by Betty Neels
‘Yes,’ he said slowly, ‘but if we had no dykes there would be no Dokkum.’ Which was unanswerable. They turned for home soon afterwards and towards the end of the journey, Aede said, ‘Here’s Friso’s village—his house is on the left.’ They were approaching it from the other side at an angle which allowed her to catch a glimpse of the back of the house. It looked bigger somehow, perhaps because of the verandah stretching across its breadth. There were steps from it leading down to the garden, which she saw was a great deal larger than she had supposed. She peered through the high iron railing, but there was no one to see. He must be lonely, she thought, living there all by himself. The road curved, and they passed the entrance. At the moment, at any rate, he wasn’t lonely—there were two cars parked by the door. Aede was going rather fast, so that she had only a glimpse; but with three car-crazy brothers, her knowledge of cars was sound and up to date. One was a Lotus Elan, the other a Marcos. It seemed that Dr Eijsinck’s friends liked speed. Harriet thought darkly of the beautiful brunette; she would look just right behind the wheel of the Lotus… Her thoughts were interrupted by Aede.
‘Friso’s got visitors… That man’s cast iron; he works for two most of the time, and when he’s not working he’s off to Utrecht or Amsterdam or Den Haag. Even if he stays home, there are always people calling.’
Harriet watched the Friso of her dreams fade—the Friso who would have loved her for always; happy to be with her and no one else—but this flesh and blood Friso didn’t need her at all. She went a little pink, remembering how she had smiled at him when she had seen him for the first time; he must have thought how silly she was, or worse, how cheap. The pink turned to red; she had been a fool. She resolved then and there to stop dreaming and demonstrated her resolution by turning to Aede and asking intelligent questions about the reclamation of land. Harriet listened with great attention to the answers, not hearing them at all, but thinking about Friso Eijsinck.
At breakfast the following morning, Harriet learned that Sieske’s two sisters would be returning in time for tea. They had been visiting their grandparents in Sneek, but now the Easter holidays were over and they would be going back to high school. Aede had gone back to hospital the previous evening; Dr Van Minnen had an unexpected appointment that afternoon; the question as to who should fetch them was debated over the rolls and coffee. Sieske supposed she could go, but there was the party to arrange.
Her father got to his feet. ‘I’ll telephone Friso,’ he said, ‘he’s got no afternoon surgery, I’m certain. He’ll go, and the girls simply love that car of his.’
He disappeared in the direction of his surgery, leaving his wife and Sieske, with Harriet as a willing listener, to plunge into the final details concerning the party. This fascinating discussion naturally led the three ladies upstairs to look at each other’s dresses for the occasion; Sieske had brought a dress back from England—the blue of it matched her eyes; its straight classical lines made her look like a golden-haired goddess. They admired it at some length before repairing to Mevrouw Van Minnen’s bedroom to watch approvingly while she held up the handsome black crepe gown she had bought in Leeuwarden. Evidently the party was to be an occasion for dressing up; Harriet was glad that she had packed the long white silk dress she had bought in a fit of extravagance a month or so previously. It had a lace bodice, square-necked and short-sleeved, with a rich satin ribbon defining the high waistline. It would provide a good foil for Sieske’s dress without stealing any of its limelight. She could see from Mevrouw Van Minnen’s satisfied nod that she thought so too. They all went downstairs, satisfied that they had already done a great deal towards making Sieske’s evening a success, and over cups of coffee the menu for the buffet supper was finally checked, for, said Mevrouw Van Minnen in sudden, surprising English,
‘We are beautiful ladies…but men eat too.’ She laughed at her efforts and looked as young and pretty as her daughter.
‘Will it be black ties?’ Harriet wanted to know.
Sieske nodded. ‘Of course. We call it Smoking—their clothes, I mean.’
