Summer at Gaglow

by Esther Freud

  And then Manu slipped into the room. He was already dressed. ‘It’s difficult to sleep,’ he offered, and she reached out to him and placed her hand around the fingers of his fist. ‘It would be easier if they didn’t allow one home at all,’ he said. And Marianna flushed indignantly and refused to accept what he was saying. ‘You can’t understand,’ he interrupted her. ‘Nothing has changed for you. It’s as if the war were a bad smell, far off, blowing the other way.’ And when she said nothing, he clasped his hands, cold suddenly and white, behind his back.

  Emanuel caught the train, his pockets full of cigarettes and short cigars for trading, his bag heavy with packed food, wrapped and arranged around his kit. There were potato cakes, and scones baked with raisins, a spiralling coil of sausage and two packets of butter wrapped in muslin. His mother had tried to add tall jars of fruit: apricots and plums preserved in syrup and a pot of stem ginger. But Emanuel had been unable to imagine spooning up these delicacies in the sleet and squalor of a camp and he had refused to take them.

  His father, alone, accompanied him to the station. It was at his insistence that the others remained behind and he kissed each of his sisters goodbye in the hall, taking a last good look at them as Marianna held open the heavy door against the snow. Schu-Schu stood with her hands on Eva’s shoulders, and as Emanuel disappeared down the street, Eva felt her fingers tightening until she had to duck away to avoid a bruise. ‘You’re hurting me.’ She twisted round and was surprised to see a hard look of fury on her governess’s face. ‘Schu?’ Eva pulled her arm, and in an instant Schu-Schu had softened back into herself and was bustling the girls in out of the cold.

  The two men remained silent through the shouts and echoes of the station. They strode together down the crowded platform and Wolf looked on as Emanuel found a seat, threw his bag onto a rack and opened a window for the last, gruff goodbye. They smiled at each other, wishing on and dreading the sharp sound of the whistle, and then, as doors began to slam and the wheels rocked, hissing and moaning, Wolf took his son’s hand. He clasped it in his own, holding onto it as the train began to pull away. ‘Your inheritance,’ he whispered fiercely, and as their arms were drawn apart, Emanuel found a large warm coin lodged against his palm.

  Emanuel sat amid a crowd of soldiers, new recruits and several older men showing signs of wounds only recently repaired. He did not look at them but gazed into the hot, rich heart of his gold. It was not money but a medal, carved on one side with thick ears of corn, and on the other in small print the words Belgard and Son. He smiled and pressed it in his hands. This will always be worth something, when everything else is dust, and he thought how a nub of gold would not splatter and disintegrate when caught in the blast of a shell. It may dent if fired upon but even a bullet hole through its core would not detract from its intrinsic value. And he began to think of Josef Friedlander and how during his week’s leave he had avoided the subject of his disappearance, locking him out from the comfort of his home. He closed his eyes to let in the image of his friend, lit up as he had seen him last and staggering on the stumps of his legs. Emanuel felt again the explosion that had driven him back into his trench where he had lain against the warm wet body of a boy, dying on his first day at the front, and it wasn’t until daybreak, when the fighting had calmed, that he was able to crawl over the ground to search for Josef, peering into the muddy and devastated faces of the wounded, and turning up the legless corpses of men. Neither he nor anyone else he knew of had ever had another sighting of Josef Friedlander, and it was concluded that he must have fallen and drowned in a waterlogged crater, one of many blown into the earth. Emanuel did not know whether or not a letter had been sent to the Friedlanders, with the official ‘missing in action’ written across it. But if it had, no news of it had been passed on to Bina, who stubbornly refused to let his silence stamp out her feelings for him. Emanuel had a letter from her now, folded safely in his jacket pocket, and at the top of his canvas bag lay a pair of finely knitted socks. They lay side by side with socks of his own. Dark green and knee high, with purple, well-turned heels. A present from the Samson girls whose names in crossstitch were tucked away under the wide rim of the ribbing.

