A Song For Summer

Part Two

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 lunchtime 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 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.”

They were both silent, remembering Ellen driving off with Marek; the joy on her face-the absolute happiness that transformed everything about her-and her return after the fire.

“Do you think he’s dead?”’

Sophie shrugged. “I almost wish he was; she wouldn’t be so hurt that way. Anyway, whether he’s dead or not doesn’t make any difference.”

“No.”

Ellen had explained to them carefully what had happened at Pettelsdorf and why she would not be seeing Marek again. She had stayed on for the autumn term, the last term at Hallendorf, and packed up the children’s trunks and helped to clear the building. She had taken the tortoise to Lieselotte’s house and then everyone left. Two months later, Hitler had marched into Vienna and been greeted by jubilant and cheering crowds. Finis Austria…

“No storks have come yet,” Liseselotte had written that spring and the following spring-and then she became “the enemy” and could write no more.

“I suppose I’d better go and congratulate her,” said Leon now. “I’ll come round on Sunday.”

But on Sunday the inhabitants of Gowan Terrace, having baked an egg-free cake in his honour, waited in vain, and when they phoned him, the telephone rang in an empty house.

The wedding was planned for December, but long before then the poor British, waiting for invasion, standing alone against Hitler, succumbed not to panic, for that was not in their nature, but to paranoia. Nazis disguised as parachuting nuns were reported daily; old ladies with a chink in their blackout curtains were taken away for questioning-and now, in an act of madness, they began to round up and imprison just those “enemy aliens” who had the most to fear from Hitler and Mussolini, and who had been engaged in the fight against Fascism while high-ranking British diplomats were still taking tea with the Führer and admiring the fact that the trains ran on time.

Austrian and German professors were hauled out of lecture rooms, doctors out of hospitals, students out of libraries, told they could pack one suitcase and taken away by the police. Italian shopkeepers, German bakers who had spent years in Britain, disappeared within an hour, weeping and bewildered. Spy mania was everywhere; even one traitor among the thousands of innocent refugees could not be tolerated. The camps they were taken to were not in fact concentration camps, the tommies who guarded them were no Storm Troopers, but the bewilderment and anguish, particularly among older refugees, was appalling.

Leon happened to be at home when two policemen came for his father. He lied about his age, packed his current film scenario-and was taken to an internment camp consisting of a large number of seaside boarding houses on the Isle of Man.

The views of the landladies evicted from their villas-from Bay View and Sunnydene and Resthaven-are not recorded. Forced to leave behind their garden gnomes, their monkey puzzles and brass plates offering Bed and Breakfast, they were replaced by rolls of barbed wire, observation towers and iron gates. Facing the sea but unable to reach it, cut off from all news of the outside world, the inmates wandered about, guarded by soldiers with fixed bayonets, trying to understand the nightmare that had enveloped them. Housed in villas stripped of everything except camp beds and a few cooking utensils, the men assembled each morning for roll call and the rations which they had no idea how to cook. And each day more confused “enemy aliens” arrived-Nobel Laureates, old men with diabetes, social democrats who had been tortured in the prisons of the Reich and had come to Britain as to Mecca or Shangri La.

Although it was obvious to even the thickest British tommy that Hitler, if he had been relying on these men for spies, would have little hope of winning the war, the net which produced such a strange catch did just occasionally dredge up a genuine Nazi. When this happened, the results were unfortunate. Immolated in boarding houses with at least a dozen Jews whose suffering at the hands of the Nazis had been unspeakable, a man polishing his boots and saying that Hitler would soon overrun Britain did not have a happy life. He was refused his rations, ostracised, the blankets stolen from his bed. Most of them capitulated and learnt to hold their tongues, but one of them, a handsome blond young man called Erich Unterhausen, continued each morning to polish his boots, give the Nazi salute and say “Heil Hitler!”

At least he did until a rainy morning in late July when he flew suddenly out of the first-floor window of Mon Repos, bounced off a privet bush, and landed on a flower bed planted with crimson salvias and purple aubretia.

He was not hurt, only bruised, which was a pity, but the news, spreading quickly through the camp, was regarded by the inmates as the first glimmer of light since the Fall of France.

Needless to say, the perpetrator of this brutality was immediately marched off to the camp commandant in his office, where he admitted his guilt and was entirely unrepentant.

“If you don’t get rid of people like Unterhausen you’ll have a murder on your hands,” he said, confusing the commandant with his flawless English. “Rounding up accredited Nazis with these people is madness. You know perfectly well who the real Nazis are in this camp-I’ve only been here a day but I can tell you: Schweger in Sunnydene, Pischinger in that place with the blue pottery cat-and the chap I threw out of the window. He’s the only one who could possibly be a spy, and the sooner he’s in a proper prison the better-anyone worth their salt could signal from here. As for Schweger, he’s in with some hotheads from the Jewish Freedom Movement and they’re starving him to death.”

“Thank you for telling me my business,” said the commandant, and was disconcerted by an entirely friendly smile from the tall, broad-shouldered man with the scar on his forehead. He looked down at the papers that had come with the prisoner.

“You say you’re a Czech.”

“I don’t say I am; I am,” said the prisoner unruffledly.

“So what are you doing here? The Czechs are our allies.”

Marek was silent. The Czechs might be allies now, but before, at Munich, they had been betrayed.

“Your name is German.”

“Yes. I came over in a fishing boat; we were strafed and capsized outside Dover. I got concussion. Apparently I spoke German to the dogs.”

“The dogs?”’

“There was a whole compound of stray dogs which the tommies had smuggled out of France when they were taken off at Dunkirk-you’ve never heard such a racket. They put my stretcher down beside a big black and tan pointer. My father’s hunting dogs were always trained in German and when I came round—”’ He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter about me; they’ll sort it out. I’m quite glad to be out of the way till the Czechoslovak Air Force reassembles. But Unterhausen must go, and the other Nazis-and old Professor Cohen must go to hospital-the one who stands by the barbed wire and gets his beard caught. He’s very eminent and very ill-if he dies there’ll be questions asked. They’re being asked already in Parliament and elsewhere.”

“Is there anything else you’d like to tell us?”’ sneered the second in command, a brash young lieutenant, but the commandant frowned him down. A humane man, he knew full well that he was caught up in one of those administrative muddles that happens in war and can claim lives.

