A Song for Summer

She sang a few bars of the slow, ascending phrase to which the girl emerges into the sunlit morning, and she was right. The silvery, ethereal notes rose in the evening air and the people sitting close by fell silent.

Marek's face was closed; a mask; he hated what he had to do.

"No, Brigitta, I didn't write it for you. If I wrote it for anyone--if that's how it works and I'm still not sure--I wrote it for a girl who had no part in the pageant, whom nobody saw, who did not act or sing or play an instrument ... and who is not here now at the party but in the kitchen, making the food we are eating."

Brigitta's cry of fury and revelation rent the air.

"The cook!" she cried. "You wrote that music for the cook!"

"Yes."

It could have gone either way. Marek, certainly, was braced for pathos and tears--and they would have been justified, for she would have made a lovely thing of Aniella's music. But the fates who had smiled on Hallendorf all day still looked benignly on the inhabitants. Brigitta did not weep or beseech as she had done after the opera. She rose, expanded her well-documented ribcage--and exploded into righteousness and rage.

"How dare you insult me like that? How dare you beg for a place in my bed and then go and sport with domestics? I offered you my art and my love and you go off to roll in the gutter. Well, do it then --make Kn@odel with your cook, but don't come running back to me. When I think what I was prepared to do for you!" She turned majestically to Staub. "Go on. Remind him of what I was prepared to do!"

"She was prepared to huddle," said Staub weakly.

"I was prepared to huddle," repeated Brigitta, to the interest of those in earshot. "But not now. Not ever again. Get the driver, Benny-- we're leaving."

But this was not so simple. Infected by the day's proceedings, the taxi driver had pinned Hermine against the wall of the Greek temple, where he was outlining the plot of a possible music drama based on his grandmother's experience with her husband's ghost, and made it clear that he was in no way ready to depart.

It was after midnight when Ellen was finished.

Now she sat on the rim of the well where she had sat at the beginning, garnering gym shoes. Fireflies danced in the catalpa tree; an owl hooted--perhaps the same one which Marek had shown her how to feed. The music still came faintly from the terrace, but the younger children were in bed; the party had moved on to the village and would continue until dawn. Enough light came from the upstairs window to show her the outline of the wheel on the coach house roof. Would they come next year, the storks--and would there be anyone left to welcome them?

He came upon her quietly, but she knew his step and braced herself. This was where one let love go lightly--bade it goodbye with an open hand in the way the detestable Brigitta had sung about. And seeking help, she called up her pantheon of people who had behaved well as she now had to do: Mozart's sister, as talented as he was, who had disappeared uncomplainingly into oblivion and domesticity; Van Gogh's brother Theo, always helping, sending money, asking nothing for himself.

But there are times for thinking about Mozart's sister, and a night full of fireflies and stars did not seem to be one of them. Marek had sat down beside her and the memory of Kalun, his arms round her, the place on his shoulder made specially to fit her head, made her close her eyes.

"I've brought you some news," he said. "Isaac is safe."

She looked up then. "Oh, that's wonderful. I'm so glad!"

"They hope to get him across to England, so your family may be hearing from him soon."

"They'll help him, I promise you."

"You know that Isaac is in love with you," he said abruptly.

She sighed. "He was afraid; I helped him--he was bound to feel that. I explained it all to Millie. But now that he's safe--"'

"I'm not so sure." He was silent for a moment. Then: "If he asked you to marry him would you accept?

Could you be persuaded to?"'

"What?"' she asked stupidly. The question made no sense to her.

"Your friend Kendrick came to see me in Vienna. He told me you were in love with someone else. I thought it might be Isaac."

But even as he spoke he realised that her answer did not matter. Whatever she might say about Isaac was irrelevant; the time for chivalry was past. When he had first seen her by the well he'd thought of her as a girl in a genre painting: as Seamstress or Lacemaker--but he'd been wrong. She was a Lifemaker; he'd seen that watching her ceaseless, selfless work for the pageant. Had his friend still been in danger Marek might have continued to stand aside, but not now. Isaac must take his chance.