by Betty Neels
Arabella went straight to the children, so that Hanneke and Larissa could be relieved at last, and when later she went to dinner, it was to find that the doctor had gone out. She sat at table with Larissa, telling her about her purchases, conscious that she would have liked him to have been there too to share the reminiscences of the day with all its pleasures. It was then that the unwelcome thought that perhaps the pleasures had been a little tame for him crossed her mind. Probably he had been doing her a kindness, because he was a kind man, and now, relieved of that duty, he had gone off to enjoy himself in a more sophisticated manner. She found herself wondering who he was with.
CHAPTER FIVE
A WEEK went by, and as the weather had turned to rain and wind, bringing with them the first chill of autumn, Arabella had every excuse to wear the new mackintosh, and on occasion, the new dresses as well. As for the children, they were fitted out, to their delight, with all-enveloping capes, so that, well wrapped up, they could be wheeled out each day. They had improved steadily—the effects of the accident were wearing off; their movements were no longer as jerky and unco-ordinated, and although their speech was slow and sometimes very indistinct, their intelligence was as keen as it ever had been. And Arabella, when the three of them were alone, encouraged them to talk—she read to them too, from a book of Hans Andersen’s Fairy Tales she had found on one of the bookshelves, and worked away at their exercises. It was a quiet, almost monotonous life, or would have been but for Larissa’s gay company, for the two girls saw a good deal of each other even though Larissa had a busy social life of her own as well as doing her share of the children’s chores.
Very often there were friends for lunch, but often too, Arabella found herself lunching alone in the dining room with George for company, for the doctor, although he came home at midday when there were guests, seldom put in an appearance otherwise, and if he did, and found her on her own, he almost always excused himself the moment the meal was finished, and although he made conversation while they ate, she had the impression that he was impatient to be gone. She had worried about this at first and then accepted it philosophically, for had not her aunt told her on a number of occasions that men, especially younger men, liked a woman to entertain them with light conversation, especially at meals, and Arabella was aware that she had no light conversation; she was too conscious of the stammer. Probably she bored the doctor stiff.
It was a day or so after she had come to this unhappy conclusion that she was crossing the hall on her way out for an hour, after seeing the children safely on to their beds and the faithful Hanneke in charge, when the sitting room door opened and a girl she hadn’t seen before came out. One of Larissa’s friends—or perhaps the doctor’s. Arabella smiled at her on her way to the door, but before she could reach it, the girl spoke.
‘The mouse!’ she exclaimed in passable English. ‘I would have known you anywhere—Gideon was right; he said that you were a mouse to look at and a mouselike companion.’ She laughed gently and the sound grated on Arabella’s affronted ears. ‘Also that you stammer—that must be a great affliction to you.’
Arabella willed herself to speak unhesitatingly and achieved a: ‘N-no, it’s n-not, you see, I’m u-used t-to it.’
‘Yes? But perhaps you have friends with much patience?’
Arabella studied the girl. She was very pretty, older than herself and expertly made up, with fair hair cut short like a boy’s and way-out clothes. Surely not the doctor’s cup of tea? But she didn’t know that; she knew very little about him—perhaps he liked fashion-plates with unkind tongues. She said quietly, holding back a fast rising temper: ‘I don’t think my f-friends n-notice that I stammer,’ and even achieved a smile as she opened the door and went out into the drizzle.
At dinner that evening she treated the doctor with such an icy politeness that it was inevitable that he should waylay her as she went to make sure that the children were sleeping before she joined him and his sister for coffee in the sitting room. He had followed her soft-footed and stopped her as she reached the door by laying a hand on her shoulder to turn her round to face him. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ he wanted to know. ‘Don’t you feel well?’
She tried to ignore the hand. ‘Very well, thank you, Doctor.’
‘Ah—so it’s temper, is it? Someone has ruffled your feathers.’
Her usually gentle eyes sparkled with anger. ‘You mean fur, surely? M-mouse fur.’
