Summer at Gaglow by Esther Freud Read Free Book Online

be sharing your house with a monster, foreign or home grown.’
    Marianna was not so sure. ‘Time will tell.’ And she kicked him lightly to let him know she was not as angry as she had been.
    Bina, Martha and Eva begged Fräulein Schulze that their hair be twisted up into the same smooth and coiling twist as her own. ‘When you are older,’ she promised, smiling, ‘and when you have more hair.’ Unlike Millie, who had tried to convince them that her previous charges went to bed early, in summer before the sun had even started to go down, and in winter straight after supper, Schu-Schu allowed them to stay up. They sat in their nightdresses and watched as she unrolled her hair and brushed it smooth and orange over her broad shoulders. She did not give it the energetic treatment used by Nanny on their own hair, but stroked it languorously, taking each section at a time and making partings like white maps across her head. Each night in rotation she asked one of the girls to brush the last back section that she couldn’t reach, and then, dividing it into three, she taught them how to braid by allowing a race in fat red pigtails to where her hair ended just above the cushion of her chair. When Marianna came in to take her goodnight kisses, she slipped out, covering her head with a shawl, and the children held their breath to see if she would reappear like that, a mixture of Medusa and a clown, her lumpy, twisted pigtails standing out and spreading mythic shadows up the walls and out across the ceiling. When she did come back to sing them one more song, they found that in the privacy of her own room she had loosened the plaits so that her hair hung, slightly kinked, in a curtain round her shoulders. Bina, Martha and Eva snorted with complaint, but Schu-Schu hunched her shoulders and threatened to tell them a ghost story right there in the dark. She held her thumb and forefinger over the candle and threatened to pinch out the flame. ‘Please don’t,’ they begged, their eyes sparkling, their knees rigid, and she gave them a final, warning leer as she tucked them in.
    It was part of Fräulein Schulze’s duty to escort the three girls to school. They went to Frau Dr Burtin’s school by the castle, which Marianna herself had attended as a child. Marianna went with them on the first day and found that almost nothing had changed. There was still the same long courtyard, and behind the school buildings a large garden where lilac and laburnum grew instead of flowers. The same games were played, songs sung, and cinnamon cake was still eaten on the day of the Director’s birthday. The children wore stiff white pinnies with bows at the back and a row of three buttons on one shoulder. It made Marianna sad to think of her mother, with tireless fingers, sewing her an identical apron for each school day. Six perfect sets of bows and buttons, and in the strongest, whitest cloth. But she herself had not been taught or brought up to sew and, not knowing where to begin, she had ordered the aprons from a dressmaker in town.
    Each day Marianna watched as her three girls, appropriately dressed, set off with their governess for school. She had hoped when she enrolled them that they might be taught French by Dr Burtin, the headmistress’s husband, who had passed on to her his tangy Alsace accent, but Dr Burtin had long since retired, and even though his birthday was still celebrated, Marianna’s daughters were taught by a young Parisian, and they recited the same poems and songs, but with perfect twittering accents that made them raise their chins and pucker like young birds. They recited ‘Les Hirondelles’ and ‘Le Souvenir de peuple’ just as she had done, and they brought home the same playground games that she had played. Now they clasped each other from behind, and snaking through the house they chanted, ‘I am going to Jerusalem and you will come along!’ This was a game Marianna had forgotten, and stooping down she agreed to