Free Summer at Gaglow by Esther Freud

Emanuel recognized many of the faces fighting for space. There was the son of the blacksmith, and the boys who worked as gardeners on the estate. He smiled at them and they grinned in his direction, clearing a small space around him as he stood stiffly in his heavy jacket, the buttons buffed, and his trousers tucked neatly at the knee into shin-tight leather boots.
    Marianna stood close beside him and the scent of flowers from her hat filled his nose and mouth. ‘Will you write?’ she asked, putting her hand on his arm. Emanuel began to move towards the train.
    ‘Manu, Manu,’ his sisters called after him. Feeling himself about to sneeze he jumped aboard and Gruber followed with his bags.
    As the train pulled away he saw his mother and three sisters standing with the throng of other women, all in white ruffled high-necked shirts, and hats and scarves against the sun. Their arms waved in a fluttering sea of gloves and fingers and he had to keep his eyes fixed on the blue ribbon in Eva’s hair so as not to lose sight of his own reeling family.
    Marianna was silent as the carriage drove them home. From under the brim of her hat she let her gaze pass over the faces of her daughters. Today it made her smile to think how many hours of her life she’d given to worrying that Emanuel would be her only child. He had been born within a year of her marriage, and it still stung her eyes to think how delighted she had been with him. How she had dressed him and washed him and insisted that the nurse wake her if he cried during the night. ‘It’s all very well,’ Wolf teased, ‘but how will you manage when you have six sons all howling after you?’ and he had placed an expectant hand on the flat of her stomach. But the years passed and with each month the familiar dragging ache in her knees signalled, yet again, that she had failed to catch the beginning of a life.
    ‘You will have to be an only child like me,’ she crooned over her son, and she thought of what her father called ‘the holy trinity’ of her own small family. And then, one after another, her daughters had been born.
    ‘What are you smiling about?’ Martha asked, and Marianna wiped her eyes with the back of her glove.
    She considered telling them something about the life of an only child, its loneliness and quiet, but found herself remembering her friend the curtain mender who came regularly to help her mother. ‘I was thinking,’ she told Martha, ‘about a very old woman and how whenever she reached the most exciting moment of a story, she began to stutter.’
    ‘How very tiresome.’ Bina raised her eyes.
    ‘Not at all. She used to let me cut out flowers to pin onto the cloth . . .’ But Martha was whispering some secret into Eva’s ear, and Bina, rather than listen to her mother, was trying to overhear what they were saying.
    Marianna sent off to her aunt Cornelia for the recipe of Tree Cake. Tree Cake had been her own favourite childhood treat. It was an exotic cake, layered in rings around a hollow trunk, with flakes of chocolate to look like bark, and to prise the recipe from her aunt was the hardest task she could set herself on Emanuel’s behalf. Another aunt had been obsessed with cleanliness, wiping the handles of doors her guests had passed through, and dusting off the seats of their chairs, but Aunt Cornelia had kept the recipe for Tree Cake all to herself and moulded an identity around the mystique of its ingredients.
    Dear, dear Manu,
    Eva wrote before he’d hardly had a chance to get away.
    I’ve been going over our plans for the future, and do you think, when the time comes to build our house we could make sure it’s near a forest? Maybe by now you’ve even seen the perfect place. I suppose the one good thing about you going off again so soon is that the more you travel the more opportunity you’ll have for finding the perfect spot.
    Eva curved her elbow round the page to hide the letter from her sisters.
    Please don’t forget I