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.
Aware that he was enjoying himself, Ellen was caught quite unawares when he followed her into the kitchen one day as she was making coffee and forgetting Sophronia Ebenezer and Nell Gwyn and even Beethoven, seized one of her hands and said in a voice choked with emotion: "Oh Ellen, I love you so much. Won't you please, please marry me?"'
Too late did Ellen reproach herself and assure him that she did not love him, could not marry him, did not intend to marry anyone for a very long time. It would have been as well to try to deprive Sir Perceval of his quest for the Grail as persuade Kendrick that all was lost. He would wait, if need be for years, he would not trouble her, all he asked was to serve her family, address even more envelopes, attend even more meetings--and be allowed to glimpse her as she went about her work.
Ellen could hardly forbid him her mother's house; there was nothing to do except hope that he would grow out of so one-sided a passion. And during her last year at university something happened which put the erudite young man entirely out of her mind.
Henny fell ill. She had terminal cancer and Professor Carr, whom she had served with her life, proposed to send her to the geriatric ward of the local hospital to die.
Like many peasants, Henny was terrified of hospitals. Ellen now stopped trying to please her relatives.
She left college three months before her finals and told her grandfather that Henny would die in her own bed and she would nurse her.
She had help, of course, excellent local nurses who came by day, but most of the time they spent together, she and Henny, and they made their own world. Herr Hitler was eliminated, as was Mussolini, strutting and braying in Rome. Even the clamour of King George's Silver Jubilee scarcely reached them.
During this time which, strangely, was not unhappy, Henny went back to her own childhood in the lovely Austrian countryside in which she had grown up. She spoke of the wind in the pine trees, the cows with their great bells, about her brothers and sisters, and the Alpengl@uhen when in the hour of sunset the high peaks turned
to flame.
And again and again she spoke about the flowers. She spoke about the gentians and the edelweiss and the tiny saxifrages clinging to the rocks, but there was one flower she spoke of in a special voice. She called it a Kohlr@oserl--a little coal rose--but it was not a rose. It was a small black orchid with a tightly furled
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.
Aware that he was enjoying himself, Ellen was caught quite unawares when he followed her into the kitchen one day as she was making coffee and forgetting Sophronia Ebenezer and Nell Gwyn and even Beethoven, seized one of her hands and said in a voice choked with emotion: "Oh Ellen, I love you so much. Won't you please, please marry me?"'
Too late did Ellen reproach herself and assure him that she did not love him, could not marry him, did not intend to marry anyone for a very long time. It would have been as well to try to deprive Sir Perceval of his quest for the Grail as persuade Kendrick that all was lost. He would wait, if need be for years, he would not trouble her, all he asked was to serve her family, address even more envelopes, attend even more meetings--and be allowed to glimpse her as she went about her work.
Ellen could hardly forbid him her mother's house; there was nothing to do except hope that he would grow out of so one-sided a passion. And during her last year at university something happened which put the erudite young man entirely out of her mind.
Henny fell ill. She had terminal cancer and Professor Carr, whom she had served with her life, proposed to send her to the geriatric ward of the local hospital to die.
Like many peasants, Henny was terrified of hospitals. Ellen now stopped trying to please her relatives.
She left college three months before her finals and told her grandfather that Henny would die in her own bed and she would nurse her.
She had help, of course, excellent local nurses who came by day, but most of the time they spent together, she and Henny, and they made their own world. Herr Hitler was eliminated, as was Mussolini, strutting and braying in Rome. Even the clamour of King George's Silver Jubilee scarcely reached them.
During this time which, strangely, was not unhappy, Henny went back to her own childhood in the lovely Austrian countryside in which she had grown up. She spoke of the wind in the pine trees, the cows with their great bells, about her brothers and sisters, and the Alpengl@uhen when in the hour of sunset the high peaks turned
to flame.
And again and again she spoke about the flowers. She spoke about the gentians and the edelweiss and the tiny saxifrages clinging to the rocks, but there was one flower she spoke of in a special voice. She called it a Kohlr@oserl--a little coal rose--but it was not a rose. It was a small black orchid with a tightly furled
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