by Betty Neels
He had no intention of wasting time talking about chips. ‘Why are you here, Miss Pomfrey? Why are you not at the house, eating your dinner….’ He paused, frowning. He hadn’t given her a thought when he returned with the boys, hadn’t asked Bas if she was back, had forgotten her.
Araminta saw the frown and made haste to explain. ‘Well, you see, it’s like this. Bas thought that I would be out until late; he gave me a key, too, so I expect there was a misunderstanding. I thought—’ she caught his eye ‘—well, I thought that perhaps you expected me to stay out. I mean, you did say that Jet would put the boys to bed, so you didn’t expect me back, did you?’ She hesitated. ‘Am I making myself clear?’
When he didn’t speak, she added, ‘I’ve had a most interesting day, and I went to the cinema this evening. I’m on my way back to the house now, so I’ll say good evening, doctor.’
‘No, Miss Pomfrey, you will not say good evening. You will come with me and we will have dinner together. I have no doubt that you have eaten nothing much all day and I cannot forgive myself for not seeing that you had adequate money with you and arrangements made for your free day. Please forgive me?’
She stared up at him, towering over her. ‘Of course I forgive you. I’m not your guest, you know, and I’m quite used to being by myself. And please don’t feel that you have to give me a meal; I’ve just eaten all those chips.’
‘All the same, we will dine together.’ He swept her into the car and picked up the car phone. He spoke in Dutch so that she wasn’t to know that he was excusing himself from a dinner party.
‘Oh, that hospital again,’ said his hostess. ‘Do you never get a free moment, Marcus?’
He made a laughing rejoinder, promised to dine at some future date, and started the car.
Araminta, still clutching her chips, said in a tight little voice, ‘Will you take me back to the house, doctor? It’s kind of you to offer me a meal, but I’m not hungry.’
A waste of breath, for all she got in reply was a grunt as he swept the car back into the lighted streets, past shop windows still blazing with light, cafés spilling out onto the pavements, grand hotels… She tried again. ‘I’m not suitably dressed…’
He took no notice of that either, but turned into a narrow side street lined with elegant little shops. At its far end there was a small restaurant.
There was a canal on the opposite side of the street, and the doctor parked beside it—dangerously near the edge, from her point of view—and got out. There was no help for it but to get out when he opened her door, to be marched across the street and into the restaurant.
It was a small place: a long, narrow room with tables well apart, most of them occupied. Araminta was relieved to see that although the women there were well dressed, several of them were in suits and dark dresses so that her jacket and skirt weren’t too conspicuous.
It seemed the doctor was known there; they were led to a table in one corner, her jacket was taken from her and a smiling waiter drew out her chair.
The doctor sat down opposite to her. ‘What will you drink?’ he asked. ‘Dry sherry?’
When she agreed, he spoke to the waiter, who offered menus. There was choice enough, and she saw at a glance that everything was wildly expensive. She stared down at it; she hadn’t wanted to come, and it would be entirely his fault if she chose caviar, plover’s eggs and truffles, all of which were on the menu, their cost equivalent to a week’s housekeeping money. On the other hand, she had no wish to sample any of these delicacies and, since she must have spoilt his evening, it seemed only fair to choose as economically as possible.
The doctor put down his menu. ‘Unless you would like anything special, will you leave it to me to order?’
‘Oh, please.’ She added, ‘There’s such a lot to choose from, isn’t there?’
‘Indeed. How about marinated aubergine to start with? And would you like sea bass to follow?’
She agreed; she wasn’t shy, and she was too much her parents’ daughter to feel awkward. She had never been in a restaurant such as this one, but she wasn’t going to let it intimidate her. When the food came she ate with pleasure and, mindful of manners, made polite conversation. The doctor was at first secretly amused and then found himself interested. Miss Pomfrey might be nothing out of the ordinary, but she had self-assurance and a way of looking him in the eye which he found disquieting. Not a conceited man, but aware of his worth, he wasn’t used to being studied in such a manner.
