Summer at Gaglow

by Esther Freud

  Eva wrapped herself in furs to climb the back stairs to the nursery. She rifled through the contents of her wooden box, sorting and inspecting her most recent treasure – the skeleton of a leaf and the high white dome of the first snowdrop. She perched on the window-sill and, looking out over the frosted garden, she began to write.

  Dear Manu,

  I am learning how to cook and build a fire so that we won’t need any servants. Maybe just someone for the laundry, unless the river curved right in beside the house and we could peg the clothes with rocks and let them wash themselves. I’m enclosing drawings of the top floor of our house and as you can see we have three long windows each, with a bath under one and a bed below the other.

  I’ve been wanting to ask you for some time, do you remember when Bina was first born. Did she have soft brown hair, and if so, how did it change? Slowly so you’d hardly notice, or overnight?

  Your devoted and impatient sister, Eva.

  One morning Eva woke to find the frost had thawed and warm sunshine glinted on to stone. The dogs twitched and snuffled in their sleep and when Eva stirred they raised their noses at her. ‘Come on,’ she whispered, not wanting to wake her mother, curled comfortably in her chair, and she held the door for them as they filed politely out. They ran through the slippery grass to see if, after one warm night, any of the seeds they’d dibbed into the earth were showing signs of sprouting, carrots, spinach, and a spiral of radishes, which Marianna said were the easiest things to grow. She noticed that the oldest dog was running with a limp, and she had to keep stopping to let it catch up. They trotted through the orchard, past the empty stables and round the side of the house until, exhausted and unfamiliarly warm, she lay down on the bench that curved against the ice-house wall. ‘Poor hungry dogs,’ she crooned, helping the last one to climb up on to the bench, ‘living off mashed bread and apple cores,’ and she let her hands droop over their tapered waists. She began to think of things that they might like to eat. Liver and bright red cuts of meat and, as she closed her eyes, a bowl of chocolate heaped with cream swam into her view. She stretched out, her face tilted to the sun and fell asleep dreaming of a mountain made from soft white rolls so that her stomach rumbled noisily and sharp juices pulled and stretched her jaw.

  When she woke, the dogs had wandered off. She sat up and tried to catch the images she’d had of peaches, bright orange and the colour of Fräulein Schulze’s hair. ‘If you don’t want them, I’ll eat them all myself,’ she’d shouted. And then the fruit had turned into a bowl of marbles and she was swallowing them while Schu-Schu spun round and round the room.

  Everywhere the frost was melting, and the sound of trickling water made her desperate for a drink. She was about to run back to the house when she remembered where she was. Jumping up she pushed the heavy door into the cellar of the ice-house and, packing down the insulating straw, felt for the pick that hung against the wall. Another door forced the passage back upon itself, and a third was divided into sections so that Eva had only to lift the centre panel to slip through to the store of ice. For all the freezing weather the ice was low, and she had to climb down into the pit to get at it. It lay like boulders moulded together with fine cracks and, careful not to trap her fingers on the sticky surface, she splintered off a piece and, juggling it in the folds of her skirt, backed out into the warmth, sealing the doors as she passed through them.

  She sat picking straw out of her clothes and dripping the ice against her mouth. She could see her mother shaking rugs by the back door, her hair covered by a scarf, and she wondered what the local children would think now if they could see her. She was making use of the first spring day, beating and dusting and hanging out their clothes to air, and as Eva watched she had an idea for a treat. She’d have to work hard and start immediately but she could make her an Easter present out of ice. She’d carve an ice sculpture, moulding it into the figure of a dog and present it to her as a centrepiece for supper. She’d need to hack one large block for a trunk, and she was sure if it was possible to form the curved neck of a swan, it must be a simple matter of patience to chisel a whippet’s spindly tail.

  Eva had been working hard for several days when Bina and Martha arrived. They stepped down from their cart in a cloud of city air, and when Eva and Marianna ran out to greet them they were stopped short by their astonished looks. Eva glanced in confusion at her mother and noticed for the first time how her hair, piled under a fur hat, was ragged with loose strands. There were spider’s legs of silver running through it and the thicker width of these white hairs gave her a dishevelled look.

  ‘How’s Papa?’ Eva asked, terrified to see he wasn’t with them, but Bina only leant over to stare at the tattered ribbon hanging from her matted plaits, pursing her lips as if she hadn’t heard.

