by Esther Freud
‘It’s fine, I’m rather enjoying myself,’ she shouted above the flush, and came out to join me. ‘You didn’t say your father had an accent.’ She was twisting her head and fluffing up her hair.
‘He doesn’t.’
‘He does, quite strong.’
I was indignant. ‘They left Germany when he was seven years old!’ And with a last trail of fingers through our hair we went back to join the table.
‘Sarah!’ Meg stretched out a hand as if we’d been gone for hours, but instead of me she pulled Pam down beside her. My father raised his eyes at me and, having little choice, I sat down opposite him.
‘Who is this?’ My grandmother looked at me confused, and my father, lowering his voice, said very firmly, ‘This is Sarah.’
Meg winked at her and tousled Pam’s streaky head. ‘She does look like you, Mrs Linder, don’t you think?’
‘No thank you.’ My father waved away more wine.
‘So, write down your address,’ Meg ordered, ‘and I’ll see what I can do about those introductions.’
Pam looked at me and shrugged, and, unable to think of what else to do, I handed her a pen.
A week or so later Pam brought a letter in to college. ‘It would be better if you didn’t come and visit us again,’ it said in Meg’s big, bouncing hand, ‘as your grandmother seemed upset by meeting you after so long. You do look so very like her, you see.’
And my father, when I told him, had to agree. ‘Well, you do look like my mother, it’s true.’ And neither of us mentioned that the letter had been meant for Pam.
Chapter 5
Fräulein Milner, the new governess, was a woman of twenty-two with long hands and pale, lifeless hair. She trembled when confronted with the contorted fury of Bina’s tearstained face, but insisted privately that she would win the children round. On the first morning she sat them comfortably at the round table in the nursery, in good winter light from the window, and attempted to teach them how to knit. She gave them each a set of wooden needles and a ball of thick white cotton, holding her hands up like the conductor of an orchestra, and with forced cheerfulness began: ‘Into the wood goes the huntsman . . .’ She slipped the needle into the first stitch. ‘Round the tree goes the dog.’ She wound a loop of cotton. ‘Out pops the rabbit.’ The needles clicked. ‘And off they all go.’ She moved on to the next stitch. Bina stared at her with undisguised disdain, while Martha, tangling up her needles in the line of casting on, began to cry. Eva sailed both needles across the room and watched them land in the fur of a rug. Millie, as the children had already named her, ignored this turn of events. ‘Into the wood,’ she continued on a new row, and more quietly, ‘Round the tree . . .’ until, with half a white face flannel to her credit, she had calmed herself into a new authority.
A month later Fräulein Milner handed in her notice. The reason she gave was her mother, who had been taken suddenly ill, she told Marianna, yet the actual reason was not the unruliness of the children but a spiteful streak she found they brought out in her. She had always liked to think of herself as a soft, amusing woman, her sunny disposition making up for her obvious lack of looks, but now when she washed at night and glanced up at her face in the oval mirror she saw a meanness in her mousy eyes, and a hard thin glint around her mouth.
After three more months and a string of weeping, broken resignations by young women with the highest references, a telegram was dispatched to Fräulein Schulze requesting her immediate return. Wolf offered to meet her from the train, but Marianna refused, insisting she was quite capable of making her own apology.
Gabrielle Schulze stepped on to the platform with an ill-concealed smile hovering on her lips. She must have been grinning like that all across the country, Marianna thought, but she held out a daintily gloved hand. ‘It seems we are unable to manage without you, after all,’ she told her. And the woman’s amber eyes glimmered with amusement. They rode back together through the city, their faces turned politely away as the stilted conversation failed. ‘I hope your family are all well?’ Marianna enquired, but she dreaded the ability of each question to turn back on itself, and eventually, grateful for the girl’s restraint in asking after her own family, she drifted into silence.
