Authors: Esther Freud
‘It was my grandmother’s estate. Very grand, somewhere in the country. Or it had been very grand.’ A leaf curled over his lip. ‘I used to go there in the holidays, although my mother never stayed for long. And the awful aunt Bina refused to go at all.’
‘Why? I mean, why awful, and why refuse to go?’ I mopped up the oil with bread.
‘Oh, you know, they disapproved of their mother. Thought she was vulgar.’ He spiked some of my ham. ‘Actually, I did ask once why they disliked her, and all they could come up with was that she drank beer. Beer, instead of wine. Although I do remember as a boy it was my mother’s companion they disliked. A great big woman with huge feet like a man.’
And just as I was searching round for something more to eat, he clapped his hands and ordered us both back to work.
My father didn’t usually talk about his family. He’d escaped from them early on, feuding and bristling to keep them out. But almost by chance he’d made a family of his own. Me and my two sisters. We had a mother each and separate lives, but looked unusually alike, with his high shoulders, and the same pale eyes. He never introduced us to his parents. I’d met a woman once who knew his mother, ‘your grandmother,’ she’d called her, and the blood caught up inside my chest. They’d talked over a garden hedge, somewhere in the country, by the sea, and I imagined them, hanging out their washing, pinning sheets, and not knowing how much I’d like to have been there.
I closed my eyes, breathing air into my hip. Why was it that even the most comfortable position became unbearable within the space of half an hour? Once I’d been under the misconception that the more difficult the pose the better the painting was likely to turn out, and I’d stiffened and twisted into strange contortions, priding myself on an ability to stall a blink. But now I lay stretched sideways, with a pillow below my ear, as close to sleep as I could get. I sighed, hoping for a response, and then to take my mind off numbness I asked what had happened to Marianna Belgard. ‘At the end I mean.’
My father didn’t answer, and I held my breath to hear the worst. ‘She came to live with us in London.’ He was darkening the shadow of my jaw. ‘And, now I think of it, it must have been very difficult for her.’ He stopped and screwed up his eyes, gripping the sheaf of paintbrushes in one hand. ‘You see, she didn’t leave Germany until it was too late. She arrived with nothing, wasn’t allowed to bring anything out, and so she lived in the small back room of my parents’ house.’ He had found the thing that worried him and was rubbing at it furiously with turps. ‘She had to rely on my parents for everything, after once having been so grand, but I don’t remember her complaining.’
‘I suppose she was lucky to get out at all, so late?’
‘Yes, she was lucky.’ And we worked on, thinking of the endless others, until both my feet went to sleep and I had to beg him for a break.
The day after Emanuel’s party, Bina, Martha and Eva travelled back with the Samsons to spend a day and a night with them at what they called the Castle. It wasn’t a castle but only a large square house with balconies below the first-floor windows and a row of small turrets above the eaves. There was no room in the brand new Samson motorcar for either their governess or Omi Lise to accompany them and, after much discussion, the decision was made that they should go alone. ‘Gruber will drive over to fetch them tomorrow afternoon,’ Marianna decided, and she waved after the receding vehicle, calling out how they must have a lovely time, unaware that her voice was drowned completely by the engine.
Marianna sighed deeply as she walked towards the house. Empty, she loved Gaglow more than at any other time. Today, with its rooms so recently vacated, the spaciousness that filled it was still warm. Each window hummed with talk and music, and the garden had a fleeting look as if a crowd of people had simply moved inside. As soon as the car was out of sight, her whippets, cowering in the porch, ran out to greet her. They spun round, stretching their front legs, growling and looking up at her with lovesick eyes. Marianna let them lead her through the garden. The eldest two, one blue, one fawn, had been brought over from England, a present to her from Wolf, and she’d never had the heart to part them from their litter. They trotted in a troupe, their tails jaunty as they swayed from side to side, and Marianna bent down to throw a stick for the pure pleasure of watching them fly. She followed them until they reached the parade Hans Dieter had so carefully preserved. The grass here was as short and warm as the blue coat of her favourite dog, cropped so close you could feel the earth humming underneath. She knelt to lay one hand against it, and saw the whippets standing, their noses raised, their ears arched in the direction of the ice-house.
