Herr Schneider, though interested in the price Marek now mentioned, said there was no question of them putting it up. He had haemorrhoids and was not allowed on a ladder and his son was up on the high pasture dealing with the cows.
‘It’s a tricky job, putting up wheels.’
‘Rubbish. It’s going on the gable end of the coach house. Any able-bodied man can do it in ten minutes.’
But this gambit was a mistake, leading back to Herr Schneider’s haemorrhoids and the fact that the doctors in Klagenfurt knew nothing and cared less. ‘I’ll sell you the wheel but you must put it up yourself,’ said Herr Schneider, adding grudgingly that Herr Tarnowsky could use the tools in the outhouse.
Marek swore and handed over a sheaf of notes. Seemingly he had hit on the one man in the district who was not related to Lieselotte. ‘I’ll have to borrow your van,’ he said.
An hour later, the wheel lashed to the back, he was on his way to Hallendorf.
If it hadn’t been for Lieselotte, Ellen wouldn’t have come – her dislike of meetings was growing worse rather than better – but this one mattered terribly to her helper, so she had found her usual place on the windowsill and now, with Sophie on one side and Lieselotte on the other, she listened to Bennet’s summing up.
‘I explained to the Mayor that we were greatly honoured to be asked – as you know, a closer union of the school and the village is something I have always wanted. On the other hand, I had to tell him that I didn’t feel that the school as a whole could be involved in the project. Of course any individuals – staff or pupils – who want to help in their own time are entirely free to do so, but –’
‘Why?’
The interruption came from Sophie, whose shyness was proverbial, and who now blushed crimson at her own daring.
Bennet looked across at her with his charming smile.
‘You mean why can’t the school be involved in a pageant to celebrate the life of St Aniella?’
‘Yes.’ Sophie nodded, still crimson.
‘Because we would be taking part in a religious ritual,’ explained Bennet. ‘It would be outside our brief as an educational establishment.’
‘She’s nice though, Aniella is.’ The tiny Sabine spoke with unexpected resolution.
‘Yes, she is,’ said Sophie. ‘She’s ordinary but she’s special too. She’s a chicken saint – you know, the kind that shelters people.’ She stuck out her thin arms, turning them into sheltering wings. ‘She looks after children and old people –’
‘And after animals,’ put in Flix. ‘Every kind of animal. Even salamanders and hedgehogs and grass snakes. The pictures are in the church.’
‘Do you all know the story then?’ Bennet was surprised.
‘No, we don’t,’ said some children at the back.
‘Perhaps you’d better tell us then, Sophie,’ said the headmaster.
‘Oh no, I couldn’t!’
‘Go on, Sophie,’ said Ellen gently.
So Sophie took a deep breath and began. Her mother had told her she couldn’t project her voice and her father had said one must never put oneself forward but now she forgot both of them. As she spoke, the children could see Aniella moving among the sick and wounded animals in her flower-filled meadow . . . could hear the clatter of hoofs as the evil knights rode towards her house. They were with her as she prayed in the grotto (‘It’s the one above the larch plantation, the one full of bicycle tyres,’ said Sophie) and hear the wing beats of the angel who consoled her. They followed the saint across the lake in a flotilla of boats, and felt the horror as she was stabbed and blood flowed over her wedding dress. ‘But it was all right,’ said Sophie, using the words that Lieselotte had used in the church. ‘Because she became beautiful again and floated up and up and flowers came down and lovely music played.’
‘It could be a promenade performance,’ said Leon when she had finished.
‘What’s a promenade performance?’ asked Janey.
‘It’s where people follow the action round. You’d start in Aniella’s house and go on to the grotto and so on. Not that I could have anything to do with it,’ Leon went on hastily, ‘because religion is the opium of the people.’
‘Well that’s really stupid,’ said Ursula hotly. ‘You might as well say you can’t do a play about the Arctic because you’re not a penguin.’
