A Song for Summer by Eva Ibbotson Read Free Book Online

slips, addressed the teachers as
    "Ma'am" and charged round frozen hockey fields shouting, "Well played, Daphne!"--and she was perfectly happy at Hallendorf. Chomsky's sun-dappled appendix scar troubled her not at all, nor the oaths of the noisier children, and for Lucas Bennet, who had founded, and now carried selflessly the burden of running, this idealistic madhouse, she had a respect which bordered on veneration. That she would have carried the portly little headmaster between her teeth to safety if the school ever caught fire, was the opinion of most members of staff. Certainly Hallendorf would have run into the ground pretty soon without her.
    "I should just take anything you find, dear," she'd said to Ellen, in whom she recognised a kindred spirit.
    "If anyone comes looking for it, I'll give you warning."
    So Ellen borrowed two beaten down mattresses from the gym and made them into floor cushions which she covered with an Indian cotton tablecloth she had found scrunched up in a dressing-up trunk. She took an armchair which had suffered enough from a common room, stripped the covers and polished the arms.
    She "borrowed" a kitchen trolley and painted it ... and decided that a small lime tree in an earthenware pot would be in less danger with her than in the courtyard.
    But what Sophie saw, after she knocked timidly on the door, was mostly light.
    "Oh!" she said. "How did it get like that? What did you do?"'
    "It was like that already. So is your room. Rooms tell you what they want, you just have to listen!"
    Sophie's life had so far been devoid of certainties. The marriage of her beautiful English mother to an austere scientist in the University of Vienna was a mistake both partners quickly put right. Carla wanted to be an actress, have parties, have fun; Professor Rakassy needed routine, silence and respect for his work. The only thing they had in common was an ego the size of a house and an apparent indifference to the happiness of their little daughter.
    They separated and Sophie began her travels across the continent of Europe: on the Train Bleu to Paris, on the Nordwest
    Express to Berlin when Carla got a walk-on part at the UFA studios ... on the Golden Arrow to London and back again ... always trying to please, to change identities as she arrived ... To be charming and prettily dressed and witty for her mother; to be serious and enquiring with securely plaited pigtails for her father ...
    Then suddenly the tug of war stopped. Both parents dropped the rope and she was packed off to a school that was unlike any she had known. That it was the beginning of a permanent abandonment, Sophie was sure.
    But now there was Ellen. Ellen had kept her promise about ringing Czernowitz and she kept other promises. Sophie attended lessons assiduously; she endured eurythmics and did her stint being a bunch of keys or a fork, but when there was a spare moment in her day she came back to her base, trotting behind Ellen with laundry baskets or piles of blankets and curling up in the evening on the floor of Ellen's room.
    And with Sophie came Ursula, bringing the red exercise book in which she was chronicling the brutalities the American Army had inflicted on the Red Indians, still scowling, still committed to hatred--but sometimes turning over what Ellen had said that first night. She had said it was sensible to go to Wounded Knee, and the calm word dropped into Ursula's turbulent soul like a benison.
    Others came, of course: Janey, and
    Ellen's bodyguard, Bruno and Frank, and a long-legged American girl called Flix who was said to be a brilliant actress but wanted only to be a vet and kept a plaster of Paris ant nest under her bed.
    And a dark, irritating, handsome boy called Leon who used his origins to secure sympathy.
    "You have to be nice to me because I'm Jewish," he would say, which drove Ursula into one of her frequent rages.
    "You're only half Jewish," she said.
    "And I bet it's the bottom half so I'll be nice to that but not