A Matter of Chance

‘You’ve made it up with your Jim,’ declared Cressida.

Molly caught her by the arm. ‘Yes, I have, isn’t it super? But that isn’t all.’

She had dragged Cressida down the street towards the café. ‘That job—the one I said I’d take in Holland—well, I can’t go now, can I? I mean, Jim wants us to get married straight away—so I thought of you…’ She had paused maddeningly as they entered the café, found a table and ordered coffee. ‘You can type, you told me so—and the job is about the alimentary system and its disorders, and you’ve had a medical ward…don’t you see? It’s just made for you.’

‘But I can’t,’ said Cressida. ‘I don’t know this doctor and he doesn’t know me.’

Molly opened her handbag and dragged out a small pile of letters. ‘Here are all the letters so’s you can see that it really is a job—and my uncle says if you could go and see him—he lives in Hampstead, he’s got a practice there—this afternoon after surgery…’ She had sugared her coffee and continued: ‘Oh, you must! You wanted something interesting and different, didn’t you? Uncle says it would take about six or seven weeks, and the pay’s good. At least go and see my uncle.’

And Cressida had said yes quickly before she could change her mind.

Molly’s uncle had been nice; elderly and a little slow, and although he had asked her a great many questions, he had been so nice about it that she hadn’t minded answering them. ‘It seems to me,’ he told her finally, ‘that this job is just what you need. I appreciate your need to get away, Miss Bingley, and Doctor van Blom is most anxious to find someone who can type adequately as well as give him occasional help with the turn of a phrase and so on.’ He smiled kindly. ‘May I take it that you will help him out?’

Cressida had said that yes, she would like to very much, but she would have to get her passport renewed and pack a few things. He had nodded and said, ‘Quite—could you be ready in four or five days’ time?’

They had made their arrangements there and then, but it was Cressida who had decided to leave two days earlier and spend them in Amsterdam. One of her friends at the hospital gave her the name of the hotel and she had had no difficulty in getting a room.

She had spent her two days exploring the city, spending hours in the museums, walking endlessly beside the canals, looking at the old houses which lined their banks, eating frugally at lunch bars, and window-shopping. And now, in the morning, she would catch a train to Leeuwarden where she would be met.

She glanced at the clock and began to coil her hair rapidly; the dining room was only open for a short time each evening; the hotel guests were expected to dine out, the snacks were for those who had just arrived, or who, for some reason or other, were going to spend their evening in their rooms.

There was a very small room by the entrance where one could get a drink or coffee, but Cressida had never seen anyone in it. She did her face and washed her hands and went down the staircase once more, to the basement, where she sat down at a table for one, drank the coffee she ordered and ate two ham rolls. They were excellent, but she had very little appetite. Indeed, she had grown thin during the last few weeks; meals, like so many other things, had become just something to get through as best she might. She supposed that in time everything would be normal again, as the incoming rector had assured her when he had called to make himself known to her and arrange to move into the rectory. Time he had said, healed everything, and she hadn’t disputed that fact; only time, when it lay heavy, took a long time to pass.

She went back to her room presently and packed her case, had a shower in the cramped cabinet down the passage, and got into bed. She wasn’t sleepy, but bed gave an illusion of cosiness. She had a sudden, vivid memory of the sitting room in her old home, with a log fire blazing in the hearth and the shabby armchairs pulled close to it, and for a moment she couldn’t see the map she was studying for the tears in her eyes, but she brushed them away resolutely and applied herself once more to its perusal. Molly’s uncle had told her that Doctor van Blom lived in a village between Groningen and Leeuwarden, he had told her the name too, but the two cities were thirty miles apart and from the numerous villages between, not one of their peculiar-looking names rang a bell of recognition. She would have to wait and see.

The tram Cressida took to the station in the morning was packed with early morning workers, but the train, when she eventually found the right platform and caught it by the skin of her teeth, was almost empty. She sat in her corner seat, watching the small flat fields give way to the woods and heaths of the Veluwe and then fields again, but now they had become wide and rolling and the towns less frequent. She had chosen to go via Groningen, and that city, when the train reached it, looked invitingly picturesque as well as large and bustling. As the train pulled away from the station she craned her neck to see the last of its spires and towers and then turned to look at the countryside with some eagerness. Somewhere close by was the village where she was to spend the next few weeks. She stared at the strange names on the station boards as they passed, but both Dutch and Friesian names were quite incomprehensible to her. However, she had been told not to worry about the language; Doctor van Blom spoke excellent English and the people she would meet would have a sufficient knowledge of it to make her lack of Dutch no problem at all.