It was to him that Marek spoke. “Most of the people in here understand what has happened-that there was bound to be confusion after the French surrendered, that we’ve got mixed up with the parachuting nuns and that it won’t go on for ever. But not all of them. There have been two suicides in one of the other camps, as you no doubt know. This whole business-interning the people who have most of all to fear from Hitler-is going to be a pretty discreditable episode in retrospect. What’s more, if Hitler does invade, you’ve made it nice and easy for him, corralling all the Jews and the anti-Nazis together so he doesn’t have to go looking.”

“So what is it you want?”’ asked the commandant.

“A piano,” said Marek.

As he came out he found a knot of excited people standing in the street.

“I told you,” cried a young man, scarcely more than a boy, who rushed up and threw his arms round Marek. “I told them it had to be you! I said if someone had defenestrated Unterhausen it would be you! But you aren’t German, are you? How did you get here?”’

“How did you get here?”’ said Marek, suddenly angry. “You can’t even be seventeen.” were they interning children now?

“I told them I was older,” said Leon. “When they came to take my father, I wanted to come too. My mother and sisters are in a camp on the other side of the island.”

Leon’s father, Herr Rosenheimer, now came forward to shake Marek’s hand. Though he had filed naturalisation papers the week before his arrest and his export-import business employed more than four hundred British workers, he seemed to be without bitterness, and had persuaded the internees (from whom all news of the outside world was forbidden) to save the newspapers that came wrapped round their ration of kippers, so that he could keep in touch with the stock exchange.

Other familiar faces now appeared in the throng: the er/while flautist of the Berlin Philharmonic; a copying clerk from the office of Universal Editions; Marek’s old tailor from the Kärntnerstrasse… and all the time more people appeared, overjoyed by the news of Unterhausen’s fate.

But Marek did not intend to waste too much time on swapping stories-and Leon, whose reminiscences would lead to Hallendorf and thus to Ellen, had straight away to understand that there would be no discussion of the past.

“There’s a piano locked in the basement of the Palm Court Hotel,” he said. “We can have it. It’ll have to be moved into some kind of hall or shed-anything. We’re going to give a concert.”

“Of your music?”’ asked Leon eagerly. “No. Not now.”

“Of what then?”’

Marek looked round at the weary men, the drab streets, the barbed wire.

“There’s only one answer to that, don’t you think?”’

“Johann Sebastian Bach,” said the flautist.

Marek nodded. “Exactly so.” For a moment he raised his eyes to heaven, seeking guidance not so much from God (whose musicality was not well documented) as from his er/while representative on earth, the Kapellmeister of Leipzig. Would it seem sacrilege to the old man to put on his masterpiece with an exhausted chorus of amateurs and an orchestra which, if it could be found at all, would be a travesty of what Bach had demanded? Yet it was this monumental work, which embraced the whole of the human condition, from the painful pleading of the Kyrie to the blaze of jubilant ecstasy of the Resurrexit, that these bewildered exiles needed and deserved.

Marek made up his mind. “We’re going to perform the Mass in B minor,” he said. “And no one had better release us till we’ve got it right!”

After the fire Marek had spent several weeks in hospital in Prague. He’d been moved there from the local nursing home when it became clear that although his apparent injuries had cleared up quickly-a burn on his temple where a beam had glanced his forehead, the smoke inhalation which had saved his life by rendering him unconscious before he could go far into the building-there was something else most seriously wrong.

At first the doctors and psychiatrists who examined him, the nuns who nursed him, put down the patient’s other symptoms to grief for his parents’ death, but as time passed and he became wilder and more distressed, the possibility of brain fever or dementia was seriously discussed.

Marek had not resisted the move, for the contacts he needed to carry out what he now saw as his life’s work could be assembled best in Prague, where the headquarters of resistance to the Germans had recently been established.

It did not take him long to prepare a dossier on the man who had set his home alight and killed his parents. Oskar Schwachek, who had also killed Franz by the river and tried to murder Meierwitz, was a Sudeten German who since the age of fourteen had been a member of the Nazi party-a fire raiser as a child, a disturbed and vicious adolescent and now, at the age of twenty-five, a killer who put his evil talents at the disposal of those who wanted to hand Czechoslovakia over to the Nazis.

Stepan and Janik had seen him near the house on the day before the fire; old Lenitschka, who had perished with the Captain and his wife, had warned them. Every servant at Pettelsdorf was looking out for him and every member of the resistance.

“But I want him alive,” Marek said.

“I want him to know who kills him. And he is not to be shot. It will happen slowly… very slowly.”

During those days of convalescence when the specialists conferred and the nuns prayed over his bed, there were only two visitors Marek did not want to see.

The first was his grandmother, Nora Coutts. She had been going for one of her famous walks when the fire began and had survived unscathed. Nora had lost her only daughter, whom she adored, and her son-in-law. She looked ten years older and something had happened to her mouth, which had been set in a firm line and now, on occasion, had to be covered with her hand. But Marek’s obsession with his vendetta, which grew with his returning strength, shocked her deeply.

“Your parents died together and almost instantly, I understand. What do you think they’d feel if they knew you were going to poison the rest of your life with this hatred? What do you think they would feel if they knew what you were doing to Ellen?”’

But Marek was deaf and blind. Ellen was a danger. Ellen, who came every day and sat quietly and patiently by his bed, waiting for him to become sane again… Ellen, who was so beautiful and whole and true, would weaken him. Even less than his grandmother did she understand that nothing but hatred must now rule his life. To track down Schwachek, to kill him very slowly and carefully, explaining at each stage what was happening to him and why-nothing else existed. And when this was done, to face prison or hanging on his own account without regret, knowing that Ellen was out of it and safe.

“There will be no more love and no more weddings,” he had said when she first came.

But she had not believed him. She thought as the nuns thought, that the shock had temporarily unhinged him. That he should wish to avenge his parents’ murder was understandable perhaps, but to make this vendetta his only reason for existing seemed impossible. Surely somewhere the man who cared for every living thing could not be wholly and permanently dead?

But the weeks passed and Marek became steadily more hostile, more obsessed, more angry. Even so, it was not till the doctors who were treating him told her that she was making him worse and delaying his recovery, that she gave up.

