Tempestuous April

by Betty Neels

  They still had a two-hour journey before them, Harriet settled herself by the window once more, listening to Sieske’s unhurried voice and watching the subtle changing of the countryside. It began to look very like the New Forest, with stretches of heath and charming little woods; there were glimpses of houses too, not large, but having an air of luxury, each set in its own immaculate grounds. Presently the woods and heathland gave way in their turn to rolling grassland. The farms looked large and prosperous, even the cows looked plumply outsize and although there were plenty of villages and towns there was a refreshing lack of factories.

  Sieske’s father was waiting at Leeuwarden, a large, very tall man with thick grey hair, a neat moustache and an elegant Van Dyke beard. He had a round merry face, but his eyes were shrewd behind the horn-rimmed glasses he wore. He greeted Sieske with a bear-like hug and a flow of incomprehensible words, but as he turned to shake Harriet’s hand, she was relieved to find that his English was almost as good as her own.

  ‘You are most welcome, Harriet,’ he said warmly. ‘We hope that you will have a pleasant holiday with us—and now we will go home; Mother is waiting—she is most excited, but she would not come with me because everything has to be ready for you when you arrive.’

  He led the way over to a BMW, and Harriet looked at it with an appreciative eye as they got in. She gazed around her as they went through Leeuwarden, glimpsing small side streets that would be fun to explore. Dr Van Minnen seemed to read her thoughts, for without taking his eyes off the road, he said, ‘You shall come here, Harriet, and look around one day soon. There is a great deal to see as well as a museum of which we are very proud.’

  Franeker, Sieske’s home, was only a short distance from Leeuwarden; in less than twenty minutes they were slowing down past a large church and turning into the main street of the charming little town.

  The doctor lived in a large house overlooking a tree-lined canal which ran between narrow cobbled streets lined with buildings from another era. No two houses were alike, except in a shared dignity of age and beauty. Harriet got out of the car and stood gaping at the variety of rooftops. She would have liked to have asked about them, but Sieske was already at the great wooden door with its imposing fanlight, and the doctor caught hold of her arm and hurried her inside behind his daughter, to be greeted by his wife. Mevrouw Van Minnen was very like her daughter and still remarkably youthful—there was no hint of grey in her pale blonde hair and her eyes were as bright a blue as Sieske’s; she was a big woman, but there was nothing middle-aged in her brisk movements. The next hour or so was taken up most agreeably, drinking coffee and eating the crisp little biscuits—sprits—that went with it. There was a great deal of conversation which lost none of its zest by reason of Harriet’s lack of Dutch, and Mevrouw Van Minnen’s scant knowledge of English. Presently they all went upstairs to show Harriet her room—it overlooked the street, so that she could see the canal below, which delighted her; and although it was small it was very comfortable. She unpacked happily; it was, she decided, going to be a delightful holiday. She did her hair and her face and went downstairs to join the family for koffietafel, and ate her bread and cold meat and cheese and omelette with a healthy appetite which called forth delighted surprise from Mevrouw Van Minnen, who had thought she had looked too delicate to do more than peck at her food. Sieske translated this to Harriet, giggling a great deal, and then said in Dutch to her mother:

  ‘Harry isn’t quite what she looks, Moeder. She appears to be a fairy, but she’s not in the least delicate; and of course it notices here, doesn’t it, because we’re all so big.’

  ‘Such a pretty girl, too,’ her mother murmured. ‘I wonder what Aede and Friso will say when they see her.’

  Aede wouldn’t be home until the evening, it seemed, and no one knew what Friso was doing—he had taken the morning surgery so that Dr Van Minnen could go to Leeuwarden—he had presumably gone to his own home. They would see him later, said Mevrouw Van Minnen comfortably, and suggested that the two girls went out for a walk so that Harriet could see something of the town.

  An hour later, the two of them were strolling along looking in the shop windows while Sieske carefully explained the prices. They had reached a particularly interesting display of clocks and jewellery when Sieske suddenly exclaimed, ‘I forgot, I have to buy stamps for Father—the post office is in the next street. Wait here, Harry—you can practise your Dutch in this window—I won’t be a minute.’