  ‘Shall we go inside?’ Their mother smiled, and turned away as if nothing in the world had changed. She picked up the limping dog like a warm basket of sticks and, with the others prancing excitedly before them, they walked through the closed up and deserted rooms.

  ‘What’s wrong with her?’ Martha whispered, and Eva explained how her back legs had stiffened with old age, forcing her to shuffle like a rabbit.

  ‘No, you idiot,’ Bina cut in. ‘Mama.’ Eva, unsure what she was after, hurried on in silence. ‘Where are we going?’ Bina protested, flapping after her and grumbling that it was far colder in this monstrous house than it ever was outside.

  ‘Mama, where are you taking us?’ Martha asked, when they had reached the octagonal hall. Marianna didn’t answer but instead threw open the door to her study. A roll of smoke curled out, clearing to show the table lit up with a row of candles and the best plates carefully set out.

  Marianna had spent the entire day preparing. With Eva’s help she’d rolled her desk into the centre of the room, had packed the pens and blotters to one side and spread it with a dark green cloth. They had worked together to push the chairs out from the fire and packed their clothes below the window-seats. The ragged blankets of the dogs were shaken out and folded and then placed neatly round the room as little oblong mats.

  ‘Good God,’ Bina snorted, ‘just look at this place.’ And Eva noticed her boots ranged before the fire and a string of drying, smoky vests and handkerchiefs hanging from a beam. Martha sneezed and her eyes were turning pink around the rims.

  ‘I suppose it is a bit smoky in here,’ Eva agreed and she stared down at the heaps of soft white ash piled beside the hearth.

  Marianna turned her back on them. ‘I can offer you fried potatoes cooked with rosemary,’ she said, lifting the lid grandly off a cracked tureen, ‘or fried potatoes cooked with thyme,’ and the others, eager for this luxury, stopped staring and settled round the table while Eva reluctantly opened a window, letting in a fresh cold stream of air.

  Eva had almost turned blue in her efforts to perfect the statue. She’d started off with great success, welding on ears with salted drops of water and chiselling a perfect snout, but the legs were causing problems, so long and thin, and suddenly so many of them, and the tail had proved virtually impossible. After each attempt she wrapped her work in reeds and laid it on the diminishing pile of ice. It was waiting now, its tail alongside it, to be presented to her mother.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Bina asked, as she jumped up from the table, but Eva slipped away without answering and ran out into the garden before it grew too dark to see. She opened up one door after another, and it was only as she squatted over the clear ice body, attempting for the last time to weld the tail, that she remembered she should not be showering gifts upon her mother.

  ‘Eva, Eva,’ she could hear her sisters calling, ‘where are you?’ In a sudden panic she threw the unconvincing dog back on to the ice and, shaking the reeds and straw out of her skirt, ran back towards the house.

  ‘So what have you found out?’ Bina asked, once they were ensconced in separate beds up in the nursery.

  ‘Found out?’ Just in time Eva remembered the point of her ext
ended stay.

  ‘Poor Eva,’ Martha murmured, her eyes still red from the clinging smoke, and Eva turned over on her side to face them with a martyred air.

  ‘It has not been easy.’

  ‘Well, as for us, we haven’t heard a word,’ Bina hissed, and it took Eva a moment to remember whose words it was they’d spent the winter waiting for.

  Eva curled up, clasping her knees and pressing them against her chest. She tried to re-create the comfort of her chair. It had seemed unnatural to retire after supper and leave her mother on the stairs. They’d exchanged shy smiles and nodded a goodnight, and Eva had been bustled off to hear the news and gossip of the last two months.

  The next morning Eva found her mother sitting on the ice-house steps. The door to the cellar was wide open and the hinged panel behind it had flapped down. Eva brought her hands up to her mouth, remembering.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Marianna insisted, before she could confess. ‘I’m sure it’s only children. They won’t mean any harm. Just children from the village.’ But there were new deep lines around her mouth and the brightness of her eyes was strained. ‘I hardly dare look to see what they’ve done to the vegetable garden.’ She sighed, and then as if to herself she murmured that she’d never felt completely welcome here, not really.

  ‘Mama.’ Eva felt she must explain, but Marianna stood up and, clicking her tongue for the dogs, strode off towards the house.

  Eva could hear the ice melting even before she reached it. The rocks had thawed on contact with warm air and, like a spring, it seeped and dripped into the ground. The reeds in which she’d wrapped her dog had uncurled over the surface, and there was the whippet’s tail, broken into pieces and returning to a mush of snow.