She got out at Leeuwarden station with much the same feeling as she experienced when she entered a dentist’s surgery; her future employer might be bad-tempered, impatient, a slave-driver… She stood under the clock on the platform as she had been told to do, and looked around her, and a great many people looked back at her, for she was quite eye-catching, her beautiful face pale with excitement and apprehension, her nicely cut tweed coat showing off her slenderness to perfection, the brown fur hat perched on top of her shining bun of hair highlighting its vivid darkness.

She didn’t have to wait long; from the people around her there emerged a short, stout man in his late middle years. He came straight at her, beaming all over his nice round face, beginning to talk to her long before he reached her. ‘Miss Bingley—Miss Cressida Bingley—what a charming name! I am delighted to welcome you; you see that I knew you at once.’ He was pumping her arm up and down as he spoke. ‘My old friend Doctor Mills described you so well…you have luggage with you? This case only? Then we will go to the car at once and return to my home as quickly as possible. We will drink coffee together and talk of my book which I am so anxious to complete.’

He walked as he talked, his hand on her arm, edging her towards the station entrance where a splendidly kept dark blue Chevrolet stood. He ushered her into the front seat, put her luggage in the boot and got into the driving seat. ‘Fifteen of your English miles,’ he observed, ‘we shall be there very shortly.’

But not as shortly as all that, Cressida discovered. They drove very slowly through the city, a busy, bustling place she wanted to explore, and she wondered if there was something about Dutch motoring laws she didn’t know—a twenty-mile speed limit in towns, for instance, and yet everyone else was travelling twice as fast. Perhaps her new employer was just a very cautious driver. On the outskirts of Leeuwarden he achieved a steady thirty, while cars flashed past at thrice that speed and Cressida, who in happier times had driven her father’s car rather well, longed to stretch out a neatly booted foot and slam it down on the accelerator, for it seemed to her a crying shame to own such a powerful car and not make use of it. She kept her itching foot still and watched the slowly passing scenery while she answered her companion’s stream of questions. Even if he was a shocking driver, he was rather an old dear.

They turned off the main road presently and trickled cautiously down a narrow lane. ‘Eestrum,’ the doctor informed her as they approached and passed through a smallish village. ‘We go to Augustinusga, that is where I live, so well placed between Leeuwarden and Groningen. It is convenient for me—and my partners—to travel to either place.’

‘Partners?’ asked Cressida. No one had mentioned them.

‘Doctor Herrima—we share a house and a housekeeper—and Doctor van der Teile, who is the senior partner and does not live in the village. We consult him, you understand; all the more difficult cases, but for the most of the time he is either at Leeuwarden or Groningen, for he has beds in both hospitals as well as consulting rooms. He is a distinguished physician and travels a good deal.’

Cressida murmured politely; he would be a very elderly man, she imagined, for Doctor van Blom was certainly in his sixties and this other partner was the senior…the third partner would be the youngest and the junior. The three bears; she suppressed a giggle.

Her companion had dropped the car’s speed to a smart walking pace and began pointing out local landmarks. A windmill, standing lonely in the wintry fields by a canal, a little wood on the other side of the water, bare and dull in the morning’s grey bleakness, but, she was assured, a charming place in the spring. An austere red brick church with plain glass windows came into view and a cosy little house beside it. ‘The dominee and his wife live there,’ explained Doctor van Blom. ‘A good friend of ours, and here, at the beginning of the village, is an excellent example of our Friesian farms.’