‘Leon is perfectly correct, however,’ said Jean-Pierre. ‘It is out of the question that we should have anything to do with a piece of Catholic superstition. Still, the lighting in the cave could be interesting: by using mirrors and back projection . . .’ His gaze became inward as he gave vent to a farrago of technicalities.
‘We’ve got all those animal masks spare from Abattoir. I don’t see why we couldn’t let them have those,’ said Rollo.
‘You could use some of the muslin that’s left over and dye it and use it to swag the boats, each one a different colour,’ said Bruno – and Rollo stared at him open-mouthed, for the boy had seized a piece of paper and begun to draw.
Bennet, letting the discussion move freely, found himself totally amazed. His agnostic – not to say atheistic – children, his Marxist staff with their detestation of any kind of superstition, were seriously discussing a religious pageant celebrating the life of a minor Austrian saint whose authenticity was much disputed. He imagined Frank’s father hearing of it, or the other parents who had entrusted their children to him on the understanding that they would grow up free of the spurious consolations of an afterlife. And why was Jean-Pierre, who slept with a poster of Lenin above his head, holding forth on the merits of the lighting technique known as Pepper’s Ghost?
‘I wouldn’t mind being a salamander,’ said Sabine firmly. ‘I’d rather be a salamander than a carcass.’
Bennet called the meeting to order. ‘I shall not prevent anyone from helping,’ he said, ‘but it must be made clear that it is done on an individual basis.’
The children, however, were concerned with a more important point.
‘Who’s going to be Aniella?’ they asked each other. ‘Who’s going to be the saint?’
It would have to be a grown-up – Aniella wasn’t a child – and someone whom everybody liked, both the village and the school.
But really the question was already answered. Bennet saw them nod to each other, heard Ellen’s name go through the room like wind through corn . . . saw them looking to where she sat, leaning her head against the window.
They were right, of course. She would be wonderful as Aniella. She would pull this amateurish escapade together with her warmth, her gravitas. Surely this time she would not refuse to be singled out, to be in the limelight?
Yes, she was going to do it! She had risen to her feet and shaken out her hair – and she looked as happy as she had done when he first saw her. Happy and honoured, perhaps, at the obvious wishes, now being expressed, that she should be the pageant’s centre and its star.
Except that she wasn’t looking at the people now surging towards her; she had turned back to the window and was looking out at the coach house roof, on to the gable of which a man on a tall ladder was fixing a wooden wheel.
For three days Marek shut himself up in his old room in the stable block. People who came to knock on his door did not do so twice, and even Tamara respected his wishes and stayed away.
His intention at first was simply to adapt some of the well-known folk songs and hymns of the district, orchestrating them for such instruments as were to hand and teaching the smaller children a simple accompaniment.
Then on the first day Ellen had come in with a tray, for he had made it clear that he would not come in for meals. The tray contained a plate with a pork chop, a helping of mashed potatoes and some garden peas. For dessert she had given him fresh fruit: a bunch of black grapes, a peach. A pot of coffee was keeping warm under a cosy.
She put the tray down and for a moment he saw her: the asymmetrical hair, the concerned eyes and strongly marked brows.
‘How??
?s it going?’ he asked her.
‘It’s amazing. The exact opposite of Abattoir. People are coming from everywhere to help. We’ve even found a fierce horse for Count Alexei – it used to pull the dustcart and it’s a stinker. And believe it or not, they all want Frank to be the angel: a huge, ferocious angel like Raphael with enormous wings and –’
But Marek had stopped listening. She saw the sudden withdrawal into his own thoughts and left him. As soon as she was gone, he dropped the manuscript paper on to the floor. Two hours later, he had written what came to be called the Aniella theme.
My God, this is worse than Hollywood, he thought. A girl comes in with a pork chop and I write a song for her. It wasn’t quite like that, of course, but it was true that he had wanted suddenly to express the sense of joy in simple things which characterised her. But now he was done for. The growling march for the evil knights was already in his head, and now the interaction of Aniella’s theme with that of the angel in the grotto.