  Bina was greatly excited by the news. ‘Vandals from the village! Smashing in the door!’ And she hugged herself and shivered.

  ‘But couldn’t the rest of the ice be saved?’ Martha asked. ‘If the doors were closed immediately?’

  Bina pointed out to her that rubbish had been thrown into the pit. ‘Reeds and straw and God knows what else and now the ice wouldn’t be worth having.’

  ‘It’s her own fault,’ Bina kicked at a trail of loose straw, ‘for being so high and mighty. Pretending to be some kind of baroness and allowing the local people to come up and entertain her.’

  ‘Schu-Schu always said she shouldn’t have made Papa take the house,’ Martha remembered. ‘She always said it was bad luck.’

  ‘And she wanted him to keep the land – imagine,’ Bina added.

  ‘Couldn’t it have been the wind that blew open the door?’ Eva asked, loyalty pushed down in her chest. ‘I’m sure I was woken last night by some kind of storm.’ But Bina only scowled at her, shaking her head in mock exasperation, and asking what other patriotic German woman gave up her own food for a crowd of English dogs.

  The vegetable garden was in perfect order. Eva found her mother pulling tiny radishes to make a soup. ‘We should be thankful,’ she told her, and Eva found herself genuinely relieved to see their rows of shoots all lying undisturbed.

  Chapter 16

  ‘I wonder what they’re saying now, our mothers?’ Kate poured the wine, and I sipped mine as I tested the spaghetti.

  ‘Do you think they’re talking about us?’

  ‘They’re probably wondering where they went wrong.’ She smiled. ‘You know, all three of us heading towards thirty, unmarried, still not settled down.’

  ‘Hardly,’ Natasha said. ‘And, anyway, I have settled down. I’ve got a job with a salary, however small.’ Natasha worked long, hard hours as a nurse, and she used her full employment to make fun of us.

  ‘In any case,’ I pointed out to Kate, ‘I’m sure Patrick would marry you tomorrow.’ Patrick was her long-suffering boyfriend, hanging on just by his nails for years.

  ‘I’d like to go away,’ Kate sighed, ‘have some kind of adventure,’ and to weigh her down I heaped her plate with food. ‘Maybe we could all go?’ She sucked a long strand of spaghetti up out of her sauce.

  ‘Go where?’ Natasha was adding up her scant days off.

  ‘Oh, somewhere different. Chile or Mexico . . . Or where’s that place practically no one has ever been – the Yemen?’

  I looked at her and saw a speckling of sauce over her nose. ‘The Yemen?’ Just then Sonny woke up and yelled. ‘Look,’ I told him, ‘I didn’t put you down for a ten-minute nap. It’s bed-time, night-time, understand?’ But he looked so pleased to see me, the tears flicked back from his eyes, the roof of his mouth all pearly pink.

  ‘The sweetness of that boy,’ Kate said, as he rode in on my arm. He was passed around the table while we took it in turns to curl spaghetti with one hand.

  ‘I don’t suppose it would be impossible.’ Natasha was coming round. ‘Sarah could leave Sonny with her mother and we could go off, the three of us. Even just for a weekend.’

  ‘Or we could bring Sonny with us?’ Kate held tightly on to him while she stretched over the table for cheese.

  ‘It depends when.’ I felt a tiny stirring of excitement. ‘We’ve never been anywhere together, the three of us, have we?’ And we drank more wine and dug out hard helpings of ice cream.

  ‘Even if we just went to the country for a day.’ Natasha waved her spoon, and I could see Kate closing up with disappointment.

  ‘No,’ I insisted, ‘we’ll have to make it special,’ and I remembered I’d forgotten all about the strawberries, which would be leaking through newspaper into the bottom of my bag. ‘To somewhere special,’ I raised my glass, and the others joined me, making Sonny chuckle when they cheered.

  The next morning Sonny woke at five and then again every hour until I crawled out of bed to get away from him. The kitchen smelt of wine and cold spaghetti, and I opened the window where my cornflowers had grown into a mass of long green shoots, dark and dusty and in desperate need of thinning out. The sweet peas were trailing half-heartedly round sticks. ‘I need a garden,’ I mumbled into the jumble of backyards, and it suddenly occurred to me that we should visit Gaglow. ‘Gaglow, it’s the perfect place,’ and I rushed through to my framed photograph and smiled at the far-off faces of the Belgard girls.

