Tempestuous April

Harriet abandoned the close scrutiny of her coffee cup. So he had been up all night; being a reasonable young woman she understood how he must have felt when he found her. And the coffee—he had asked if it was hot and she hadn’t even asked him if he wanted a cup. How mean of her—she opened her mouth to say so, caught his eye and knew that he had guessed her intention. Before she could speak, he went on smoothly,

‘I am indebted to—er—Harriet for her help; very competent help too.’

Mevrouw Van Minnen said something, Harriet had no idea what until she heard the word koffie. She opened her mouth once more, feeling guilty, but he was speaking before she could get a word out.

‘What is Dr Eijsinck saying, Sieske?’ she said softly.

Her friend gave a sympathetic giggle. ‘Poor Harry, not understanding a word! He’s explaining that he couldn’t stay for the coffee you had ready for him because he had to go straight back to the twins.’

Harriet had only been in Holland a short time, but already she had realized that hospitality was a built-in feature of the Dutch character—to deny it to anyone was unthinkable. Mevrouw Van Minnen would have been upset. Friso was being magnanimous. The least she could do was to apologize and thank him for his thoughtfulness.

He got up a few minutes later and strolled to the door with a casual parting word which embraced the whole company. She was too shy to get up too and follow him out—it might be days before she saw him again. He had banged the front door behind him when Sieske said urgently,

‘There, I forgot to tell Friso about the flowers for Wednesday! Harry, you’re so much faster than I—run after him, will you? Tell him it’s all right. He’ll understand.’

Harriet reached the pavement just as he was getting into the car. He straightened when he saw her, and stood waiting, his hand still on the car door.

She said, short-breathed, ‘Sieske asked me to give you a message. That it’s all right about the flowers, and that you would understand.’

She stood looking at him and after a moment he gave a glimmer of a smile and said, ‘Oh, yes. Of course. Thanks for reminding me.’

‘I wanted to—It was lucky Sieske asked me. I’m so sorry about this morning—you know, the coffee. It was mean of me. I don’t know why I did it.’ She stopped and frowned, ‘Yes, I do. You weren’t very nice about me being in a dressing-gown, but of course I understand now, you must have been very tired if you were up all night—I daresay you wouldn’t have minded so much if you had had a good night’s sleep,’ she finished ingenuously.

‘No, I don’t suppose I should,’ he agreed gravely. He got into the car, said good-bye rather abruptly, and was gone, leaving her still uncertain as to whether he disliked her or not.

It suddenly mattered very much that she should know, one way or the other.

They were immersed in plans when she got back to the sitting-room. Wierd was coming to luncheon, reiterated Sieske; they would go for a drive, she and Wierd and Harriet and Aede. Dokkum, they decided, with an eye on Harriet’s ignorance of the countryside, and then on to the coast to Oostmahorn, when the boat sailed for the small island of Schiermonnikoog.

They set out about two o’clock, Wierd and Sieske leading the way. It was glorious weather, although the blue sky was still pale and the wind keen. Harriet in a thick tweed suit and a headscarf hoped she would be warm enough; the others seemed to take the wind for granted, but she hadn’t got used to it. It was warm enough in the car, however, and Aede proved to be an excellent guide. By the time they had reached Dokkum, she had mastered a great deal of Friesian history and had even learnt—after a fashion—the Friesian National Anthem, although she thought the translation, ‘Friesian blood, rise up and boil,’ could be improved upon. The others were waiting for them in the little town, and she was taken at once to see the church of St Boniface and then the outside of the Town Hall, with a promise that she should be brought again so that she could see its beautiful, painted council room.

The coast, when they reached it, was a surprise and a contrast. Harriet found it difficult to reconcile the sleepy little town they had just left with the flat shores protected from the sea by the dykes built so patiently by the Friesians over the centuries. Land was still being reclaimed, too. She looked at the expanse of mud, and tried to imagine people living on it in a decade of time; she found it much more to her liking to think of the people who had lived in Dokkum hundreds of years ago, and had gone to the self-same church that she had just visited. She explained this to Aede, who listened carefully.

‘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 to 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,

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