  Emanuel slipped the medal into the long pocket of his trousers. He could feel it there, warm against his thigh, and he hoped it might protect him through the rest of the winter and into the spring. ‘On my next leave I shall not go home,’ he promised himself, repeating what he had whispered for goodbye into Schu-Schu’s ear, and in that way he felt he could will, through his own impending sacrifice, an end to the war before the summer.

  Emanuel opened his eyes. The new recruits had set up a card game and were laying bets for cigarettes. They nodded to him and he shrugged and joined them, laying down his cards and raising the stakes with a cigar.

  Roaming in the Gaglow orchard, attempting to identify the blossom, Eva was caught in a rainstorm, and rather than run back to the house she stayed crouched under a tree. The downpour was exhilarating. She loved the rain cracking through the afternoon, spraying her face and arms. But then the sky opened up with lightning and the tree under which she was sheltering began to shudder in a low, rough wind. She heard her name called from the back door of the house and just as she was tensed to run, another rolling wave of thunder darkened the sky, followed in three short seconds by a blaze of lightning. She heard her name again, ghostly on the wind, but she didn’t dare move from where she was. The rain had turned cold and the cotton of her dress was wringing. The bow in her hair whipped into her eyes and, unable to help herself, she began to cry. Her tears were warm, and the running of her nose fell hotly on her upper lip. She put up her hands to catch some of the heat between her fingers, and as she did so the brittle branches of the tree snapped above her head and the sky lit up with a crack of cold white light. Eva opened her mouth to scream when a hand reached out and pulled her into the open. It was her mother, who clasped an arm around her and, stumbling over the ruts and trenches of the orchard, ran with her to the house.

  Eva was too excited to go to bed. ‘I narrowly missed being struck by lightning,’ she boasted, through chattering teeth. But Marianna, her lips white, her hands shaking, insisted on a fire being lit in the nursery and that Eva, once her wet clothes had been removed, should sit wrapped in rugs and be forced to drink a bowl of soup. Marianna brought it up herself. She had the cook make it clear from chicken stock and sticks of thyme, and she sat by Eva’s bed to see that every last mouthful was spooned and drunk. ‘I have sent for the doctor,’ she said, and when Eva wriggled and protested, Marianna only tightened the blankets round her neck and put a hand to her forehead.

  By midnight Eva was delirious. Her temperature had soared and her throat was so inflamed that she could hardly swallow. The doctor declared it a severe case of flu. He stood at the end of her bed while Marianna scanned his face for the diagnosis he was too afraid to give. ‘Surely she has all the symptoms of pneumonia?’ Marianna challenged, and the doctor looked up startled, as if she had caught him on the exact word.

  He knelt down and slipped a hand under the back of Eva’s head. ‘We must hope she pulls through the night,’ he said, giving up on the pretence, and he pushed her eyelids back to check on the milky blue of her delirium.

  The doctor, who had driven over from the nearest town, stayed on at Herr Belgard’s insistence. He was given a room on the floor below with a high and inviting wooden bed, but decided for the sake of his reputation to remain in an armchair in the nursery, where he could keep an eye on any change in the condition of his patient. Marianna was too upset to talk. She pulled a chair up to Eva’s bedside and mumbled out a string of incoherent prayers.

  Fräulein Schulze hovered by the fire. ‘Eva,’ she whispered, ‘you should have called for me.’ And unable to restrain herself, she rushed over and plumped up the pillows, adjusted the clutter of the bedside table and placed a hand over her burning charge.

  Three days later, Eva woke, feeling light and dry and strangely happ
y. The burning embers of a nightfire smouldered in the grate and the chairs around her bed were empty. She threw back the blanket and let her feet slide to the floor. The whiteness of her skin was mesmerizing and her blood, when she ran across the room, pricked and tingled in her joints. She knelt up on the window-sill and pushed her head out between the curtains. It was her favourite time of day: the beginning of the morning when the sun has washed away all traces of the dawn. Eva unhooked the latch and let in a still cool draught of air. She let it play over her face and down between the buttons of her nightdress, enjoying the coldness of her fingertips and the shiver that ran along her spine. She could still feel the cloying warmth of the room on the soles of her upturned feet and she longed to jump out into the morning. She pushed the latch further and, twisting on the wide sill, she began to turn herself round. The slap caught her leg. It came from nowhere and stopped her breath.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Her mother’s voice flew at her, and she was pulled down from the window-sill and rushed back to bed. Marianna wrapped the blankets high up round her shoulders, and then clasping her swaddled body she held her tight and cried into her hair.