  Harriet looked her fill, and then because Sieske still hadn’t come back, went to the edge of the pavement and looked up and down the street. It was surprisingly busy for a small town, with a constant thin stream of traffic. She was standing on the corner outside the beautiful town hall and she watched idly as the various buses and lorries halted by her; the cars were mostly small, so that when an AC 428 Fastback pulled up it caught her attention immediately. There was a girl sitting in the front by the driver—a girl so dark that it was impossible not to notice her amongst the fair-haired giants around the town, thought Harriet; she was quite beautiful too. She turned her head and stared at Harriet with great black eyes which barely noticed her. She looked cross, and Harriet, with that extraordinary feeling that in someone else’s country you can do things you wouldn’t do in your own, stared back openly before transferring her gaze to the driver. He was looking ahead and she studied his profile at her leisure; it was a handsome one, with a domineering nose and a firm chin; his forehead was high and wide and his very fair hair was brushed smoothly back from it. Looking at him, she had the sudden deep conviction that they had met before; 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 g
lasses.

  ‘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 the family assembled. She was just putting the last pin into her hair when there was a knock on the door, and when she called ‘Come in’, Aede put his inquiring head into the room.

  ‘Harriet? Are you ready? I wondered if you would like to put on a coat and come for a quick run in the car—there’s heaps of time.’

  She had already caught up the pink raincoat; it wasn’t raining any more, but it lay handy on a chair and she put it on, saying,

  ‘I’d love to, Aede. But do we tell someone?’

  They were going downstairs. ‘I told Moeder,’ he said. ‘She thought it was a jolly good idea.’

  His car was outside—a Volkswagen and rather battered. Harriet got in, remarking knowledgeably that it was a good car and how long had he had it. This remark triggered off a conversation which lasted them out of Franeker and several miles along the main road. When he turned off, however, she asked, ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Just round the country so that you can see what it is like,’ Aede replied, and turned the car into a still smaller road. The country looked green and pleasant in the spring evening light. The farms stood well apart from each other, each joined to its own huge barn by a narrow corridor at its back. They looked secure and prosperous and very different from the more picturesque, less compact English farms. They passed through several small villages with unpronounceable names in the Fries language, then circled back and crossed the main road again so that they were going towards the coast. On the outskirts of one village there was a large house, with an important front door and neat windows across its face. It had a curved gabled roof and a large garden alive with daffodils and tulips and hyacinths. Harriet cried out in delight, ‘Oh, Aede, stop—please stop! I simply must stare. Will anyone mind?’

  He pulled up obligingly and grinned. ‘No, of course not. It is rather lovely, isn’t it?’

  ‘And the house,’ she breathed, ‘that’s lovely too. How old is it? Who lives there?’

  ‘About 1760, I think, but you can ask Friso next time you see him; it’s his.’

  Harriet turned an astonished face to her companion. ‘You mean Dr Eijsinck? He lives there? All by himself?’

  Aede started the car again. He nodded. ‘Yes, that is, if you don’t count a gardener and a cook and a valet and a housemaid or two. He’s got a great deal of money, you know; he doesn’t need to be a doctor, but his work is the love of his life. That doesn’t mean to say that he doesn’t love girls too,’ he added on a laugh.

  ‘Why doesn’t he marry, then?’ She waited for Aede’s answer. Perhaps Friso was engaged or at least in love; what about that dark girl in his car?

  Aede thought for a moment. ‘I don’t know,’ he said slowly. ‘I asked him once
—oh, a long time ago, and he said he was waiting for the girl.’ He shrugged his wide shoulders. ‘It didn’t make much sense…’ He broke off. ‘Here’s Franeker again; we’re a bit late, but I don’t suppose it will matter.’

  Harriet smiled at him. ‘It was lovely, Aede. I enjoyed every minute of it.’

  He brought the car to a rather abrupt halt in front of the house and they both went inside.

  ‘I’ll be down in a minute,’ said Harriet, and flew upstairs, to throw down her raincoat, look hastily at herself in the mirror and then race downstairs again. Almost at the bottom of the staircase she checked herself abruptly and continued down to the hall with steps as sedate as the voice with which she greeted Dr Eijsinck, whom she had observed at that very moment standing there. Disconcertingly he didn’t answer, and she stood looking up at him—he was in her way, but his size precluded her from passing him unless she pushed by. It seemed a long time before he said reluctantly,