‘Ah, next year.’ She had not deceived herself; somehow she had made him angry. ‘Of course. What a little islander you are, with your English Channel which makes everyone so seasick and you so safe. You think we shall still be here next year? You think the world will stay still for you?’
‘No,’ she said, putting up her chin. ‘I don’t think that as a matter of fact. I came here because I wanted to find Kohlröserl and thought maybe I didn’t have very long, but it doesn’t matter; the storks would still –’
‘Kohlröserl? Those small black orchids?’
‘Yes, my grandmother spoke of them before she died, but never mind about that. I want storks because –’ and she repeated the words she had spoken to Sophie, ‘because they bless a house.’
He had withdrawn again but she no longer felt his anger. ‘What exactly do you intend for this place?’ he said presently.
It was her turn now to fall silent. She had tucked her feet under her skirt, still perched on the rim of the well.
‘I can’t put it into words . . . not properly. It’s to do with those paintings of places where the lion lies down with the lamb . . . you know, those primitive painters who see things very simply: birds of Paradise and great leaves and everything blending with everything else. Or the Forest of Fontainebleau – I’ve never been there, but I saw a picture once where the stags had crucifixes between their antlers and even the animals who are probably going to be shot look happy. When I saw the castle from the lake that first time, I imagined it all. The rooms clean and clear and smelling of beeswax and flowers, and the roses still free and tangly but not choked . . . a sort of secret husbandry that made them flourish. I thought there might be hammocks under the trees where the children could lie and I imagined them running out when it rained so as to turn their faces to the sky – but not before they’d shut the windows so that the shutters wouldn’t bang. I thought there could be a place where everything was received with . . . hospitality: the lessons and the ideas . . . and the food that comes up from the kitchens. Of course the food wouldn’t be like it is now,’ she said, smiling up at him. ‘There’d be the smell of fresh rolls in the morning and pats of yellow butter . . . and somewhere in the theatre which the count must have built with so much affection for his mistress, there’d be a marvellous play full of magic and laughter and great words to which people would come from everywhere . . . Even the villagers would come, setting sail for the castle in their boats – even the man who found Chomsky in his fishing nets would come.’ She looked up, flushing. ‘I know there can’t be such a place, but –’
‘Yes, there can,’ he said abruptly. ‘I could take you to a place that . . . feels like that. If times were different I would do so.’
‘And it has storks?’
‘Yes, it has storks.’
He rose, dropped the gym shoe into her trug. Then he stood looking down at her – not smiling . . . considering . . . and she caught her breath, for she felt that she had been, in that moment, completely understood.
‘I’ll look for a wheel,’ he said – and walked away across the courtyard to begin his work.
But later, tending to the bonfire of lopped branches and hedge clippings, Marek wondered what had made him liken his home to this mad place. Pettelsdorf owed its existence – its wealth – to the forest which surrounded it, and those who are custodians of trees lead a life of rigorous discipline. To his father, and his father’s father before him, the two thousand hectares of his domain were wholly known. An architect coming to bespeak oak planks for the belfry of a church was led to one tree and one tree only in the seemingly limitless woods. There were trees of course which were sacrosanct: a five-hundred-year-old lime, with its squirrel nests and secret hollows, which Marek as a boy had claimed as his own, would never be cut, nor the elm by the house beneath which he’d lain on summer nights watching the stars tossed back and forth between branches. But in general there was no room for sentiment at Pettelsdorf; a forest of sweet chestnuts and pine, of walnut and alder and birch, is not something that looks after itself. Only a meticulous daily husbandry ensures the balance between new growth and ancient hallowed trees, between sun-filled clearings and dense plantations.
But Ellen had used the same word: husbandry. She saw the children (he had realised this at once) as his father, and he himself, had learnt to see their trees: those that needed pruning, those that grew aslant, those that required only light and air. She was like those girls one sees in genre paintings: girls labelled Lacemaker or Water Carrier or Seamstress. Quiet girls to whom the artists had not bothered to give names, for it was clear that without them the essentials of life would cease.