‘Idiot!’ he told himself, facing days without sleep and an amount of work out of all proportion to the occasion – but nothing now could have stopped him.
In the evening she came again with the fresh supply of manuscript paper he had sent out for, and a supper tray.
‘I need a large Thermos of coffee,’ he said. ‘Black. Nothing else.’
When she had gone he went to the window and stretched. It occurred to him to wonder if he would have written this music if Ellen had agreed to be Aniella; if she had given in to the clamour of those who wanted her to be the pageant’s star. But she had not considered it even for a moment.
‘It would be completely wrong for me to do it; I’m not Austrian and I’m not a Catholic. I’ll help in any way I can but there’s only one person who can do it – you must see that.’
And they had seen it. Lieselotte would not have to act – she was Aniella – and by insisting on this uncomplicated and well-loved girl, Ellen had brought the village round behind the enterprise to a man. But it had touched Marek, as it had touched Bennet, that she had meant what she said when she’d insisted that she herself did not want to act or sing or be singled out in any way.
‘What if it rains?’ asked Frau Tischlein. She was the old woman who had warned Ellen of the wild children at Hallendorf. Now suddenly the wild children were everywhere; in the village, in Lieselotte’s house . . . suggesting, rehearsing . . . They were even in the church, where hammering and sawing could be heard all day, for Lieselotte, at her own insistence, was to be flown upwards to the tower.
‘It won’t rain,’ said Frau Becker. ‘God would not permit it when we are working so hard in his name.’
They were certainly working hard. The scheme for the pageant seemed to grow spontaneously like a river gathering tributaries. Lieselotte’s own house was too high up the mountain to be used, but a similar wooden house not far from the grotto was commandeered. To this house the villagers brought flowers for the window boxes and tubs of ornamental shrubs, and when Rollo fixed an imitation morning glory up one wall, it became the house in the painting.
‘I want to be a salamander too,’ said the six-year-old son of the shoemaker and was sent to Bruno to be fitted out with yellow spots.
What had happened to Bruno was as great a miracle to Ellen as anything that had happened to the saint. Coming to look for him late one night, she found him in the art room.
‘Don’t tell me to go to bed,’ he said angrily – and she didn’t, for she had seen what he was making: the mask that would turn Aniella into an old crone, an uncanny masterpiece fashioned from rice paper and silk in which Lieselotte’s pretty features were still discernible beneath the wrinkles.
‘They have taken my baby!’ cried Hermine, finding the herring box empty and coming distraught to Ellen.
‘It’s all right, she’s with Frau Becker and the others in the sewing room.’
‘But they will give her bad things to eat – sweet things, and in the book it says –’
But when Andromeda was returned, with icing sugar on her cheeks, she smiled and cooed and slept the night through for the first time since she was born.
Problems arose continuously. How would the followers get from the house to the church? Not everyone could go in the flotilla of boats. No one expected the tight-fisted Captain Harrar to offer his paddle steamer, but he did; it would follow at a distance and there would be room for everyone.
When it became clear that even with all the village women sewing, the dresses would not be done, six nuns appeared from the convent, asked for Ellen, and were led to the hall which had been taken over as a workshop. One of these, Sister Felicity, turned out to be an expert botanist and supervised the making of Alpenrosen petals for Aniella to strew over the lake, and head-dresses of saxifrage and gentians and cornflowers for the guests. But it was Ellen who made Aniella’s wedding gown, fighting Bruno for the last of the muslin and creating a dream dress which had Lieselotte in tears.
Only Ursula still stood aside.
‘I wish you’d be one of the bridesmaids like us,’ said Sophie. ‘We’ll be sailing over the lake with Aniella; it’ll be fun. Ellen’s got a dirndl for you, she told me.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ said Ursula. ‘No one wore braces on their teeth in those days. People would jeer at me.’
‘No they wouldn’t,’ began Sophie – but Ursula had already marched off with her red exercise book.