Harriet giggled. ‘How funny, though they look nice whatever you call it.’ Friso Eijsinck, for instance, would look very nice indeed…
Harriet was sitting writing postcards at the desk under the sitting-room window when she heard a car draw up outside. It was the AC 428. She watched the two girls and Dr Eijsinck get out and cross the pavement to the front door; the girls were obviously in high spirits, and so, for that matter, was the doctor. Harriet, peeping from her chair, thought that he looked at least ten years younger and great fun. She returned to her writing, and presently they all three entered the room, bringing with them the unmistakable aura of longstanding friendship, which, quite unintentionally, made her feel more of a stranger than she had felt since she had arrived in Holland, and because of this, her ‘Good afternoon, Doctor’, was rather stiff and she was all the more annoyed when he said,
‘Oh hullo—all alone again? I’d better introduce you to these two.’ He turned to the elder of the girls.
‘This is Maggina.’ The girls shook hands and Maggina said ‘How do you do?’—she was like her mother and Sieske, but without their vividness. Rather like a carbon copy, thought Harriet, liking her.
‘And Taeike,’ said the doctor. She was fourteen or fifteen, and one saw she was going to be quite lovely; now she was just a very pretty girl, with a charming smile and nice manners. She shook hands with Harriet, then went and stood by Friso and slipped her hand under his arm. He patted it absent-mindedly and asked Harriet in a perfunctory manner if she had had a busy day, but there was no need for her to reply, for just then the rest of the family came in and everybody talked at once and there was nothing for her to do but to smile and withdraw a little into the background. She looked up once and found Dr Eijsinck watching her across the room, with an expression on his face which she found hard to read, but he gave her no opportunity to do so, for the next moment he had taken his leave. She heard the front door bang and his car start up, but withstood the temptation to turn round and look out of the window.
Wednesday came, the day of the party, and with it a Land-Rover from Dr Eijsinck’s house. It was driven by his gardener, and filled to overflowing with azaleas and polyanthus, and great bunches of irises and tulips and freesias. Harriet, helping to arrange them around the house, paused to study the complicated erection of flowers she had achieved in one corner of the drawing-room and to remark,
‘I suppose Dr Eijsinck has a very large green house?’
It was Taeike who answered. ‘He has three. I go many times—also to his house.’
Harriet twitched a branch of forsythia into its exact position before she answered, ‘How nice.’ It would be easy to find out a great deal about the doctor from Taeike, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She asked instead,
‘Tell me about your school, will you?’ then listened to Taeike’s polite, halting English, aware that the girl would have much rather talked about Friso Eijsinck.
Wierd came after tea, with more flowers, and sat talking to Dr Van Minnen until Sieske, who had gone upstairs to dress, came down again looking radiant. It was the signal for everyone else to go and dress too, leaving the pair of them to each other’s company, to foregather presently in the drawing-room where they admired the plain gold rings the happy couple had exchanged. They would wear them until their marriage, when they would be transferred from their left hands to their right. It seemed to Harriet that this exchange of rings made everything rather solemn and binding. ‘Plighting their troth,’ she mused, and added her congratulations to everyone else’s.
The guests arrived soon afterwards, and she circled the room with first one then the other of the Van Minnens, shaking hands and uttering her name with each handshake. A splendid idea—only some of the names were hard to remember. She was standing by the door, listening rather nervously to the burgemeester, a handsome man with an imposing presence who spoke the pedantic English she was beginning t
o associate with the educated Dutch, when Friso Eijsinck came in. She had been right. He looked—she sought for the right word and came up with eye-catching; but then so did the girl with him. A blonde this time, Harriet noted, watching her while she smiled attentively at her companion, and wearing a dress straight out of Harpers & Queen. In her efforts to prevent a scowl of envy, Harriet smiled even more brilliantly and gazed at the burgemeester with such a look of absorbed attention that he embarked upon a monologue, and a very knowledgeable one, about the various theatres he had visited when he was last in London. It was fortunate that he didn’t expect an answer, for Harriet was abysmally ignorant about social life in the great metropolis, and was about to say so, when he paused for breath and Friso said from behind her,
‘Good evening, Miss Slocombe…burgemeester.’
He shook hands with them both, and the burgemeester said,
‘I was just telling this charming young lady how much I enjoyed “The Mousetrap”!’ He turned to Harriet. ‘I also went to see “Cats”.’ He coughed. ‘You’ve seen it, of course, Miss Slocombe?’