For a moment he regretted his spoilt evening, but told himself that he was being unjust and then suggested that she might like a pudding from the trolley.
She chose sticky toffee pudding and ate it with enjoyment, and he, watching her over his biscuits and cheese, found himself reluctantly liking her.
They had talked in a guarded fashion over their meal—the weather, the boys, her opinion of Utrecht, all safe subjects. It was when they got back to the house and she had thanked him and started for the stairs that he stopped her.
‘Miss Pomfrey, we do not need to refer again to the regrettable waste of your free day. Rest assured that I shall see to it that any other free time you have will be well spent.’
‘Thank you, but I am quite capable of looking after myself.’
He smiled thinly. ‘Allow me to be the best judge of that, Miss Pomfrey.’ He turned away. ‘Goodnight.’
She paused on the stairs. ‘Goodnight, doctor.’ And then she added, ‘I bought the chips because I was hungry. I dare say you would have done the same,’ she told him in a matter-of-fact voice.
The doctor watched her small retreating back and went into his study. Presently he began to laugh.
CHAPTER FOUR
ARAMINTA woke early on Sunday morning and remembered that the doctor had said that he would be away all day—moreover, he had remarked that he had no doubt that she and the boys would enjoy their day. Doing what? she wondered, and sat up and worried about it until Jet came in with her morning tea, a concession to her English habit.
They smiled and nodded at each other and exchanged a ‘Goeden Morgen’, and the boys, hearing Jet’s voice, came into the room and got onto Araminta’s bed to eat the little biscuits which had come with the tea.
‘We have to get up and dress,’ they told her. ‘We go to church with Uncle Marcus at half past nine.’
‘Oh, do you? Then back to your room, boys, I’ll be along in ten minutes or so.’
Church would last about an hour, she supposed, which meant that a good deal of the morning would be gone; they could go to one of the parks and feed the ducks, then come back for lunch, and by then surely she would have thought of something to fill the afternoon hours. A pity it wasn’t raining, then they could have stayed indoors.
Jet had told her that breakfast would be at half past eight—at least, Araminta was almost sure that was what she had said; she knew the word for breakfast by now, and the time of day wasn’t too hard to guess at. She dressed and went to help the boys. Not that they needed much help, for they dressed themselves, even if a bit haphazardly. But she brushed hair, tied miniature ties and made sure that their teeth were brushed and their hands clean. She did it without fuss; at the children’s convalescent home there had been no time to linger over such tasks.
The doctor wasn’t at breakfast, and they had almost finished when he came in with Humphrey. He had been for a walk, he told them. Humphrey had needed to stretch his legs. He sat down and had a cup of coffee, explaining that he had already breakfasted. ‘Church at half past nine,’ he reminded them, and asked Araminta if she would care to go with them. ‘The church is close by—a short walk—you might find it interesting.’
She sensed that he expected her to accept. ‘Thank you, I would like to come,’ she told him. ‘At what time are we to be ready?’
‘Ten past nine. The service lasts about an hour.’
They each had a child’s hand as they walked to the church, which was small and old, smelling of damp, flowers and age and, to
Araminta’s mind, rather bleak. They sat right at the front in a high-backed pew with narrow seats and hassocks. The boys sat between them, standing on the hassocks to sing the hymns and then sitting through a lengthy sermon.
Of course, Araminta understood very little of the service, although some of the hymn tunes were the same, but the sermon, preached by an elderly dominee with a flowing beard, sounded as though it was threatening them with severe punishments in the hereafter; she was relieved when it ended with a splendid rolling period of unintelligible words and they all sang a hymn.
It was a tune she knew, but the words in the hymn book the doctor had thoughtfully provided her with were beyond her understanding. The boys sang lustily, as did the doctor, in a deep rumbling voice, and since they were singing so loudly, she hummed the tune to herself. It was the next best thing.
