Tempestuous April. Betty Neels
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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 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