Authors: Esther Freud
Marianna insisted that a place be set for Fräulein Schulze at Emanuel’s birthday dinner. She still held out the hope of winning her round, and even offered up one of her own last season’s dresses. But when Gabrielle Schulze entered the dining room, the dull red of the dress transformed by rosebuds stitched in satin and nestling voluptuously against the whiteness of her skin, Marianna found herself regretting it. The woman seemed to hold her head too high and Marianna noticed how, with cleverly exacting fingers, she had managed to disguise the necessary insertion of an extra panel across and under the wide sweep of her bust.
The party continued the following day with a lunch of cold meats, pickled vegetables and fruit, to be eaten in the garden. Eva woke early, her eyes swollen with tears trapped under her lids during the night. It made her skin look thick and out of focus. No one noticed. Bina was too busy telling anyone who’d listen about the dancing, and how admired she’d been by certain young men. Martha hung on every one of Bina’s words. ‘If you were so interested, why didn’t you come and see for yourself?’ Eva wanted to say, but she stopped herself, instead folding a piece of bitter bread around some cheese and chewing at the ends of it.
By mid-morning Marianna Belgard stood, in ivory taffeta, surveying her three daughters. Bina’s bright face, she noticed, held a new ferocity, while Martha as ever was vague and shy. Eva had dark childish rings under her eyes. ‘Are you quite well?’ She put a hand under Eva’s chin, and raised the girl’s face to her own.
Eva scowled. Typical, she thought. Discovered by my enemy. And then, realizing how far she’d allowed herself to go in spite, she blushed up at her mother. The silly girl’s in love. Marianna smiled, remembering herself as a child, and her heart lurched to think that they could not be friends.
It was only the overnight guests who had been invited to the picnic lunch. Tables had been set up, draped in white, on the flagstones behind the house that caught the early-morning sun. By lunchtime the stones had warmed and the sun had settled high above the house so that chairs could be arranged in or out of the shade. Eva knelt down and placed the back of one hand on a warm flag. Without intending it, and against all orders, she had come to love this house. She walked round to the front and looked down the straight drive to where the red roofs and the church spire of the village nestled in the valley. Apple orchards spread away to each side and the fields at the back were dotted with creamy, brown-faced cows. A carriage was hurtling, its black hood up, along the drive towards her. Four horses, harnessed in leather, trotted against the hill. Eva walked forward to see who it could be. She could make out Gruber, their own coachman, sitting high up on his box, holding the reins, and as the carriage swung into the drive it began to slow. A door flew open and Emanuel jumped down. ‘Manu,’ Eva called, picking up her skirt to race towards him, but from nowhere her mother had appeared, beaming and chastizing, and striding, with her arms outstretched, towards him.
Eva snorted and, just as they saw and waved to her, she took off to run round the side of the house and down to the stables where Gruber would be returning the horses to their stalls.
Eva watched her brother as he sat between the Samson girls, helping them to wine and sweet slices of frangipane, and sharing in the continuing joke of the night before.
‘Which one do you think?’ Bina nudged her.
‘Which one what?’ Eva scowled.
‘Is he most likely to propose to?’
Eva put her elbows on the table and stared at the perfect smiling ovals of their faces, lit up and turned towards Emanuel. Angelika and Julika. Julika and Angelika. ‘Neither,’ she said, and she felt a chill like a water spider run over her hand.
‘You’re useless.’ Bina pinched her, snorting and moving to where Martha sat at the other end of the table. Eva watched her lips as she muttered, ‘Utterly useless, what a waste,’ into Martha’s ear.
Eva leant forward to catch what her brother was saying. ‘Oh, yes,’ Angelika interrupted him, ‘of course Paris is the only place there is.’
‘For a honeymoon,’ Julika added, and both sisters blushed a golden shade of pink.
‘What rubbish people talk.’ Eva swore under her breath. She stood up and ran into the house, stopping only to peer into the high hall mirror to inspect her scowl and the sticky lashes of her eyes.
The drawing room was filled with flowers and scattered with chairs and sofas, arranged in groups for the comfort of last night’s guests. Eva stepped over the plum-coloured rugs, holding her nose against the cloying scent of lilies until she reached the grand piano. She let her hands fall heavily on the keys. They clashed and chimed, and her heart raced with the uneven notes. Omi Lise appeared in the door, her mouth puckered disapprovingly and a silk-fringed shawl draped over her arm. Eva caught her eye and ran.