Back at the house, the doctor asked Bas to bring coffee into the drawing room.
‘I shall be leaving in a few minutes,’ he told Araminta. ‘I expect you intend to take a walk before lunch, but in the afternoon Bas will drive you to Steijner’s toy shop. They have an exhibition of toys there today and I have tickets. And next door there is a café where you may have your tea. Bas will come for you at about five o’clock. If you want him earlier, telephone the house.’
The boys were delighted, and so was Araminta, although she didn’t allow it to show. The day had been nicely taken care of and the boys were going to enjoy themselves. She had no doubt that she would too.
The doctor stooped to kiss the boys. ‘Have fun,’ he told them, and to Araminta, ‘Enjoy your afternoon, Miss Pomfrey. I leave the boys in your safe hands.’
It was only after he had gone that she realised that she hadn’t much money—perhaps not enough to pay for their tea. She need not have worried. The boys showed her the notes their uncle had given to them to spend and a moment later, Bas, coming to collect the coffee cups, told her quietly that there was an envelope for her in the doctor’s study if she would be good enough to fetch it.
There was, in her opinion, enough money in it to float a ship. She counted it carefully, determined to account for every cent of it, and went back to collect the boys ready for their walk.
They decided against going to one of the parks but instead they walked to one of the squares, the ‘neude’, and so into the Oudegracht, where there was the fourteenth-century house in which the Treaty of Utrecht had been signed. They admired the patrician house at some length, until Araminta said, ‘Are we very far from your uncle’s house? We should be getting back.’
They chorused reassurance. ‘Look, Mintie, we just go back to the neude and Vredeburg Square, and it’s only a little way then.’
She had been there the day before, spending hours looking at the windows of the shopping centre. The doctor’s house was only a short distance from the Singel, the moat which surrounded the old city—much of its length was lined with attractive promenades backed by impressive houses.
‘By the time we go home I shall know quite a lot about Utrecht,’ she told the boys. ‘Now, let’s go back to the house and have lunch; we don’t want to miss one moment of the exhibition…’
Steijner’s toy shop was vast, housed in a narrow building, several storeys high, each floor reached by a narrow, steep staircase. The front shop was large and opened out into another smaller room which extended, long and narrow, as far as a blank wall. Both rooms were lined with shelves packed with toys of every description, and arranged down their centres were the larger exhibits: miniature motor cars, dolls’ houses, minute bicycles, magnificent model boats.
The place was crowded with children, tugging the grown-ups to and fro, and it was some time before Araminta and the boys managed to climb the first flight of stairs to the floor above. The rooms here were mostly given over to dolls, more dolls’ houses and miniature kitchens and furniture, so they stayed only for a few minutes and then, together with a great many other people, made their way to the next floor.
This was very much more to the boy’s liking—more cars and bikes, kites of every kind, skates, trumpets and drums, puppets and toy animals. Araminta, with the beginnings of a headache, suggested hopefully that they might go and have their tea and wait for Bas in the café. More and more people were filling the shop, the narrow stairs were packed, but the children were reluctant to move from the displays they fancied.
‘There’s camping stuff on the next floor,’ said Peter, and he tugged at her hand. ‘Could we just have a look—a quick peep?’ He looked so appealing and since Paul had joined him, raising an excited face to her, she gave in. ‘All right. But we won’t stay too long, mind.’
The last flight of stairs was very narrow and steep, and the room it led to was low-ceilinged and narrow, with a slit window set in the gable. But it was well lit and the array of camping equipment was impressive. There were only a handful of people there and before long they had gone back down the staircase, leaving the boys alone to examine the tents and camping equipment to their hearts’ content.
They must have a tent, they told Araminta excitedly, they would ask Uncle Marcus to buy them one. ‘We could live in it in the garden, Mintie. You’d come too, of course.’
They went round and round, trying to decide which tent was the one they liked best. They were still longing to have one and arguing about it when Araminta looked at her watch.
