumped up cushions, the clinging smell of her

scent. Brigitta had disappeared and reappeared in a cream lace peignoir, and was trying to snuggle up to him on the sofa.

He moved away.

"Brigitta, that's over, you know it is. I came to help with the opera. We're colleagues, that's all."

She lifted her face to his. The periwinkle-blue eyes filled with tears. "Darling, how can you say that?

When you know I love you."

"But I don't love you, Brigitta." God, how hard it was to say that to a woman. He pushed a hand through his hair, angry that she had put him in this position. "I respect you enormously as a musician; you gave a marvellous performance tonight, but our affair is over. I'm going to America and you have Stallenbach."

"Oh him!" She edged closer. The peignoir was wide open now; clearly he was supposed to be dazzled by her breasts, her stomach --and indeed if quantity were all this would have been no problem.

"Don't you remember, my darling, how marvellous it was?"'

Marek sighed. It had been good at times, but even then it was that she had always stood for something.

It was Mozart's lovelorn Countess or Violetta--doomed and dying with perfect breath control--that he had felt he was holding in his arms.

She had begun to cry now, but carefully, for she still wore make-up. "It's because I'm getting old. It's because I'm nearly forty."

She was forty-three and she was using blackmail. She was still playing the role she had played in the opera. "You're like Octavian," she stormed. "The first young thing you see and you're away."

"No, Brigitta, it isn't that; you're still a very beautiful woman."

It wasn't because she was young that he had wanted Ellen.

Brigitta was crying in earnest now. "I worked so hard for you. And now because my youth has gone ..."

She had worked hard. She had been as obedient as a child, this bullying, autocratic woman.

"Come, Brigitta; you'll be stopping all the clocks next."

She had played that scene superbly; the scene where the Marschallin describes the "unrelenting flow of time" and how sometimes she gets up in the night and stops the clocks in the palace. He could hear their soft chiming, evoked by the harps and the celeste, and her voice soaring above them. Did he have the right to deride her fear of ageing even if she was using it to get her way?

Never sleep with anyone out of pity. The maxim was engraved on his heart, as on the heart of everyone who wished to take and receive pleasure in the act of love.

"I'm leaving, Brigitta. I'm going to America, you know that."

"Then stay with me just one more time. Stay with me because of what we made tonight."

"All right, Brigitta. I'll stay for that."

At three a.m. he woke in the opulent bed, hot and oppressed, and sat up suddenly.

"What's the matter?"' she asked sleepily.

He turned a blank face to her. "What?"'

"You said something. Did you have a nightmare?"' He pushed the hair out of his eyes, longing to leap out of bed, to go and walk and walk, away from this stifling place.

"What did I say?"'