A Song for Summer

  Surely not, thought Nora, shocked at her own thoughts. Her father had been a clergyman; she had the strongest views on the sanctity of marriage.

  She walked on, making a loop behind the house. She passed a flock of bantam hens, their feathers brilliant in the sunlight, a little copse of foxgloves and meadowsweet – and found herself by the edge of the orchard.

  The plums had been picked, and the cherries, but the apples were ripening: red and gold and green. Between the trees two washing lines were strung and a girl was hanging out the washing. Household washing: tea towels and pillow cases, shirts . . . and nappies; a lot of nappies. She moved gracefully, bending down to the basket, shaking out the garment, fastening it to the line, and because she had known at once who it was, Nora stepped back into the shelter of the copse so that she could watch unseen.

  Ellen looked well. She was sunburnt, her faded cotton dress and sandals were the acme of comfort and ease; she was absorbed completely in her task; Nora could sense her satisfaction in seeing the clean clothes, caught by the breeze, billowing gently. There were three baskets: Ellen had emptied two of them, but now she turned, for from the third had come a small whimpering sound and she dropped the shirt she was holding back into the basket and went over and very gently picked up the baby that had just woken and put it over her shoulder, and began to rub its back. It was the essence of love, of motherhood, that gesture: the baby’s soft head nestling into Ellen’s throat, her bent head as she spoke to it, its sudden pleasurable wriggle of response . . . Nora could feel it as if it was her own shoulder that the baby leant against – so had she held Milenka, and so Marek, and the thought that this child could have been Marek’s child, flesh of her flesh, went through her, bringing an atavistic pang of loss.

  But her question was answered and she could only give thanks that she had not made her presence known. A marriage could be annulled – an adult could take his chance and Kendrick must have known of the love Ellen bore Marek. But not a child; a child could not be set aside.

  Long after she had made her way back and sat in the train as it crawled southwards, Nora still saw this idyllic vision: the red apples, the blue sky, Ellen with her windblown curls stroking softly, rhythmically the back of the child that lay against her shoulder, and somewhere in the orchard, a blackbird singing.

  A man leaving wartime London, perhaps for ever, will say goodbye to a number of places. To St Martin-in-the-Fields to hear the Blind Choir sing Evensong; to Joe’s All Night Stall near Westminster Bridge where Wordsworth’s famous view can be combined with the best jellied eels in London; to the grill room of the Cafe Royal . . .

  And to the Lunchtime Concerts at the National Gallery, possibly the best loved institution to come out of the war. If the British had heroines during these gruelling years – the Queen, tottering in her high heels through the rubble to bring comfort to those bombed from their homes, the Red Cross nurses accompanying the soldiers to the front – there was no one they loved more than Dame Myra Hess with her frumpish clothes, her grey hair rolled in a hausfrau bun, her musicality and her smile.

  For it was this indomitable woman who had coaxed the best musicians in the land to play in the emptied gallery for a pittance and bullied the authorities again and again to repair the bomb-damaged building, making these lunch hours into an oasis for all those who cared for music. Marek, who knew her and loved her, had come early, knowing that on the days that she herself played the piano, the queue stretched round Trafalgar Square. He had every reason to be grateful to her; a protégé of hers had played his violin sonata here, and he had heard the finest quartets in the country here on his leaves, but today, probably his last time here, he wanted to sit quietly as a member of the audience, for he knew that the sight of the tired housewives, the sailors and office workers listening rapt to her playing would be one of the memories he would take with him overseas.

  He was in London for a few days, waiting to hear the time and place of his departure, which was always a secret till the last minute. He wore uniform and his stick was on the floor under his chair. He walked with a limp still but his leg was almost healed.

  The dark-haired girl next to him had come in late and moved in deliberately beside the distinguished-looking Flight Lieutenant. She was a dedicated intellectual and tended to pick up men in places where their intelligence was guaranteed – art galleries, concerts, serious plays. Marek, well aware of her intentions, was disinclined to take the encounter further than the remarks they exchanged in the interval . . . and yet it was a long time since he had had a woman.

