A Song for Summer

The white cloth was spread on the table and they were lifting the paper-thin dough from below ... lifting it with spread fingers so slowly, so gently, making it thin and ever thinner without once letting it go into holes, and Henny stopped for a moment and said more seriously than she usually spoke: "You have a real talent, Hascherl. A proper one."

Even so, when the time came to choose her career, Ellen didn't have the heart to rebel; she took her Higher Certificate and went to Cambridge to read Modern Languages because she spoke German already and was extremely fond of chatting. As it happened, not much chatting went on during her tutorials and her supervisor found the Austrian dialect in which she recited Schiller's poetry singular in the extreme. But she liked Cambridge well enough--the river and the Backs, and the friendly young men who paid her compliments and took her punting and asked her to dances. She learnt to deflect their proposals of marriage and made good friends among her fellow students, the shopkeepers, and the ducks.

With Kendrick Frobisher she was less adroit. He was a blond, serious, painfully thin young man of twenty-eight with pale blue eyes, and belonged to her life in London where he assiduously attended the meetings at Gowan Terrace, addressed envelopes, and showed a proper concern for the Higher Education of Women.

Kendrick was the youngest son of a domineering mother who lived in Cumberland and had, when she was a young woman, personally delivered a camel on the way to church. This had happened in India where she grew up, the daughter of an army colonel stationed in Poona. The camel was pregnant and in difficulties and though she was only nineteen years old, Kendrick's mother had unhesitatingly plunged an arm into its interior and done what was necessary before passing on, indifferent to her blood-stained dress and ruined parasol, to worship God.

Returning to Britain to marry a landowner, this redoubtable woman had produced two sons, young men who hunted, shot, fished and would presently marry. Then came Kendrick who was a disappointment from the start--an unsporting, pale, nervous boy who was bullied at school and read books.

In the London Library, researching the minor metaphysical poets on whom he was planning a monograph, or at the many lectures, art exhibitions and concerts he attended, Kendrick was happy enough, but real people terrified him. It was causes that he espoused, and what more worthy cause than the education of women and the emancipation from slavery of the female sex?

So he started to attend the meetings in Gowan

Terrace and there found Ellen handing round sandwiches.

"The egg and cress ones are nice," she said--and that was that.

Because he was so obviously a person that one did not marry, Ellen was not careful as she was with the young men who kissed her in punts. It seemed to her sad to have a mother who had delivered a camel on the way to church, and Kendrick had other problems.

"What is your house like?"' she asked him once, for he lived in a small bachelor flat in Pimlico and seldom went home.

"Wet," he had answered sadly.

"Wetter than other houses?"' she wanted to know.

Kendrick said yes. His home was in the Lake District, in Borrowdale, which had the highest rainfall in England. He went on to explain that as well as being wet it was red, being built of a particular kind of sandstone which became crimsoned in the rain.

Realising that it could not be easy to live in a wet red house with two successful older brothers and a mother who had delivered a camel on the way to church, Ellen was kind to him. She accompanied him to concerts and to art galleries and to plays without scenery, and smiled at him, her mind on other things, when he paid her compliments.

These were not the ordinary kind: they involved Kendrick in hours of pleasurable research in libraries and museums. Ellen's hair had darkened to an unsensational light brown and she had, to her great relief, largely outgrown her dimples, but in finding painters and poets who had caught the way her curls fell across her brow, or the curve of her generous mouth, he was on fertile ground.

"Look, Ellen," he would say, "here's a portrait of Sophronia Ebenezer by Raphael. Or it may only be by the School of Raphael," he would add conscientiously. "The attribution isn't certain. But she's tilting her head just like you tilt yours when you listen."

In the delectable Nell Gwyn Kendrick discerned the curve of Ellen's throat and her bestowing glance, and Wordsworth's lines: "She was a phantom of delight" might have been penned with her in mind. Even music yielded its images: the Scherzo of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony

seemed to him to mirror precisely her effervescent capacity for joy.