by Betty Neels
She’d had no idea that an antiquarian bookshop could be so busy; she received money, handed over change and parcelled up books for most of the afternoon. She wasn’t of much use selling, but at least she allowed Mr Bell the freedom to talk to his customers and show them his treasures. Hopefully in a few weeks she would be of more use to him.
She was managing quite nicely, he had told her, but she knew that if she wanted to keep the job she would have to learn a great deal as quickly as possible. She closed the door on the last customer and went to fetch her jacket.
Mr Bell was pottering about, putting back books taken off the shelves. ‘A good day, Mary, and we shall be busy tomorrow—Saturday. A different kind of customer, though. I’ll see you in the morning. Goodnight.’
She wished him goodnight too, and he locked the door as she went out. It had been a warm day and the late afternoon was still pleasant, but the streets were crowded with people going home and the traffic was a steady roar.
She took a breath of moderately fresh air and almost choked on it as Professor van Rakesma, appearing apparently from the ground at her feet, said briskly, ‘The car’s round the corner. I’m going to Hampstead; I’ll give you a lift.’
She found her voice. ‘Oh, you startled me. That’s kind of you, but I can get home easily on the underground.’
‘Don’t talk nonsense—it’s the rush hour. Come along.’
She went with him, telling herself that she was a weak fool and at the same time happy to see him again. For the last time, she reminded herself sternly as he ushered her into the comforting depths of the Rolls’s front seat, shut her in and went round the bonnet to get in beside her.
He drove off without fuss and without speaking, and she watched the people hurrying along home and tried to think of something to talk about. Perhaps it would be better to stay silent until they were clear of the worst of the traffic. She was still making up her mind when Professor van Rakesma spoke.
CHAPTER FIVE
‘I MUST find the time to take your sister for that drive I promised,’ said Professor van Rakesma. ‘Will she be at home on Sunday—some time in the morning? Your parents wouldn’t object to her coming with me? We might have lunch somewhere.’
Lucky Polly, thought Mary. ‘I’m sure they wouldn’t mind, and Polly will be over the moon. It’s very kind of you; I don’t suppose you have a great deal of leisure.’
‘Not a great deal, no. How long have you been working for Mr Bell? You left the lady with the two children?’
‘This is my second day.’ She added defiantly, ‘And I like it; I hope I shall be able to stay and get to know a great deal about books. Yes, I left Mrs Bennett; the children were a bit difficult. Perhaps I’m not cut out to look after them.’
‘My dear girl, the sternest of matrons would have found those two a handful. Did the dentist subdue them?’
She smiled. ‘For the rest of the day, yes. I hope they get a nice, kind mother’s help whom they’ll like.’
‘They sound like orphans...’
‘They need someone to love them.’
His gentle grunt was soothing.
When they reached her home he got out to open the door and then the gate to the drive. ‘Thank you for the lift. Shall I ask Polly to come out and you can tell her yourself? She’d like that.’ She went pink. ‘That’s awfully rude; I didn’t mean it like that. Please come in and see her.’
The problem was solved by Polly, running down the drive. Mary turned thankfully to her. ‘Polly, Professor van Rakesma has invited you to go for a drive...’ She held out a hand and had it engulfed in his large cool one. ‘Thank you again; I’ll leave you to arrange things.’
When she had gone into the house Polly said breathlessly, ‘Mary doesn’t know that I’ve already been out with you?’
He smiled and shook his head. ‘I’ve given myself a day off on Sunday; I thought we might go a little further afield this time. Do you suppose you could persuade her to come too? I think a day in the country might do her good.’
‘Oh, she’d love it.’ Her face clouded. ‘But I’m not sure that she’d come; she’s always there on Sundays, to see to the dinner and get tea for Mother and Father.’
‘Well, do your best; perhaps we can persuade her between us.’
Polly swung on the gate. ‘Well, will you bring Richard?’
‘Most certainly—he likes the country.’