  But Myra Hess was returning; she had begun to play the Mozart A Minor Sonata and Marek closed his eyes, savouring the directness and simplicity of her playing. Then in the middle of the slow movement, the sirens went.

  Attempts by performers and audiences alike to carry on during air raids as though nothing had happened had long since been frustrated. Gallery curators appeared from all sides, shepherding the audience down into the basement shelter – and Marek, who had hoped to escape from the building, found himself leaning against a wall, the dark-haired girl still pinned to his side.

  ‘Shall I get you a sandwich?’ she asked. ‘They seem to have opened the canteen.’

  Marek looked up and found himself staring straight at Ellen.

  She had come down the day before for her mother’s fiftieth birthday, bringing butter and eggs from the farm and dahlias and chrysanthemums from the garden. Two of the windows of Gowan Terrace were boarded up, leaking sandbags surrounded the house, but the sisters saw nothing wrong; Holloway Prison had been far more uncomfortable

  Ellen had provided the kind of instant party she was famous for, and assured her mother, as she invariably did, that she was blissfully happy and leading exactly the life she would have chosen.

  Then on the following day she went to the National Gallery to visit her sandwich ladies. It was meant to be a purely social visit, after which it was Ellen’s intention to go upstairs and hear the concert properly and not in the occasional snatches she had been permitted as a canteen worker when somebody opened a door.

  But she was unlucky. The ladies who ran the canteen were members of the aristocracy and famous alike for the excellence of their sandwiches and the ferocity of their discipline. Ellen chanced to arrive on the day that the Honourable Mrs Framlington had been delayed by a time bomb on the District Line, and presently found herself behind the counter, slicing tomatoes and piling them on to wholemeal bread. But even the canteen ladies had to take shelter when the sirens went, moving across to the reinforced basement and setting up their trestle tables among the audience.

  It was then that Ellen, finding herself opposite Marek, did something unexpected. She put down the plate of sandwiches, walked over to him and grasped his sleeve in a gesture in which desperation and possession were so strangely intermingled that the dark-haired girl vanished into the crowd. Only then, still grasping the cloth as though to let go would be to risk drowning, did she respond to his greeting, and speak his name.

  An hour later they sat on a bench in St James’s Park, looking not at each other but at the ducks, waddling complacently up and down in front of them. The meat ration was down to eight ounces a week but the British would have eaten each other rather than the wildfowl in their parks. Ellen did not look at Marek because what she had experienced when she saw him had frightened her so badly that she had to search out neutral things to look at: the withered grass, the empty deck chairs and in the distance the gold railings of Buckingham Palace. Marek looked away because he was summoning up his last ounce of strength for what was to come and sensed already that it might not be enough.

  The things they would normally have done to compose themselves were denied to them. Since his leg was still stiff and painful, they could not walk the streets, or find, later, somewhere to dance where they could hold each other with perfect propriety. They could not, in the middle of the afternoon, have dinner and sit in intimacy at a shaded table.

  ‘I mu
st get back to Gowan Terrace,’ said Ellen presently, her voice hardly audible. ‘They’ll be expecting me.’

  ‘So you’ve said,’ said Marek. ‘Several times.’ But when he turned he saw that her eyes were full of tears.

  ‘We shall have tea,’ decided Marek. ‘Tea at the Dorchester. Tea is not threatening; we will drink it calmly.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  They found a taxi and it was calming to drink Lapsang Souchong and eat petits fours overlooking Hyde Park as though four years were not between them and there was no war. He had told her about Schwachek’s death. Now he told her that he was going to Canada; that this was the last time they would meet, and at once the intimacy of the tea room, the soupy music vanished and Ellen found herself trembling, plunged into a sudden hell.

  ‘I have to go,’ she said pitifully.

  He nodded and limped to the reception desk.

  ‘Have you got one?’ she asked when he returned.

  ‘Got what?’

  ‘A taxi.’

  He shook his head. ‘No. What I’ve got is a room for the night.’