He was standing by the window of his hospital room when she told him she was leaving. A tortoiseshell butterfly was beating its way against the window, and as he caught it in his hand she held her breath, for she expected him to crush it between his fingers, so mad had he become.

But he opened the window and released it carefully into the summer afternoon. That was her last memory of him: the killer with the scar on his forehead, gently freeing the butterfly-and then his bleak, toneless and unadorned: “Goodbye.”

The betrayal of the Czechs at Munich came soon afterwards. Marek joined the Czech Air Force, flew his plane to Poland when the Germans overran his country, went on fighting with the Poles — and when they were beaten, with the French.

When the Germans advanced through Northern France, he was flying Potez 63’s with a Reconnaissance Squadron of the French Air Force, never sure whether the airfield from which he took off would still be there when he returned, attacked both in the air and on the ground.

The occupation of Paris in mid-June put an end to these adventures. The crews were summoned, given rations and their pay, and told they were on their own. Marek was caught up in the demoralisation of the retreating troops, the fleeing refugees. Separated from his crew, he reached Brittany at last, found a fishing boat willing to take him across to Dover, and opened his eyes to the extraordinary sight of dozens of baying, quarantined dogs.

The slobbering, excited animals had given him his first glimmer of hope-for it struck him as possible that a nation mad enough to carry stray dogs on to the boats that took them off the beaches might — just might-be mad enough not to surrender simply because all hope was lost.

Closest to his stretcher was a pointer bitch with anguished eyes. Marek soothed her, was overheard by an exhausted sergeant who was trying to sort out the flotsam that still came over the Channel in the wake of the debacle-and presently found himself on the Isle of Man, watching Erich Unterhausen polish his boots and give the Nazi salute.

It had been Ellen’s intention to get married quietly in the Bloomsbury Registry Office, invite a few friends back to Gowan Terrace, and go up to Crowthorpe the next day.

But in September the Blitz began. Broken glass was swept from the streets along with the autumn leaves; the scent of smoke was seldom out of people’s nostrils; nights spent in shelters or the basements of their houses left everyone exhausted-and a new band of heroes emerged: the pilots who went up each night to give battle to the bombers that came across to devastate the cities. Doris and Elsie and Joanie, who had crept back to their parents in London, were sent back to Cumberland, the cook general who had struggled on at Gowan Terrace left to make munitions and at the end of October, the Registry Office received a direct hit.

Under these circumstances it seemed sensible to have the wedding at Crowthorpe, and if the villagers were not to be upset, to make it a wedding in the local church-and this in turn meant Sophie and Ursula as bridesmaids and inviting the guests to stay the night before, since travel on the blacked out trains was far too unreliable to make a day trip possible.

Announcing her engagement to the ladies with whom she made sandwiches, her fellow firewatchers and the women who bandaged her on Thursday afternoons, Ellen now became lucky. She knew she was lucky because everybody told her so.

“Lucky you, going to live in the country, away from it all,” or “Lucky you, not having to worry about the rations; they say you can get butter and eggs and everything up there,” or “I wish I was you, getting a good night’s sleep.”

Ellen’s response to her great good fortune was unvarying; she instantly invited whoever had congratulated her to Crowthorpe: the milkman’s sister who had taken over his round when he was called up, an old man who came to lick envelopes at Gowan Terrace, and an orderly at her mother’s hospital. It was as though the provision of fresh air, birdsong and undisturbed nights was what made being so very lucky endurable.

But it was her family-her mother working too hard at the hospital, her Aunt Annie whose operation had been postponed as the wards filled up with the casualties of the Blitz, the aunt who ran a bookshop, and, of course, the Hallendorf children — for whom she particularly wanted to provide sanctuary.

“You will come, won’t you?”’ she begged them. “Not just for the wedding-you’ll stay, won’t you? There’ll be log fires, it’ll be really comfortable, you’ll see,”-and they said, yes of course they would come, though Dr Carr pointed out that she could not leave her patients for long, and Aunt Phyllis and Aunt Annie, who were helping to organise petitions demanding the release of the interned “enemy aliens” as well as their other work, were not sure that they could take too much time off in the north.

“She is happy, isn’t she?”’ asked Dr Carr of her sisters, who said they were sure she was, and anyway it was probably a mistake to start a marriage with too many expectations. “Better to build it up slowly,” Phyllis said, a view which Ellen shared and propounded to Margaret Sinclair over pilchards on toast in Lyon’s Corner House.

“People always used to get married for sensible reasons,” she said-and Margaret, whose heart smote her, had perforce to remain silent, for her own existence was hardly a blueprint for a successful love life. Immured in his secret hide-out in Surrey, reputedly breaking codes, Bennet had been compelled, when the air raids began, to send Tamara for safekeeping to her mother in the north, and Margaret, deprived of the hope that a bomb would instantly and painlessly destroy the Russian ballerina, spent her free time in her bedsitting room in case Bennet could get to London and needed a cup of tea.

Sophie and Ursula (for whom Ellen was making dresses out of parachute silk which scratched her hands) tried to cheer each other up, but without success.

“She reminds me of Sydney Carton,” said Sophie. “You know, the man who said “It is a far, far better thing that I do now than I have ever done before and then went off to be executed.” She sighed. “I wish they’d let Leon out; he could help with the music at least.”

“You really miss him, don’t you?”’ said Ursula.

“Yes, I do. And his family. They’ve been incredibly good to me.”

Kendrick was now officially released from the Ministry of Food, since farming-which he was believed to be about to do-was regarded as work of national importance, and went north to Cumberland, but could not be relied upon for practical arrangements. He was in a state of profound exaltation but slightly apprehensive. The Facts of Life had been told to Kendrick not by his mother, who had better things to do, or even by a kindly nursemaid, as is so often the case with the English upper classes-the maids engaged by Mrs Frobisher were seldom kindly-but by a boy called Preston Minor at his prep school.

Although the horrific information conveyed by this unpleasant child had been modified later by the reading of Great Literature, there was still a considerable gap between Kendrick’s conception of Ellen as the Primavera or Rembrandt’s Saskia crowned with flowers, and what was supposed to happen in his father’s four-poster bed after the nuptials were complete.

The wedding was planned for the eighteenth of December, and now the submarine menace came to the rescue of the bridegroom and the bride. Patricia Frobisher was unable to secure a place on any of the convoys sailing from Africa and would not be able to attend.