Both men were looking down at her, the speaker with a look of polite inquiry, Dr Eijsinck with a decided twinkle in his grey eyes. Her colour deepened. ‘Well, no. You see I live in a very small village on the edge of Dartmoor. I…I don’t go to London often.’ She forbore to mention that she hadn’t been there for at least five years. She withdrew her gaze from the older man and looked quickly at the doctor, whose face was a mask of polite interest; all the same, she was very well aware that he was laughing at her. She opened her eyes very wide and said with hauteur, ‘Even if I lived in London I think it would be unlikely that I should go to see “Cats”. I’m not very with-it, I’m afraid.’
She allowed her long curling lashes to sweep down on to her cheeks for just a sufficient length of time for her two companions to note that they were real. The burgemeester, who was really rather a dear, allowed a discreet eye to rove over her person. He said with elderly gallantry,
‘I think that you are most delightfully with-it, Miss Slocombe. I hope that I shall see more of you before you return to that village of yours. And now take her away, Friso, for I am sure that was your reason for joining us.’
There was nothing to do but smile, and, very conscious of Friso’s hand on her arm, allow herself to be guided across the room. Once out of earshot, however, she stood still and said,
‘I’ll be quite all right here, Doctor. I’m sure there are a great many people to whom you wish to talk.’ She looked pointedly through the open double doors into the dining-room, where the beautiful blonde, glass in hand, was holding court. Somebody had started the record-player; Sieske started to dance and half a dozen couples joined them. Her companion, without bothering to answer her, swung Harriet on to the impromptu dance floor. He danced well, with a complete lack of tiresome mannerisms. Harriet, who was a good dancer herself, would have been happy to have remained as his partner for the rest of the evening, but in fact it was long after midnight before he came near her again. She was perched on the bottom stair, between two of Aede’s friends, listening to their account of life on the wards in a Rotterdam hospital where they were housemen. She saw him standing in the open doorway of the drawing-room across the hall, watching them. After a minute he started to cross the hall, taking care that both young men saw his approach. When he was near enough, he said smoothly,
‘Harriet, I have looked for you everywhere.’ He glanced at the two young men with a smile of charm and authority which brought them to their feet with a cheerful ‘Very well, sir,’ and an equally cheerful ‘See you later’ for Harriet who found herself alone on the staircase; but not for long, for Dr Eijsinck folded himself into the space beside her, taking up the lion’s share of it with his bulk. Harriet was annoyed to feel a thrill of pleasure at his closeness and in an effort to ignore it, said crossly,
‘You haven’t been looking for me everywhere—you must have seen me dozens of times in the last hour or so. And why did you send those two boys away? I wanted them to stay.’
He stretched out his long legs. ‘Yes, I thought you would,’ he said complacently. ‘That’s why.’
Harriet’s bosom heaved with an emotion she didn’t bother to define; she turned furious blue eyes to meet his lazily smiling ones. ‘Well,’ she uttered at length, and then again, ‘Well!’
‘At a loss for words?’ he asked kindly, to madden her. She turned her head away, and smiled at Taeike who was wandering across the hall, and was on the point of calling her when he said softly, ‘No, Harry, I want to talk to you.’ His voice sounded different—firm and gentle. She looked at him and went slowly pink under the look on his face; he was smiling too—the smile was different too. He studied her for a minute and then said mildly, ‘That’s better; you usually look at me as though I were a rather unspeakable drain.’
She gave a little splutter of laughter at that and then frowned fiercely to show him that she hadn’t meant it. ‘Excepting the first time we met,’ he continued, ignoring the frown. ‘You looked at me then as though you were—er—glad to see me.’
She managed to look away at last, and despite the sudden thudding of her heart said steadily, ‘I thought you were someone I…knew.’
‘That’s not quite true, is it?’
Not looking at him made it easier to regain a level head. He hadn’t said that he had been glad to see her; and what about the brunette and the exotic blonde who had accompanied him that evening? And what had Aede said? That Friso had a great many girl-friends—Sieske had said it too. Harriet had no intention of being one of the many. She said in the same steady voice,
‘Not quite true, no. But it answers your question well enough.’