He said goodbye then, and drove away, and Polly went indoors. She was a wise child; she said nothing about Mary’s going with them on Sunday.
Professor van Rakesma drove himself back home, wondering what had possessed him to suggest spending a Sunday with a teenager and her stand-offish sister. He could, he reflected, have spent it in the company of friends, or driven himself to the little cottage in Gloucestershire, to potter in its small and beautiful garden with Richard for company. He shrugged his shoulders, turned the car into Cheyne Walk, and stopped before the handsome Regency house where he had a flat.
His man came into the hall-as he went in. He was a young man, with a pleasant but ugly face and a thatch of fair hair. ‘Evening, sir. Your mother’s been on the phone; she said she’d ring around eight o’clock. Dinner in half an hour?’
The professor was leafing through his post. ‘Please, Fred. It’s your evening off, isn’t it?’
‘S’right. Me and Syl are going to see that new film at the cinema.’
‘Splendid. Has she named the day yet?’
‘Boxing Day—got to wait a bit, haven’t I? But you’ll be in Holland, sir, and by the time you get back we’ll be nicely settled in—looking forward to it, she is. Hope there’ll be enough to keep her busy...’
‘I’ve no doubt you’ll find something.’ He looked up, smiling. ‘Something smells good.’
‘Beef en croute—just about ready. I’ve put the drinks in the sitting-room. Richard’s in the garden.’
Professor van Rakesma opened a door at the back of the square hall and entered his sitting-room, a pleasant place comfortably furnished with deep armchairs, small lamp-tables, placed where they were most needed, and glass-fronted cabinets on either side of the Adam fireplace.
He crossed the room and opened the door leading to a small garden beyond, and Richard came bounding in to sit at his feet while he had a drink and finished reading his letters. The last one he read slowly, and then read again.
It was from someone he had known for a number of years in Holland; Ilsa van Hoeven and her husband had been friends of the family, and when they had divorced she had continued to see the van Rakesmas. She was a charming woman, good-looking and most intelligent, and she made no secret of her warm feelings towards him. He supposed that one day he might marry her. It was time that he settled down and she would be a suitable wife.
The thought crossed his mind that he didn’t particularly want a suitable wife, but he dismissed it, finished his drink and crossed the hall to the dining-room, to sit at the oval table with its gleaming silver and elegant china and eat his dinner.
Presently, with Fred gone and the house quiet, he went to his study to work on his book until after midnight. In the morning he would go to the hospital to check on several of his patients and if he wasn’t called to an urgent case he would drive down to the coast to dine with friends.
Mr Bell had said that it would be busy on Saturday, but all the same Mary was surprised at the constant flow of customers. They ignored the expensive first editions and rare volumes, asking for books on fishing, sport of all kinds, history and old maps, and there were a few young women looking through turn-of-the-century books on costumes and manners of that period.
Somehow she scrambled through the day, and when the last customer went through the door she said apologetically, ‘I’m afraid I wasn’t much use, Mr Bell.’
‘On the contrary, you were a great help to me; besides, you have the right temperament. This is the one shop where customers refuse to be hurried, and I saw that you realised that.’ He handed her an e
nvelope. ‘You will suit me well, Mary. I hope that you will stay with me, although I suppose a pretty creature like you will marry and leave me!’
‘Well, I have no one in mind at present,’ she told him, her fingers crossed because that was a whopping lie if ever there was one. ‘I like working here very much, and I’ll learn all that I can as quickly as possible.’
‘Good, good. I’ll see you next Thursday.’ He bade her goodnight and locked the door behind her, and she made her way home, tired and rather hungry. Not that that mattered. She had eighty-five pounds in her purse, and money meant security for another week. It wasn’t only that which made her feel happy; she had seen Professor van Rakesma the day before.
Perhaps it was the afterglow of that happiness which made her agree almost without hesitation to go with Polly when he called for her on Sunday morning. She had no reason to stay at home, for her mother and father were having lunch with friends and there was nothing to keep her.