Ellen, navigating with meticulous concentration the route to the day which would make her so happy and so fortunate, saw in this the hand of Providence. Her plans for Crowthorpe could now go ahead without battles: the proper housing of the evacuees, the installation of land girls (a move opposed by Patricia) and the removal of the green lines which Mrs Frobisher, glorying in the restrictions of wartime, had painted round the bath to show the limits of hot water which might be used.

Both the recent bereavement in the Frobisher family and the bride’s own inclinations made a small wedding desirable. In addition to the immediate families, they invited only a few university friends, those of the Hallendorf children who could get away, Margaret Sinclair-and Bennet, whose kindness to her after her return from Prague Ellen had never forgotten. Since it was unlikely that Bennet would get leave, Ellen had hoped to be spared Tamara, but fate decreed otherwise.

On a visit to Carlisle not long before the wedding, Ellen saw a sight which no one could have beheld unmoved. Two women were plodding wearily along the rain-washed pavement. Both carried string bags of heavy groceries, both wore raincoats and unbecoming sou’westers, both had noses reddened by the cold. One was considerably older than the other, but their resemblance was marked: mother and daughter, clearly bored with each other’s company, on the weekly and wearisome shopping trip.

It was only when the younger woman stopped and greeted her that Ellen realised she was in the presence of the Russian ballerina who had been Diaghilev’s inspiration and the confidante of Toussia Alexandrovna, now returned for wartime safekeeping to her mother, and demoted most pitiably to Mrs Smith’s daughter Beryl.

“Ellen-how lovely to see you!”

Tamara’s pleasure in the meeting was unfeigned. Her mother’s colliery village on the bleak coastal plain was only thirty miles from Crowthorpe; she knew of the Frobishers’ importance and Crowthorpe’s size. She wanted an invitation to the wedding, and she got it. Appalled by the reduction of the sinewy sun worshipper and maker of icon corners to Mrs Smith’s Beryl, Ellen invited her not only to the wedding but-since there were no buses from Tamara’s village-to the house party on the night before.

On a morning in late November a number of men were pulled out of the routine roll call in the camp and told to report to the commandant. From Sunnydene, an elderly lawyer named Koblitzer who walked with a stick, and a journalist named Klaus Fischer; from Resthaven, Herr Rosenheimer and his son Leon; and from Mon Repos (from which the defenestrated Unterhausen had been taken to Brixton Jail), Marcus von Altenburg.

Wondering what they had done, they made their way down the grey rain-washed streets towards the hotel by the gates which housed Captain Henley’s office.

“We’ll need a chair for Koblitzer,” said Marek when they were assembled, and a chair was brought.

In spite of this request, an air of cheerfulness prevailed. The commandant had shown himself a good friend to the inmates; conditions in the camp had improved considerably in the last two months. Even the disagreeable lieutenant looked relaxed.

“I have good news for you,” said the commandant. “The order has come through for your release. You’re to collect your belongings and be ready for the transport at seven in the morning. The ferry for Liverpool sails at ten, and tickets will be issued for your chosen destination.”

The men looked at each other, hardly taking it in at first.

“On what grounds, as a matter of curiosity?”’ asked Leon’s father. “To whom do we owe our freedom?”’

Captain Henley looked down at his papers. “You, Rosenheimer, on the grounds that you are employing nearly five hundred British workers in your business, and your son on the grounds that he is under age. Klaus Fischer has been spoken for by the Society of Authors, who say he’s been writing anti-Nazi books since 1933, and Koblitzer on grounds of ill health.”

Not one of them pointed out that all this information was available at the time they were arrested. Yet their joy was not unalloyed; they had made friendships of great intensity, had started enterprises which must be left undone. Fischer ran a poetry class, Rosenheimer had started a business school-and all of them sang in Marek’s choir.

One by one the men stepped forward, signed a paper to say they had not been ill-treated, were given their documents. Then it was Marek’s turn.

“You’ve been requested by the commander of the Royal Air Force Depot, Cosford. The Czechs have formed a squadron there to fly with the RAF.” Henley looked at Marek with a certain reproach. “You could have told us you flew with the Poles and the French.”

Marek, who had in fact explained this several times to the interrogators at Dover and elsewhere, only smiled-and then produced his bombshell.

“I shall be very happy to be released,” he said, “but not before the end of next week.”

“What?”’ The second lieutenant couldn’t believe his ears.

“We’re performing the B Minor Mass on Sunday week. The men have been rehearsing for months; there’s absolutely no question of my walking out on them at this stage. They’ll understand at Cosford.”

The commandant was an easy-going man, but this was mutiny. “Men in this camp are released as and when the orders come through. I’m not running a holiday camp.”

Nobody made the obvious comment. They were all staring at Marek.

“If you want me to go before the concert you’ll have to take me by force. I shall resist and Klaus here can make a scandal when he gets to London; he’s an excellent journalist. “Czech Pilot Manhandled by Brutal Soldiery”-that kind of thing. I’m entirely serious about this.”

No one knew what to say. They thought of the work of the last weeks, the slow growth of confidence, the obstacles overcome-and then the excitement as the sublime music grew under Marek’s tutelage. No one who had sung Dona Nobis Pacem in this miserable place would ever forget it.

“They’re coming from the other camps,” Marek reminded him.

The commandant did not need to be told this. He himself had authorised a hundred men to come and had borrowed spare copies of the score from the cathedral choir in Douglas; news of the performance had attracted interest all over the island. If morale had improved, if there had been no suicides, no serious breakdowns in his camp, the Mass in B Minor had played a part.

“Someone else can take your place, I’m sure,” said the lieutenant.

“No, they can’t. They can’t!” Leon spoke for the first time. “Only Marek can do it.” He stepped forward, leaning towards the commandant. “And I want to stay too! I don’t want to be released till Marek is; I want to—”’

“No,” said Marek, at the same time as Herr Rosenheimer turned in fury on his son: “You will please to stop talking nonsense, Leon. You will come with me. Do you want to kill your mother with worry?”’

Frau Rosenheimer had been released three weeks earlier and it was likely that her lamentations, petitions and bribery had hurried her husband’s release.

Leon might have argued with his father, but Marek’s face made it clear that he would give no quarter.