She skipped past the high windows, catching at the curtains and not looking back until she reached a small door covered by a tapestry. She felt behind it and found the handle. The door opened and she slipped through into a long, vaulted passageway. This corridor was cold and lined with flowering pots of marguerites. Her feet echoed on the stone floor as she walked, more slowly now, straining her eyes into damp, half-empty rooms in which, not so many years before, the previous owner, Hans Dieter, had housed his collection of ivory-handled whips and guns. The sun fell onto white stone in harsh triangular patterns, and Eva trod as softly as she could to keep the echo to a minimum.
Through a last narrow door the corridor widened out into a circular hall. This was Eva’s favourite room. It had a slanting pattern of black and white tiles over its octagonal floor and the curve of the walls made her want to spin. Through a side entrance off this hall Marianna Belgard had her own private study. It was where she talked things over with the gardeners and discussed the hiring of men and the upkeep of the stables, regretting regularly that her husband, against her good advice, had thought it safest to sell off all the land. There was a large, leather-topped desk in the centre of the room, on which lay a book of paper, ragged at the edges like raw silk, and so heavy it was hardly worth the effort it took to close it. Stone-edged windows looked out onto the flower garden, and each deep window-seat had a rug arranged on it, especially plumped and folded for Marianna’s dogs. Marianna had a fleet of whippets, fawn and blue, who trotted daintily after her along the corridors, slipping occasionally and clipping the polish on the parquet floors. They stood, their eyes, like oil, popping out with sorrow when she stepped into her carriage, and when she returned to the house, even after an absence of a day, they greeted her with swirls and yelps and frantic, scampering circus twirls of joy.
Eva heard a noise. She stopped, still on tiptoe, her eyes on the circular ceiling, and looked across the hall into her mother’s study. Marianna was standing, leaning with one hand on her desk and deep in conversation with the sturdy red-faced woman with whom Eva had nearly collided the night before as she hovered on the stairs. ‘Frau Samson,’ Eva muttered to herself, and she raised an eyebrow. You see, she thought, our mother has no qualms about marrying off poor Manu, even when she has the plain, hard evidence of how those girls are likely to turn out! And she hunched her shoulders in exasperation.
Eva kept an eye on her mother’s profile, smiling and nodding to stout Frau Samson sitting in the window-seat, until they readied themselves to leave the room. Eva pressed herself into the curve of the wall and held her breath as her mother passed by, a whippet in tow, and walked with her companion back along the corridor, still talking lightly about troublesome cooks, suppressing a smile for the splintery patch of dog hair that had attached itself to the older woman’s behind.
Eva escaped through the back door. She ran directly ahead, up the stretch of lawn to where the ice-house stood at the end of its own short drive. This tiny house was the one part of the estate Hans Dieter had taken the trouble to maintain, and the lawn that led to it was smooth and dense with years of careful tending. It had a roof like a dove-cote with rounded sloping tiles, and the pillars that supported it were freshly painted in a creamy white. Eva stepped into the cool shade of its interior and was startled by the sight of her governess standing with her eyes half closed against the door that led down to the cellar.
‘Schu-Schu,’ she said, laying a hand softly on her arm. Fräulein Schulze blinked and looked at her, and without a word picked up a long tin bucket. She felt with her hands for the hidden catch and swung the door open onto the freezing store of ice.
Eva lay down on the bench that curved into the wall and shouted down to where Fräulein Schulze rummaged underground. ‘This isn’t your job, collecting ice. Do you have gloves?’
Fräulein Schulze’s laugh echoed up at her through the half-closed door. ‘It’s not a job. I wanted ice myself.’ And she reappeared with a collection of shards lining the bottom of her bucket. Eva reached in and chose a flaking tentacle which she dripped over her forehead, her nose and into her mouth. ‘I’ve asked Cook to prepare some redcurrant ice for you. I haven’t forgotten it’s your birthday too.’ And before Eva had a chance to pull her down on to the bench and hug her, she strode off across the lawn and disappeared into the house.