  Eva was mystified. ‘What have I done?’ But Marianna continued to hold her, muttering Bina’s name through her own as she rocked her in her arms.

  Eva was kept in bed for weeks. At night the fever caught her up, less forcibly with time, but in the mornings she continued to wake with an overwhelming longing to get up and run into the cool bright air. One afternoon the children from the village school came up to Gaglow to wish her well in convalescing. They trooped into the nursery, almost twenty of them, and sang songs in an arc around her bed. Eva sat up and stared at them. The girls had plaited hair and short silver lashes, with eyes that watered with emotion when they sang. The boys made fists with their hands and thumped them hard against the leather of their shorts. After several rousing verses, the village teacher led them in a poem, mouthing the words encouragingly and with expressions of exaggerated melodrama.

  Marianna stood by Eva’s bed and smiled down at her, glancing from her bemused face to the ruddy open mouths of the local children. It was their teacher who had insisted. ‘It is a tradition of the village,’ he told her, ‘and so long since there was a child in the house.’

  ‘But I don’t want to be entertained by anyone,’ Eva had protested.

  And Bina, on hearing the news, insisted she and Martha be taken back to Berlin in order to escape this new humiliation. ‘Never has anyone been so grand,’ she complained to Schu-Schu, as the carriage whisked them back to the city, and they pitied Eva for being left behind, alone and at the mercy of their mother.

  Soon Eva was allowed outside for short stretches of fresh air so long as she gave her promise not to leave the lawn and at all costs to avoid straying into the bad association of the orchard. Gaglow was deserted. Wolf had returned to his work, and Bina and Martha, in the company of Fräulein Schulze, had insisted on remaining in Berlin.

  Through the long hours of afternoons Eva watched her mother from an upstairs window wandering about her garden, examining the restored splendour of the grounds and making small adjustments in the absence of the gardeners. Paths had been cleared from under beds of bindweed, and over their first summer at Gaglow the gold and turquoise lichen was scaled off the statue. It fell in mossy shavings round the feet of a forgotten nymph, until one morning, pale and glimmering, it appeared stone naked in the centre of the lawn. The fountain was unblocked, the pipes repaired, and floating lilies that had clogged the pond were thinned and cleared and given space to stretch their leaves.

  Marianna came up to visit in the early evening when, having bathed her hands in rose water and sprinkled it on her hair, she would take Eva’s fingers in her own and ask Omi Lise for her progress. In the first days, when Eva was still drained and dizzy, Marianna sat with her and told her stories. She told her about journeys she had made when she was still a child, and how her parents took their holidays in shifts. ‘I always hated my summer birthday,’ she said, ‘because it fell on the last day of school and was a day of packing.’ Each July she and her mother travelled up into the mountains, and on their return, her father set off alone for two weeks by the sea. Marianna’s mother stood in for him as head of the firm. She sat at his desk and smiled down at the five men he hired to help him in his printing business, using the time to stitch monograms in coloured thread on to the table linen. ‘It wasn’t until I was sixteen that I went on holiday with my father, our first and last,’ and she thought of the pneumonia and how, until now, it had been a curse over her life.

  ‘Was he ill for a very long time?’ Eva asked, but Marianna simply shook her head, wincing at the vision of her mother, arriving half an hour too late.

  Eva had never spent so much time alone with her mother. She found herself forgetting the years of collected woes, the tiny details of deceit and treachery, and took to watching her fondly from above, her broad-brimmed hat high over her hair, and the row of cloth-covered buttons, like jewels, scattered down the front of her dress. Her face, above the stiff, fluted collar, was lost in shadow, but Eva could see her arms waving and hear her shouts as she rallied her depleted team of gardening men, pointing and explaining and plucking at her gloves as if she would like to tear them off and plunge her own hands into the earth. Once, after a short, sharp letter from Bina, full of sneers and messages of pity, Eva tied a knot in the hem of her nightdress to remind her, when it caught against her toes, whose side she was meant to be on.

