by Betty Neels
Reilof was waiting, leaning against a wall talking to Mr Burnett. They both looked up as Laura crossed the vast expanse of floor, and came to meet her. Mr Burnett stayed talking for a few minutes before he wandered away and Reilof said briskly, ‘Delightfully punctual—we’ll get a taxi.’
They crossed the forecourt to the street and a passing taxi wheeled out of the traffic and stopped. ‘The Baron of Beef,’ instructed the doctor, and Laura, pleased that she knew what he was talking about, said: ‘Oh, yes—Gutter Lane.’
‘You’ve been there?’ Reilof sounded very faintly bored and she wished suddenly that she hadn’t come.
‘No—but one of the chef’s assistants was in the ward with a severed tendon.’ She couldn’t think of anything else to say after that and was thankful that their ride was a short one, and even more thankful to find that the restaurant was almost full of chattering people; at least the atmosphere was cheerful and would create the illusion of a pleasant meal…á deux. She sat down with her usual composure, her busy mind mulling over topics of conversation which might serve to divert her companion.
She need not have bothered; once he had ordered their drinks and suggested that she might like to try the pâté maison and follow it with sole au gratin, while he himself decided on steak and kidney pudding with oysters to precede it, he sat back in his chair and said matter-of-factly: ‘Now, let’s discuss things in a businesslike fashion, shall we?’
Laura gave him a bleak look. Would they spend the rest of their lives being businesslike? she wondered unhappily. Perhaps with time, when he had got over Joyce, he would talk to her with the same warmth he had shown towards her sister and his eyes would smile instead of looking like black stone.
‘By all means,’ she agreed, and took a good sip of sherry to give her heart. It was an excellent sherry; she took another sip and felt a little better, relaxing in her chair, waiting for him to say whatever it was he wanted to be businesslike about. She had to wait a few minutes, for he said nothing at all, only looked at her in a thoughtful way as though he expected her to say something first. Well, she wasn’t going to; she took a third sip of sherry and eyed him with faint belligerence.
He said surprisingly, ‘You look nice—you always seem to wear slacks and blouses…’
‘Only because when I’m home I have the house to see to and do the cooking,’ she pointed out tartly, and was instantly mollified by his,
‘Well, you won’t need to do that. I have an excellent housekeeper who will be only too glad to relieve you of both housework and cooking,’ and then, as though he sensed that he hadn’t said quite enough: ‘Your cooking is excellent.’
‘Thanks, but not on a par with this.’ She indicated the pâté which had been set before her, and went on deliberately: ‘Joyce didn’t like cooking—how were you going to manage?’
His eyes were like black ice. ‘I have just told you—I have an excellent housekeeper. Laura, will you oblige me by not talking about Joyce? There seems no point in doing so.’
She buttered a finger of toast and popped it into her mouth. ‘Well, I won’t if you don’t want me to, but you can’t just cut her out of your life like that.’ She hesitated. ‘Perhaps you can, though.’
He didn’t answer her. ‘Have you resigned your job?’
‘Yes, I leave…’ she calculated quickly, ‘in three weeks and a day.’
He nodded. ‘Early July, that should suit us very well. We can have a quiet wedding and a short holiday before we return to Holland.’
She gave him a straight look. ‘Aren’t you being a little high-handed?’ and had to wait for his answer while he sampled the wine the waiter had poured. When their glasses had been filled, he said: ‘I beg your pardon, you’ve scarcely had time to make up your mind, have you?’
She replied with disarming honesty. ‘Yes, I have, only you—you’re taking everything for granted. If we’re to make a success of it we have to start off with everything understood, don’t we? I think,’ she went on a little shyly, ‘that we must be honest with each other, mustn’t we? Like good friends.’
‘I hope we shall be that, and you’re quite right, of course. We must also undertake not to interfere in each other’s lives.’ He saw her bewildered look. ‘That’s to say, while we will, I hope, live together comfortably enough, there must be no question of encroaching upon each other’s privacy.’
Just for a moment Laura quailed; the wish to put down her knife and fork and walk out of the restaurant was strong, but only for a moment. She loved this withdrawn, proud man sitting opposite her. Perhaps he would never love her, she strongly doubted it, but she might, in the course of time, win his affection. Anyway, what did life hold for her if she decided not to marry him after all? Nothing.
‘A very good idea,’ she agreed pleasantly. ‘You will, of course, have to put me right as we go along. You were saying about the wedding…is it to be from my home?’
‘Why not?’ he wanted to know coolly. ‘I’ll bring the car over and we can go somewhere quiet—the West Country perhaps.’
‘That would be nice. Just exactly where do you live, Reilof?’
‘Between Hilversum and Baarn in a very pleasant part of the country. There are woods around and villages tucked well away from the roads. My home is almost exactly between the two towns, very convenient, as I have beds in Hilversum hospital and consulting rooms in both places. Patients occasionally come to the house, too. I have a partner, a good deal younger than myself—Jan van Nijhof.’
Laura sat silent while the waiter served her sole, and only when they had started to eat again did she ask him: ‘And family?’