He didn’t take his hand away, indeed, its fellow pinned down her other shoulder with a gentle grip which defied the tentative wriggle with which she had tried to free herself. ‘Do I? I don’t know, you tell me.’
She answered with a decided snap: ‘N-no, I w-won’t! It’ll t-take too long, b-because I s-stammer.’
His eyes narrowed. ‘Someone said that? They called you a mouse, they—jeered, perhaps, at your stammer?’
‘You did.’
He shook his head. ‘I would never jeer at you, Arabella. Perhaps I have called you a mouse from time to time, I may even have mentioned your stammer, or passed some remark when it was mentioned in my hearing. No, someone, hearing me, twisted my words into jeers and pity. Is that it?’ He gave her a small shake. ‘Who was it?’
‘A very pretty girl with short hair and lovely way-out clothes, who was here this afternoon,’ mumbled Arabella. ‘One of your girl-friends, I daresay,’ she added crossly.
His eyes widened with laughter. ‘One of them? I am flattered, Arabella. I think I know who you mean, though Elsa van Oppen, who is not, I might add, one of my girl-friends.’ He grinned suddenly and disarmingly, ‘Just at the moment I haven’t a girl-friend, although I am beginning to think…’ He bent his head and kissed her lightly on her mouth, turned her round, opened the door and gave her a gentle push. ‘Get along with you, Arabella,’ he said in a voice which might have been an older brother’s.
When she went back to the sitting room ten minutes later he had gone out, which was a good thing, for she felt, to her surprise, shy at seeing him again. Despite her homely little face she had been kissed on a number of occasions, but never for the right reasons; because it was Christmas, and the housemen at Wickham’s went round kissing everyone from old Sister Blake who was due to retire, to the newest student nurse; by casual friends of the family, overcome by some event which had nothing to do with herself, or by one of Hilary’s admirers, carried away by feelings which she herself had never engendered. But the doctor’s kiss, casual as it was, had stirred her strangely.
He was sitting alone at breakfast the next morning though, with a pile of letters to read. She wished him good morning, received a cup of coffee from him and took a roll from the bread basket he offered her, an open letter still clutched in his other hand. She put the roll on her plate and sat staring at it, and then, anxious to appear normal, buttered some of it and started her breakfast. What a ridiculous, unlikely place in which to make such a monumental discovery, she was thinking; she had always imagined that people fell in love on moonlight nights, or on a dance floor during the last waltz, even drifting along a river in a canoe—not at the breakfast table at eight o’clock in the morning. For that was what she had done; fallen in love with the doctor. That was why she had been so happy, she supposed. She sipped her coffee and knew that she wasn’t going to be quite as happy as that any more. She and the doctor got on very well together, but that was all, at least on his side. She would have to take care.
‘Why are you frowning?’ asked the doctor suddenly, ‘Are the children worrying you?’
‘No—they’re fine, I was just planning our day.’ She smiled at him across the expanse of white damask between them. ‘It’s tomorrow that they are to be X-rayed, isn’t it?’
He had picked up another letter. ‘Yes—ten o’clock. There will be an ambulance here at half past nine.’ He began to read, forgetting her at once.
The children regarded the visit to the hospital as an outing; they were boisterous at the very idea of it and consequently jerki
er than usual in their movements. But they had no objection to being X-rayed—the whole business went off a great deal better than Arabella had dared to hope. She took them back to the doctor’s house in time for their midday dinner, without having set eyes on Doctor van der Vorst. He wasn’t at lunch either, and although Larissa was chatty about the children and her own morning, she had nothing to say about her brother. It was absurd, thought Arabella, that she found it quite impossible to mention him, just because she had fallen in love with him. She would have to adopt a more sensible attitude towards the situation if she was to pass the remaining days of their stay in any degree of comfort of mind. She was quite unable to think how she should set about this, for just to think of him sent her heart knocking against her ribs and a pleasant tingle up her spine.
She wrenched her mind away from the fascination of thinking about him and begged her companion to tell her more of her wedding plans—a surefire subject, calculated to keep them both occupied for any length of time.
