A Song for Summer Read Free Page A

head.
    "It didn't look much, but oh Ellie, the scent! You could smell it long before you found the flowers. In the books they tell you it smells like vanilla, but if so, it's like vanilla must smell in heaven. You must go, Liebling. You must go and put your face to them."
    "I will, Henny. I'll bring back a root and--"'
    But she didn't finish and Henny patted her hand and smiled, for they both knew that she was not a person who wanted things dug up and planted on her grave.
    "Just find them and tell them ... thank you," said Henny.
    A few days later she spoke of them again: "Ah yes, Kohlr@oserl," she said--and soon afterwards she died.
    Ellen didn't go back to finish her degree. She enrolled at the Lucy Hatton School of Cookery and Household Management and Henny was right, she did have talent. She graduated summa cum laude and her mother and her aunts and Kendrick Frobisher watched her receive her diploma. As she came off the platform with her prizes, grace touched Dr Charlotte Carr, who was a good woman, and she threw her arms round her daughter and said: "We're all so proud of you, my darling. Really so very proud."
    And three months later, in the spring of 1937, answering an advertisement in the Lady, Ellen set off for Austria to take up a domestic post in a school run by an Englishman and specialising in Music, Drama and the Dance.
    It was listed in the guide books as an important castle and definitely worth a detour, but Schloss Hallendorf had nothing to do with drawbridges or slits for boiling oil.
    Built by a Habsburg count for his mistress, its towers housed bedrooms and boudoirs, not emplacements for guns; pale blue shutters lay folded against pink walls, roses climbed towards the first-floor windows.
    Carinthia is Austria's most southern province; anything and everything grows there. In the count's pleasure gardens, morning glory wreathed itself round oleander bushes, jasmine tumbled from pillars, stone urns frothed with geraniums and heliotrope. Behind the house, peaches and apricots ripened in the orchards and the rich flower-studded meadows sloped gently upwards towards forests of larch and pine.
    And to the front, where stone steps descended to the water and black swans came to be fed, was a view which no one who saw it ever forgot: over the lake to the village and up ... up ... to the snowy zigzag of the high peaks.
    But the Habsburg counts fell on hard times. The castle stood empty, housed wounded soldiers in the Great War ... fell empty again. Then in the year 1928, an Englishman named Lucas Bennet took over the lease and started his school.
    Ellen stood by the rails of the little steamer and looked back at the village with its wooden houses, the inn with its terrace and chestnut trees, the church on a small promontory.
    It was a serious church; not onion domed but with a tall, straight spire.
    In the fields above the village she could see piebald cows as distinct as wooden toys. were they feasting on Henny's Kohlr@oserl, those fortunate Austrian cows?
    There was still snow on the summits, but down on the lake the breeze was warm. It had been a moment of sheer magic, coming through the Mallnitz tunnel and finding herself suddenly in the south. She had left London in fog and drizzle; here it was spring. The hanging baskets in the stations were filled with hyacinths and narcissi, candles unfurled on the chestnut trees; she had seen lemon trees and mimosa.
    The steamer which rounded the lake three times a day was steeped in self-importance. The maximum amount of bustle accompanied the loading and unloading of passengers, of crates, of chickens in hampers--and the captain was magnificently covered in gold braid.
    They stopped at a convent where two nuns came out with wheelbarrows to fetch their provisions, passed a small wooded island and stopped again by a group of holiday houses.
    "That's where Professor Steiner lives," said an old peasant woman in a black kerchief, pointing to a small house with green shutters