  She shrank back in her chair. ‘You can’t have done that. You can’t.’ She was unable to believe that he could be so cruel.

  ‘You don’t have to sleep with me. You don’t have to remove a single stitch of clothing. But before I go we must talk properly. I must know if you’re happy and if you can forgive me for what I did to us both.’

  She was silent for long enough to make him very frightened. Then she lifted her head and said that sad thing that girls say when all is lost. She said: ‘I haven’t got a toothbrush.’

  But for a long time no talking was done. There was a moment when she first lay in his arms, both of them perfectly still like children about to sleep, when she thought that maybe she could hold back what was to happen – when she thought that perhaps she did not have to know what was to be denied her for the rest of her life. Perhaps Marek also was afraid of the pain that knowledge would bring, for he too made himself very quiet as though to rest like this was enough to assuage his longing.

  But of course it was not to be, and later, when it was over, she realised that it was as bad as she had feared – that it was worse . . . That to try and live without the love of this one man was going to destroy her – and yet that somehow it had to be done.

  ‘All right,’ said Marek. ‘Now talk. I want to know everything about your life. Everything.’

  Darkness had fallen; the sky was clear and full of stars; being able to see them, undazzled by the neon lights, had been one of the benisons of the war. Marek had gone to the window. Now he came back to bed, and kissed her chastely on the forehead to show her she could converse uninterrupted, and like a child she folded her hands and began.

  ‘I have goats,’ she said. ‘Nearly twenty of them. Angoras. They’re very beautiful animals. Kendrick doesn’t like the milk – no one likes the milk – but we make cheese, and they don’t smell at all, they’re very –’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Marek. ‘I am acquainted with goats.’

  ‘Yes.’ She admitted this, her head bent. ‘And bantams; I have a flock of Silkies, they’re beautiful birds, white feathers and black legs. Of course the eggs they lay aren’t very large – you wouldn’t expect it – but they have a very good flavour. And we won first prize in the Village Show for our onions, and –’

  She babbled on, producing her strange agricultural litany, and Marek, afraid he would be given the milk yield per Jersey cow, gently turned her head towards him. ‘You were going to make Crowthorpe into a sanctuary,’ he prompted, remembering Leon’s words in the internment camp.

  ‘Yes.’ She was silent, remembering her vow. ‘And I have. It’s just that when you have a sanctuary you can’t exactly choose. I mean, when people came and knocked at the door of a cathedral in the olden days, the priest couldn’t say “I’ll have you and you and the rest must go away”; he had to have everyone.’ She paused, surveying in her mind the current population of Crowthorpe. ‘The land girls are all right, and so are the evacuees that came first, the little Cockney ones, but then we had two more lots from Coventry and Birmingham and they hate each other and their children make Molotov cocktails in lemonade bottles and throw them out of the window, and the people I wanted like my mother and Sophie can’t get away; Sophie’s in Cambridge and Leon’s joined the pioneers, so I’m left with people like Tamara –’

  ‘Tamara! You’re not serious? The Little Cabbage?’ She nodded. ‘She’s not there all the time but she doesn’t get on with her mother and I don’t mind her too much because she plays the gramophone with Kendrick and he tells her about Dostoevsky. Of course it would be nice if she brought her ration book and stopped stealing the flowers from the conservatory, but it’s not easy for Kendrick, me being so busy . . . and none of it matters because it’s wartime and compared to people all over the world –’ She broke off and he saw her pass a finger along her lower eyelid, in the gesture he had seen her use at Hallendorf to stem the tears of a child.

  ‘Ellen, I don’t understand this,’ he said, gathering her into his arms. ‘I don’t understand what you’re saying. Nora said . . . that’s why I didn’t come . . . Not because of Kendrick – he can go to the devil – but because of you.’

  ‘Nora,’ said Ellen, bewildered. ‘How does Nora know?’

