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.
Ellen had shrunk away from him. ‘I don’t know why you’re putting me through all this,’ she said, her voice full of bewilderment. ‘When you know –’ she broke off, reaching for the tatters of her pride. ‘I’ve never asked you for anything. I’ve always known that you were going to America with Brigitta . . . and that no one who doesn’t understand about. . . enharmonic intervals and tritones . . . and species counterpoint can matter seriously to you. But –’
‘You’re so right,’ interrupted Marek earnestly. ‘So absolutely right! The idea of sharing my bed and board with someone who doesn’t understand tritones and enharmonic intervals is absolutely abhorrent to me. I can conceive of nothing more dreadful. I am particularly attached to conversations about enharmonic intervals before breakfast – and species counterpoint too, though in general I prefer to discuss that in my bath.’
She looked up, trying to read his voice. He had bent down to pick up a tin punched with holes, which he handed her.
‘I’ve brought you a present.’
‘Not a frog? Because I don’t kiss them, if you remember, so it would be a waste.’
‘No, not a frog. Open it.’
She could not clearly see the flowers lying on the damp moss, but she could smell them – and Henny had been right. Only in heaven could one find such a scent.
‘Sister Felicity told me where to look for them. I only brought a few; they’re getting rare.’
She couldn’t speak. Any other farewell present she could have taken lightly, but not this.
Marek had risen and now stood looking down at her.
‘I’m leaving in the morning,’ he said.
‘Yes, I know.’
‘But not for America.’
‘Oh? Why not?’
He shrugged. ‘I don’t really know. I suppose you could say that I have decided to stay and share the fate of my countrymen.’
She took a steadying breath. ‘Where to, then?’
‘To Pettelsdorf,’ he said, using the old name for his home. ‘And I want you to come.’
Mozart’s sister vanished into the shadows; Van Gogh’s brother dematerialised. Joy exploded and the night stars sang.
‘To see the storks?’ she asked.
‘That also,’ said Marek – and pulled her to her feet.
Tamara, alone of those at Hallendorf, had had a frustrating and unpleasant day. Not one of the Toscanini Aunts had noticed her or asked about her career. She had been presented simply as the headmaster’s wife and then ignored.
Well, now Bennet should make it up to her; he should make her feel special and wanted again. In the bedroom, with its windows over the courtyard, she took the record of the Polovtsian dances out of the sleeve, sharpened the fibre needle of the gramophone, took off her dress.
Bennet turned from the window to find the proceedings well under way. But this time he did not view them with his usual mixture of dread and resignation. Instead he smiled pleasantly at his wife and said: ‘Not tonight, dear. I’m rather tired.’
He did not, however, show any particular signs of fatigue. Instead he walked past Tamara, who was in the act of unstoppering the Bessarabian Body Oil, and made his way downstairs.
It seemed to him to be his duty as well as his pleasure to be the first to congratulate the two people he had seen embracing so closely and passionately by the well.
‘A consummation devoutly to be wished,’ he murmured, thinking of Marek and Ellen sharing a life.
There could have been no better ending to this happy day.
It was as lovely as she had expected, the famous Forest of Bohemia. Pools of light between ancient trees, new-minted streams tumbling over glistening stones . . . Squirrels ran along the branches of great limes; woodpeckers hammered at the trunks of oaks that had stood ‘from everlasting to everlasting’.
Bennet had insisted on lending them his car for the few days he could spare Ellen. It was an open Morris Minor; they drove along the lanes as if in a beneficent perambulator, at one with the birdsong and the sky.
‘Are you hungry?’ Marek said. ‘Would you like to stop somewhere for lunch?’, and she wondered how soon it would be before just seeing him turn his head would no longer send her heart leaping. It would stop, this joy, she told herself; she had watched married couples on the Underground, in tea shops, and it was clear they didn’t feel like this, but at the moment it was impossible to imagine.
She shook her head. ‘I’m fine.’
But he decided to stop the car just the same. ‘It seems I need to kiss you,’ he explained. ‘If you have no objection.’
They drove on, past a tiny chapel with silvered aspen tiles on the roof and water wheels which seemed as much a part of the forest as the trees. No wonder, she thought, that Marek growing up in this had such assurance, such strength – and the gift of silence which came from it.
The assurance, too, to state his plans without embarrassment.