Marianna straightened silently. She bit her lip and, without warning, loudly clapped her hands, laughing as all five animals sprang away, leaping and twisting, released by magic from a spell. They swarmed around her, smiling like a shoal of eels, and using both her hands she attempted to stroke them all at the same time, feeling their backs wriggling delightedly away. And then once again they froze, their noses twitching and their ears poised. Marianna listened with them. And then she heard a laugh. A woman’s laugh, low and confidential. She shook herself and looked around. No one was there. ‘Come on,’ she called. ‘Home,’ and walked away down the gradual slope to the back door of the house. The dogs, their tails curving down in disappointment, trotted dutifully behind.
Marianna had an early supper with her husband and Emanuel. She smiled happily across at them, and asked how they thought the girls would be getting on that evening at the Castle. ‘They’ll be having a wonderful time,’ Wolf laughed, ‘and we shall be hearing about it for the rest of the summer. “Julika and Angelika, Angelika and Julika,”’ he mimicked, and Marianna glanced over at Emanuel, catching his eye as he was about to raise a spoon of chilled soup to his mouth. He blushed, and a green stain smudged against his teeth.
‘They’re lovely girls, both of them.’ Marianna turned a little sharply on her husband, and Wolf, missing her tone, agreed with a wink that lovely they most certainly were.
*
Eva sat on a low cane chair and listened to the conversation of the older girls. She had attempted to add to it, joining in with stories of her own, but found her interruptions frowned at and frozen out by Bina. When she persevered, looking to the Samson sisters for support, she simply met their patient, gentle stare, and with embarrassment she realized that the urgent, brilliant tales she was attempting were ones they’d probably heard before.
Frau Samson sat a little way away, her head bent over fine embroidery. She had placed herself carefully just far enough away to give the impression of not being able to overhear while still catching quite easily at each new strand of conversation. Eva felt inclined to join her. Today she liked the look of her large lumpy shoulders and the folds of her neck as she bent over her work. There was no sign in her of her daughters’ delicacy and she wondered what had happened to the husband, and if he were the one from whom they’d inherited the tiny wrists and the heart-shaped apricot chins.
Angelika’s voice lowered and she began to tell the others about a proposal of marriage she’d received while on holiday in St Moritz. He was a small, bald man of almost thirty who had failed to understand her when she said she couldn’t marry him as she was still at school. ‘I am quite prepared to wait,’ he replied, and when she’d avoided him for the rest of that day, he proved that he was not in fact prepared to wait at all. In the middle of the night he’d begun hammering on the hotel door of an uncle who was travelling with them, and had demanded to know what was going on. The uncle was so annoyed at being woken that he told him quite plainly that nothing was going on or ever would be, and when they went down to breakfast the next morning Angelika found, to her relief, that he had changed hotels.
Bina and Martha laughed so hard that streaks of red appeared on their necks, and Eva had to close her eyes to force away the image of the little angry man hammering and hammering, in love. Julika burst in with a much more glamorous proposition from a mountain climber. He swore that to win her love would be more marvellous than ascending the world’s highest peak. Marriage to her, he insisted, could be the great adventure of his life. Eva found herself biting her lip for the end of this story, and it was with an uncomfortable sense of loss that she listened to Julika confide how it had been the sight of his frizzy red hair squirrelling out from under his hat that had decided her against him.
‘A narrow escape.’ Bina sighed, and Martha added tremblingly that she didn’t know what she’d have done in a similar situation.
Eva closed her eyes and let the sun wash over her. She was waiting, as the others were, to hear what Bina might come up with. She was only a year younger than the Samsons and it was necessary that she offer up something against their dazzling display. The silence lasted fractionally too long and Martha began a dry, unconvincing cough. Eva opened her eyes, and saw her sister struggling. ‘Binschen,’ she smiled, ‘it’s not like you to be so shy,’ and kicked her just above the ankle. Bina only glared at her, and to save the family name Eva added, ‘So what about that doctor in Heligoland who had flowers specially brought over from the mainland?’ The others turned to her, their faces brightening. ‘Bina likes to keep him to herself,’ she whispered, happy to have found a part to play at last. Bina looked modestly at her hands. ‘Yes,’ Eva took a breath, ‘from one day to the next this young man would note down the colour of her dresses, and then order bouquets of flowers especially to match them. We don’t know whether or not he ever got the opportunity of proposing.’ Bina sat up a little straighter and the eyes of the others rested on her now mysterious face. ‘But she certainly never gave him much encouragement.’ And Eva added, rather too solemnly, ‘Poor man.