“I’ll get in touch with the depot and see what they say,” said the commandant.

It was a defeat, but as the men returned to their houses, Captain Henley was not altogether sorry. He had rejoined the army hoping to be sent on active service, but they had told him he was too old and sent him here to do this uncongenial job. Yet sometimes there were rewards. He was not a musical man but now, without knowing that he knew it, he hummed the opening bars of the Sanctus with its soaring, ever ascending solo on the flute.

Then he picked up the telephone and asked for Cosford.

Outside a number of men were gathered, for rumours of a new batch of releases had come through.

“Is it true you’re going tomorrow, Marek?”’ said a thin, white-faced man with his collar turned up. He had dragged himself to rehearsals of the Mass day in day out, in spite of a weakness of the lungs.

“No.”

Marek said no more but Leon, in a white heat of hero worship, spoke for him. “They wanted to release him straight away but he won’t go till after the concert.”

“Is it true?”’

The news spread among the men, faces lightened, someone came and shook him by the hand.

“All right, that will do,” said Marek, getting irritated. “I’ll see you at two o’clock in the hall.”

Knocking on the door of Mon Repos that night, Leon shivered with apprehension and the cold wind from the sea. He had come to a resolution which took all his courage. Ever since Marek had appeared in the camp, he had made it clear that Hallendorf and Ellen were taboo subjects-but now Leon was leaving and he was going to speak.

“I’ve come to say goodbye and to give you my father’s address in London. He says you’ll be welcome at any time for as long as you like-but you know that. We’ve got a splendid air-raid shelter!”

“Thank you.”

Leon took a deep breath and plunged. “I’ve heard from Sophie,” he said.

Marek was silent, his eyes wary. “She’s going to be a bridesmaid at Ellen’s wedding.”

He did not expect Marek to reply, but he said: “To Kendrick Frobisher, I take it?”’

“Not exactly,” said Leon. “More to his kitchen garden and his cows and his evacuees. It’s supposed to be a sanctuary for us all, the wet house. She hasn’t asked us if we want to be there.”

Marek had reverted to silence, his eyes fixed on a sampler saying East West, Home’s Best which the departing landlady of Mon Repos had forgotten to take down.

“She’s getting married on the eighteenth of December, just a week before Christmas. The wedding is at Crowthorpe in the village church at two o’clock in the afternoon. Crowthorpe is where Kendrick lives, it’s between Keswick and Carlisle…”

He babbled on, repeating the time and place, the nearest railway station, till Marek turned his head.

“Shut up, Leon.” There was no feeling in his voice, only a great weariness.

“I could tell her you’re here. I could tell her you’re free. She doesn’t know you’re in England-Sophie didn’t know whether we should—”’

Now though Marek did show emotion. The onset of one of his instant and famous rages.

“You will say nothing about me to Ellen. You will not mention my name. I put you on your honour,” said Marek, reverting unexpectedly to his year at an English Public School. “You will-only hurt her,” he said presently.

Leon’s hero worship subsided momentarily. “I could hardly hurt her more than you have done,” he said.

“Oh darling, you look beautiful,” said Dr Carr, stepping back and smiling at her daughter. “You look quite lovely!”

This is always said to brides by their doting mothers-but as she turned from the mirror in her white dress, it had to be admitted that Ellen’s beauty was of an unexpected kind. Perhaps it was the sepulchral light of Crowthorpe in the mist and rain of December as it came through the stained-glass windows, but Ellen looked submerged, muted, like a bride found under the sea.

She had altered the dress she had worn to the opera in Vienna and covered it with a short jacket, and her curls were held in place by a circlet of pearls left to her by her august grandmother, Gussie Norchester. She wore no veil, and Sophie had gone to fetch the bouquet of Christmas roses which Ellen had made that morning. The Christmas roses had been a bonus; they had helped Ellen very much when she found them unexpectedly growing behind a potting shed in the dank and freezing garden, for it was not easy to remember her vision of Crowthorpe as she had first seen it on that summer day. But she would be faithful; she would do it all; everyone who came here should be fed and warm and comfortable-and the farm manager had suggested they keep goats, whose milk was not rationed.

Thinking of goats, of whom she was extremely fond, Ellen began to make her way downstairs.

Sophie and Ursula, shawls over their bridesmaid’s dresses, were on the landing, talking to Leon. The lights had had to be turned on by midday, but only a faint glow, cast by a lamp in the shape of a Pre-Raphaelite maiden, illumined the stairs and they were too absorbed to notice her.

“Janey’s absolutely sure,” Leon was saying. “He wasn’t on the train. She waited till every single person had got off; and there isn’t another one today.”

“He doesn’t have to come by train. Pilots get petrol, I’ll bet. He could come up by car even now.” Sophie, usually so inclined to fear the worst, had all along been convinced that Marek would come-that he would stride in at the last minute and carry Ellen off.

“Can’t we do something to slow her up?”’ They thought of Aniella in her swagged boat, the draperies trailing in the water. Crowthorpe was wet enough, God knew, but Ellen was doing the short drive to the church in the estate’s old Morris.

“We could put sugar in the carburettor,” suggested Ursula, who had become addicted to gangster films.

But sugar was rationed, and the wedding was in half an hour.

“He might still come,” said Sophie obstinately. “Marek’s just the sort of person to burst into the church and if he does I’ll tug at Ellen’s dress or tell her to faint or something.”

From upstairs they heard the rustle of silk, a sharp intake of breath-then Ellen came down the stairs towards them.

“Marek is here?”’ she said very quietly. “He’s in England?”’

All three turned to her, consternation in their faces.

“Yes,” said Leon, “I was with him in the internment camp.”

“And he knows that I’m getting married today?”’ Silently they nodded.

“I see.”

Anguished, waiting, they looked at her. But she did not crumple up, nor weep. She straightened her shoulders and they saw pride cover her face like a film of ice.

“I’ll have my flowers, please, Sophie.” And then: “It’s time to go.”

