A Song for Summer by Eva Ibbotson Read Free Book Online Page A

to your horrible top."
    Leon was a committed Marxist and filled his room with posters of Lenin rallying the proletariat, but the carefully unravelled jerseys he wore were made of purest cashmere and his underclothes were silk.
    Leon's father (whom he referred to as a "fascist beast") was a wealthy industrialist who had transferred his business interests from
    Berlin to London when Hitler came to power, and his devoted mother and sisters sent him innumerable parcels of chocolate and delicatessen from Harrods which he despised, but ate. But if it was difficult to like the boy, no one could dispute his gift; he was intensely and unmistakably musical.
    Ellen had expected the children to come, but she hadn't quite bargained for the staff, abandoning their cluttered bedsitting rooms to eat her Bath Oliver biscuits and drink her Lapsang Souchong tea. Hermine Ritter came with her love child in its herring box and sat with her grey-flannelled legs apart and spoke of the historic conference in Hinterbruhl where she had been overcome, virtually in her sleep, by a Professor of Vocal Rehabilitation who had drunk too much gentian brandy and left her with Andromeda, who was being brought up to be self-regulating but always seemed to be in a temper.
    "I will be glad to mind her for you sometimes," Ellen said. "But you must get her some proper nappies."
    "Oh surely not? In the book by Natalie Goldberger--"'
    But Ellen, watching the puce, distempered baby flaying about inside Hermine's tabard like Donald Duck in a tent, said she thought nappies would be nice for Andromeda.
    Jean-Pierre came, with his boudoir eyes and practised cynicism; a brilliant mathematician who professed to loathe children and could send them out of his classes reeling with excitement about the calculus, and Freya, a sweet-natured Norwegian who taught history and PE and was in love with a hard-hearted Swede called Mats who lived in a hut in Lapland and did not write.
    David Langley came, the bony-kneed biology teacher who was busy identifying the entire frit fly population of Carinthia, and Chomsky of course, fixing his congenitally despairing eyes on Ellen, and eating a quite remarkable number of biscuits.
    There was one member of staff, however, who was conspicuous by her absence. The Little Cabbage did not come and when Ellen met her, two days after her return, the encounter was unfortunate.
    Ellen during those first days worked as she had not
    worked before. She scrubbed, she sewed on name tapes, she set up her ironing board in the laundry room, she brought pots of flowers upstairs and emptied washing baskets and mended curtains.
    Soon the words "Where's Ellen?"' could be heard with increasing frequency as children came in with grazed knees, bruised foreheads or more complex bruising of the soul. They learnt by the state of her hair how much time she could give them: when it was screwed up on top of her head it was best to fall in behind her with a cloth; when it was in a plait over one shoulder she was bound for the garden; when it was loose she had time to talk. Her clean, starched aprons, pink or white or blue, became a kind of beacon. On the days that they were blue, Chomsky would make an excuse to leave the metalwork shop and tell her that she reminded him of his nursemaid, Katya, whom he had deeply loved.
    During that time, when she took almost no time off and did not even allow herself to think of Kohlr@oserl Ellen began to feel that she was some way to accomplishing her task.
    But pride goes before a fall. Ellen's fall came at the end of the first week when she was cleaning out a strange collection of debris she found in a small round room in the East Tower.
    She had noticed a painting hanging on a dark wall above a table full of unsavoury litter: an old tin of Cerebos salt, rusty round the rim, a candle-end burnt dangerously low, a dead bunch of marigolds with slimy stalks and a piece of bread covered in mouse droppings.
    Appalled by this health and safety