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

given it away. Then to cover her short breath, she plumped up the pillows on the bed and folded back a corner of his sheet. She took a last glance at the desk to see that everything was in order, and stepped out into the hall. A murmur of voices drifted through from the kitchen where the cook clattered about, passing on licentious stories about the family for whom she used to work, enjoying the sight of Dolfi, the maid, blushing and covering her mouth, and knowing that on her first day off Dolfi would pass them on to her sister who also worked as a maid.
    Wolf lounged on the divan, soothed by the nightly unpinning of Marianna’s hair. ‘Are you all right, my love?’ he asked, caught by her slow movements and her arms frozen in the air above her head.
    ‘Yes.’ She smiled, starting. ‘I’m perfectly all right.’
    Wolf raised himself so that he could see his own reflection in the triple-sided mirror. He was watchful, since his daughters’ births, for any signs of melancholy. ‘You need a change of scene,’ he told her, and before he had time to promise her an afternoon of walking in the countryside she turned to him and suggested they make a trip to Italy.
    ‘You can’t deny that the Schulze has the children under tight control.’ Wolf, delighted by this joke against herself, found he had agreed.
    ‘We shall go as far as Rome,’ she said, and he came and sat beside her, pushing her along the upholstered seat so that he had to catch her quickly round the waist to stop her slipping off.
    Italy had been the chosen destination of their honeymoon and they had always promised to return. They had travelled to Lucerne and then on to Milan where the white marble cathedral had reminded them of a cake shop in Berlin. This confession, shyly given, had drawn them so warmly together that, even though it had been February, Marianna still remembered Milan as a city of blue skies and flowering avenues of trees. From there they had travelled to Genoa with its narrow lanes and high white roads up above the sea. They stayed in a small hotel, recommended for its French chef, where all the other guests smiled and nodded to each other whenever they came into the dining room. ‘Oh, no, we’ve been married well over a year!’ Marianna protested when they offered their congratulations, but she could tell that not one of them believed her.
    A week before they were due to leave for Italy, Marianna and Wolf were invited to a party at the house in the Tiergarten Strasse where they had first met. Marianna was taken in to dinner by the director of the German Bank. ‘When you are in Rome,’ he told her, ‘you must not miss paying a visit to the Pope.’ Marianna laughed, but he insisted that if she left her card with the Prussian Consul at the Vatican, she would most likely get an audience. He had done the same thing the year before. ‘Make sure you have a black silk dress, and that your husband has a dinner jacket.’
    On their first Sunday in Rome, Wolf and Marianna drove to the house of the Ambassador and left their card. ‘Don’t expect to hear another thing about it,’ Wolf warned, but three days later they received an invitation, gold-embossed and at the request of His Holiness the Pope.
    Marianna bought a square of black lace to cover her head, as the invitation instructed, and Wolf dressed in his evening suit. At the appointed time they took a taxi to the Vatican. ‘Look at all those Roman Catholics,’ Marianna whispered, as two women wearing identical lace squares over their hair stepped down from a carriage.
    Wolf pinched her. ‘Shhh, I know those people. They are the Goldsteins from Charlottenberg.’ But before they could call out to them, a guard in gold-embroidered uniform helped them down and escorted them to their appointed place in the Pope’s private rooms, where he left them standing under a painting of the finding of Moses.
    Clerics in robes of blue, green and purple silk filed through the room and it was