Oh damn, he thought, having promised storks, having opened the door to a place he had never meant to leave and that was lost to him until his wearisome task was done. For it was strange how easily, had things been different, he could have taken her to Pettelsdorf. She would precede him up the verandah steps; the wolfhound would nuzzle her skirt; his mother would give the little nod she gave when she found the right word for one of her translations and his father would put down the gun he was cleaning and take out the 1904 Imperial Tokay he kept for special guests. While in the brook behind the house, the storks she craved would solemnly perambulate, searching for frogs . . .
Which was nonsense, of course, for the work he had to do must involve no one, and even if he did what he set out to do he would still not be free, for incredible as it seemed, it looked as though there was going to be another war.
It was not till the beginning of her second week that Ellen was able to devote herself to the kitchen and its staff.
The kitchens, which had once supplied the Hapsburg counts with roast venison and casseroles of grouse, and had sent sucking pigs and flagons of Napoleon Brandy upstairs, had not changed substantially since the days when the last of Hallendorf’s owners had feted Franz Joseph after a week of hunting. An electric cooker had replaced the huge bread ovens and the range, and there was a frigidaire stuck with revolutionary slogans proclaiming the need for the overthrow of the Costa Rican government. But the vast wooden kitchen table was the same, the long passages which separated kitchen and larder and the stone steps down to the cellars.
Nevertheless, Ellen, entering to begin her supervisory duties, looked at the room with pleasure. It was not dark; the windows at the back looked on to the courtyard and the catalpa tree, and everything was solid and clean.
The cleanliness surprised her because the food which had hitherto been served up was dire. Lumpy brown rice risottos to which spikes of bony fish adhered; strange salads devoid of dressing but rich in small pieces of gravel and slimy tropical fruits which had come from far away in tins.
Ellen’s arrival, in her crispest apron, was not greeted with enthusiasm either by the persecuted Costa Rican, Juan, or by Fräulein Waaltraut Nussbaum-Eisenberg, an impoverished aristocrat whose nephew was Mayor of Klagenfurt.
Juan cooked for his keep and a vestigial salary and expected any day, he said, to hear a knock at the door and to be taken away by the secret police of his country, and Fräulein Waaltraut disapproved of meat, eggs and fish and would have fed the school entirely on borage and bilberries if Bennet had let her.
‘Well, of course we must have salads,’ said Ellen, ‘but not with gravel, and stinging nettles must be picked young. Also these children are growing so we must make sure that there is plenty of protein.’
She laid her cookery books on the table and asked if she could see the larder. This went down badly, Fräulein Waaltraut pointing out that she wasn’t used to being inspected and Juan waving his arms and declaring that it was a Thursday, and it was on Friday that the boat came with fresh supplies.
Since it was obvious that both Juan and Fräulein Waaltraut, like the tinned mango shards from impoverished African countries, belonged to Hallendorf’s tradition of succouring the needy irrespective of worth, Ellen continued to be surprised by the wooden table scrubbed to whiteness and the pots and pans scoured and neatly stacked.
Clearly there was someone else working down here and presently she found her; not in the kitchen itself but in the scullery, washing up the breakfast things.
Ellen came on her unobserved and as she watched, her spirits rose. The girl was very young – not more than eighteen – and dressed in a spotless dirndl: a blue sprigged skirt, a pink bodice, a white blouse. Her blonde hair was pinned neatly round her head, she was small and sturdy and she worked with a steady rhythm and concentration, as though what she was doing was . . . what she was doing, and nothing else.
‘Grüss Gott,’ said Ellen, holding out her hand. ‘I’m the new supervisor – my name is Ellen.’
The girl turned, wiped her hands. ‘I’m Lieselotte,’ she said – but as she dropped a curtsy Ellen had to restrain herself from rushing forward and taking the girl into her arms. For this might have been Henny, come back from the dead: Henny as she had been in her own country, wholesome, giving and good.
‘Tell me, Lieselotte, was it you who boiled the eggs and made the poppy seed rolls on Sunday?’
