A Song for Summer

Ellen had gone with her raincoat and sou'wester, her wellington boots and three sweaters, prepared for the glowering house beneath its grey scree of fells and rock.

But something had gone wrong. She got out at the station to find a landscape of brilliant sun and dramatic purple cloud shadows; of luminous cushions of moss and laundered lambs. The air was full of the scent of may blossom; walking up the drive she came on clumps of brilliant pink and golden azaleas.

Crowthorpe itself was certainly an unattractive house: mottled brick, mock Tudor arches, narrow ecclesiastical windows, but there was a kitchen garden whose greenhouses, untended since the call-up of the gardener, still produced tomatoes and cucumbers, and nothing could stop the roses climbing up the liver-coloured walls.

If only it had rained, she thought afterwards ... but all that weekend the Lake District preened itself, the air was as soft as wine, a silken sheen lay on the waters of Crowthorpe Tarn and when she climbed the hill where the hikers had perished she saw a view to make her catch her breath. In Kendrick's woods the bluebells lay like a lake; there were kingfishers in the stream ...

If only Patricia Frobisher had been there to lay her dead, authoritarian hand over the house and spoil Ellen's image of Crowthorpe as a kind of jolie laide which could be brought back to life ... But Patricia had overestimated her own strength: stricken by her double loss, appalled at the thought of Kendrick as sole owner

of her home, she had allowed her brothers to take her away with them to Kenya.

Perhaps it was the blond Jersey calf, the youngest in the herd, which the farm manager made her feed from a bucket ... Or the two old servants, the only ones who had not left to do war work, who invited her into the kitchen and fed her on shortcake ... Or the sight of the sunshine streaming into a small summer house where her Aunt Annie, facing a gall bladder operation, could so suitably recuperate. But most probably it was the sight of three small, pale faces--Elsie and

Joanie and Doris--the Cockney evacuees banished by Mrs Frobisher before her departure to the gun room on account of ringworm, who threw themselves on Ellen and said they wanted their Mam.

Travelling back to London, Ellen thought of Sophie, needing somewhere quiet to study for her University Entrance, and Ursula, whose appalling grandparents tried to keep her captive in their hospitalised house among spittoons and bedpans. Margaret Sinclair was working in the dungeons of the Ministry of Information and seldom saw the daylight; she would benefit from weekends in the country. Bennet was incommunicado doing something unbelievably secret in Bletchley Park, but her mother was working far too hard in her hospital. And if the bombing started, as everyone thought it must do any day, there could be no safer place in England than Kendrick's home.

Even so Ellen held off until the day she met two men in uniform wearing the badge of the Czechoslovak Air Force--and realised that her heart had not leapt into her mouth. That she no longer expected Marek to appear, or claim her. That dead or alive she knew him to be lost for ever.

Kendrick would not have dared to propose to her again. No one proposed to Ellen in those years since Marek vanished. Isaac was sheltering in Gowan Terrace, waiting for his visa to the States, when Ellen came back from Hallendorf. He had seen in an instant that his case was lost, and shown his quality by leaving her alone. And the procession of young men who came to the house after he left for America, though they fell in love as they had always done (she was perhaps more beautiful than ever) knew better than to declare themselves. Perfectly friendly as Ellen was, there was something in her manner that put that out of court.

It was Ellen who informed Kendrick that if he

was willing to consider a marriage of the old-fashioned kind, for the management of land and the care of children, she was prepared to become his wife.

Sophie and Leon met during their lunch break in Hyde Park to discuss the news of the engagement.

Sophie's father, complete with experimental rats and Czernowitz, was now installed in a big house in Surrey and her mother was in Scotland, so she spent the week boarding in Gowan Terrace.

The bedding plants had been removed and the ground divided into allotments so that Londoners could dig for victory; the gas masks abandoned during the phony war now hung again from people's shoulders--

but Sophie, who had been so terrified of rejection and abandonment, found herself less frightened than she had expected at the prospect of invasion and total war.

"Why is she doing this?"' Leon asked. He was working as tea boy in a film studio, but still enjoyed the comforts of his parents' mansion near Marble Arch.

"She's sorry for Kendrick and the evacuees, and Aunt Annie has to have a gall bladder operation, and she wants us all to go there when the bombing starts--or even if it doesn't."