by Betty Neels
‘Where are we now?’ she ventured to ask.
‘The Keizersgracht. It’s a canal which runs almost in a full circle round the city. There are other canals which follow its line exactly, rather like a spider’s web. All of them contain beautiful old houses, most of which are embassies or warehouses or offices now.’
She peered around her; the houses were large, tall and built on noble lines with big square windows and great front doors, and despite this they contrived to look homelike. She said so and heard him laugh. ‘I’m glad you like them, for here we are at my—our home.’
He had slowed the car and stopped outside a double-fronted, red brick house, its front door reached by a double row of steps, its windows, in orderly rows, large and square, its roof, Deborah could see, craning her pretty neck, ended in a rounded gable which leaned, very slightly, forward. She would have liked to have stood and stared, just as she would have paused by the canals, but Gerard was waiting for her. He took her hand as she got out of the car and drew it under his arm and mounted the steps to the door which opened as they reached it.
This would be Wim, she guessed, a short, thick-set man with grizzled hair and blue eyes set in a round, cheerful face. He shook Gerard’s proffered hand with pleasure and when Gerard introduced him to Deborah, took her hand too and said in heavily accented, difficult English:
‘I am happy, Mevrouw. It is a moment to rejoice. My felicitations.’
She thanked him, and without knowing it pleased him mightily by remarking on his knowledge of English, adding the rider that she hoped that her Dutch would be as good. Upon this small wave of mutual friendliness they entered the hall, while Wim closed the door behind them.
The hall was narrow, although it had two deep alcoves, each with a wall table and a mirror hanging above. Along one side, between them, was a double door, carved and arched, and beyond them a carved wooden staircase. On the other side of the hall there were three doors and an arched opening reached by several descending steps, coming up which now was a tall, thin, middle-aged woman, with pale hair which could have been flaxen or equally well grey. She wore a rather old-fashioned black dress and a large print apron and although her face seemed severe she was smiling broadly now. She broke at once into speech and then turned to Deborah, her hand held out, and began all over again. When she finally stopped Deborah smiled and nodded and asked Gerard urgently: ‘Please will you tell Marijke that I’ll learn Dutch just as soon as I can, so that we can have the pleasure of talking to each other?’
She watched him as he repeated what she had said in his own language. It sounded like nonsense to her, but she supposed that if she worked hard enough at it, she would at least learn the bare bones of it in a few weeks, and anyway, it seemed that she had said the right thing, for Marijke was smiling more broadly than ever. She shook Deborah’s hand again, said something to Gerard in which the word coffee was easily recognisable, and went back down the steps while Wim opened the first of the doors in the hall for them to enter.
The room had a very high ceiling of ornamental plaster work and panelled walls ending in a shelf two thirds of the way up, upon which rested a collection of china which Deborah supposed was Delft. The furniture was comfortable, upholstered in a russet velvet which went well with the deep blues and greens and ambers of the vast carpet. The lampstands were delicate china figures holding aloft cream and russet shades. She found the room delightful, although it was a good deal more splendid than she had expected.
They had their coffee sitting side by side upon a small settee covered in exquisite needlework, and somehow the sight of the old, beautifully simple silver coffee service on its heavy tray flanked by cups which should by rights have been in some museum, so old and fragile were they, depressed her; she had expected comfort, certainly, but this was more than comfort, it was an ageless way of life which she would have to learn to live. She shivered a little, thinking of the dinner parties; possibly the guests would dislike her…
‘It’s all strange, isn’t it?’ Gerard was at his most placid, ‘but it’s home. All this’—he waved a large, square hand—‘has been handed down from one son to the next, whether we have wanted it or not, though to be honest, I love every stick and stone of the place, and I hope that you will too.’ He put down his coffee cup. ‘You will be tired. Would you like to go to bed?’
She was quite taken aback. ‘Oh, no, thank you, I’m not in the least tired. If I might just go to my room, I could unpack and change my clothes. I expect you have a great deal to do.’