There was to be as little ‘acting’ as possible, everyone agreed on that. Enacting yes, acting no, but it had been decided that there should be a brief commentary to link the scenes together and to his utter amazement, Bennet himself had agreed to write it.
What am I doing? he asked himself. I’m an atheist; I’ve been one all my life. Yet now he wrote words for an Austrian saint who lived by God, for an angel lit from behind (if the generator worked) by a Marxist teacher of Mathematics. He wrote words to proclaim the treachery of the greengrocer, who had been cast as Count Alexei – and told himself he was an idiot and did not stop.
By now no one remembered any more who belonged to the village and who to the school. Bennet cancelled all afternoon lessons, did not even open the letter from his stockbroker and told Margaret to abandon all correspondence with Toscanini Aunts. Convinced that he faced ruin and derision from such parents as would make their way to Hallendorf, Bennet found he did not greatly care. If this was the end of his beloved school, it was a good one.
Into this creative chaos, there now burst Marek’s music.
On the morning of the fourth day he showered, shaved and went to find Ellen.
‘I want Leon – tell him to copy these parts; I need three copies at least. And find me Flix and those Italian twins and the red-haired boy with a scar behind his ear.’
‘Oliver?’ she said. ‘You want him?’
‘Yes; he can sing. I heard him when he was carving. And Sophie; she can hold a tune. I’ll teach them first and they can help the others. Three o’clock this afternoon in the music room.’
He then commandeered Bennet’s car and drove to the village where he asked to see the leader of the Hallendorf Brass Band and said he expected him and his players next morning at the castle.
‘But we’re competing in the finals at Klagenfurt in a month,’ said the leader. ‘We –’
Marek said this was a pity, but he expected them at ten, and disappeared into the kitchens of the Goldene Krone, summoned the assistant chef and told him to fetch his brother and his accordion. Two hours later he was in Klagenfurt, in the School of Music, and said he needed a fiddler, a cellist and a viola player for the coming week.
‘But that is out of the question. No one will come for a country pageant. They have exams.’
‘Ask them,’ said Marek briefly – and handed over his card.
The principal backed away. They were true, then, the rumours he had heard.
‘Yes, sir; of course. I’ll send the best players I’ve got.’
‘They’ll need strong shoes,’ sa
id Marek. ‘Ten o’clock at the castle.’
In the days that followed, Bennet, watching Marek’s rehearsals, saw every one of his educational beliefs thrown over.
‘I can’t sing;’ said Sophie, ‘my mother says I have a voice like a corncrake,’ – and was treated to a blistering attack on people who at the age of twelve were still under their mother’s thumb. ‘If you were an Arab you’d be married by now,’ said Marek. ‘I decide who can’t, and no one else. Now open your mouth and sing.’
Leon, after three hours of copying music, said he was tired and was treated to a stare of such contempt that he changed his mind, and reached for another pile of manuscript paper.
‘You’re late,’ said Marek to the students of the Klagenfurt Academy, emerging from their car.
‘I’m sorry, Herr Altenburg. We had a puncture.’
‘Don’t let it happen again. Here’s your music. I want it by heart tonight. You represent continuity; you’ll go from venue to venue accompanying the narrator. In the last scene you’ll be playing in the tower of the church.’
‘Herr Altenburg, I can’t; I have vertigo.’ And as Marek looked at him: ‘All right – I’ll get the chemist to fix me something.’
But with the youngest children from the village and the school Marek was gentle. He played the tune for Aniella once, and again and for the third time. He played the tune for the wicked knights (to be enacted, unexpectedly, by the greengrocer, the butcher – and Chomsky) and the music for the wedding feast. And he told them that they must be strong and trust him while they learnt to play their triangles and shake their tambourines and bang their drums in the right way, because while this happened the tunes would go away.
‘But they’ll come back,’ he said, ‘all the tunes will come back and you’ll see how important you are,’ and they nodded and let themselves be led away by Freya to practise.
Odd things happened. A boatload of dentists from the conference booked into the annexe of the Krone overheard a rehearsal.