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 fire watchers 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 eamp 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 ab
out 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.’