Kendrick was waiting at the altar beside his best man, a Cambridge acquaintance whom no one had met before. Pausing inside the church, Ellen surveyed the guests as they turned their heads. The Crowthorpe retainers in their dark heavy overcoats fared best, accustomed as they were to the hardship of the Frobisher regime and the freezing church. Margaret Sinclair was there, giving her a heartening smile, but not Bennet, who was still breaking his codes… Janey beside Frank, in the uniform of a private… a whole bevy of gallant aunts, real ones and honorary ones, in hats they had dusted out specially-and, sitting a little apart and looking not at all like Beryl Smith but entirely like Tamara Tatriatova, (and wearing-Ellen had time to notice-coma pilfered geranium from the conservatory in her turban), the Russian ballerina. Yet it was the detestable Tamara who had made the previous night endurable, taking Kendrick into his study to listen to Stravinsky and leaving Ellen free to help the maids with preparations for the wedding lunch.

But now it was beginning. Leon was sitting beside the old lady who played the organ; he had insisted on helping her turn the pages, ignoring her plea that she knew the music by heart. He was shuffling the music, still playing for time. She saw him look directly at Sophie, who half shook her head.

“He might still come,” said Sophie obstinately. “Marek’s just the sort of person to burst into the church and if he does I’ll tug at Ellen’s dress or tell her to faint or something.”

From upstairs they heard the rustle of silk, a sharp intake of breath-then Ellen came down the stairs towards them.

“Marek is here?”’ she said very quietly. “He’s in England?”’

All three turned to her, consternation in their faces.

“Yes,” said Leon, “I was with him in the internment camp.”

“And he knows that I’m getting married today?”’ Silently they nodded.

“I see.”

Anguished, waiting, they looked at her. But she did not crumple up, nor weep. She straightened her shoulders and they saw pride cover her face like a film of ice.

“I’ll have my flowers, please, Sophie.” And then: “It’s time to go.”

Kendrick was waiting at the altar beside his best man, a Cambridge acquaintance whom no one had met before. Pausing inside the church, Ellen surveyed the guests as they turned their heads. The Crowthorpe retainers in their dark heavy overcoats fared best, accustomed as they were to the hardship of the Frobisher regime and the freezing church. Margaret Sinclair was there, giving her a heartening smile, but not Bennet, who was still breaking his codes… Janey beside Frank, in the uniform of a private… a whole bevy of gallant aunts, real ones and honorary ones, in hats they had dusted out specially-and, sitting a little apart and looking not at all like Beryl Smith but entirely like Tamara Tatriatova, (and wearing-Ellen had time to notice-a pilfered geranium from the conservatory in her turban), the Russian ballerina. Yet it was the detestable Tamara who had made the previous night endurable, taking Kendrick into his study to listen to Stravinsky and leaving Ellen free to help the maids with preparations for the wedding lunch.

But now it was beginning. Leon was sitting beside the old lady who played the organ; he had insisted on helping her turn the pages, ignoring her plea that she knew the music by heart. He was shuffling the music, still playing for time. She saw him look directly at Sophie, who half shook her head.

There was nothing more to be done. The first strains of Widor’s Toccata rang out over the church, Sophie and Ursula arranged the folds of Ellen’s dress, and she began to walk slowly towards her bridegroom.

She was halfway up the aisle when they heard it-Sophie and Ursula, Leon with his keen hearing… and Ellen too, even above the sound of the music. The creaking of the heavy oaken door on its rusty hinges; and the gust of wind as it blew open. Sophie tugged once at Ellen’s dress and Leon’s hand came down on the organist’s arm so that she faltered…

What they saw then was a strange reversal of what had happened to Aniella in the pageant. For Ellen turned and as she saw the tall, broad-shouldered figure outlined in the lintel of the door, her face became transfigured. The pride and endurance which had made her look almost old, vanished in an instant, and she became so beautiful, so radiant, that those who watched her held their breath in wonder.

Then the latecomer, a neighbouring landowner who was Kendrick’s godfather, removed his hat and hurried, embarrassed, to his pew.

And the wedding went on.

In allowing the two ancient maids to prepare the master bedroom for their use, Ellen realised she had made a mistake. But she had not wanted to stop them having the chimney swept and doing what they could to air the bedclothes. Shut for years in their basement kitchen, chilblained and deprived of light, the Frobisher maids did not often use their initiative, and Ellen had no wish to deprive them of their traditional expectations.

But she had not examined the room in detail, having expected little from her wedding night except to endure it, and she had not realised that there was quite so much furniture: tables both round and square, brass pots, palms and fenders, bellows and tallboys and a stuffed osprey in a case. A picture of the The Released Garrison of Lucknow Crossing the Ganges hung above the bed which was high and, considering its nuptial purpose, surprisingly narrow, and on the opposite wall was a painting of a pale, dead shepherd in the snow, guarded by two collies who did not seem to have gathered that he was no longer in a position to tell them what to do.

The farm manager had sent up a basket of logs, but the vast size of the chimneypiece made the small fire seem even smaller, and Kendrick, in an unexpected attack of masculinity, had earlier hit the logs with a poker and almost destroyed it. On the chest in the dressing room were photographs of Roland and William in various manly situations-playing cricket, decimating tigers or passing out on parade at Sandhurst-and none as usual of Kendrick-who now came nervously into the bedroom in his striped pyjamas, fell over a padded stool and said: “Oh Ellen!”

His tone was reverent rather than passionate and he looked cold.

“Come and get warm,” said Ellen, who was already in bed, her hair brushed out, looking, as Kendrick stammeringly began to tell her, like Danae or Cleopatra, or perhaps Goya’s Maya on her satin couch.

But even he realised that the time for conversation was past, andwitha gulp he got into bed beside her where, considering how thin he was, he seemed to take up a surprising amount of room, especially his feet, which were icy and very large.

Once in bed, he found himself staring straight at the dead shepherd being guarded by dogs and Ellen saw a flicker of alarm pass over his face.

“What is it, Kendrick?”’

“I always used to look at that picture when Mummy was telling me what I’d done wrong. She used to send for me while she answered letters at that desk. That was where she read me my school reports too.” His gaze turned inwards to the terrors of the past.

“We’ll change the pictures tomorrow,” promised Ellen-but the idea that anything connected with his mother could be changed seemed to frighten Kendrick even more.

She lay back on the pillow, stifling a yawn, and waited to see if Kendrick had any idea of how to proceed-he might after all have read a book. When this did not seem to be the case, she stretched out her arms and drew her trembling husband towards her, letting his head rest on her breast, where he continued, though short of air, to proclaim his worship and to liken her to various people whose names she did not catch.

