She followed Sophie into the castle. The rooms, with their high ceilings, gilded cornices and white tiled stoves, were as beautiful and neglected as the grounds. But when she reached the top floor and Sophie said: “This is your room,” Ellen could only draw in her breath and say: “Oh Sophie, how absolutely wonderful!”
The child looked round, her brow furrowed. The room contained a broken spinning wheel, a rolled up scroll painting of the Buddha (partly eaten by mice) and a pile of mouldering Left Book Club paperbacks-all left behind by various housemothers who had not felt equal to the job.
But Ellen had gone straight to the window. She was part of the sky, inhabiting it. One could ride these not very serious clouds, touch angels or birds, meet witches. White ones, of course, with functional broomsticks, who felt as she did about the world.
Lost in the light, the infinity of space that would be hers each day, she lowered her eyes only gradually to the famous view: the serrated snow peaks on the other shore, the climbing fir trees above the village, the blue oblong of water with its solitary island across which the steamer was chugging, returning to its base.
Sophie waited. Her own view was the same — the room she shared with two other girls was only just down the corridor-but when she looked out of the window something always got in the way: images of her warring parents, the terror of abandonment, the letters that did not come. Now for a moment she saw what Ellen saw.
When Ellen spoke again it was to ask a question. “Are there storks here, Sophie? Do you have them at Hallendorf?”’
“I don’t think so.”
“We must get some,” said Ellen decidedly. “We must make them come. Storks are lovely; they bless a house, did you know?”’
Sophie considered this. “It could be difficult about the blessing,” she said, “because we don’t have anybody to do it here. We don’t have God.”
“Ah well,” said Ellen, turning back into the room. “One thing at a time. What we need now is a bonfire. Can you find me two boys with strong muscles? Big ones.”
Sophie puckered her forehead. “The biggest are Bruno and Frank but they’re awful. Bruno wrote “Eurythmics is…”, he wrote that thing about eurythmics on the temple and Frank is always thumping about and banging into people.”
“They sound just what I want. Could you go and get them for me please?”’
Lucas Bennet sat in his study with its book-lined walls, sagging leather armchairs and the bust of William Shakespeare which held down the sea of papers on his desk. He was waiting to interview his new housemother and had prepared himself for the worst. Ellen Carr had only been in the building for an hour and he himself had not set eyes on her, but he already knew that she was very pretty and very young and this could only mean disaster. She would want to produce a ballet based on Book Three of the Odyssey which she would not actually have read, or write a play in which she would take the lead while the children filled in as woodland spirits or doomed souls in hell. Chomsky would fall in love with her, Jean-Pierre would flirt with her, the children would run wild in their dormitories and after a term she would leave.
Which was unfair, because this time he had taken the advice of his sensible secretary and advertised not in The Socialist Gazette or the Progressive Educator, but in the Lady, a magazine in which employers sought old-fashioned nannies and housekeepers and cooks. Visions of an ample widow with bulging biceps had sustained him ever since Conchita’s need to join a Marxist flamenco troupe could no longer be gainsaid and she had removed herself, two weeks into the term, leaving the children with no one to care for their domestic needs.
And now it was all going to start again.
Ten years had passed since he took over the lease of the castle and started his school. A small, plump and balding visionary, he came from a wealthy and eccentric family of merchant bankers, diplomats and scholars. His time at Oxford (where he read Classics) was cut short in 1916 by the Great War, which left him with a troubling leg injury and a loathing for nationalism, flag-waving and cant. Obsessed by the idea of art as the key to Paradise-as the thing that would make men equal and set them free-he decided to start a school in which children from all nations would come together in a common endeavour. A school without the rules and taboos that had made his own schooling so wretched, which would offer the usual subjects but specialise in those things that were his passion: Music, Drama and The Dance.
The time was ripe for such a venture. The League of Nations gave hope of peace for the world; in Germany the Weimar Republic had become a byword for all that was exciting in the arts; the poverty and hardship of the post-war years seemed to be over. And at first the castle at Hallendorf did indeed attract idealists and enthusiasts from all over the world: followers of Isadora Duncan came and taught Greek dancing; Russian counts explained the doctrines of Stanislavsky; disciples of Brecht came from Germany to run summer schools and put on plays. True, the villagers continued to stand aloof, not pleased to find naked Harmony Professors entangled in their fishing nets, but in those first years it seemed that Bennet’s vision would largely be realised.
Now, nearly ten years later, he had to face the fact that Hallendorf’s early promise had not really been fulfilled. The intelligentsia of Europe and America continued to send him their children, but it was becoming clear that his idealistic progressive school was being used by the parents as… well, as a dump. The children might come from wealthy homes, and certainly he extracted the maximum in fees so that he could give scholarships to those with talent, but many of them were so unhappy and disturbed that it took more than experimental productions of the Russian classics or eurythmics in the water meadows to calm them. And the staff too were… mixed. But here his mind sheared away, for how could he dismiss incompetent teachers when he allowed Tamara to inflict her dreadful ploys on his defenceless children?
It had to be admitted too that Hallendorf’s annual performance in the theatre the count had built for his mistress had not, as Bennet had hoped, brought eminent producers and musicians to Hallendorf. Toscanini had not come from Milan (and a lady rumoured to be the great conductor’s aunt had turned out to be someone quite different), nor Max Rheinhardt from Berlin, to recognise the work of a new generation, and the villagers continued to stay away.
And now of course Max Rheinhardt couldn’t come because he had fled to America along with half the theatrical talent of the German-speaking countries. It had happened so quickly, the march from the last war to the possibility of the next. Bennet did not think that the insanity that was Hitler’s Germany could last, nor did he think that Austria would allow itself to be swallowed by the Third Reich, but fascism was on the move everywhere, darkening his world.
Furthermore, the money was running out. Bennet’s fortune had been considerable, but short of standing on a bridge and throwing banknotes into the water, there is no faster way to lose money than the financing of a school.
A knock at the door made him look up. The new matron entered.
She was all that he had feared yet it was hard to be disappointed. True, she was very young and very pretty, but she had a smile that was funny as well as sweet, and there was intelligence in the soft brown eyes. What held him though, what surprised him, for he had found it to be rare, was something else. His new housemistress looked… happy.
“You’re very much younger than we expected,” he said when he had asked about her journey and received an enthusiastic reply about the beauty of the landscape and the kindness of her fellow travellers.
She acknowledged the possibility of this, tilting her head slightly in what seemed to be her considering mode.