‘The day we left,’ she continued quickly, ‘the young doctor stood miserably on the pier and watched our boat pull out. He didn’t wave or shout, and then suddenly from behind his back he produced a bunch of red and purple flowers, anemones, and waved them at us. I suppose he chose anemones because they were the most colourful flowers he could find and would be bound to match something Bina was wearing. Well, as we pulled away he began to throw them, petal by petal into the sea. Everyone on the ferry clapped and cheered and Bina . . .’ she looked at her sister for inspiration ‘. . . Bina, who was dressed from head to toe in white, turned bright red, her ears went purple, and her black eyes glared, so that her whole face suddenly looked exactly –’ Eva caught herself and stopped in time from running in the wrong direction. ‘But the most terrible part of it was, Bina wouldn’t even wave to the poor man. She took one look at him and ran inside to hide until he was completely out of sight.’
‘Bina!’ The Samson sisters exclaimed in one accusing breath. ‘How cruel.’ But their faces opened up with admiration.
Eva lay back comfortably in her chair. She screwed up one eye to glance sideways at her sister and was surprised to catch the dark fury of her scowl as she patted and smoothed the blush out of her cheeks.
‘Manu,’ Eva called, as soon as the Samson motorcar had set them down at Gaglow, and she ran through the house, along the downstairs corridor and out on to the back lawn to find him. Instead she found her mother, bent over a rose bush, surreptitiously plucking at the dead heads of the flowers. ‘He hasn’t gone away again?’ she gasped, and Marianna, without looking up, said she needn’t worry, they’d got him until the autumn.
‘Emanuel,’ Eva shouted, running down towards the orchard, but she could see between the rows of stunted trees that he wasn’t there. The door to the walled garden was shut, and dragging her feet, she walked in a wide arc of the upper lawn, wading through a spray of wild raspberry and re-emerging on the sloping mound into which the ice-house had been built. The wall rose up out of the earth, only feet below the tiles, and as Eva scrambled round it, huffing and preparing to give up, she heard her brother’s voice. He was talking softly, with a laugh between each word, and she could almost hear his slanting smile.
‘I’m back, Manu, I’m back,’ she announced, shrieking round a pillar, and her brother, as if she’d given him a fright, sprang out towards her.
‘Manu?’
But there was her governess, leaning into the curved wall. ‘Evschen, you’re back already.’ And she stretched out a hand. Her face was milky white and dense, as if she’d just woken from a sleep. ‘We didn’t hear you.’ She laughed, and Emanuel dropped his shoulders and stepped towards them both.
‘How was the Castle?’ He put his arm around her, his face opening up especially for her, and Eva lolled blissfully between them, Schu-Schu and her brother, retelling every detail of each hour, until it was time to go into the house.
Emanuel had never been one of Fräulein Schulze’s charges. She had come to them when Eva was still a baby and Emanuel, already quite grown up at eleven, was studying with a private tutor.
At first Marianna did not realize the effect the governess was having on her daughters. In the space of a few months, Bina, always wayward and given to fits of temper, became distant and cold, and the other two, ruled as they were by their elder sister, followed suit with their behaviour. It was only after returning home from a month-long visit to a spa town that Marianna clearly saw how they had changed towards her. Instead of rushing, their little arms outstretched and groping for the presents she had hidden in her cape, they lined up stiffly and curtsied, one by one. ‘My darlings,’ Marianna gasped, horrified at this cold reception. ‘What manners!’ But the children just looked glumly down, as if they longed for nothing more than to return to the private world of their nursery. She’d kept them with her for as long as she could bear it, and then when their formality showed no sign of easing she gave up miserably and sent them away. She imagined them prancing freely out of their regulation finery and throwing feather pillows at each other under the treacherous freckled eye of Fräulein Schulze.