She saw at once that she had said the right thing, for the relief on his face, quickly suppressed, was real enough. ‘Yes, I have. Shall we meet again for lunch? I’ve asked Mother round.’ He smiled nicely. ‘You’ll feel better once you have met her.’
She got to her feet and he walked with her to the door, opened it and called for Marijke. Even as Deborah started up the staircase in the wake of the older woman, she heard him cross the hall to the front door.
Her room was at the back of the house and her luggage was already in it. As soon as Marijke had left her she went to the window, to discover a small garden below, with a fountain in its centre and tubs of flowers grouped round it. There was grass too, only a very small circle of it, but it looked green and fresh, and brooding over the cheerful little plot was a copper beech, rustling faintly in the wind.
Deborah turned her back on the pleasant scene presently to survey the room; large and airy and furnished in the style of Chippendale, probably genuine pieces, she thought, caressing the delicate lines of the dressing table. There was a vast cupboard along one wall with a door beside it and on the opposite wall a tallboy. The bed was wide and covered with the same pastel pale chintz as the curtains, the carpet was a deep cream and the lamps and small armchair were covered in pink striped silk. A beautiful room. She sighed her content and hastened to open the first of its three doors. A bathroom with another door leading back on to the landing, she glanced quickly at its luxury and crossed the room. The second door opened on to a short corridor lined with cupboards and lighted by a window on its other side, there was a door at its end and she opened that too and went in. Gerard’s luggage was there, so this was his room, smaller than her own and a little severe but just as comfortable. It, too, had a door leading on to the landing and a bathroom built into a deep alcove.
She went back the way she had come and had a bath and put on a plain cotton jersey dress the colour of apricots, then sat down at the dressing table and did her face with great care and arranged her hair in its smooth wings with the chignon at the back, put her engagement ring back on her finger and, after a long look at herself in the handsome mirror, made her way downstairs.
There were voices in the sitting room and she heard Gerard’s laugh. His mother had arrived. She trod firmly down the staircase and had almost reached the bottom when he appeared in the sitting room doorway.
‘I thought I heard you,’ he greeted her smilingly, and whistled briefly. A small dog scampered past him and across the hall. ‘Here’s Smith, I’ve just fetched him from the vet.’
Smith had halted in front of her and she sat down on the stairs and put out a gentle hand. ‘Hullo, Smith,’ she said, ‘I hope we’re going to be friends.’ The dog stared at her with bright black eyes, and after a moment wagged his tail and allowed her to stroke him, and when she got to her feet, walked quite soberly beside her to where Gerard was waiting.
He took her arm as they went into the sitting room and led her over to the window where his mother sat. She wasn’t at all what Deborah had imagined she would be; small for a start, almost as small as her own mother, and her eyes were brown and kind. Her nose was an autocratic little beak, but the mouth below it was as kind as the eyes. She stood up as they reached her and said in excellent English:
‘Deborah, my dear, welcome to the family. You do not know how happy I am to see Gerard married, and to such a lovely girl. I must say that he described you very well, but I have been longing to meet you
. Gerard, bring a chair over here so that I can talk to Deborah—and pour us all a drink.’
And when Deborah was seated and he had gone to the other end of the room where the drinks were laid out on a Pembroke table: ‘You must not think that I order him about, my dear. Indeed, I would not dream of doing any such thing, but just now and again I pretend to do so and he pretends to do as I wish. It works very well for us both. And now tell me, what do you think of this house?’
‘I’ve only seen a very little of it; Gerard had things to do… What I have seen I find quite beautiful.’
The older lady nodded complacently. ‘I knew you would like it—love it, I hope. I did, still do, but my husband and I were devoted and without him it doesn’t seem the same—besides, I was determined to leave it the moment Gerard told me about you.’ She smiled faintly. ‘I think I guessed before that.’ She gave Deborah a long, thoughtful look and Deborah looked back at her, her eyes quiet.
