Summer at Gaglow Read Online Free PDF

over a year.’ And Marianna simply repeated that a seat was booked for Ulm in Fräulein Schulze’s name and she would need to be at the station by eight o’clock the following morning.
    Marianna Belgard stood with folded hands and stared down at the red-hot, raddled faces of her daughters. ‘I shall manage,’ she had said when, earlier that day, Wolf mentioned that he might just possibly be expected to have dinner out with grain merchants recently arrived in town.
    ‘Come on now, my silly little loves,’ she ventured, when the display of grief continued unabated. ‘It cannot be the end of the world . . .’ But her voice was sunk in wails and the endless maddening repetition of Schu-Schu’s name. By late afternoon Marianna felt the strain of her own temper rising, and she had to stop herself from running to the kitchen for a basin of cold water. She imagined the gratifying sloosh of it as all three screaming mouths were startled into silence. But she gripped her hands, resisting, and sent out instead for Nanny from her evening off.
    The following morning Bina still refused to eat, and Eva and Martha, having found small mementoes of their governess, a brooch and a bead-encrusted hairslide tucked under their pillows, howled with renewed strength. Marianna called the doctor out. ‘A possible case of fever,’ he diagnosed. ‘Not always serious, but in this case we cannot be too careful.’ And, with narrowed eyes, he prescribed a medicine to be administered at intervals throughout the day. Marianna, torn between respect and a reluctance to betray her children, wrote down his instructions and paid his bill.
    ‘What if they really have become ill?’ And having forgotten all about Eva, the marble and the suddenness of Fräulein Schulze’s departure, she began to administer the bitter-tasting medicine, forcing it down and driving one more spoke into the claim against her. Nanny was no help: attached to her as the children were, in the course of the last year Fräulein had succeeded in undermining her authority. Where once Nanny might have silenced them with a stern look and the withdrawal of some treat, now they only laughed at her. ‘I used to be your father’s nurse,’ she told them, ‘many years ago, and he would never have given me such trouble.’ And for a moment they were silent thinking over how their papa often stopped and pressed her chalky hand, laying it against his cheek, and calling her not Nanny but Omi Lise, as if she were a real-life grandmother.
    After five more broken nights of wailing, it was Emanuel who suggested that Schu-Schu might be reinstated. He stood in the nursery and watched his sisters, red-eyed and unrelenting, while Eva, exhausted from the effort to maintain the vigil, sat palely in her cot.
    Marianna refused her son’s advice. Instead she drove with him to the zoological gardens, where they strolled along the gravel paths, breathing in the smell of the exotic plants and admiring the animals, the flock of pelicans and the great brown bear staring languidly out at them. ‘How sad,’ Emanuel said, his fingers clinging to the wire of the pen, his eyes fixed on the animal, whose paw scratched and scratched against the ground.
    ‘Come away,’ Marianna urged, the pink ends of his thumbs so vulnerable to one great swipe.
    Emanuel took her arm. He was almost thirteen and growing taller by the month. He talked now and then about the day when he would begin work with his father, dealing grain on the exchange, and Marianna’s pride in him occasionally rose up and overwhelmed her. It seized her by the throat and squeezed delicious tears from her eyes. She gripped his arm and led him in the direction of the sea lions.
    There was a café in the centre of the park where they sat down and ordered ices. It was hardly the weather for it, and they smiled at each other over the cold silver of their spoons.
    Marianna longed to ask his opinion of the governess Schulze and the strange power that she