It was too chilly to take the children out after their afternoon rest. Arabella thought with regret of the fun they had had in the swimming pool; she doubted if it would be warm enough for them to use it again, for the weather had changed with unexpected suddenness, and even if it should change again, and she doubted that, she and the children would be gone. She put the thought from her, and with Sally on one side of her, and Billy on the other, began on a highly coloured jigsaw puzzle, for even if neither of them could manage to put the pieces together, they were both expert at seeing where they should go. In the resulting clamorous directions, which took time and patience to understand, Arabella quite failed to hear the door open and the doctor come in.
She was only aware of him when a large, well-kept hand came down over her shoulder, took the piece she was holding from her, and fitted it in where it should go. ‘Like life,’ commented Doctor van der Vorst in his pleasant, lazy voice. ‘We fuss and fret to get the pattern just so, when all we need is patience until what we are looking for turns up under our hands.’
Arabella didn’t understand him in the least, but it was a nice safe subject; she was on the point of embarking on a chat about puzzles in general and this one in particular, when he took the wind out of her conversational sails by saying: ‘The children’s X-rays are excellent—couldn’t be better. They are fit to travel, I propose to send them home in a couple of days’ time.’
It was like being knocked on the head; surprise had robbed her of her tongue while thoughts of a completely impractical nature hounded and harried themselves in and out of her head. At length she achieved:
‘Oh—how n-nice! I’m s-so glad.’ She turned brightly to Billy.
‘You hear what the doctor s-says, Billy? We’re g-going home in t-two d-days.’
Her gaiety sounded hollow to her, but no one else seemed to find anything wrong with it, the doctor made a few remarks relevant to the journey and went away again, leaving her to deal with the excited children. Hanneke had a half day free; Arabella gave Billy and Sally their tea in their room, pleading that the news had made them a little agitated, and then because she didn’t care to leave them alone in that state, settled down to read to them. Larissa, who had offered tea before she herself had gone out, had already left the house, and she supposed the doctor to be out too. It was a pity that having refused tea so definitely, she now longed for this refreshment above anything else. True, she had only to ring the bell and ask Emma to bring some, but this was something she couldn’t bring herself to do. Emma had been a tower of strength since the children had come to the house, and heaven knew she must have had a great deal of extra work thrust upon her. Arabella drank a glass of water from the tap in the cloakroom and plunged anew into the Tale of the Pie and the Patty Pan. It wasn’t one of her favourites, but the children loved it.
‘There began to be a pleasant smell of baked mouse,’ she read, and:
‘My dear girl—must you? I have a soft spot for mice, but definitely not baked. Why are you sitting here? Larissa had her tea hours ago, but I have been waiting for you—where is Hanneke?’
Probably no one had told him. She explained patiently about Hanneke going to a cousin’s wedding, which, she had been informed, would go on until well into the night.
He nodded understandingly. ‘They set great store by weddings in this country, you know.’ He was drawing a face on Billy’s plaster, his handsome head close to the small boy’s. He didn’t look up from this absorbing task when he asked: ‘And do you set great store by weddings, Arabella?’
She said, ‘Yes, I do,’ and then, carried away on a wave of recklessness: ‘And orange blossom and proposals and f-falling in l-love.’ She stopped abruptly, aware that she sounded like a fool.
He added a heavy moustache to the face and a pair of outstanding ears. ‘So do I,’ he told her placidly as he got up and rang the wall bell by the fireplace, and when Emma had come and he had spoken to her, he asked: ‘Why, if you did not wish to have tea with us, did you not ring? Emma tells me that it was because Hanneke wasn’t here that you remained here—surely you know that you had only to mention this for someone to relieve you for half an hour?’