Before setting out for the station Marianna had asked that Omi Lise keep the girls occupied, tucked away in the nursery, so that at least she could be spared the sight of a doorstep reunion with their governess. With a forced smile, she bid Fräulein Schulze hurry in to them, left her in the hall and walked quickly through to her own sitting room where, having taken her seat at the piano, she began to play a tinkling arpeggio with both feet firmly pressed down on the pedals.
Marianna had to summon up her courage as the time approached to wish her girls goodnight. They would be waiting for her, defiant if she didn’t come, defiant if she did. She nodded civilly to Fräulein, who had been reading from a book of gruesome fables, and bending over each small bed, she lightly touched each forehead with her lips. ‘Goodnight, Mama,’ they said in turn, and when Marianna left the room her heart felt lighter, and she began to hope that, having provided her daughters with the one person for whom they longed above any other, they might forget their fury and warm towards her.
When Fräulein Schulze returned from Ulm she had a new way of putting up her hair, plaited and curled under in a ridge around her head, and during her short absence from Berlin, she seemed to have bloomed into an unnatural state of beauty. The glow of victory, Marianna called it, but she could not help noticing how it lasted on right through the spring and into summer where the colour of her face was drawn out by the warm nights and the changing auburn of the trees.
Even her husband, usually blind to the allure of other women, noticed the change. ‘Something seems to have happened to that girl,’ he said. ‘Do you think she’s . . .’
‘She’s what?’
Wolfgang Belgard removed his glasses. ‘It’s probably nothing.’ He began to rub his eyes. ‘It may just be the ramblings of old age, but does she spend her entire time with the children?’
Marianna left the dressing table. ‘You know my idea?’ She settled beside him on the divan. ‘I think she may be some kind of demon in disguise. The Bonn Dragon. Or the Black Sea monster. I’ve heard rumours that it has recently escaped from a lagoon and was even sighted in the restaurant car of the express train to Berlin.’ Wolf laughed. ‘But seriously,’ she pressed him, ‘I wish . . . I just wish we didn’t have to trust her with the children.’
‘We’ve been through all this business before.’ He sighed, sinking his head back into the cushions. ‘She’s probably got some secret admirer. Doubtless, my love, it can all be explained. Go to the park with her, keep an eye out for some young man, passing more than once. Suffering. Reading poetry.’ He turned and stroked the loose hair back from her face.
‘Are you asking me to spy on her?’ Marianna shook him off. ‘Do you think I don’t have enough to do with my days?’
‘All I’m trying to convince you of,’ he tried again, ‘is that you are unlikely to be sharing your house with a monster, foreign or home grown.’
Marianna was not so sure. ‘Time will tell.’ And she kicked him lightly to let him know she was not as angry as she had been.
Bina, Martha and Eva begged Fräulein Schulze that their hair be twisted up into the same smooth and coiling twist as her own. ‘When you are older,’ she promised, smiling, ‘and when you have more hair.’ Unlike Millie, who had tried to convince them that her previous charges went to bed early, in summer before the sun had even started to go down, and in winter straight after supper, Schu-Schu allowed them to stay up. They sat in their nightdresses and watched as she unrolled her hair and brushed it smooth and orange over her broad shoulders. She did not give it the energetic treatment used by Nanny on their own hair, but stroked it languorously, taking each section at a time and making partings like white maps across her head. Each night in rotation she asked one of the girls to brush the last back section that she
couldn’t reach, and then, dividing it into three, she taught them how to braid by allowing a race in fat red pigtails to where her hair ended just above the cushion of her chair. When Marianna came in to take her goodnight kisses, she slipped out, covering her head with a shawl, and the children held their breath to see if she would reappear like that, a mixture of Medusa and a clown, her lumpy, twisted pigtails standing out and spreading mythic shadows up the walls and out across the ceiling. When she did come back to sing them one more song, they found that in the privacy of her own room she had loosened the plaits so that her hair hung, slightly kinked, in a curtain round her shoulders. Bina, Martha and Eva snorted with complaint, but Schu-Schu hunched her shoulders and threatened to tell them a ghost story right there in the dark. She held her thumb and forefinger over the candle and threatened to pinch out the flame. ‘Please don’t,’ they begged, their eyes sparkling, their knees rigid, and she gave them a final, warning leer as she tucked them in.