‘Then he lived in a huge flat,’ his mother explained, taking it for granted that Deborah knew what she was talking about. She shuddered delicately. ‘He loathed it, although he never said so…’ she broke off as Gerard came towards them.
‘Champagne,’ he announced, ‘as befits an occasion,’ and he lifted his glass to Deborah.
They lunched without haste, although the moment they had finished Gerard excused himself on the pretext of a visit to the hospital as well as his consulting rooms to see what his secretary had got for him. ‘Mother will love to show you the house,’ he told Deborah as he prepared to leave. ‘Don’t wait tea—I don’t expect to be back much before six.’
She smiled and nodded because that was what she would have to learn to do cheerfully from now on; watch him go through the front door and then wonder where he had gone to and what he was doing and who he was with…it didn’t bear thinking about. She turned to her mother-in-law with a too-bright smile and professed herself eager to explore the house.
Gerard had been right when he had described it as being full of narrow passages and old staircases, and some of the rooms were very small, although all were charmingly furnished. Deborah wandered up and down with Mevrouw van Doorninck, stopping to peer at family portraits or admire a mirror or one of the trifles of silver or china with which the house was filled. When they had finally completed their tour, she said: ‘I feel as though I had turned you out, Mevrouw van Doorninck. How could you bear to leave?’
‘It was a wrench, Deborah, but I have some of the furniture in the flat and all my personal treasures. I had made up my mind before Gerard’s father died that I would leave, although Gerard didn’t want it. You see, I wanted him to marry again, and if I had stayed here, he might never have done so. But living on his own, without a wife to greet his guests and arrange his dinner parties and run the house…that sounds all wrong, my dear, but I don’t mean it to be. He talked about you several times when he came home from Clare’s, you know. He told me what a quiet, sensible girl you were and how capable and charming, and I hoped that he would ask you to marry him, and you see that I have my wish.’ She patted Deborah’s hand. ‘You must come and see me very soon—tomorrow if Gerard can spare the time, and then in a day or so I shall give a small dinner party for you so that you can meet the family. You will feel a little strange at first, but I’m sure that Gerard will arrange for you to have Dutch lessons and show you round Amsterdam and show you off to his friends. Very soon you will settle down quite nicely.’
And indeed, to all intents and purposes Deborah did settle down. To the world around her she presented a calm, unruffled face, charming manners and a smiling acceptance of her new way of life. True to her promise, Mevrouw man Doorninck had given her dinner party, where she had met Gerard’s sister and brothers; three nice people anxious to make her feel at home. They were considerably younger than he and she liked them at once. She met the children too; Lia had two boys, and Pieter and Willem had a boy and a girl each, all rather alike with pale flaxen hair and blue eyes and just as willing as their parents to absorb her into the family, the older ones trying out their school English on her, the toddlers not caring what language she spoke.
And because Gerard had done nothing about it, she had asked Wim’s advice and found herself an old dry-as-dust professor, long retired from his university chair at Leiden, and applied herself assiduously to her Dutch—a disheartening task, she soon discovered, what with the verbs coming at the end of a sentence instead of the middle and the terrible grammar, but at least she had learned a few dozen words, correctly pronounced—the old professor had seen to that. It was amazing the amount one could learn when one applied oneself and one had, sadly enough, time idle on one’s hands.
But there was one person amongst the many whom she met whom she could not like—Claude van Trapp, a man younger than Gerard and a friend of the family since their boyhood days. He was good-looking, and what she would suppose could be described as good fun. He was certainly an intelligent man, and yet Deborah mistrusted him; she found his charm false, and the snide remarks he let fall from time to time seemed to her to be spiteful more than witty. It surprised her that Gerard tolerated him with a careless good humour which annoyed her, and when the opportunity occurred she had, in a roundabout way, tried to discover the reason for this. But he had only laughed and shrugged his great shoulders. ‘A little sharp in the tongue, perhaps,’ he conceded, ‘but we have known each other since our pram days, you know.’