Sitting in the car beside him, while Polly shared the back seat with Richard, she wasn’t quite sure how she had come to be there. Indeed, she was vague as to which of her two companions had actually invited her to join them, but here she was, prepared to enjoy herself.
It seemed that Professor van Rakesma was prepared to enjoy himself too—answering Polly’s excited questions readily, keeping up a relaxed flow of easy talk but never, she noticed, saying a word about himself.
‘Where are we going?’ asked Polly. She had leaned forward so that her chin was resting on the back of his seat, her safety-belt strained to its limit.
‘I thought somewhere by the Thames would be nice. In Oxfordshire.’
‘But that’s miles away,’ said Polly delightedly.
‘Not so far, and once we’re clear of the suburbs we can use the M4 for a while.’ He glanced at Mary. ‘Do you know that part of the world?’
‘No. Hardly at all. I’ve been to Oxford—’
‘Mary was going to university,’ interrupted Polly. ‘Only, Mother was ill.’
He asked casually, ‘What were you aiming at?’
‘English literature and poetry and, if I could manage it, Anglo-Saxon.’
‘Well, you are in the right place with Mr Bell.’
‘Yes, I’m sure I shall learn a lot with him.’
‘What’s the use of a lot of stuffy books?’ Polly wanted to know. ‘You’d be better to get married, Mary.’
‘There is always that alternative,’ said the professor softly.
She would make some man a good wife, he reflected. Certainly she was an extremely pretty girl, though a bit too stand-offish—perhaps she was shy. He turned his head. ‘We turn off here,’ he told Polly. ‘I do hope you’re hungry.’
The Beetle and Wedge was an old ferry inn by the river. Its garden sloped down to the water and there was a restaurant on the houseboat moored at the end. Professor van Rakesma parked the car, secured Richard on his lead, handed him to Polly and went along to see about a table. He had booked earlier and they were shown on to the houseboat, which was already half filled with people lunching.
Mary thanked heaven that she and Polly had dressed with more care than usual; Polly had even been persuaded to abandon her fashionable heavy boots for sandals. As for Mary, she had eased her feet into a pair of high-heeled sandals that she had bought in the January sales and which pinched, although they were the height of fashion.
They were nipping at her toes now, and she wished she could take them off. But she forgot them soon enough as she studied the menu while they drank their cool drinks—no alcohol, of course, since the professor was driving and Polly was too young, but Mary’s tonic water with its slice of lemon and tinkling ice was just what she wanted.
The set lunch cost thirty pounds, she noted with concern; she couldn’t allow him to pay more than a hundred pounds for the three of them. After all, he was only taking Polly for a drive because she had asked him to.
Perhaps he would have preferred to spend his Sunday with friends, or a friend, she thought darkly, frowning at the thought so that he said casually, ‘I don’t think we’ll have the set lunch—may I order for you both? The Dover sole is excellent, and how about garlic mushrooms first and a salad?’
That’s better, thought Mary, and turned the page. Dover sole under à la carte was almost as much as the whole of the set lunch. Perhaps if she just asked for a salad... She had no chance; he was ordering, asking Polly if she liked French fries or potato croquettes, and the salad when it came was made up of every rare salad vegetable she could think of.
The mushrooms were delicious, and since she had plenty of common sense she ate them with pleasure and a good appetite. She enjoyed the sole too, with an unselfconscious satisfaction which Professor van Rakesma found charming and a little touching. He hadn’t much to say to her, though he joined in Polly’s cheerful chatter, pretending not to see that she was slipping some titbit under the table from time to time to a silently waiting Richard.
Mary, eating ice-cream too delicious to describe in normal language, said, ‘This is a very beautiful place and the river looks charming. It must be very popular.’
‘It is; it’s open all the year too, except for Christmas Day. I’ve been here in winter on a frosty day; it’s worth a visit then.’
‘Did you come with a young lady?’ asked the irrepressible Polly.