It was part of Fräulein Schulze’s duty to escort the three girls to school. They went to Frau Dr Burtin’s school by the castle, which Marianna herself had attended as a child. Marianna went with them on the first day and found that almost nothing had changed. There was still the same long courtyard, and behind the school buildings a large garden where lilac and laburnum grew instead of flowers. The same games were played, songs sung, and cinnamon cake was still eaten on the day of the Director’s birthday. The children wore stiff white pinnies with bows at the back and a row of three buttons on one shoulder. It made Marianna sad to think of her mother, with tireless fingers, sewing her an identical apron for each school day. Six perfect sets of bows and buttons, and in the strongest, whitest cloth. But she herself had not been taught or brought up to sew and, not knowing where to begin, she had ordered the aprons from a dressmaker in town.
Each day Marianna watched as her three girls, appropriately dressed, set off with their governess for school. She had hoped when she enrolled them that they might be taught French by Dr Burtin, the headmistress’s husband, who had passed on to her his tangy Alsace accent, but Dr Burtin had long since retired, and even though his birthday was still celebrated, Marianna’s daughters were taught by a young Parisian, and they recited the same poems and songs, but with perfect twittering accents that made them raise their chins and pucker like young birds. They recited ‘Les Hirondelles’ and ‘Le Souvenir de peuple’ just as she had done, and they brought home the same playground games that she had played. Now they clasped each other from behind, and snaking through the house they chanted, ‘I am going to Jerusalem and you will come along!’ This was a game Marianna had forgotten, and stooping down she agreed to rest her hands on either side of Eva’s narrow body and skip through the apartment. They traipsed along the corridor to their father’s study where the children egged each other on to call out to him, ‘Papa? We are going to Jer-u-sa-lem, and you come along.’
Marianna urged them to be quiet and tried, by jostling from behind, to move them on. But they only raised their voices louder, ‘We are going to Jerusalem,’ and she was forced to call for Fräulein to distract them from their mission.
‘I don’t mind the interruption,’ Wolf always said, when a scuffle broke out behind his door. But the truth was that he engrossed himself so entirely in his work that he never heard the shrill voices of his daughters until they were raised in screams of furious frustration, punctuated by his wife’s calls for help and her foot stamping on the wooden floor.
Schu-Schu, strong as an ox, hoisted Eva up on to her back and, rolling the other two under her arms like puddings, strolled with them to the corner nursery, leaving Marianna quivering and alone, too angry to take up her husband’s invitation to sit with him while he finished off his work. Marianna retreated to the curving embrace of her piano, lit a thin cigar and allowed her fingers to drift over the keys; smoking and playing melancholy waltzes until Emanuel came home.
Emanuel had begun to attend classes in Italian and English. He met up with a group of boys who read Shakespeare aloud together, taking it in turns to play a leading role. Emanuel always arrived home from these events flushed and soft-limbed, his head too full of fights and romance to want to enter into any trivial conversation and he often spent the entire evening dreaming in his room. Marianna suspected he might be writing verse. She had found a locked drawer in his desk and had glanced around, hoping to come across the key. She would never search for something hidden, but if her glance happened to fall across it, then surely there would be no harm in a little natural curiosity.
Marianna left the piano now and wandered through to his room. She sat down on the high-backed leather chair that he had insisted upon since he was a small boy, and picked up a pen left lying on its side. She dipped it in ink and let an oily drop gather and slip to the end of the quill until it fell on to the blotting paper. It absorbed almost too fast, evaporating between the hungry grains. She allowed herself one more drop, transfixed by the softness of the ink as it slid over the nib. She then hurriedly replaced the pen. What was she doing whiling away her time? She had letters of her own to write, and she rattled the locked drawer once more before leaving.