‘I am going to take Ellen home to meet my parents,’ he had said to the children and the staff. ‘And when term is over, I’m going to marry her.’
‘Can we come to the wedding?’ the children asked: Flix and Janey, Bruno and Ursula . . . and Sophie, trying to be happy for Ellen, trying to fight down her fear of loss.
‘Of course.’
Later he had asked her if she wanted to be married from Gowan Terrace. ‘Your mother would like it, I imagine?’
Ellen did not mind ‘where’ or even ‘whether’. She lived in a Blake-ian world of now; if God had arrived she would have asked him to dinner, unsurprised.
Marek too had shrugged off his restless concern for his country’s future and his own. He would stay at Pettelsdorf, write the symphony that for some time now had declared its intention to be composed, and fetch Ellen when the term was done.
They had been so kind at Hallendorf, so happy for her, thought Ellen gratefully: Freya and Lieselotte offering to do her work, Hermine hugging her . . . Chomsky had been surprised, understandably, that anyone could be preferred to him, but if he had to lose he was content to lose to Marek. Now she remembered Leon’s face as Marek handed him two sheets of music – a serenade he had written as a boy and found in Steiner’s trunk.
‘For my biographer,’ Marek had said, teasing him, and the boy had flushed with pleasure and for once been silent.
Only Tamara had not been there to see them off.
‘She’s got a migraine,’ Margaret had whispered. ‘It’s a good one – Toussia Alexandrovna was an expert!’
But it was Steiner Ellen thought of now, fingering the silver filigree cross she wore round her neck. He had come across the lake to say goodbye and taken her aside.
‘I bought this for Marek’s mother many years ago . . . before she was engaged. I’d like you to have it,’ he’d said.
She’d made no attempt to refuse. There were no games to be played with this old man. She only kissed him and wiped her eyes and asked no more questions, for his lifelong love for Milenka was obvious in the way he opened the box and took out the beautiful thing he had chosen with such care, and never proffered.
In the early afternoon they stopped at an inn and sat outside at a wooden table beside a stone trough where the dray horses came to drink. They ate rye bread and cheese and drank the famous beer of Marek’s country – and she asked again those questions which are the best of all because the answers are waited for, and known. Will Nora Coutts still be in her room drinking Earl Grey from Harrods? Will Lenitschka have baked a beigli for you and will it contain apricots and
hazelnuts? Will the geese be patrolling your mother’s hammock and is it honestly true that your father goes hunting with Albanian Indigestion Pills? She found she knew the name of Marek’s wolfhound but not of his mother’s Tibetan terrier, and now too she wanted to know what the old man was called, the one who kept bees and said: ‘Pity; pity about the music,’ whenever Marek went away.
‘Tell it again,’ she begged, asking about the spare doves that had to be driven away in washing baskets, and the grandfather who had outlived Chekhov and was buried with his fishing flies – and he would begin to do so and then decide it was more urgent to hold her and kiss her and learn the exact disposition of the freckles on her nose.
‘The light will be right,’ he said as they got back into the car. ‘The house faces west.’ She would see it with the ochre walls bathed in the sleepy gold of early evening. ‘It’s just a house,’ he said, trying to rein back, but it was useless. Her love for Pettelsdorf, before she had ever set foot in it, was ineradicable.
Oh Henny, if only you were here, she thought; if only you knew. But Henny did know. It was Henny who had taught her not to fear happiness. ‘It takes courage to be happy,’ Henny had said. But I have it, thought Ellen, and looked at Marek’s hands on the steering wheel and vowed she would give him space to work and time to be alone, but not perhaps at this second when it was necessary to touch one of his knuckles carefully with her fingertips in case it went away.
‘I’d like to go to the well first,’ she said, ‘the one you told me about in Kalun . . . where the girls go after their betrothal and draw a glass of water and bring it to their lovers.’ She looked at him a shade anxiously. ‘You will drink it, won’t you – even though water is for the feet?’
‘Yes, Ellen,’ he said, his voice suddenly husky. ‘I will drink it.’
They drove on for another hour. Then the trees seemed to grow more luxuriant, more spacious and the verges of the road were tended. They were coming to a demesne.
Marek had been right about the light. The sun was beginning to drop behind the trees, to send rays across the trunks, illumining the willow herb and foxglove in the grass. The time of day that means home-coming, the end of labour, the welcoming hearth.
