Summer at Gaglow
Authors: Esther Freud
GAGLOW
Esther Freud
Contents
‘It is not always easy to find the novel that will draw one willingly into its narrative and engage us consistently to the final page . . . To write in such fashion is an unusual accomplishment, but one that Esther Freud has achieved resoundingly . . .
Gaglow
is a very fine novel’
Deborah Bosley,
Observer
‘As the modern narrator traces clues and legacies left by her ancestors, the novel grows into an enchantingly forgiving study of the difficulties of intimacy, rooted in pain that is all the more shocking for being elegantly underplayed’
Patrick Gale,
Daily Telegraph
‘Evocative and intriguing’
Elle
‘She succeeds, too, in communicating the significance of these finished, spectral lives to those still in progress . . . The result promotes a novel of insight and relevance to something of greater stature’
Rachel Cusk,
Express of Sunday
‘Her observations are acute: there is virulent spite whipped up by their governess towards the mother; there is courage in letters to their brother when he is called up to fight for his country. And there is delightful, youthful innocence, all the more poignant for its backdrop of war’
Raffaella Barker,
Daily Mail
‘A remarkably assured work’
David Robson,
Sunday Telegraph
The Belgard girls did not admire their mother. They disapproved of her card-playing and the cigars she smoked when her husband was away from home. But their brother Emanuel they all adored. The following week he was to be twenty-one and the family were united for once in planning a party to span an entire weekend. The guests had been invited, the caterers informed and flowers were to be collected from the gardens and conservatories and arranged in monumental bouquets throughout the house. The party was to be held at Gaglow, and not at their Berlin apartment which, although large, was not large enough to hold the guests they expected to attend.
It was the summer of 1914 and it was also Eva’s birthday. No one seemed to remember in the flurry of activity that, on the same day as her brother would be twenty-one, Eva was to be eleven. She held her head up high and defied them to remember. Marianna Belgard had arranged for new dresses to be made for each of her three daughters. Bina was to have a pale peach satin, ruched and tucked along the front, Martha a blue with a sash bow at the back, and Eva, really still a child, would wear white. Bina, at fifteen, considered herself excessively ladylike, with or without the new dress. She intended behaving at the party with incomparably perfect manners, and enjoyed the prospect of showing up her mother. ‘She’s so vulgar,’ she protested, when after dinner Marianna continued to sit at table with the men, drinking beer and beating them at cards. Bina, Martha and Eva, their old nanny comfortably asleep, would often slip out of bed to spy on her through the thick drapes that led into the dining room. ‘It’s no way to behave,’ Bina hissed, and the others nodded in vigorous agreement, adding solemnly, ‘Poor Papa, poor, poor Papa.’
Eva sat in a large armchair, looking out through the french windows to where the grass was being clipped and mown, and thought with longing of the moment when Emanuel would come home. She thought how she would climb into his lap and tease him while he read. She would pull at the little hairs that grew singly on his chin and whisper the names of girls Mama had planned for him to marry. Eva shivered as she thought of the people her mother had invited to the party. Smart brash women with loud voices and thick necks. Emanuel would have nothing to do with them, she knew that, and, besides, he had made a promise to her. It was a promise secured on their shared birthday, the year that she’d turned seven, and she’d insisted that he swear to it, pricking his finger with a pin and blotting it against her thumb.
Emanuel’s arrival was overshadowed by the talk of war that came with him from Hamburg. ‘It’s only rumour,’ he consoled his mother. ‘The consensus at my university is that there will not be a war,’ and he repeated his theory to various groups of guests clustered around the piano in the drawing room or strolling on the upper lawn.
Emanuel also arrived with a birthday present for Eva. ‘Did you think you were forgotten?’ he teased, and she thanked him nonchalantly, gulping back relief. It was an inlaid Turkish box that shone in shades of rose and amber wood. Set in the centre was a pattern of mother-of-pearl uncurling like a flower. ‘It has a key,’ he told her, and when she twisted it, the box opened to reveal a lining of green felt and her name carved at the back between the hinges.
Eva had embroidered her brother five white handkerchiefs with his initials and a scattering of pink-eyed flowers in one corner. ‘He’ll never use them,’ Bina teased, and Martha laughed that he would most likely hide them at the bottom of a drawer. Eva glared in triumph when Emanuel shook one out and tucked it into the top pocket of his waistcoat, the flowers bursting out against the cloth. He kept it there throughout the afternoon, transferring it to his evening suit when, with the guests, he retired to change for supper.
Of the three girls it was only Bina who was allowed to stay up for the night-time celebrations. Places had been laid for a hundred people at a long gallery of tables that spiralled round the dining room. Bina came up to the nursery where both Nanny and the governess, Fräulein Schulze, burst into praise over her dress and the way in which her hair had been arranged. Eva stared furiously into her green baize box and cursed that she was years too young. ‘It’s even worse luck for me,’ Martha said, and it cheered Eva up a little to see that she was right.
Their mother came up to wish them both goodnight. ‘You have been more than perfect today.’ She smiled, glittering in the doorway of their double room, while Martha and Eva sat at twin dressing tables and stared sulkily back at her through the glass. ‘Sleep well.’ She blew them each a kiss and left them to rejoin the party.
‘Did you see the earrings she had on?’ Martha gasped, and Eva agreed that they were hideous. Great red rubies that dragged down the lobes of her ears. ‘And such skinny arms.’ She winced, continuing to give her hair the one hundred obligatory strokes insisted upon by Nanny.