It took months of casual glances, but Marianna eventually discovered the key to Emanuel’s locked drawer. Her hand trembled as she turned it and felt the lock give with a small unoiled click. It was much as she had suspected. Sheaves of closely written pages pressed together and bound with lengths of thin red ribbon. Marianna lifted the first pile and let the papers droop over her knees. She flicked through impatiently, unsure what she was searching for. ‘Her eyes flash dark in winter light, her cheek is pale, her lips are bright . . .’ she read at the very bottom in an old round hand. And between the essays and the translations there were other attempts at poetry. ‘Her eyes grow pale, her heartbeat slows . . .’ Marianna felt a special glow at having been right about her son. She held on to her pride and worked on it to cancel out the ugliness of spying. ‘Her hair rolls bold in flames of gold.’ She felt unnerved suddenly at the passion of his words and then, smiling quickly, she reassured herself that, after all, he showed some signs of promise.
Marianna heard a rustle in the corridor and quickly replaced the pages, stacked in the right order, in the drawer. She twisted the key and slipped it under the blotting paper where its small, irregular shape had given it away. Then to cover her short breath, she plumped up the pillows on the bed and folded back a corner of his sheet. She took a last glance at the desk to see that everything was in order, and stepped out into the hall. A murmur of voices drifted through from the kitchen where the cook clattered about, passing on licentious stories about the family for whom she used to work, enjoying the sight of Dolfi, the maid, blushing and covering her mouth, and knowing that on her first day off Dolfi would pass them on to her sister who also worked as a maid.
Wolf lounged on the divan, soothed by the nightly unpinning of Marianna’s hair. ‘Are you all right, my love?’ he asked, caught by her slow movements and her arms frozen in the air above her head.
‘Yes.’ She smiled, starting. ‘I’m perfectly all right.’
Wolf raised himself so that he could see his own reflection in the triple-sided mirror. He was watchful, since his daughters’ births, for any signs of melancholy. ‘You need a change of scene,’ he told her, and before he had time to promise her an afternoon of walking in the countryside she turned to him and suggested they make a trip to Italy.
‘You can’t deny that the Schulze has the children under tight control.’ Wolf, delighted by this joke against herself, found he had agreed.
‘We shall go as far as Rome,’ she said, and he came and sat beside her, pushing her along the upholstered seat so that he had to catch her quickly round the waist to stop her slipping off.
Italy had been the chosen destination of their honeymoon and they had always promised to return. They had travelled to Lucerne and then on to Milan where the white marble cathedral had reminded them of a cake shop in Berlin. This confession
, shyly given, had drawn them so warmly together that, even though it had been February, Marianna still remembered Milan as a city of blue skies and flowering avenues of trees. From there they had travelled to Genoa with its narrow lanes and high white roads up above the sea. They stayed in a small hotel, recommended for its French chef, where all the other guests smiled and nodded to each other whenever they came into the dining room. ‘Oh, no, we’ve been married well over a year!’ Marianna protested when they offered their congratulations, but she could tell that not one of them believed her.
A week before they were due to leave for Italy, Marianna and Wolf were invited to a party at the house in the Tiergarten Strasse where they had first met. Marianna was taken in to dinner by the director of the German Bank. ‘When you are in Rome,’ he told her, ‘you must not miss paying a visit to the Pope.’ Marianna laughed, but he insisted that if she left her card with the Prussian Consul at the Vatican, she would most likely get an audience. He had done the same thing the year before. ‘Make sure you have a black silk dress, and that your husband has a dinner jacket.’
On their first Sunday in Rome, Wolf and Marianna drove to the house of the Ambassador and left their card. ‘Don’t expect to hear another thing about it,’ Wolf warned, but three days later they received an invitation, gold-embossed and at the request of His Holiness the Pope.
Marianna bought a square of black lace to cover her head, as the invitation instructed, and Wolf dressed in his evening suit. At the appointed time they took a taxi to the Vatican. ‘Look at all those Roman Catholics,’ Marianna whispered, as two women wearing identical lace squares over their hair stepped down from a carriage.