“I think we should get undressed properly,” said Ellen, trying to repress the school-mistressy note in her voice.

She slipped off her night-dress, but the sight of her naked, fire-lit body affected him so strongly that he became hopelessly entangled in his pyjama cord.

Ellen freed him, glad that her time at Cambridge had given her some experience. “Don’t worry, darling,” she said.

“We’ve lots of time.” And: “Everything’s all right,” she said at intervals during the long night, wondering what exactly she meant by this, while Kendrick shivered and stuttered out his admiration and said he was no good to anyone and never had been but he loved her more than anyone had ever loved before.

“Do you think you would be better in another room, Kendrick?”’ she asked towards dawn. “Somewhere that doesn’t have these associations?”’

For a moment, Kendrick brightened. “There’s the old nursery at the top of the house. I slept there when I was little with my nanny.” Kendrick’s face had relaxed; clearly he was remembering a golden age. “It’s quite a big room and it clears the trees so you can see the river.”

“Good. We’ll try that as soon as I can make some blackout curtains. Now don’t worry any more, darling. We’ll be fine up there. Just go to sleep.”

But Kendrick had sat up, in the grip of a terrible panic: “You won’t leave me, Ellen, will you? You won’t go away and leave me alone? I’ve always been alone and I couldn’t—”’

He began to weep and Ellen, fighting a weariness so profound that she thought it must pull her down to the centre of the earth, managed to take him into her arms.

“No, Kendrick, I won’t leave you alone, I promise. I’ll never leave you alone.”

He became calm then, and slept, and snored (but not unpleasantly), while Ellen lay awake till the image of the dead shepherd in the snow became visible and she had achieved the dawn.

“That’s extraordinary,” said Jan Chopek, looking at Marek stretched out on his iron bed in the Air Force Barrack at Cosford. “I’ve never seen him drunk. Not like this. Not incapable. God knows he drank all right with the Poles, and with those idiots from the Foreign Legion in France-but I’ve never known him pass out.”

“Well, he’s passed out now. Thank God he’s not on duty for the next forty-eight hours.”

“If he had been he wouldn’t have done it,” said Jan, and the British Pilot Officer shrugged. He’d already noticed that Marek was hero-worshipped by his fellow Czechs.

Marek had approached his blackout systematically, retiring to his room, loosening his tunic, and tilting the vodka bottle into his mouth so that no one would have to drag him to his bed. He had not even been sick, but all efforts to rouse him were unavailing.

Between his locker and Jan’s was a picture of a pneumatic blonde left behind by the previous occupant who had not returned from a night raid on Bremen, and a calendar. Under the date-December the eighteenth-was the motto: No Man Can Bathe Twice In The Same River.

“Something went wrong,” said Jan. “He tried to get leave for the weekend-he was going up north to the Lake District for something. He got it, too-and then Phillips pranged his car and he had to go up instead of him. He didn’t say much, but he was very upset, I think.”

Marek, when things went wrong, became extremely silent, but he had not often resorted to the standard panacea for disappointment.

“Well, there’s nothing we can do except wait till he comes round,” said the Pilot Officer.

This Marek did some six hours later, about the time that Ellen was rising from her nuptial bed. He had a shower, changed and decided that Fate had spoken. He was not certain now if he would have gone north and interrupted the wedding like someone in an opera. Certainly he had intended to. But the war had intervened-while Ellen was being married he was turning back over the Channel-and it was for the best. For Oskar Schwachek, now Gruppenführer Schwachek, still lived, and while he did so, Ellen must be protected from whatever was to come.

It wasn’t only Goethe who said beware of what you wish for in youth in case in later years it is granted to you.

He did say it-in the course of his long life Goethe said almost everything-but others said it too, among them Nora Coutts, Marek’s formidable grandmother, who now sat by his bed and said: “Did you expect to be pleased then, when you heard?”’

Eighteen months had passed since Ellen’s marriage. In the summer of 1941 Hitler’s madness had caused him to attack Russia, but even if the danger of invasion had ceased, the British, their cities ceaselessly bombed, their Air Force stretched beyond its limits, were experiencing total war as never before.

Marek had flown Wellingtons with the Czech Squadron of Bomber Command since his release from the Isle of Man and always returned safely, but the previous week a hit to his port engine had forced him to bail out with his crew before he could land. His leg was in plaster and in traction, and now, to his fury, he was being taken out of active service and sent to Canada as an instructor.

“I’ll be fit in another month,” he’d raged, but without avail.

“We need first-class people to train the younger men,” the Station Commander had said, not liking to point out that two years of solid flying were enough for a man well into his thirties and one who had been through hell before he ever reached Great Britain.

But it was not this news to which Nora Coutts was referring. As next of kin she had been summoned when Marek was injured, and now she sat at the head of his bed, knitting comforts for the troops. The balaclavas and mittens she made bore no resemblance to the misshapen artefacts which Ellen had garnered from the gardens at Hallendorf: Nora was a champion knitter as she was a champion roller of bandages and provider of meals-on-wheels, and since her return to her native land just before the outbreak of war had been the mainstay of the WVS.

“What did you expect?”’ she repeated.

“To be pleased. To be relieved… to feel that a weight had dropped from my mind,” said Marek, and wondered why he had been so stupid as to share with his grandmother the news he had received three days before from Europe. If he hadn’t been feeling so groggy and confused after they set his leg he would have had more sense.

“You ordered a man to be killed and to know who was responsible. Your orders have been carried out, Schwachek is dead-and you expect to be pleased? You?”’

“Yes.”

But looking into her face, whose implacable sanity reminded him somehow of Ellen, he began to realise how mad he had been. “I should have done it myself. I wanted them to find him but it was for me to do.”

“It’s done now; there was no choice.”

But she said no more, for the fracture in his leg was a multiple one and he had a dislocated shoulder — and now he was to be separated from his comrades and the work he loved.

Lying back on the pillows, weary and in pain, Marek reached out once more for the triumph that should have been his-and once again it eluded him. Schwachek had been bound for Russia. That horrific campaign in which the Germans were dying like flies might well have done Marek’s work for him. His grandmother was right; he had been mad.

“Do you ever think of Ellen?”’ she asked suddenly.