She hadn’t pursued the subject, for it was apparent that Gerard was so tolerant of Claude’s comings and goings to the house that he hardly noticed him and indeed probably believed him to be the boy he had known. She knew him to be incapable of pettiness or meanness himself, so he certainly wouldn’t expect it or look for it in his friends. He was, in fact, blinded by familiarity and she could do nothing about it. But after the first few meetings, she contrived to slip away on some pretext or other when Claude came to the house; easily enough done, for she was taking her duties seriously and there was always something to do around the house, and when his company was unavoidable she behaved with an impeccable politeness towards him, meeting his malicious titbits of gossip and innuendoes with a charming vagueness, ignoring his thinly veiled contempt for her apparent dimness, just as she ignored his admiring glances and sly looks.
It was after she had been in Holland a bare three weeks that Claude called one afternoon. She was in the little garden with Smith, sitting under the shade of the copper beech while she learned the lesson Professor de Wit had set her. It was a beautiful day and she felt a little drowsy, for the night before they had given their first dinner party, quite a small one but nerve-racking. All the same, it had been a success and she had been elated by Gerard’s pleased comments afterwards; she had even allowed herself the satisfaction of knowing that he had admired her in the new dress she had bought for the occasion, a pale green silk sheath. She had worn the thick gold chain his mother had given her and of course, her lovely ring. After the guests had gone home, he had followed her into the drawing room and leaned against the wall, watching her as she went round plumping up cushions, restoring chairs to their original places and moving the small tables carefully. It was a room she already loved, its grandeur mitigated by a pleasant homeliness, brought about, she was sure, by the fact that it was lived in. She moved a priceless Rockingham vase to a place of safety and said with satisfaction: ‘There, now it looks like itself again—I think your friends must love coming here, Gerard.’
‘I daresay.’ He sauntered across the pale Aubusson carpet towards her. ‘A pleasant and successful evening, Deborah, and you were a perfect hostess. I knew that you would make me an excellent wife—you are also a very charming and beautiful one.’ He bent and kissed her. ‘Thank you, my dear.’
She had waited, hoping foolishly that he might say more; that he found her attractive, even that he was falling a little in love with her, but his bland: ‘What a wise choice I have made,’ gave her little consolation. She had said a little woodenly th
at she was pleased that she was living up to his good opinion of her and wished him a good night, to go to her room and lie very wide awake in her vast bed until the early hours of the morning. Three weeks, she had reminded herself, and that was only a fraction of the lifetime ahead of her, playing the hostess to Gerard’s friends, helping him in every way she could, keeping his home just as he wanted it, taking an interest in his work on those all too rare occasions when he talked about it.
She remembered that she didn’t even know where the hospital was, nor for that matter, his consulting rooms, and when she had asked him he had said kindly that he imagined she had enough to fill her days without bothering her head about such things, and then, sensing her hurt, had offered to take her to the hospital and show her round.
It was almost as though he were keeping her at arms’ length…and yet he had been good to her and very kind; she had a more than generous allowance, and true to his promise, Maureen was to visit them in a week’s time and when Deborah had admired a crocodile handbag he had bought it for her without hesitation. He had bought her a car too—a Fiat 500—and opened accounts at all the larger shops for her. He was generous to a fault, and she repaid him in the only ways she knew how; by breakfasting with him each morning even though he was immersed in his post which she opened for him, and after he had gone, sorted for his secretary to attend to when she came during the morning. And she was always waiting for him when he got home in the evenings, sitting with Smith in the garden or reading in the sitting room. She wasn’t sure if this was what he wanted her to do, and it was difficult to tell because he was unfailingly courteous to her, but at least she was there if he should want to talk. In a week or two, when she knew him a little better, she would ask him.
She applied herself to her Dutch grammar again and twiddled Smith’s ears gently. There was still an hour before Wim would bring the tea and Gerard had said that he would be late that evening. She sighed and began to worry her way through the past tense of the verb to be.