  ‘She came up to see you.’ But he could not go on. Nora’s description of Ellen in her fruit-filled orchard still had the power to sear him. ‘She was like that girl in the Mille Fleurs tapestry,’ she had said. ‘The one with the unicorn. You must let her be, Marek. You must promise me to let her be.’ Forcing himself, he tried to put into words what Nora had told him. ‘That’s why I didn’t come; because of the child.’

  Ellen stared at him; a searchlight fingering the sky passed over her face and he saw the huge, bewildered eyes.

  ‘Oh God!’

  The bleakness in her voice made him overcome his own misery. Somehow he must enter into what now seemed her reason for living.

  ‘What is it, the baby? A boy or a girl?’

  She lay back against the pillows. ‘I don’t know,’ she said wearily. ‘It might have been Tyrone or Errol or Gary . . . there are so many of them and they’re all named after film stars.’

  He pulled her up, grasping her shoulders. ‘Explain,’ he said urgently. ‘Don’t play games with me.’

  She tried to smile. ‘I told you about sanctuaries; you can’t choose. The billeting people asked me if I’d take unmarried mothers – the idea is they help with light housework in exchange for their keep and then when they’ve had their babies, after a month, they go away and put their babies in a crèche and find work. The first part works all right – they’re nice enough girls; they’ve mostly been made pregnant by some soldier who’s posted overseas. It’s when they’re supposed to go away that it’s not so good.’

  But he was scarcely listening. ‘You mean you haven’t got a child; you’re not even expecting one?’

  She gave a forlorn shake of the, head. ‘Nor likely to,’ she could have said, but did not, for it seemed important to protect Kendrick. The move from the master bedroom to the old nursery had not made much difference. Kendrick continued to stammer out his adoration and to beg her night after night not to leave him alone, but that was as far as it went. At first the knowledge that his talentless fumblings were unlikely to produce a child had devastated Ellen, but the endless infants produced by her unmarried mothers had calmed her distress. There would be plenty of children after the war in need of homes. She would adopt one then.

  But Marek was transfigured. He would not have taken her from her child, or deprived a man of his flesh and blood, but now there was no obstacle.

  ‘Thank God,’ he said. ‘You’re mine then’ – and reached for her again.

  The second time is better than the first; more certainty and already that touch of recognition that is one of the most precious elements of love. Marek now was a conqueror; the relief, the joy he
felt transmitted in every gesture, and Ellen followed him movement for movement . . . remembering as if her life depended on it the feel of his skin, the muscles of his shoulder, the touch of his hair.

  So that when morning came and she said she must go back, he did not believe it.

  ‘You’re mad. You’re absolutely mad. Do you think you’re making that poor devil happy with your pity? Surely he deserves better than that?’

  But he was not frightened yet. He was still certain of victory.

  ‘I promised,’ she kept repeating. ‘I promised I wouldn’t leave him alone. Night after night, I promised. He’s always been alone. His brothers bullied him and his mother despises him. The whole house is full of photos of Roland and William and not one of Kendrick –’

  ‘For God’s sake, Ellen, do you suppose I care about any of that? I remember him from school – he was always by a radiator. You can’t help people like that.’

  She shook her head. ‘I promised,’ she kept repeating. ‘He’s so afraid; he follows me about all day and tells me how much he loves me. You can’t take your happiness by trampling on other people.’ And then, very quietly, ‘What will happen to the world, Marek, if people don’t keep their promises?’

  She saw his jaw tighten and waited almost with relief for him to give way to one of his rages. A man who defenestrated Nazis and threw children into the lake would surely lose his temper and make it easier for her.

  But at the last minute he understood, and held her very quietly and very closely, and that was almost more than she could bear.

  ‘If you change your mind I’ll be at the Czech Club in Bedford Place till I sail.’

  But she only shook her head, and opened one of his hands and held the palm for a moment against her cheek, and then she said: ‘It’s time to go.’

  The train was exactly what she needed; it was freezing cold, the toilet did not flush, someone had been sick in the corridor. In such a train one could let the tears come, and opposite her in the evil-smelling frowsty compartment, an old woman leant forward and touched her knee and said: ‘Aye, there’s always something to cry about these days.’