Marek turned his head on the pillow and smiled.

“What do you think?”’ he said.

After she left Marek, Nora Coutts did something she did very seldom; she hesitated.

She had not hesitated when she told the Russian anarchist not to be silly, and she had not hesitated when she left all her possessions behind and walked to the Czech border, arriving there an hour before the Germans invaded, but she hesitated now.

“Do you ever think of Ellen?”’ she had asked Marek, and got her answer.

But Ellen was married. In the world into which Nora had been born that would have been the end of the matter. But in the world as it was now, where human beings were shot out of the sky, or torpedoed or gunned down, was it perhaps important that people should part without misunderstanding, with the air clear between them? She did not for a moment consider that Ellen would leave her husband, and would have been shocked if anyone had suggested it-but would it comfort Ellen to know that Marek was aware now of his madness? That it would console Marek to see her before he sailed, she was certain.

In the end she decided to do nothing, but a month after her visit to the hospital, a troop ship en route from Canada was torpedoed.

Two days later, she set off for the north.

Nora walked from the station; at eighty-two she would have scorned to take a taxi for a distance of two miles. Marek had been discharged from hospital and was waiting for his orders to sail. Glad though she was that he was no longer flying, she would miss him badly when he went overseas. He talked of her joining him in Canada, but she would stay now and die here.

Once again the Lake District failed to live up to expectations. It was not raining; the late summer afternoon was golden and serene; after the devastation of the cities, this piece of untouched countryside with its dark, leafy trees, its running brooks, its silence, was Paradise indeed. Nor did the first sight of Crowthorpe dismay her; she had after all been born when Queen Victoria was on the throne; the gables and turrets and pointless timbering did not trouble her. She herself in Folkestone had been brought up in a villa not unlike Kendrick’s house.

But at the gate she hesitated. She had not told anyone she was coming; only Ellen knew her — to anyone else she would be just an old lady in stout shoes going for a walk. Her case was still at the station-she had wanted to leave her options open — and now she decided to take a path that led towards the back of the house and seemed to slope upwards towards the hill. In this country of ramblers it was probably a right of way, and she wanted above all to get the feel of the place, and of Ellen’s life.

She had not told Marek what she was going to do, for the simple reason that she did not know herself. To see if Ellen was happy? Nothing as simple as that-yet there was some question that she expected this visit to answer.

In a small meadow by the house she saw a flock of Angora goats; beautiful animals, their bells reminding her of the cowbells in the Bohemian hills and bringing a sudden stab of homesickness for Pettelsdorf. Down by the stream in the valley, children were paddling and calling to each other in Cockney accents. Evacuees. Yes, there would be evacuees; Ellen would welcome them with open arms.

She had come to the kitchen garden; looking through the gate in the wall she saw tomatoes ripening in the greenhouses and well-kept vegetable beds. As she gazed, a land girl came by trundling a barrow, but Nora was not ready yet and turned away. What had been a lawn had been ploughed up and planted with potatoes. As she might have expected, Ellen was presiding over a house and grounds most excellently and patriotically kept, and in a countryside of unsurpassed loveliness, and to her own dismay she found herself experiencing a pang of disappointment. Yes, there was no other word for it, and she was shocked. Had she wanted to find that Ellen was unhappy, full of regrets… even ill-treated or misunderstood? Had she wanted to take the girl in her arms and comfort her and tell her that Marek still loved her, and marriages could be annulled?

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 Café 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 must 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.”

Kendrick would not be expecting her; she had intended to stay away three days. She left the taxi at the gates and walked to the house on foot; the night air might undo some of the ravages of her tears. For a moment she halted, tipping her head back at the moon just freeing itself from the scudding clouds.

“I’m trying to do what’s right, Henny,” she said. “I’m trying to be good. You said that mattered, so help me, please!”

But Henny had never been a nocturnal person; she flourished in sunlight among pats of yellow butter and golden buttercups, and there was no rift in the wild and stormy sky.

By the back door she put down her case and let herself in silently. Everything was dark; Kendrick would be in bed on the top floor.

She crept upstairs, careful not to wake the other occupants of the house. On the second-floor landing she paused. Surely that was music coming from the master bedroom which she and Kendrick had vacated-music both so unexpected and yet so familiar that she could not at first think what it was.

Puzzled, she made her way along the corridor; and silently she opened the door…

Marek’s orders to report for embarkation at Liverpool came a day later. He spent his last afternoon in London alone in his room in the Czech Club, trying to overcome his wretchedness sufficiently to join his friends drinking down below-and watching through the window the procession of girls who were not Ellen which had haunted him since he left her. Girls with her way of walking, except that no one walked with her lightness and grace; girls whose burnished heads turned as they passed to show him a completely different face.

There was one crossing the garden square now, a girl with raindrops in her hair, carrying a suitcase…

Only she did not go past as the others had done; she did not show him a completely different face as she came closer. She made her way up the steps and when she saw him at the window she collapsed, helpless, against the rails.

“What is it, my darling?”’ he said, running down and gathering her in his arms. “For God’s sake, Ellen, what’s happened?”’

She turned her face to his; and he saw her tears.

“The Polovtsian Dances is what’s happened! Oh Marek, you won’t believe it,” she gasped, and he saw that she was helpless with laughter. “The Polovtsian Dances and the Bessarabian Body Oil and the undulating- all of it. Only I can’t tell you here, it’s too indelicate.”

But even when they retreated to the privacy of his room, she was too convulsed to speak.

“I promised I wouldn’t leave him alone — but he wasn’t alone! You see, he couldn’t… with me… because I was a goddess to him… But Tamara is not a goddess; she is an elemental, she is a dark Life Force…” Laughter overcame her once more. “They tried to explain it to me… Oh, if you could have seen her growling at him and calling him galubchick — and then she pulled him on to the bed and the osprey fell on top of them!”

But later, when Marek had finished kissing her and showering her with instructions about what she had to do-go to Canada House, get permits, set the annulment in train-she grew suddenly silent and pensive and for a moment his heart contracted.

“What are you thinking, Ellen? Tell me, for God’s sake.”

She turned to him and because she knew that what she was about to say might hurt him, she laid her hands in a gesture of reassurance against his chest.

“I was thinking,” she said very seriously, “that I was really going to miss the goats.”