She leant out, filling her lungs with the scents of the forest: resin, mushrooms, the peppery scent of the birches – and something else.
‘A bonfire?’ she said. ‘Or are they burning stubble?’
She did not realise anything was wrong till she saw Marek’s face and then, suddenly, she was terribly afraid. And at the same time, the smell grew stronger and there was a sound like the wind, which grew louder, became a roar. Even then she thought only of forest fires. That anything else could be burning was out of her power to imagine.
Marek had put his foot down on the accelerator. The little car lurched forward, rounded a bend . . . and she found that she had whimpered like a stricken animal.
It was the house that was burning. Flames licked the ochre walls; tongues of fire shot through the blackened window frames . . . had reached the roof – and all the time, worse than the smoke, the heat, was that terrifying, monstrous roar.
She should have stopped him. In her nightmares, for the rest of her life, she struggled with him, but he was too quick. He didn’t open the car door; he vaulted over it, and ran.
At the gates the men, pathetic firemen in toy helmets with buckets, tried to hold him back, but he pushed them away as if they were flies and raced towards the house and vanished.
‘No!’ they shouted after him. ‘No! Come back!’
She followed. Knowing it was madness, she ran after him, but the men were ready for her. They pinned her down as she struggled; held her fast. ‘No,’ they repeated in Czech. ‘No’ – hurting her in their grasp, forcing her on to the ground.
As she gasped for breath, lying pinioned, she saw high above the burning house, the storks circling and flapping for a last time above their ravaged nests. Then they became black streaks in the polluted, hellish sky, and were gone.
Kendrick Frobisher’s house, in the summer of 1940, was not wet.
It was a heavenly summer, the summer in which France fell and the British Expeditionary Force was evacuated from Dunkirk. Leaves were never such an intense and iridescent green; sunlight glinted on flower-studded meadows as the Germans encircled the Maginot Line and overran not only France but Belgium and Holland. Birdsong filled the air in the lull between bursts of gunfire and accompanied the fleeing refugees who blocked the roads. It was as though the weather was preparing a glorious requiem for the death of Europe.
In London, where Ellen was making sandwiches in the basement of the National Gallery, the barrage balloons swayed and glinted in the milky skies; nurses and air-raid wardens and office workers lay in the grass in their snatched lunch hours. Anxious relatives, scouring the bulletin boards to see who was safely returned across the Channel, found it easier to hope because of the warmth.
There are a lot of sandwiches to be made in a war. Ellen made them in the National Gallery at lunch time, where the exhausted Londoners could hear the best music in the land for a shilling. She made them in a canteen for soldiers on leave in Shaftesbury Avenue, and she made them, along with basic meals of mince and mashed turnips, in one of the British restaurants set up by the government to help with the rations. She also went fire watching twice a week on the roof of the Methodist Chapel near Gowan Terrace because she liked, even now, three years after she had last seen Marek, to go to bed extremely tired, and acted as model for the St John’s Ambulance classes on Thursday afternoons, being bandaged by zealous housewives and carried about on gates.
She would have done rather more than that – would have joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service, in fact – if it hadn’t been for a visit she paid, in late June, to Kendrick’s house in Cumberland.
As Patricia Frobisher had expected, Kendrick had been declared unfit for military service. He had been directed into the offices of the Ministry of Food, where he had been instrumental in issuing the first ration books and writing the edict forbidding the use of icing sugar in wedding cakes.
Ellen had seen him occasionally but it was not till he came to a lunch-time concert in a state of great distress that she allowed him to resume anything like their former friendship.
Kendrick’s eyes were rimmed with red and he had come to take his leave of her. For the thing that Patricia had dreaded most of all had come to pass. Kendrick’s brother William had been killed in a flying accident at the beginning of the war and now it turned out that Roland, his elder brother, had been lost during the retreat from France.
‘I’m so sorry,’ said Ellen, trying to comfort him – but it seemed that Kendrick’s grief was not for his brothers, who had behaved to him with unrelenting cruelty, but for his mother.
‘If only it had been me,’ Kendrick said, ‘I’m no use to anyone – but it had to be Roland.’
This had annoyed Ellen very much – to the point where she had agreed to come and visit Kendrick, who had been perfectly happy in the Ministry of Food and was now the sole owner of Crowthorpe: the house, the farm, the derelict quarry and two thousand acres of woodland.
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 p
reened 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.