by Betty Neels
‘Who is this plain girl?’ she asked in Dutch. ‘She is terrible to look at!’
Philomena, who had worked hard at that language and understood a good deal of what was said, tried to look as though she hadn’t understood a word, but the bleak expression on her face brought a suspicious frown to the doctor’s face. ‘Take care, Tritia—she knows something of our language, and that was unkind. If you had been up half the night, you would look plain too.’ He took her arms from his neck and smiled at Philomena. ‘This is Tritia, my adopted cousin.’ His blue eyes were watchful. ‘Her English is bad, perhaps you had better try some of your Dutch.’
Philomena shook hands with a serene smile which nicely concealed her hurt rage. ‘Oh, I’m sure your cousin’s English couldn’t be worse than my Dutch—words are all right, it’s when you come to sentences…’
She saw the frown lift from the doctor’s face and the small flicker of dislike in the girl’s face. She wondered why. She had no looks, she could only agree there, and the doctor had showed her no more attention than he would have offered a maiden aunt. She was the poorest competition, quite beneath the girl’s notice. A little demon at the back of her usually sensible mind prodded her into saying: ‘I must look frightfully untidy—I’ve not had the chance to go to my rooms and change into uniform.’ She smiled brilliantly at Tritia and then made her farewells to Mevrouw van der Tacx with an unselfconscious ease which was very much at variance with her appearance, before accompanying the doctor out of the room.
It was sheer chance which caused Ellie to come into the hall as they were crossing it; she stopped to wish Philomena goodbye and made some remark about the brevity of her sleep. ‘You will be glad to change your clothes and attend to your hair and face, miss,’ she concluded with the kindly interest of an old and devoted servant. And Philomena, quite forgetting that she had just declared that her Dutch was fragmental, answered her readily enough, making a great many mistakes and mispronouncing her words most dreadfully, but demonstrating very clearly that she was quite capable of understanding what was said.
It wasn’t until they were the other side of the door and about to get into the car that the doctor remarked thoughtfully: ‘Your Dutch has improved enormously during the last five minutes, Philomena.’
She gasped and frowned fiercely at her own stupidity and went a bright pink. ‘Well, what would you have done?’ she asked him defiantly.
‘Probably the same as you,’ he told her coolly. ‘Tritia didn’t mean a word of it, you know—she’s like a child…’
Philomena would have liked to have disillusioned him about that, but she was a kind-hearted girl and quite without conceit. ‘She was right,’ she observed quietly, ‘I am plain.’
He eyed her in a thoughtful, leisurely way. ‘I believe I told you once that I liked what I saw, Philly… Now get into the car like a good girl—there’s an enormous clinic this afternoon.’
They were almost there when he said casually: ‘If Hubert can spare you, perhaps you would like to spend the weekend with us? My mother would be delighted.’
Of course she would, reflected Philomena sourly. It would be company for the poor lady, probably left alone while her son and Tritia went off together. She let the bit about Hubert pass; it did her flattened ego good to think that her companion imagined, even for a few minutes, that the young man was interested in her. She said sedately: ‘Thank you, that would be delightful.’
‘Good, I’ll pick you up about half past eleven on Saturday.’
Saturday was the other end of the week, but there was little time to dwell on the possible delights in store for her. She changed, piled her hair into a severe knot under her cap, did what she could to her face and repaired downstairs to her dinner, watched over by her motherly landlady, dying to ask questions, but knowing that there was no time to gossip. Philomena presented herself at the clinic with only minutes to spare and plunged into work. All three doctors were there, but excepting for instructions about the patients and requests for this and that, none of them, least of all Walle, had much to say to her.
