Summer at Gaglow by Esther Freud Read Free Book Online Page A

rest her hands on either side of Eva’s narrow body and skip through the apartment. They traipsed along the corridor to their father’s study where the children egged each other on to call out to him, ‘Papa? We are going to Jer-u-sa-lem , and you will come along.’
    Marianna urged them to be quiet and tried, by jostling from behind, to move them on. But they only raised their voices louder, ‘We are going to Jerusalem,’ and she was forced to call for Fräulein to distract them from their mission.
    ‘I don’t mind the interruption,’ Wolf always said, when a scuffle broke out behind his door. But the truth was that he engrossed himself so entirely in his work that he never heard the shrill voices of his daughters until they were raised in screams of furious frustration, punctuated by his wife’s calls for help and her foot stamping on the wooden floor.
    Schu-Schu, strong as an ox, hoisted Eva up on to her back and, rolling the other two under her arms like puddings, strolled with them to the corner nursery, leaving Marianna quivering and alone, too angry to take up her husband’s invitation to sit with him while he finished off his work. Marianna retreated to the curving embrace of her piano, lit a thin cigar and allowed her fingers to drift over the keys; smoking and playing melancholy waltzes until Emanuel came home.
    Emanuel had begun to attend classes in Italian and English. He met up with a group of boys who read Shakespeare aloud together, taking it in turns to play a leading role. Emanuel always arrived home from these events flushed and soft-limbed, his head too full of fights and romance to want to enter into any trivial conversation and he often spent the entire evening dreaming in his room. Marianna suspected he might be writing verse. She had found a locked drawer in his desk and had glanced around, hoping to come across the key. She would never search for something hidden, but if her glance happened to fall across it, then surely there would be no harm in a little natural curiosity.
    Marianna left the piano now and wandered through to his room. She sat down on the high-backed leather chair that he had insisted upon since he was a small boy, and picked up a pen left lying on its side. She dipped it in ink and let an oily drop gather and slip to the end of the quill until it fell on to the blotting paper. It absorbed almost too fast, evaporating between the hungry grains. She allowed herself one more drop, transfixed by the softness of the ink as it slid over the nib. She then hurriedly replaced the pen. What was she doing whiling away her time? She had letters of her own to write, and she rattled the locked drawer once more before leaving.
    It took months of casual glances, but Marianna eventually discovered the key to Emanuel’s locked drawer. Her hand trembled as she turned it and felt the lock give with a small unoiled click. It was much as she had suspected. Sheaves of closely written pages pressed together and bound with lengths of thin red ribbon. Marianna lifted the first pile and let the papers droop over her knees. She flicked through impatiently, unsure what she was searching for. ‘Her eyes flash dark in winter light, her cheek is pale, her lips are bright . . .’ she read at the very bottom in an old round hand. And between the essays and the translations there were other attempts at poetry. ‘Her eyes grow pale, her heartbeat slows . . .’ Marianna felt a special glow at having been right about her son. She held on to her pride and worked on it to cancel out the ugliness of spying. ‘Her hair rolls bold in flames of gold.’ She felt unnerved suddenly at the passion of his words and then, smiling quickly, she reassured herself that, after all, he showed some signs of promise.
    Marianna heard a rustle in the corridor and quickly replaced the pages, stacked in the right order, in the drawer. She twisted the key and slipped it under the blotting paper where its small, irregular shape had