Tempestuous April. Betty Neels

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СКАЧАТЬ her heart started to race, she wished with all her heart that he would turn and look at her. As though she had shouted her wish out loud at him, he turned his head and she found herself gazing into level grey eyes. It seemed to her that she had known him—a complete stranger—all her life; she smiled with the sudden delight of it, wondering if he felt the same way too. Apparently he did not; there was no expression on his face at all, and she went slowly pink under his cool stare. The traffic ahead of him sorted itself out, and he was gone, leaving her gazing sadly after him; the man who had been in her thoughts for so many years; the reason for her being more than friends with the men she had met. He had been her dream; but dreams didn’t last. A good thing perhaps, as quite obviously she had no part in his; indeed, he had looked at her as though she had been a lamp-post.

      Sieske came back then, and said, ‘Harry, what is it? You look as though you’ve seen a ghost.’

      Harriet turned to walk beside her friend. ‘No, not a ghost.’ She so obviously didn’t want to say any more that Sieske bit off the questions she was going to ask, and started to talk about something quite different.

      Aede arrived after tea—which wasn’t a meal at all, Harriet discovered, just a cup of tea with no milk and a plate of delicate little biscuits. He was like his father, tall and broad, and looked younger than his twenty-five years. He had just qualified as a doctor and was at the hospital at Leeuwarden working as a houseman, and it would be at least another six months before he started to specialize; eventually, of course, he would join his father’s practice. He told Harriet these interesting facts in fluent English, sitting beside her on the comfortable sofa near the stove. He drank the decidedly cool tea without apparently minding in the least, and consumed the remainder of the biscuits. Harriet liked him; he wasn’t as placid as Sieske, but he was obviously good-natured and an excellent companion. They sat around happily talking shop until almost supper time, while Mevrouw Van Minnen, looking almost as young as her daughter, sat in a straight-backed chair by her work table, knitting a sock at speed and managing to take a lion’s share in the talk despite the fact that everything had to be said twice in both languages.

      They sat down to the evening meal soon after seven, with a great deal of laughing and talking. Dr Van Minnen, who had disappeared soon after tea to take his evening surgery, came back in time to dispense an excellent sherry from a beautiful decanter into crystal glasses.

      ‘Where’s Friso?’ inquired his wife. ‘He hasn’t called to see Sieske.’

      The doctor answered her and then repeated his words, this time in English for Harriet’s benefit. ‘My partner has had to go to Dongjum, a small village a few miles from this town—an extended breech, so he’s likely to be there most of the night.’

      Harriet felt a pang of pity for the poor man—she had been told that he didn’t live in Franeker, but in a nearby village close to the sea; he looked after the rural side of the practice while Dr Van Minnen attended his patients in Franeker.

      ‘Is Dr Eijsinck’s share of the practice a large one?’ she asked Aede.

      ‘Hemel, yes—and very scattered, but he’s a glutton for work.’

      And Harriet added a harassed expression and a permanent stoop to the stained waistcoat, and then forgot all about him in the excitement of discussing Sieske’s and Wierd’s engagement party, when their forthcoming marriage would be announced. It was to be a splendid affair, with the burgemeester and the dominee and various colleagues of the doctor coming, as well as a great many young people. It was fortunate that the sitting-room and the drawing-room were connected by folding doors, which could be pushed back, making one room. Harriet sat back, listening quietly and wondering which of her two party dresses she had had the forethought to bring with her she should wear. Every now and then she thought about the man in the AC 428 Fastback.

      The following morning after breakfast, Harriet took the post along to the doctor in his surgery. She hadn’t been there yet, but she had been told the way. She went down the long narrow passage leading to the back of the house and through the little door in the wall opposite the kitchen. She could hear a murmur of sound—shuffling feet, coughs and a baby crying, as she knocked on the surgery door. The doctor was alone, searching through a filing cabinet with concentrated fierceness. His voice was mild enough, however, as he remarked.

      ‘Mevrouw Van Hoeve’s card is here somewhere—the poor woman is in the waiting room, but how can I give her an injection until I check her notes?’

      Harriet put the post down on the desk. It seemed that doctors were all the same the world over.

      ‘I’ve brought your post,’ she said soothingly. ‘If you’ll spell the name to me I’ll look for the card while you see if there’s anything important …’

      Dr Van Minnen gave her a grateful look. ‘I do have an assistant,’ he explained, ‘but she’s on holiday.’

      He sat down with a relieved sigh and picked up the first of his letters, and Harriet started to go through the filing cabinet. Mevrouw Van Hoeve was half-way through the second drawer, filed away under P-S; no wonder she couldn’t be found. Harriet took it out and turned round in triumph to find that the door had opened and a man had come in; he spoke briefly to Dr Van Minnen and stood staring at her with the same cool grey eyes that she had been trying so hard to forget. She stood staring back at him in her turn, clutching the folder to her; her pretty mouth agape, while the bright colour flooded her face.

      Dr Van Minnen glanced up briefly from his desk. ‘Harriet, this is my partner, Friso Eijsinck.’

      The Friso she had imagined disintegrated. This elegant waistcoat had never borne a soup stain in its well-cared-for life; indeed, the whole appearance of its wearer was one of a well-dressed man about town. There was no sign of a stoop either; he was a giant among the giantlike people around her and he wore his great height with a careless arrogance; and as for the harassed expression—she tried her best to imagine him presenting anything but a calm, controlled face to the world, and failed utterly.

      She said, ‘How do you do, Doctor,’ in a voice which would have done credit to one of Miss Austen’s young ladies, and this time she didn’t smile.

      His own, ‘How do you do, Miss Slocombe,’ was uttered in a deep, rather slow voice with a faint impatience in its tones. There was a pause, during which she realized that he was waiting for her to go. She closed the filing cabinet carefully, smiled at Dr Van Minnen, and walked without haste to the door which he was holding open for her, and passed him with no more than a brief glance, her head very high. To her chagrin he wasn’t even looking at her. Outside, with the door closed gently behind her, she stopped and reviewed the brief, disappointing meeting. She doubted if he had looked at her—not to see her, at any rate; he had made her feel in the way, and awkward, and this without saying anything at all. She walked on slowly; perhaps he hated the English, or, she amended honestly, he didn’t like her.

      Sieske was calling her from the top of the house and she went upstairs and put on her clove pink raincoat and tugged its matching hat on to her bright hair, then went shopping with Sieske and her mother.

      Wierd was coming that evening. Harriet spent the afternoon setting Sieske’s hair, and after their tea combed it out and arranged it for her, then stood back to admire her handiwork. What with a pretty hair-do and the prospect of seeing Wierd again, Sieske looked like a large and a very good-looking angel.

      There was no evening surgery that day; they were to meet in the drawing-room for drinks at six-thirty. Harriet went upstairs to change her dress wondering what she was going to do until that time. She suspected that the arrangement had been made so that Sieske and her young man would have some time to themselves before СКАЧАТЬ