Read Summer at Gaglow for Free Online Page B

months and a string of weeping, broken resignations by young women with the highest references, a telegram was dispatched to Fräulein Schulze requesting her immediate return. Wolf offered to meet her from the train, but Marianna refused, insisting she was quite capable of making her own apology.
    Gabrielle Schulze stepped on to the platform with an ill-concealed smile hovering on her lips. She must have been grinning like that all across the country, Marianna thought, but she held out a daintily gloved hand. ‘It seems we are unable to manage without you, after all,’ she told her. And the woman’s amber eyes glimmered with amusement. They rode back together through the city, their faces turned politely away as the stilted conversation failed. ‘I hope your family are all well?’ Marianna enquired, but she dreaded the ability of each question to turn back on itself, and eventually, grateful for the girl’s restraint in asking after her own family, she drifted into silence.
    Before setting out for the station Marianna had asked that Omi Lise keep the girls occupied, tucked away in the nursery, so that at least she could be spared the sight of a doorstep reunion with their governess. With a forced smile, she bid Fräulein Schulze hurry in to them, left her in the hall and walked quickly through to her own sitting room where, having taken her seat at the piano, she began to play a tinkling arpeggio with both feet firmly pressed down on the pedals.
    Marianna had to summon up her courage as the time approached to wish her girls goodnight. They would be waiting for her, defiant if she didn’t come, defiant if she did. She nodded civilly to Fräulein, who had been reading from a book of gruesome fables, and bending over each small bed, she lightly touched each forehead with her lips. ‘Goodnight, Mama,’ they said in turn, and when Marianna left the room her heart felt lighter, and she began to hope that, having provided her daughters with the one person for whom they longed above any other, they might forget their fury and warm towards her.
    When Fräulein Schulze returned from Ulm she had a new way of putting up her hair, plaited and curled under in a ridge around her head, and during her short absence from Berlin, she seemed to have bloomed into an unnatural state of beauty. The glow of victory, Marianna called it, but she could not help noticing how it lasted on right through the spring and into summer where the colour of her face was drawn out by the warm nights and the changing auburn of the trees.
    Even her husband, usually blind to the allure of other women, noticed the change. ‘Something seems to have happened to that girl,’ he said. ‘Do you think she’s . . .’
    ‘She’s what?’
    Wolfgang Belgard removed his glasses. ‘It’s probably nothing.’ He began to rub his eyes. ‘It may just be the ramblings of old age, but does she spend her entire time with the children?’
    Marianna left the dressing table. ‘You know my idea?’ She settled beside him on the divan. ‘I think she may be some kind of demon in disguise. The Bonn Dragon. Or the Black Sea monster. I’ve heard rumours that it has recently escaped from a lagoon and was even sighted in the restaurant car of the express train to Berlin.’ Wolf laughed. ‘But seriously,’ she pressed him, ‘I wish . . . I just wish we didn’t have to trust her with the children.’
    ‘We’ve been through all this business before.’ He sighed, sinking his head back into the cushions. ‘She’s probably got some secret admirer. Doubtless, my love, it can all be explained. Go to the park with her, keep an eye out for some young man, passing more than once. Suffering. Reading poetry.’ He turned and stroked the loose hair back from her face.
    ‘Are you asking me to spy on her?’ Marianna shook him off. ‘Do you think I don’t have enough to do with my days?’
    ‘All I’m trying to convince you of,’ he tried again, ‘is that you are unlikely to