‘Yes, I kn-know, but Emma has s-so much to do—she has no t-time to s-spare—I was quite c-comfortable…’
‘My dear girl, you don’t suppose that this house is run by Emma and Hanneke alone, do you? But perhaps you do, for you see very little of the place other than this room and the sitting room and dining room. There is Juffrouw Blind who comes each day to clean, besides another niece of Emma’s who helps her in the kitchen. Either of these ladies would have been perfectly willing to sit with the children.’
‘Well, I didn’t know that, did I?’ Arabella answered snappishly, and was instantly contrite at his warm:
‘No—how could you? I should have thought of such things, especially when Larissa is out.’ He turned to speak to Emma, still waiting beside him. ‘Emma will take tea into the sitting room and Juffrouw Blind will sit with the children.’
So Arabella had her tea, and fingers of hot buttered toast with it, not to mention tiny, paper-thin biscuits and a rich fruit cake, the latter especially for the doctor’s benefit because he had a strong partiality for it. They talked comfortable nothings and not a word was said about the journey. Afterwards Arabella wondered uneasily if she had talked too much about herself. The doctor hadn’t seemed to ask questions, but she had found herself telling him about her parents and her life with her aunt and uncle, but not, if her memory served her faithfully, very much about Hilary, for she had been conscious of a strong desire—quite hopeless, she realized—to keep the doctor to herself, and once Hilary had found out about him she was quite capable of finding a way to meet him. And at dinner that evening, very aware of his large, amiable presence at the head of the table, her determination to keep these few weeks in his house as a secret memory became even stronger. She had mentioned him in her letters home, but she had never described him, she hoped now that her family, and especially Hilary, would imagine him to be dull and middle-aged.
She speared a forkful of Emma’s delicious Peach Melba and then let it fall again at the doctor’s soft enquiry: ‘Deep thinking, Arabella? What about, or should I not ask?’
She said almost guiltily: ‘Nothing…that is…’ she searched feverishly for some lighthearted reply and achieved only another, ‘nothing.’
He was far too nice to tease her; he began to talk of something else immediately, and she loved him, if that were possible, a little more for his tactful kindness.
It wasn’t until late the following evening that she saw him again, for he had been from home all day. She had had her bath, brushed her hair and hopefully applied a cream to her face which guaranteed to keep it youthful for ever; now she was pottering silently about the children’s room, getting out clean clothes for the morning. When there was a light tap on the door, she called a soft ‘come in’, supposing it to be Larissa.
It wasn’t Larissa but the doctor,
who glanced at her briefly. ‘Hullo—sorry to bother you at so late an hour. Can you be ready to leave after lunch tomorrow?’
She stood by the pillow cupboard, quite dwarfed by its carved magnificence, her arms full of small garments. Her heart, surprised at the sight of him, had tripped and raced on happily; now it hung like a leaden thing in her chest. She said with care, because she didn’t want to stammer: ‘Yes, of course. I can pack in a very short time and be ready to leave when you wish—we haven’t much with us. Are the children to know?’
He didn’t answer her at once, but stood leaning against the wall, his hands in his pockets. ‘Not caught unawares, Arabella?’ he asked. And when she didn’t answer him: ‘I think the children might be told after breakfast, don’t you? See that they have a simple lunch—they’ll travel better that way. They should be home for their supper.’
‘Home?’
‘Wickham’s. They will have a check-up there and go home the next day. It will be a long journey for them.’
A very long journey, she thought sadly, taking me away from you for the rest of my life.
He strolled nearer, to stand before her studying her intently.
‘You have beautiful hair,’ he said at length. And indeed, in the subdued light from the one lamp she had switched on, its mousiness had taken on a pleasant soft brown and there was no denying its length.
‘What’s that on your face?’ he wanted to know.
‘A nourishing cream,’ she explained seriously. ‘It’s to k-keep me y-young.’
He gave a whispered bellow of laughter. ‘But you are young, dear girl.’ He paused. ‘Do you know how old I am?’
She shook her head. ‘No.’ She smiled suddenly and a dimple showed briefly in one faintly pink cheek. ‘Would you like to borrow some of my cream?’
She hadn’t noticed him move, but now he was as close as he could get.