The clinic finished late and they left one by one, leaving her to clear up and then take herself off for her evening meal. There was an hour or so before Doctor de Klein’s evening surgery, time enough for Mevrouw de Winter to take up her position in the kitchen door while Philomena ate and ply her with questions. And Philomena, who regarded conversation of any kind as an exercise in Dutch, described the night’s activities, trying out a new word here and there and trying, too, to get her tenses right, so that she had no time to herself before she made the short journey to Doctor de Klein’s house. It was still a lovely evening when she had finished there, but by now she was too tired to care; she went back to her little room, carrying the cup of coffee Mevrouw de Winter had made for her, and was in bed and asleep before she could drink it.
Her days were busy, but she enjoyed them now that she felt more at ease with her work and had got over her initial shyness at speaking Dutch, and in the evenings when she was free, she took the Mini and explored the surrounding countryside, taking care never to go too near Walle’s castle and refusing to admit, even to herself, that she was on occasion lonely. Everyone was kind, she told herself; she had a dozen acquaintances and had been out once or twice with Corrie. Besides, Doctor de Klein had suggested that she should join him and his family on a picnic in the near future. She wrote cheerful letters home, although no one, so far, had answered them, but her friends at Faith’s wrote regularly, begging for news, so that, what with her dogged study of the Dutch language and long descriptions of her life to pen, she had little time in which to feel sorry for herself.
Saturday morning was everything that a June morning should be, still a little cool, for it was still early in the month, but the sky was blue and the sun shone. Philomena, up early, packed her overnight bag with slacks and a cotton shirt, sensible canvas shoes, and a slip of a green crêpe dress which matched her eyes, and when morning surgery was over, she rushed back to change into a cotton shirtwaister in Liberty print before getting to work on her face and hair. The result was fairly satisfactory, she decided; she would never be a beauty, but the deceptively simple hairstyle the expensive hairdresser had created for her made the most of its fine straight length, and her face, while not exactly what she would have owned, was passable. She sprayed herself with Madame Rochas, put on elegant sandals, picked up her bag and went downstairs, to arrive at the front door at the same moment as the doctor in the Khamsin. He wished her a cheerfully casual good morning, then got out of the car to open the door for her and take her case. She thought how elegant he looked in his sports shirt and slacks with a silk cravat tied carelessly, the elegance quite unstudied, although she guessed that it must have cost a great deal of money; possibly he was a wealthy man, she hadn’t considered that seriously until that moment. Not, she hastened to remind herself, that it made the slightest difference to her whether he was rich or poor.
They talked in a friendly, desultory way as he drove the short distance to the castle. When it came in sight Philomena asked: ‘What do you call it—your castle?’
‘Kasteel Tacx.’
‘Oh. Did you take the name from it, or did your family give it?’
‘An ancestor built it—a van der Tacx—oh, three hundred years ago or more. It took him almost a lifetime, I believe, and ever since his descendants have been adding to it, and pulling bits down and adding on wherever they fancied.’
‘And have you added anything?’ she wanted to know.
‘I? Lord no, though I must admit that I’ve installed central heating.’
They had arrived at the entrance and he got out to open her door. As she stepped past him he remarked carelessly: ‘You look different, though I can’t think why. Probably because you’re not in uniform.’
Hardly a compliment, she reflected, but at least he must have looked at her; perhaps the green dress, coupled with even more attention to the hair and face, might make him look a second tim
e. She sighed a little as the door opened as they reached it and a tall, bony old man stood aside for them to enter.
The hall, viewed from the entrance, was even more magnificent than Philomena had remembered, the staircase rising splendidly from its further wall to the gallery above, its walls lined with paintings she had had no time to notice on her previous visit. The doctor’s hand propelled her gently across the hall, not, this time, to the sitting room but to the other side, through a narrow door leading into a small, cosily furnished room with French windows open on to a vast conservatory. He didn’t stop here, however, but went through another door into the garden beyond. No expense spared, Philomena told herself silently, taking in the well ordered flower beds, the smoothly raked paths and the velvet lawns stretching away to a distant shrubbery backed by trees.