Eva wandered back towards the terrace. She could see that the lunch party had reorganized itself into small groups clustering thickly round the table ends, while long sections of starched white linen, heavy with unfinished food, lay abandoned in between. The light legs of chairs knocked together, and girls’ heads bent against the strengthening sun.
Eva saw her brother talking to a man in uniform. They were strolling away from the rest of the party, setting out across the lawn, the toes of their shoes kicking as if they were not entirely in agreement. Several of Emanuel’s friends had arrived for the party in their National Service uniforms. Thick wool jackets the colour of dung with long, scalloped pockets across their chests. The soft hats on their heads were puckered at the front with buttons and, in some cases, a badge.
Eva took a handful of black chocolates from a bowl and followed the two men, trailing a little way behind, her eyes on the ground as if searching the lawn for stray spring flowers. Emanuel was talking in low, alarmed tones about the murder in Sarajevo of Franz Ferdinand. He put his arm on the thick cloth of his friend’s jacket and wondered aloud if it would be an enforced conscription, were war to break out. ‘But no one would need to be forced.’ The other man shook him off, and Eva thought she saw her brother shiver in a long ripple down his back.
‘Of course, of course,’ he agreed quickly, ‘I myself will sign up like a shot,’ and they laughed, swapping stories of military adventures, tales of bravery and daring until Eva, distracted by a clump of golden celandines growing at the edge of the fountain, let them trail out of hearing.
Sometimes while my father painted I stared up at the huge beast of my body, my gargantuan breasts, my widened thighs, and tried to find the charcoal outline of my former self. I hadn’t known about the baby when I’d come for my first sitting, arriving smooth and pale and full of hope for how I was likely to turn out. I arranged myself in elegant profile, one arm limp across my stomach, my eyes fixed, half shut, on the corner of the room.
‘When exactly are you due?’ My father squinted as my painted body grew, masking the damask roses of the sofa, and at thirty weeks the canvas was sent away to be enlarged. Nine months had seemed such a never-ending stretch of time, and at first I’d put in extra hours, imagining the picture might be finished before I even started to show, but now with only six weeks left we had entered into a race. I moved my hand and laid it high under my ribs where the hard butt of the baby’s head was pressing. ‘Turn round,’ I whispered, and I tried to catch the underwater fingers as they fluttered back and forth below the skin.
‘Something rather extraordinary has happened.’ My father had his back to me, scanning the canvas where the paint was piling up on my left breast.
‘What extraordinary?’ I asked, the high dome of my stomach tightening as I twisted round. He moved his eyes from one breast to the other and then peered back at his work.
‘Well, some rather dubious-sounding man has written to say that the descendants of Marianna Belgard, my maternal grandmother, are entitled to some property, now that the Wall’s come down. There are some warehouses, apparently, and a theatre in East Berlin.’
‘A theatre?’ I struggled to sit up. ‘Do you know what it’s called? Where it is exactly?’ And for a moment I imagined inheriting the Berliner Ensemble, pirouetting on the stage where Brecht had stood, employing myself, an out-of-work actress, single mother, and giving jobs to all my friends.
The baby hiccuped just below my navel.
My father didn’t answer. I could see that he was waiting for me to settle down. I rubbed my hip and dropped back into position.
‘There is a catch, of course.’ He was widening (unnecessarily, I thought) a deep blue vein that ran in from my shoulder.
‘Oh?’
‘Yes, this man, Herr Gottfried something or other, insists he’ll only tell us where the property is if we promise to give him sixty per cent of its value. It’s a racket apparently, springing up all over East Germany.’ And he stabbed his paintbrush hard against his leg. ‘My feeling is,’ he said at last, ‘the whole thing’s to be avoided.’ I frowned in disappointment, already in my dreams having sold on the warehouse at enormous profit and, with my share, moved out of my tiny top-floor flat in Camden Town.
My father made a plate of salad for me, shaking olive oil on to
mâche
and cutting two thick slices of ham. ‘Mustard?’ he offered, but the baby was still hiccuping.
‘You know what I
would
be interested in hearing about?’ He reached over and whipped delicate leaves off my plate. ‘Gaglow.’
‘Gaglow?’ I was eating too fast, hoarding the plate childishly against me, wishing he’d leave my food alone.