She looked at him then, to find only amusement on his face, perhaps she had been mistaken after all. He held out a hand. ‘Let’s dance,’ he said.
They circled the room once before he drew her out on to the verandah. The night was surprisingly mild, wind still and very dark. They stood looking out over the unseen garden; the faint clean smell of grass, mingled with the tang of tulips and the heavier scent of the hyacinths, made the air a delight. The music had stopped, to be replaced by a babble of voices until presently a new record was put on—it was ‘If you go away’ and a man was singing. Harriet listened to the words—they made her feel sad, even though they were only part of a song. Friso Eijsinck, very close beside her, said softly,
‘You like this song.’ It was a statement, not a question.
‘Yes.’
‘You think it is possible for a man to feel like that about a woman?’
‘Yes,’ said Harriet. Regrettably, her conversational powers had deserted her; perhaps a good thing, for she was having difficulty with her breathing.
‘It expresses sentiments which I do not think I can improve upon,’ said Dr Eijsinck thoughtfully, ‘unless it is by doing this…’
She was caught, turned and held close—and then kissed. She had been kissed before, but never in this fashion. Against all common sense, she kissed him back. When she drew away he loosened his hold at once, but without releasing her, and said over her shoulder,
‘Hullo, Taeike.’
Harriet, still within the circle of his arm, glimpsed her standing in the doorway for a brief moment before she turned on her heel and went inside. She had said nothing at all, but she had broken the spell; she told herself that she was glad, for she had so nearly allowed herself to be carried away. She said lightly,
‘It’s getting chilly—shall we go inside?’ and led the way back to the drawing-room without looking at him. She was at once whisked off to dance, and Friso didn’t seek her out again, only towards the end of the evening she saw his broad back disappearing through the door, and when she searched the room, the beautiful blonde had gone too.
It was while she was helping to restore some sort of order to the rooms after the last guest had gone that Harriet finally admitted to herself that she had fallen in love with Friso Eijsin
ck; not the perfect Friso of her dream, but this man of whom she knew nothing; who barely spoke to her, and when he did, left her uncertain as to whether he even liked her. She stacked some plates carefully—probably he didn’t—his kiss on the verandah had been almost certainly prompted by the sweet-smelling garden and the song…and almost as certainly he would have forgotten it by now. She wished with all her heart that she could do the same.
CHAPTER FOUR
IT SEEMED very quiet on Thursday; Wierd, who was a pathologist and worked for a big drug firm outside Delft, had left early; so had Aede; neither of them would be back again for at least a week, but Sieske, sitting on the end of Harriet’s bed for a rather sleepy morning gossip, told her that Wierd had suggested that the two girls should go down to Delft on Monday; he would be free in the afternoon, and it was a chance for Harriet to see something of Holland.
‘Very nice,’ said Harriet, ‘but I’d love to poke around on my own. Would you mind? You could both meet me somewhere.’
Sieske protested at this until Harriet said, ‘Then I shan’t come.’ She liked Sieske very much, and Wierd was great fun, but she remembered the old adage ‘Two’s company, three’s none’. Besides, it would be good for her to go on her own. She smiled persuasively at her friend, and got her own way.
They went to Sneek in the afternoon, to visit Sieske’s grandparents. Sieske drove the Mini she and her mother shared between them, with Harriet beside her, and Mevrouw Van Minnen dozing comfortable in the back. They took the narrow country roads, through small villages, each with its own church and café, and less frequently, a solitary shop, with rows of klompen on either side of the door and a great many advertisements in the windows for Van Nelle’s tea and Niemeijer’s coffee and the more familiar washing powders and Blue Band. Sneek, when they reached it, was smaller than she had expected, and very quiet. Sieske explained that the best time to visit it was during the sailing week in August, when it was packed with visitors, but it was too early in the year for the boats to be out on Sneekermeer, although the more hardy were to be found at week-ends, wrapped warmly against the wind, enjoying the luxury of an almost empty lake.