‘A married sister in den Haag, two younger brothers—one has a practice in Toronto, the other is working for his fellowship at Leiden. My mother is dead and my father lives in Loenen, a small place quite close to Hilversum. He retired several years ago, although he occasionally does some lecturing.’
‘All doctors,’ commented Laura, very much struck.
‘Every man jack of us, and my sister is married to an orthopaedic surgeon.’ He smiled so nicely at her that she was emboldened to ask, ‘Did they know that you were going to get married?’
‘I mentioned the possibility, no more.’
She heaved a sigh of relief. ‘Oh, good.’ She added in a muddled fashion, ‘I mean they won’t know it’s me instead of Joyce.’
Presumably he understood her, for he agreed blandly before asking her what she would like for a sweet; quite obviously he wasn’t going to discuss his feelings on the subject. She ate the delicious sorbet set before her with no more pleasure than if it had been the prunes and custard so often offered in the hospital canteen, while she talked with determined cheerfulness about the weather, the prospect of a warm summer, the little dog he had rescued and other safe but rather dull topics. Her companion, replying to her remarks with unfailing politeness, demonstrated to her quite clearly that he was thinking about other things. They got up to go finally, still exchanging platitudes, and at the hospital entrance she broke off her muddled thanks for her dinner to say: ‘It won’t do, you know—you’re bored stiff with me, aren’t you, and hating every minute. We’d better stop now before it’s too late…’
His sudden grip on her arm made her wince. ‘Laura, I’m sorry. If I have appeared bored, believe me that wasn’t the case; if I’ve been a poor companion, I apologise, but I have to make a fresh start and you can help me—you’re helping me already, just by being you; quiet and undemanding, allowing me my ill humour and lack of interest. If you will have patience just for a little while…’ He half smiled. ‘I’m a poor bargain, aren’t I? But you see, it’s rather like waking up from a beautiful dream and getting used to reality again. Very likely I shall find reality far better than the dream, but I have to forget the dream first.’ He loosed his hold on her arm and took her hands in his. ‘Do you know, I don’t believe that I could have said that to anyone else?’
He bent suddenly and kissed her gently, and she stood looking
up at him, smiling uncertainly. She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, and when he observed, ‘I have always thought of you as a plain girl, but I was mistaken. When you smile you’re quite pretty,’ she had no words with which to meet his remark, so she wished him goodnight and went up to her room, to sit before her dressing-table mirror and stare at her face.
Presently she got up and started to get ready for bed. ‘He must have been looking at me in a poor light,’ she remarked to the room at large.
He came, to her surprise, the following day, and put his head round the office door while she was sitting at her desk writing up the charts.
‘You’re off at five o’clock?’ he wanted to know; a rhetorical question, since he already knew, but Laura said cheerfully that yes, she was, and why?
‘If you’re not too tired, would it be a good idea to go to your home and have a word with the local parson?’
‘Of course, why not?’ Her placid face showed nothing of the excitement tearing around inside her. She added prosaically: ‘I shall probably be a little late—ops day, you know.’
Reilof went away after a few minutes, leaving her to jumble up the charts in a hopeless manner while she tried to look into her future. A quiet wedding, he had said, and then a brief holiday—could one call it a honeymoon? She thought not—she would have to think about clothes, it was a cheering thought to brighten her other, gloomier ones.
It said much for her good sense that she gave her usual careful report to Pat when she came on duty, personal thoughts damped down.
She wore the Jaeger dress again, for the evening, though bright, was cool, and by dint of hurrying she managed to reach the hospital entrance as it was striking six o’clock. It was as she was hurrying down the corridors that she recollected that Reilof hadn’t got the car with him—they would have to go by train and at this time of the day it would be packed. But as she reached the door she saw Reilof leaning against the bonnet of an old Morris which she recognized as belonging to George.
When she reached it she exclaimed, ‘Hullo, how on earth did you get George to lend you his car? He never lends it…’
‘There’s an exception to every rule,’ he remarked easily. ‘He swears it goes like a bomb, but I’m not so sure—as long as it gets us there and back again.’ He opened the door for her and then went round to sit beside her. ‘This will teach me not to come over without a car.’
‘Then why did you?’
They were edging into the evening traffic. ‘I hadn’t a great deal of time and I wanted to see you, Laura.’
She couldn’t think of anything else to say but ‘Oh,’ and then sat silent until at length the traffic thinned a little as they reached London’s outskirts. Only then she asked, ‘Why?’
It was surprising what speed he was getting out of the elderly car. ‘I wanted to be certain—not of myself, but of you; to know that you really meant what you had said; to get our plans made and settled.’
Laura could understand that; he had to forget Joyce, hadn’t he? as quickly as he could, and he was going the right way about it, although it must be a painful experience. She suspected that he was a man of determination when it was needed and she was sure that once they were married he would treat her with consideration, albeit perhaps with indifference. But he certainly wouldn’t throw Joyce in her teeth, and would never let her feel that she was second choice. She paused in her reflections to say: ‘If you turn off left at the next crossroads there’s a short cut…’
Presently he began to talk—about nothing in particular it was true, but it was agreeable to find that they had quite a lot in common, and even though he hardly noticed her as a girl they were getting on far better than she had imagined. By the time they reached her home she was beginning to feel completely at home with him, and fancied that he too felt the same. All to the good, she told herself as she got out of the car, since they’d chosen to share their life together.