‘Well, at least we have Bina to report back.’ Eva brushed vigorously. ‘Not to mention,’ she lowered her voice, ‘our own dear Schu.’
‘Now, now, children.’ It was Nanny standing behind them with their nightdresses, freshly pressed and aired. ‘I’m sure Fräulein Schulze will be too busy enjoying herself to have time for such nonsense.’
‘Oh, Omi, Omi Lise,’ they both protested. They caught each other’s eye and grinned. This was exactly what their governess had time for and what, above anything, she enjoyed. It was her wicked bedtime stories that had won them over at the very start, and the way she poked fun at strangers, livening up the walks they took even on the most dreary days, and filling her charges, each one, with a small, warm well of spite.
Eva lay in bed, listening to the distant strains of the music and running over in her mind the various eligible girls invited by her mother. Who would Emanuel be dancing with, she wondered, and she smiled at the off-hand way in which he had accepted their attentions.
‘Martha?’ she whispered. ‘Martha, are you asleep?’
Martha answered drowsily that she was.
Eva let her lie in silence, and then, unable to contain her question, she hissed across the room, ‘Martha, tell me something. Do you imagine, one day, that you’ll get married?’
Martha turned grumpily under her quilt. ‘What? Of course I will.’ And she turned again, and burrowed her head down under the covers.
If Bina had been there, tucked into bed in the adjoining room, she would not have allowed her sisters to go to sleep but would have organized a spying party to outwit Nanny and slip down to the next landing where it might have been possible to see the people milling about in the tiled hall as they passed through from supper to dancing. They could have peered through the twist of the stairs, doubling back on themselves if anyone were to start ascending. ‘Martha?’ Eva called, feeling that they were possibly giving in too easily to their imposed curfew, but Martha lay rigid, insisting she had drifted off to sleep.
Eva forced herself out of bed. She felt honour bound to attempt at least one glimpse of the proceedings. She knotted her long hair on the nape of her neck and, with slow fingers, inched the door until it was wide enough to slip through. Once safely out in the corridor she ran along the wooden floorboards, hanging for a second over the stairwell to check for adult hands circling the banisters and skipping down the first flight of stairs, keeping to the curve of the outside wall. At the next landing, she peered quickly over into the hall. A surge of talk and tinkling musicians floated up at her, and seeing nothing but the edges of dresses and the black elbows of men she craned further, holding on to the slippery wood and stretching her head and shoulders out into the scented air. At that moment a red-faced woman began to climb the stairs, looking short of breath in her tightened waistband. Eva flung herself back on to the landing and ran along a corridor, hiding in the deep doorway to a guest bedroom.
When it was safe to venture out again, she scaled the crook of the stairs, clasping the wooden railings with her knees and arching her back, imitating Bina on a dozen past occasions. She had to restrain herself from calling out and waving, and wondered that until now she had put up with so many secondhand reports. Eva hung there, waiting for someone to come into her view, and then she was rewarded by the sight of the two Samson girls exchanging flushed confidences at the foot of the stairs.
The Samson sisters were famous for their beauty, and their attendance at the party had been much discussed. Eva gazed down on their identical chestnut heads as they swayed towards each other in shared laughter. Her knees were starting to tremble with the effort of clinging, head down like a bat, when the girls, flushed and golden as French apples, were joined by her brother. Emanuel stood between them, his back against the carved post of the stairs, and lowering his voice, so that both sisters leant towards him, he began to tell them something. A story. A secret. Eva, her fingers whitening on the wood, strained impossibly for his whispery voice to rise above the music. And then as she watched, guessing at nothing, they all laughed, their three open mouths tilting upwards in the same split second to make crescents in their faces. They were still laughing, more softly and in interrupted chuckles, when Emanuel, a hand hovering around each sloping shoulder, led them away.
Eva, cold and furious, untangled her knees and slid down to the floor. She swung round, half expecting to see Nanny scowling in her stiff white nightdress, waiting crossly to escort her back to bed, but Nanny was sitting by the nursery fire, eating a plate of marzipan roses that had been sent up to her by Fräulein Schulze. Not caring now who saw her, Eva stamped up the last flight of stairs. She trailed along the low, polished corridor, and on reaching her own room, flung herself into bed. ‘Martha?’ she called, but Martha refused to be woken, and with the absent Schu-Schu’s vengeful name on her lips, she cried herself to sleep.
Marianna Belgard had wanted all three of her daughters to be included in the night-time celebrations. She mentioned this to her husband in the hope of enlisting his support, but he made it clear that she would come in for too much criticism, and not least from their eldest girl. Wolf Belgard smiled when he said this, softening on Bina’s name, and he caught his wife around the waist and kissed her. Marianna pulled angrily away. It was easy for him to make light of these hostilities. He was well loved by his children, and he either could or would not see how from an early age his daughters had turned their backs, poking fun and scheming up between themselves to undermine her. Marianna had tried several times to explain this to him, forcing back her tears as she spoke, but he refused to believe her, only laughed and teased and attempted to draw her back into the state of cheerfulness he relied on for himself. It was only Emanuel who understood, Emanuel who took her hand and pressed it when the girls refused to let themselves be kissed goodnight, when they ran away from her in the park, or called out for their governess in small plaintive voices when they were sick.