Lieselotte nodded. ‘Yes. I am not supposed to cook, I’m just here to clean and wash up, but on Sundays Fräulein Waaltraut isn’t here and –’ She flushed. ‘It’s difficult. I am thinking of giving in my notice.’
‘Oh no!’ Ellen shook her head with vehemence. ‘You can’t possibly do that. Don’t even think of it. From now on it is you and I who are going to do the cooking.’
The girl’s face lit up. ‘Oh, I love to cook. Everyone thinks Austrian food is heavy and greasy, but that’s only bad Austrian cooking. My mother’s omelettes are like feathers and her buttermilk is so fresh and good.’
‘Your mother taught you to cook, then?’
‘Yes.’
‘And do you have any brothers and sisters? We shall need some help because I have to work upstairs as well.’
‘I have two sisters. They wanted to come but my mother thought it wouldn’t be good . . . they’re young – and sometimes the children behave so badly.’
‘Well, anyone would behave badly if they had to eat fishbone risotto,’ said Ellen. ‘I tell you, Lieselotte, we’re going to transform this place.’
‘But,’ the girl looked towards the kitchens where an altercation was beginning between Juan and Fräulein Waaltraut, ‘how will you . . . ? He has nowhere to go and she is related to the Mayor.’
‘I think perhaps Juan could teach pottery. And – well, I shall think of something. Now, here are the menus I thought of for next week – but I’d like to use as much local produce as possible. I expect you know people who would supply us?’
‘Oh yes. Yes.’ She smiled. ‘But they do not live in Abyssinia.’
In Gowan Terrace, Ellen’s mother and her aunts missed her more than they could possibly have believed. The house without her seemed empty, silent and cold. If Dr Carr had scarcely noticed, in her busy life, the flowers Ellen had brought in and arranged, she noticed their absence. Below stairs, the cook reverted to boiled fish and virulently coloured table jellies, and the man who came to help in the garden dug up Ellen’s peonies and destroyed the clematis.
Not that the sisters didn’t keep busy. There were more meetings than ever: meetings about the disenfranchised women of Mesopotamia, about mathematics teaching in communes and free contraception for prostitutes. But even the meetings were not quite what they had been – they were briefer, there were fewer young men, and the sandwiches sent up by the cook were so unappetising that they abandoned them and settled for digestive biscuits.
It was different, however, when one of Ellen’s letters arrived from Hallendorf. Then Dr Carr and her sisters allowed special people to stay behind after the chairs were cleared and the lantern slides put away, and the letter was read not only to initiates like the ‘aunt’ who ran the Left Book Club Shop or the former headmistress of Ellen’s school, but to others – even men – who had a record of good work for the causes. And among these was Kendrick Frobisher.
Kendrick had made himself so useful in Gowan Terrace, addressing envelopes, sorting slides and fetching leaflets from the printers, that he could not really be left out of anything as enjoyable as reading the next instalment of life at Hallendorf. It was true that Annie (the one who was a professor of Mycology and therefore saw things dispassionately) had voiced her doubts about the advisability of this.
‘He’s very much in love with Ellen; don’t you think it might encourage him to hope if we invite him to what are, in a sense, family occasions?’
But advisable or not, no one had the heart to exclude Kendrick, who had been compelled to visit the wet house in Cumberland for a family reunion in which his oldest brother, a major in the Indian Army, had told him about pig sticking, and his other brother, a stockbroker who was learning to fly his own plane, had given an account of looping the loop.
So Kendrick sat with Charlotte and Phyllis and Annie and heard about the strange behaviour of the Little Cabbage (for whose Eurythmics classes the children drew lots) and the play chosen for the end of the year performance, which was set in a slaughterhouse and was politically sound but sad. They heard about the discovery of Lieselotte in the kitchen, about Ellen’s rage with parents who did not write to their children, and her triumph in weaning Andromeda from sphagnum moss to Turkish towelling. And they heard – though briefly – about someone called Marek who had put a tortoise on wheels and was going to help her find storks. Sometimes Ellen would add: ‘Please give my love to Kendrick and tell him I’ll write properly soon,’ and this would send the young man out into the night walking on air, and more determined than ever to fulfil what he saw as his mission.