There were garden chairs and tables arranged here and there and a swinging hammock. Mevrouw van der Tacx was sitting in one of the chairs, very upright, knitting, and in the hammock Tritia lay, her blonde prettiness set off by the pale blue of her sundress. She got up gracefully as they approached and came to meet them, to throw an arm round the doctor’s neck and smile up at him. Philomena had the impression that if she hadn’t been there the girl would have kissed him, and it afforded her a little pleasure to see that he disentangled himself gently, without taking his hand from her own arm, and went on his way to where his mother was sitting. Mevrouw van der Tacx’s welcome was sincere and warm and since she included her son in the easy conversation she started, he sat down beside Philomena, apparently not noticing Tritia’s attempts to entice him over to the hammock, so that presently that young lady turned a sulky shoulder and pretended to sleep.
They had coffee presently, and when his mother suggested that Philomena might like a stroll in the garden, the doctor got to his feet readily enough, and although he asked Tritia if she would like to go with them, he hardly gave her time to reply as he wandered away with Philomena beside him.
The gardens were beautiful and vast, with a formal Dutch garden at one side of the castle which led to a rose garden not yet fully in flower but still lovely enough for Philomena to exclaim over it in delight and which led, in its turn, to open parkland sloping gently down to the river.
‘It’s glorious!’ she declared, and meant it. ‘How you must love your home. Don’t you wish…’ she hesitated, and he finished for her:
‘That I had nothing else to do but live here? Sometimes, but I love my work, Philly—it’s part of my life, just as it was part of my father’s.’
‘It’s very large.’
He smiled down at her. ‘I suppose it is, although I don’t notice that—besides, my mother comes to stay fairly frequently, although she lives in Friesland now, and as she is one of four sisters, I have family enough, and Tritia is living with us for the time being while one of my aunts is away—life is never dull while she is around.’
Philomena longed to make a pithy answer to this, but didn’t, and because the silence became rather too lengthy as they strolled along, began to make knowledgeable remarks about roses, their growing and cultivation in general and his own magnificent collection in particular. It was rather disconcerting when he made no reply to her painstaking efforts, so that she said rather tartly: ‘I expect you would like to go back now…’
He stopped abruptly and turned her round to face him, a hand under her chin so that she was forced to look at him. ‘Now what on earth made you say that, Philly?’
Her candid green eyes met his blue ones. ‘Well, I’ve been talking about roses for minutes on end and all you’ve done is grunt or not answer at all—I daresay you’re bored.’ She added quickly: ‘It doesn’t matter, my stepmother has tried to turn me into something interesting like Chloe or Miriam, but I’m not, you see.’
‘And thank God for that,’ he said gently. ‘You should have a better opinion of yourself, Philly. I suspect that you grew up in the shadow of those two lovely sisters of yours and somewhere along the line you got the idea that you were plain, dull and quite uninteresting.’
He sounded very kind and she seethed inwardly, hating his pity, and seethed even more as he went on: ‘You should forget all that—you’re none of those things.’ He waved a hand in a vague fashion. ‘Do something to your hair, buy new clothes, make-up, shoes…you have beautiful eyes and when you don’t screw it into that great bun, your hair is beautiful too.’
Philomena, by a superhuman effort, kept her face calm. She had been seething, now she was at boiling point, and it took all her resolution not to point out to him that she had already done all these things and he hadn’t even noticed. She said sweetly: ‘I must follow your good advice—I had no idea that you were so observant.’
She had no answer to his placid: ‘Oh, it wasn’t I who was observant—Tritia mentioned it; she’s quite an expert on such things,’ but he didn’t seem to notice her silence, for he went on placidly: ‘Would you like to go riding? I’ve a nice little mare which would just suit you.’
She schooled her voice to pleasant friendliness. ‘I’d love that—could I ride anywhere in the park? What about the road?’
‘Oh, there are several quiet lanes around here—I’ll show you.’
She said a little too quickly: ‘Oh, you don’t have to do that, I shall enjoy pottering around on my own.’ She gave him a brief smile, still swallowing rage.