  I rang Kate first and then Natasha, but both were either still asleep or out. ‘We are going to Gagalow,’ I sang, ‘we are going to Gag-a-low,’ and then, like a shock, it hit me. I stood in the middle of the floor, my nightdress limp, my hair all straggled on my neck and looked down at my feet. I’m lonely, I thought, and I crawled back into bed and rested one arm across my baby’s body where the breath drew in and out under his vest.

  ‘Pam?’ I knew she’d still be asleep, but I didn’t feel I could wait any longer. ‘Pam?’

  Then with a click and a whirr she cut through her machine. ‘Hello?’

  ‘I’m sorry, did I wake you?’ I tried to sound surprised, and already I could hear her in her smoky bed, the creamy pillows denting while she searched round for a light.

  ‘No.’ There was a cigarette between her teeth now. ‘What time is it?’ A match hissed into the phone.

  ‘I just wondered, did you ever find out anything about Mike?’

  She took a deep inhalation and lowered her voice. ‘Yes, as a matter of fact I did.’ And she talked right on through her smoke so that I could almost see it drifting towards me down the line.

  ‘You do realize, don’t you, that Mike’s not just in Kilmaaric. He is Kilmaaric. He’s the lead.’ And my ear felt hot with fury. No, I thought, not like that. Something bad, something real and nasty, but instead I listened as she carried on. ‘Apparently they’re all really excited about him, think he’s going to be the next Big Thing,’ and she stopped to take another drag and say, ‘I hope he’s sending you lots of money.’

  ‘I don’t care about the fucking money,’ and I thought about my tulip dress, flowered in blue and white, and bought with the whole contents of one cheque. ‘So he’s not having an affair with anyone? Not sleeping with the producer? Come on, Pam, there
must be more? I’m going crazy.’

  Pam paused. I could feel it pained her to admit it, but she didn’t know. ‘I think Carol would have mentioned if there was any kind of intrigue. Why? What have you heard?’

  ‘Nothing.’ I sighed. ‘Pam, you don’t fancy coming up this way for lunch?’ But she settled back against her pillows and said she was having lunch with Brad.

  ‘Brad is it now?’

  And she promised to call me later with more news.

  ‘So what are we going to do?’ Sonny had woken and was looking at me sideways. Outside our window was a long, hot, empty day. ‘I suppose we’d better get ourselves dressed.’ Then I remembered that once a week in Primrose Hill there was a baby-massage class. ‘I don’t suppose it can last long.’ I eyed his dimpled arm and packed a towel, some almond oil and a sheaf of extra nappies.

  The streets were gritty with ice cream and the sticky pips of fruit. I clacked along in my new dress, avoiding chewing gum, and stopping every now and then to adjust the shade above Sonny’s head.

  A mass of pushchairs was already in the hall, and upstairs, in a long bare room, babies were laid out naked on a semi-circle of mats. They lay white against the green, like water-lilies or slivers of lychees, and their mothers knelt above them rubbing oil into their hands. The babies mewed and twittered, coughed and cried while vital information was swapped back and forth from one woman to the next. The whole room hummed with their voices and the baby-massage teacher, a young, lean man with close-cropped hair, sat waiting to begin. ‘All right, ladies,’ his voice, soft London, cut through the noise, ‘let’s start with the right leg,’ and I fumbled with the sticky tag of Sonny’s nappy to pull it off in time. ‘Lots of oil, that’s right, then take the leg and ease it out, hand over hand.’ Sonny was looking at the baby on his right, a tiny oriental girl with a shock of fine black hair. ‘And now the other leg.’ I eased oil into the creases, feeling the soft ligaments, like squid, behind each knee and the dense cool ripples of a thigh. There was silence in the room. ‘Now knock those heels together for good humour,’ and each woman smiled as she felt the soft pad of her baby’s feet spring back into her palm. We rubbed their tummies with our fingertips, eased out each hip and let their short soft arms slide through our hands. ‘Now turn them over,’ and they flipped and slipped like seals on to their fronts while we smoothed along their backs with quick warm strokes. My shoulders were tight with concentration and then one baby began to cry. ‘Pick him up,’ the teacher said, ‘if he’s not happy.’ And as if on cue another wail went out. Soon the room was fretful with demanding cries and a great array of breasts and bottles was ushered out to soothe them. I wrapped up Sonny in his towel and cuddled him against me. His face shone silkily with oil and his hair smelt bitter as a nut.