And his mission was no less than to bring to Ellen, through his letters, all the cultural activities of her native city. Now, when Kendrick went to an exhibition of Mexican funeral urns, or saw a Greek play in a basement in Pimlico, he went not only for Ellen, but in a mystical sense with her. He invariably bought two programmes and made careful notes throughout the performance so that he could share his experiences, and these he added with his comments and impressions to the weekly letter.
Thus it was that when he attended a concert of contemporary music at the Wigmore Hall, Ellen was treated to a complete breakdown of the music played, an annotated copy of the programme and two sheets of comments stapled to the back in Kendrick’s handwriting.
‘Curiously enough, I think I know the man who wrote the songs I have marked, the ones which were encored. As you see, his name is Altenburg. He was becoming well known in Germany before Hitler came to power but now he has withdrawn all his music from performance in the Third Reich – he won’t even allow his compositions to be printed there. There was a boy at school with the same name – he had a German father, or maybe it was Austrian – and he stood out from the others because he was so good at music but also because he was so strong and unafraid. He was expelled after a year for hanging one of the housemasters out of a first-floor window. He didn’t drop him but he held him out over the shrubbery by his ankles. It was a big scandal, because the master could have fallen and been killed, but we were all glad because the master was a sadist and he’d been beating small boys in the most appalling way, so Altenburg was a hero, but he left straight away. The school said they expelled him but we thought he just went. He didn’t seem at all bothered about what he’d done. He just said defenestration was quite common in Prague where his mother came from.’
Kendrick paused, wondering whether to explain about the defenestration of Prague, which was a famous event in the history of Czechoslovakia. He was a person who could spell Czechoslovakia without recourse to a dictionary and was quite conversant with the religious disputations of the Bohemian capital which had resulted in two Catholics being thrown out of the window by irate Protestants who believed themselves betrayed. But there was no more room on the programme, and Ellen sometimes looked tired when he explained things at length, so he put the notes to one side and returned to his letter, telling her once more that he would always love her and that if she co
uld ever bear to think of him as a husband he would be unutterably happy.
He then signed the letter, put in the theatre programme of the Greek play, the reviews cut out of The Times, two exhibition catalogues and the annotated programme of the Altenburg concert, and took them to the letter box.
These all arrived safely, delivered on the yellow post bus with its Schubertian horn which careered round the lake at dawn. Ellen read the letter, for she continued to feel sorry for Kendrick, but she left the catalogues and the concert programme on her work table to look at later, for she was planning a complete refurbishment of Hallendorf’s dining room and the cultural life of the metropolis would have to wait.
On the same morning as Ellen heard from Kendrick, and Sophie once again turned away empty-handed from her pigeonhole, Marek received a postcard which he pocketed with satisfaction. The picture showed a pretty Polish village complete with smiling peasants and the text read simply: ‘Tante Tilda’s operation a success. She sends her love.’
Heller was safe then. Marek could imagine him, his monocle restored, holding forth in the officers’ mess of the Flying Corps. So now there was nothing to do till he got news of Meierwitz: the enquiries he had set in train as the result of Heller’s disclosures would take time. And this rescue would be the last. He had promised Steiner, and he himself was aware that the time for lone adventures was past. Hitler’s defeat now could only come from the other countries waking up to their responsibilities, not, as he had once hoped, from within.
Marek therefore turned his attention once more to Hallendorf’s neglected grounds, spraying the trees in the orchard, repairing the frames in the kitchen garden, staking the roses. Wherever he worked, boys congregated to watch but they did not watch for long. One either left Marek alone, or one helped, and the ‘helping’ was not of the kind that involved self-expression or ceased when the novelty of the task had worn off.
Most of the children were genuinely useful, but Leon’s desire to ‘help’ was different. This quicksilver, twitchy child wanted something from Marek; his apparent affection was a kind of persecution. Marek was aware of this. He sent him to work as far away as possible: hoeing a path on the lower terrace, or wheel-barrowing logs from a distant wood pile, but it was impossible for the boy to stay away for long.