Tempestuous April. Бетти Нилс

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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. СКАЧАТЬ