‘Time for tea, my dears,’ she told them. ‘We mustn’t keep Bas waiting.’
It was another five minutes before she could prise them away and start down the stairs in single file. Peter was in front and he stopped on the last stair.
‘The door’s shut,’ he said.
Araminta reached over. ‘Well, we’ll just turn the handle.’
Only there wasn’t a handle, only an old-fashioned lock with no key. She changed places with Peter and gave the door a good push. Nothing happened; the door could have been rock. She told the boys to sit on the stairs and knocked hard. There was no reply, nor did anyone answer her ‘hello’. The place was quiet, though when she looked at her watch she wondered why. The exhibition was due to close at five o’clock and it was fifteen minutes to that hour. All the same, surely someone would tour the building and make sure that everyone had left. She shouted, uneasily aware of the thickness of the door.
‘What an adventure!’ she said bracingly. ‘Let’s all shout…’
Which brought no result whatever.
‘Well, we’d better go back to the room. Someone will come presently; it’s not quite time for people to have to leave yet.’ She spoke in a matter-of-fact voice and hoped that the boys would believe her.
Back upstairs again, she went to the narrow window. The glass was thick and, although it had once opened, it had been long since sealed up. She looked around for something suitable to break it, picked up a tent peg and, urged on by the boys, who were revelling in the whole thing, began to bash the glass.
It didn’t break easily, and only some of it fell into the street below, but anyone passing or standing nearby could have seen it. She shouted hopefully, unaware that there was no one there. The doctor’s second car, another Jaguar, was standing close by, but Bas had gone into the café to see if they were there.
Of course, they weren’t; he went to the toy shop, where the doors were being locked.
‘Everyone has left,’ he was told, and when he asked why they had closed a quarter of an hour sooner than expected, he was told that an electrical fault had been found and it was necessary to turn off the current.
‘But no one’s inside,’ he was assured by the owner, who was unaware that the assistant who had checked the place hadn’t bothered to go to the top room but had locked the door and gone home.
They could have gone back to the house, thought Bas. Miss Pomfrey was a sensible young woman, and instead of lingering about waiting for him she would have taken the boys home to let him know that they had left earlier than they had planned.
He got into the car and drove back, to find the
Bentley parked by the canal and the doctor in his study. He looked up as Bas went in, but before he could speak Bas said urgently, ‘You’re just this minute back, mijnheer? You do not know about the exhibition closing early? I thought Miss Pomfrey and the boys would be here.’
The doctor was out of his chair. ‘At the toy shop? It is closed? Why? You’re sure? They were not in the café?’
‘No one had seen them. I spoke to the man closing the place—there’s been an electrical fault, that’s why they shut early. He was sure that there was no one left inside.’
The doctor was already at the door. ‘They can’t be far, and Miss Pomfrey isn’t a girl to lose her head. Come along. We’ll find them. You stay in the car, Bas, in case they turn up.’
With Bas beside him he drove to Steijner’s shop. There were few people about—the proprietor and his assistants had gone home—but there was a van parked outside and men unloading equipment.
The doctor parked the car and walked over to them. ‘You have keys? I believe there are two boys and a young woman still inside. I’m not sure of it, but I must check.’
He looked up as a small splattering of glass fell between them. He looked up again and saw what appeared to be a stocking waving from the gabled window.
The man looked up, too. ‘Best get them down, mijnheer. I’ll open up—you won’t need help? I’ve quite a bit of work here…’
He opened the door, taking his time over its bolts and chains, giving the doctor time to allow for his relief, mingled, for some reason which he didn’t understand, with rising rage. The silly girl. Why didn’t she leave the place with everyone else? There must have been some other people there, and the boys would have understood what was said—everyone would have been warned in good time.
He raced up the stairs, turned the key in the lock of the last door and went up the staircase two at a time. The boys rushed to meet him, bubbling about their adventure, delighted to see him, and he put his great arms around their small shoulders.