The evening passed satisfactorily; her father seemed to have accepted the situation without much trouble, and Uncle Wim behaved as though the pair of them had intended to marry all along. They talked for a bit, the four of them, and then Laura took Reilof down the road to the rectory, where the Rector, a dear, dreamy man with a frightful memory, discussed their wedding with evident pleasure, digressing a good deal to inquire after Joyce, and even breaking off in the middle of a sentence to say: ‘I rather thought that our little Joyce had been thinking of marrying you, Doctor van Meerum, which just shows how mistaken one can be. She showed me a magnificent ring one day, I remember, but she refused to tell me who had given it to her—now I realise that it was this rich young man from America. I hope the dear child is very happy—such a pity that they were unable to marry here. I daresay that you’ve heard from her?’
The doctor said gravely that no, he hadn’t, and reminded the Rector that he hadn’t told them if ten o’clock in the morning would be too early an hour at which to be married.
‘Certainly not—and it’s to be a quiet wedding, that seems to me to be an excellent choice. Of course Laura is well known in the village and popular, too, but she would hardly want to wear white satin and orange blossom.’ He smiled with kindly tactlessness at her. ‘I remember when you were christened, my dear—almost thirty years ago.’
Laura choked and caught Reilof’s eye and saw the gleam in it before managing to say, ‘I’ve not had time to think what I shall wear, but I’m sure it won’t be white satin. May we settle for ten o’clock then, Mr Lamb? And now we really must go; I’m on duty in the morning, you know.’
As they walked back Reilof observed: ‘It would serve everyone right if you were to turn up in bridal finery and a dozen bridesmaids behind you.’ He looked down at her thoughtfully, and she thought that he was really seeing her. ‘You don’t look as old as you are,’ he told her kindly, a remark which left her seething, although she thanked him in a colourless voice and bit back the retort ready on her tongue, while a resolve, a little vague as yet, took shape in the back of her head that one day he should eat his words.
The rest of the evening passed pleasantly enough. No one, meeting the doctor for the first time, would have guessed, even remotely, that he was suffering from a broken heart. His manners were delightful, he entered into the conversation readily, and gave no indication of his true feelings, and only when Uncle Wim deliberately introduced Joyce into their talk did Laura see the little muscle twitching at the corner of his mouth and his face assume the bland expression she so much disliked.
All the same, their return journey was cheerful enough, although she would have been happier if he had shown more interest in their wedding. He saw her to the Nurses’ Home, assured her that he would be seeing her again before long and wished her goodnight, adding: ‘I have a ring for you, I must remember to give it to you the next time we meet.’
A more casual way of becoming engaged she had yet to discover. She fumed her way to bed, alternately positive that she wouldn’t marry such a wretchedly unfeeling man, and just as sure that she would make him such a good wife that he would forget Joyce completely.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE next three weeks passed quickly. Laura embarked on a shopping expedition, using up a good deal of the money she had saved during the last few years; refusing the good-natured help of her friends, she spent her free time combing the shops for exactly what she wanted, pretty clothes which would detract from the plainness of her face. She chose a beautifully cut dress and jacket for her wedding in a rich clotted cream crêpe with a little turban hat of the same colour patterned with green and turquoise and ruby red; this last as a concession to the ring Reilof had given her—the ring Joyce had refused to wear because it was old-fashioned. Laura loved it; its three rubies were set in an oblong of diamonds and mounted on gold, and it had fitted her finger exactly. Childishly she had taken that as a good omen.
She had bought shoes and handbag to go with her wedding outfit too, and then laid out the rest of her money on a dress or two, more shoes
and sandals and all the undies she could afford. It was after she had spent all her money that she recollected that her evening dresses were out of date and few in number; perhaps Reilof didn’t go out much in the evening, but it would be awful to find that he did and she had nothing to wear. She was pondering the problem when it was solved for her by the unexpected cheque which her father sent her, and she spent the whole of it on two long dresses, one a pale pink chiffon with a tiny bodice and a floating cape and the other brown, the colour of her eyes, with little cape sleeves trimmed with lace, its low neckline trimmed with lace too.
Satisfied at last with her purchases, she invited her friends to view her new wardrobe and was delighted when they presented her with a gift—a suitcase, not leather, it was true, but smart and good-looking all the same. She packed her new finery into it feeling that at least she wouldn’t put Reilof to shame with shabby possessions, and left St Anne’s for the last time.
Most of the odds and ends and her other clothes had already been sent home, and Reilof was to pick her up on his way from Holland. He was waiting for her as she went through the main door, a handful of her closest friends with her. And this time there was no Aston Martin but a silver-grey Rolls-Royce drawn up in the forecourt. Laura hesitated for a moment, feeling suddenly uncertain, but he came to meet her and in the burst of talk from her companions she forgot the uncertainty and felt only excitement. All the same she had lost her tongue, and it was only when she had said her final goodbyes and had been ushered into the car and Reilof was beside her that she said: ‘How super being met by a Rolls…’