He took no notice of Mary’s quick, ‘Hush, Polly, you mustn’t—’
‘Indeed I did. She had never been here and she found it very beautiful.’
‘Was she beautiful too?’ Polly took no notice of Mary’s quick breath.
He didn’t seem to mind her questions. ‘Yes. She doesn’t know England very well, so it was a surprise, you see.’
Ah, here she was, thought Mary. The love of his life, and Dutch with it. She wished suddenly that she hadn’t come, that she would never see him again, would forget him, meet a man—any man—she thought wildly, who would want to marry her and thus put an end to all this nonsense of loving him.
She concentrated on eating the ice-cream, and when he asked her if she would like coffee replied in a composed voice that she would.
They sat for a while when they had finished their meal, watching the boats on the river, until Mary, on edge that he might want to get back to his home, said that perhaps they should get back. ‘Mother and Father will be home by the time we get there,’ she added lamely.
It was mortifying to see how readily he agreed, and this time, when Polly asked if she could sit in front, she was only too glad to share the back seat with Richard who, tired out after a short scamper, put his whiskery little head in her lap and went to sleep.
When they reached the house she invited him in in a voice which, while polite, dared him to accept. Professor van Rakesma, being the man he was, accepted. Being shaken off by the ladies of his acquaintance was something he had never experienced before, and it intrigued him.
He sat in the shabby drawing-room, drinking the tea Mary had made and showing no signs of wishing to leave. Filling the kettle for yet more water for the tea, Mary thumped it on to the stove and Bingo, cleaning his whiskers after his supper, gave her an enquiring glance. ‘Yes, well, all right,’ she said. ‘Only I wish he’d go so I never have to see him again.’
She bore the teapot back and Polly handed round second cups and the last of the Maderia cake which Mary had made early that morning. He had two slices. Anyone would think that he hadn’t had a good lunch, she reflected; now she would have to make another cake, since everyone else was eating it too.
It was a great pity that he and her father had found something in common—John Donne’s poems. The subject lasted them for the best part of an hour until, at length, he said, ‘You must forgive me for outstaying my welcome; it is a pleasure to meet someone with the same enthusiasms as oneself.’
Mr Pagett said, ‘You must come again; I have one or two rather special books you might like to examine. As for John Donne, we have another enthusiast here—Mary.
..’
Professor van Rakesma turned to look at her. ‘Then we must certainly renew our acquaintance and share our opinions,’ he said blandly, and watched her go pink. She muttered something about not having time and he said, still bland, ‘Ah, but one can always find the time for something one wishes to do.’
‘Well, I can’t,’ said Mary, goaded into rudeness so that the pink got deeper.
The professor studied her for a moment, and wondered if she knew how lovely she was when she was annoyed. He thought not. Presently he got up to go, making his farewells with easy good manners, bending his height so that Polly could kiss his cheek and giving Mary a smiling nod and a friendly, ‘A delightful day, Mary; I do hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.’
Watching him drive away, she thought that that was the sort of remark which he could have made equally well to an aunt or some acquaintance whom he wasn’t likely to see again. Well, he wasn’t going to see her again, was he? Not if she could help it.
Professor van Rakesma, driving himself home, considered his day and, since there was no human companion to listen to his musings, addressed Richard, sitting beside him. ‘Quite pleasant,’ he observed. ’In fact I rather enjoyed myself. Polly is a delightful child; it is a pity that Mary is so poker-backed.
‘I wonder why she is so cautious with me. Do I inspire you with fright, Richard? Do I behave like an ogre? It is possible that she just doesn’t like me. If I were an unscrupulous man I might be tempted to do something about that...! When we first met I found her attractive; indeed, I went out of my way to get to know her, didn’t I? I wonder why. The instinct to meet a pretty girl again? Possibly.
‘I must be warned that she does not share my interest.’ He frowned. ‘Not that I have any intention of becoming interested.’
To all of which Richard merely rolled his eyes at his master and then went to sleep.