  Eva did not like to let her brother know about her illness. Instead she wrote,

  Dear Manu,

  I’ve been thinking how we could have a fence around our house made from rows of runner beans. In my opinion the little red flowers are prettier than anything and just think how useful it would be when we are suddenly in need of lunch. I know our intention is to lead a very simple life but I’ve set my heart on a bath made exactly to my measurements, so I can rest my head and stretch my toes right to the end. Let me know if you would also like one and I’ll draw up plans.

  Your devoted sister, Eva.

  As he read, Emanuel saw her small mouth chattering, confiding the plans, the familiar dreams she insisted that he share, and he always saved her words for last. Bina’s letters were packed with news. ‘The facts are,’ she often began, and she would search about among the things she knew to let him into something gruesome. She had a talent for disaster and would sniff it out, drawing it in towards herself, however distant. Martha spent hours, her pen in her mouth, pondering on the perfect way to phrase her thoughts. Her letters began quite formally but soon trailed, sidetracking into snatches of myth and ancient history and revealing secrets closely kept on behalf of other girls at school. She thought of her brother in a place not dissimilar to Antarctica and trusted he would be the one person capable of keeping these things to himself.

  Emanuel received more letters than any other man in his regiment. He was teased and envied and occasionally asked to arrange correspondence for a soldier less fortunate than himself. ‘They can’t all be your sisters,’ they nudged, and when he insisted that they were, and that they would make for baffling if not useless pen pals, they asked to see a picture. Emanuel had a photograph, the three girls at Gaglow dressed in white and lying on cane chairs in the sun of the summer porch, but he shook his head and swore there was no such thing. The other man cursed him for a liar and a cheat and slapped him on the shoulder, but as he walked away Emanuel heard him mutter that he was nothing but a Jew, and didn’t deserve the honour of dying for his country.

  No one except Schu-Schu suspected that Emanuel would not come home on the first day of his leave, but after six long months, despite his promise, he found it impossible to stay away.

  ‘Would you come in and dance with us, just once?’ Eva begged him, as they waited in the shade of the veranda for the first young ladies to arrive.

  Marianna, anxious that her daughters’ social education should not be thwarted by the
war, had set up a network of dancing lessons to be carried out at various houses throughout the summer.

  ‘I may do.’ Emanuel squeezed her hand. ‘But I wouldn’t want to upset your partner.’

  ‘Oh, Amalie won’t mind, and anyway you could dance with her as well. She’s never danced with a man. No one except old Herr Friedrichson.’

  ‘And you, have you danced with any men?

  Eva smiled and frowned simultaneously so that her eyes almost disappeared. ‘Only with you.’

  Emanuel had dreamed on many miserable nights of holding the Samson sisters in his arms. Either one, or both, but now as he sat in the drawing room listening to the rolling piano and the tap of the old dancing teacher’s cane, he felt disinclined even to see them. But when the soothing rumble of a waltz drifted under the door of the hall, he clicked his boots together and, for the sake of Eva, made his entrance.

  There were twelve girls in the room, six couples, and as each whirling partner turned and saw him, a blush spread up over her neck and face and turned the dance into a burning ring of pink. Emanuel stood in uniform by the door. He lowered his eyes and watched the feet and ankles of the girls. ‘One two three, one two three,’ tapped old Herr Friedrichson, nodding with his twirled moustache and sweltering in the shiny cloth of his coat. ‘One two three, one two three.’ As Emanuel’s eyes swept the room he wished he could shake the hard sneer for all this prettiness from the corners of his mouth.

  When the music stopped Eva broke away quickly from the plump embrace of her partner and presented herself before her brother, smiling up at him for the next dance. Fräulein Schulze, who was standing by the piano, rescued the deserted Amalie and they set off again, accompanied by the ponderous chords of the ancient Frau Mendel who had been almost completely deaf since her seventieth birthday more than a decade before.