‘Well, I don’t, so you’ll have to put up with my company, Philly.’ They were standing by the river, watching its clear water swirling past. ‘I suppose we had better go back for lunch.’
A pleasant meal, for the doctor and his mother saw to that, making her feel at home, ignoring Tritia’s sweetly barbed remarks, the doctor with good-humoured indulgence, his mother with disapproval. Philomena was heartily glad when Tritia refused to go riding with them. She had a headache, she declared, looking slyly at Walle to see what he would say. Philomena’s deflated spirits were lifted a little when he merely remarked that in that case she had better go and lie down quietly until it was better.
The mare was a chestnut and not too quiet, and Walle’s own mount, a great bay, was anxious for exercise. They circled the park and then took to the lanes bordering it, not talking much, letting the horses go where there was a stretch of open ground and then ambling along side by side. Philomena, in cotton shirt and slacks, her hair hanging in a thick plait down her straight little back, was, for the moment, very happy, so that the evening ahead of her, to which she hadn’t been much looking forward, suddenly offered quite pleasant possibilities. She mulled them over while Walle told her about the estate and by the time they had reached the castle again she felt eager enough for them.
A needless exercise; as they made their way through the back corridors towards the hall, they were met by Mathias, the elderly manservant, with the news that Philomena was wanted on the telephone. Doctor de Klein with the news that there had been an accident; an elderly woman with severe head injuries would need to go at once to Utrecht. Philomena was to return at once and accompany the patient to hospital. ‘So sorry to spoil your afternoon,’ said the doctor belatedly, ‘but there is no one else. You should be back by eight o’clock.’ He added: ‘If Doctor van der Tacx is there ask him to speak, will you?’
She handed Walle the telephone without a word. Her pleasant evening had been spoilt and there was nothing she could do about it. She waited quietly while Walle spoke to his partner and when he had finished said in her sensible way: ‘I’ll go and pack my bag—is there someone who could drive me back?’
‘I’ll drive you—and why pack a bag? You’ll come back here—we’ll put dinner back an hour. Come along.’
So she went as she was and driving fast, they were outside the clinic at the same time as the ambulance came to a halt before its door. The patient was on a stretcher in one of the surgeries. Walle and his partner went to look at her before she was carefully loaded in, then Walle spoke briefly to the ambulance driver, even more briefly to Philomena and got into his car again, back
ing it so that the ambulance could pass. Philomena, a white overall covering her slacks, was too occupied with her patient and the instructions she had been given to do more than nod absently in his direction, and it wasn’t until she had handed the woman over at the hospital that she began to wonder what happened next, and the ambulance driver’s tap on her shoulder settled the matter for her. She was to go back to Ommen with him and report the patient’s condition to Doctor de Klein and then, presumably, await events.
Did one telephone the castle and say that one was back, she wondered, or go to one’s lodgings and hope for the best? It wasn’t much good guessing, so she gave up within a short time and spent the return journey practising her Dutch on the driver, a cheerful man, only too glad to tell her all about his wife and children and some of the more spectacular cases he had had to deal with. She understood quite a bit of what he was saying and learnt a few new words as well, besides teaching him a handful of English phrases in return. He wished her a cheerful goodbye as he dropped her off close to the clinic, and she turned to make her way to Doctor de Klein’s house; the clinic was closed, he would have gone home and doubtless expected her to go there. The church clock struck eight o’clock and she barely had time to register that fact when she saw Walle leaning against the bonnet of his car, watching her, and when she exclaimed: ‘Oh, I didn’t expect you…’ he came to meet her with: ‘What a wretched fellow you must think me!’ She could hear the laughter in his voice. ‘I told the driver to radio through when he left Utrecht.’
She beamed at him. ‘Oh, how nice of you, but I have to see Doctor de Klein.’
‘I know. We’ll go there now.’
It only took ten minutes or so; she gave her concise, accurate report, was thanked warmly for her help, and whisked back into the car.