Cressida was still craning her neck to see the last of it as they entered the village itself, circled the square lined with houses and stopped cautiously outside one of them, a red brick house with its door exactly in the centre and its windows arranged across its face in mathematical rows. She hoped it wasn’t as plain inside as it was out, and had her hope realised; the front door opened on to a long, narrow hall, lofty-ceilinged and a little dark and from which numerous doors opened. Doctor van Blom threw open the first of these and ushered her in, at the same time raising his voice in a mild bellow. This was instantly answered in person by his housekeeper, a tall, thin woman, no longer young but with such a forceful air about her that one could have imagined her barely in her prime. She smiled at the doctor, smiled at Cressida, shook her hand and followed them into what was obviously the sitting-room, comfortably furnished, the leather chairs a little shabby perhaps, but there was some beautiful china and silver lying around on shelves and tables, rather as though someone had just been admiring the objects and set them down haphazardly. There were shelves of books, too, and an old-fashioned stove giving off a most welcome heat.

Cressida took the chair she was offered and surrendered her coat to the housekeeper, her unhappy heart much cheered by her kindly reception, and when Juffrouw Naald went away and came back a moment later with a tray laden with coffee-cups and biscuits, she partook of these refreshments with more pleasure than she had felt for some time.

They had been sitting for perhaps ten minutes when the door opened and a tall, thin man, about the same age as Doctor van Blom, came in. ‘My partner, Doctor Herrima,’ her employer told her, and after introductions had been made, Cressida found herself sitting between the two of them, filling their coffee-cups and answering their gentle questions.

‘A pretty girl,’ observed Doctor Herrima to no one in particular, ‘a very pretty girl.’ He looked keenly at her. ‘And you can type, I understand?’

She assured him that she could.

‘You are also a nurse?’

‘Oh, yes,’ she told him, ‘I’ve been trained for more than four years.’

He looked across at his partner. ‘A splendid choice.’ And when his partner nodded happily, ‘What do you think of our country, Miss Bingley?’

Cressida put down her cup. ‘Well, I haven’t seen a great deal of it. Two days in Amsterdam and then coming here by train…’

‘You must see Leeuwarden and Groningen—now there are two magnificent centuries-old cities. Do you drive?’ It was Doctor van Blom who spoke.

‘Yes—we had a rather elderly Morris.’

‘Ah.’ He pondered this for a minute. ‘My car is a powerful one, as you may have noticed, and Doctor Herrima runs a BMW. I do not know if you feel competent to drive either of them?’ He sounded doubtful.

Cressida thought of the snail-like pace at which they had driven from Leeuwarden and replied soberly that she thought she would be capable of driving either of the cars. Indeed, the idea of driving the Chev on one of the excellent motorways appealed to her very much: to drive and drive and drive, away from her grief and loneliness.

She shut her mind to the idea and made a suitably admiring remark about the car, to which Doctor van Blom responded with instant eagerness. They were two dears, she decided; unworldly and content in their rather cluttered, pleasant sitting-room.

She asked diffidently about their practice and was told at some length and sometimes twice over that it was a large one, covering a great number of outlying villages and farms; that they had a baby clinic once a week, a small surgery for emergencies, and dealt with a wide variety of patients.

‘There are quite a number of accidents,’ explained Doctor van Blom, ‘farms, you know—they have these modern machines, some of them are complicated and if a farm worker doesn’t understand what he is doing…’ He gave a little shrug. ‘And then of course there are those who live some way away, and they tend to delay sending for us or coming to the surgery, and sometimes the injury or illness is made much worse in consequence. We have splendid hospitals, of course, and our senior partner is always available for consultation.’ He wagged his balding head. ‘A very clever man,’ he stated, ‘as well as our great friend. He had an English godfather, and you will find his English excellent.’

Cressida dismissed this paragon with a nice smile and asked about the book. ‘When would you like me to start?’ she wanted to know.

‘You feel that you could start today? Splendid, Miss Bingley—perhaps after lunch?’

‘That would be fine, and please will you call me Cressida?’

They both beamed at her. ‘With pleasure. And now you would like to go to your room and unpack. We have lunch at noon—is that time enough for you to settle in?’

They escorted her to the door, cried in unison for Juffrouw Naald, and stood watching her as she trod up the steep, uncarpeted stairs to the floor above, with the housekeeper leading the way.

Her room was in the front of the house, a corner room with big windows so that she had a wide view of the square below and the houses around it. It was nicely furnished if a trifle heavily, with Second Empire mahogany bed, matching chest of drawers, a ponderous dressing table and an enormous clothes closet. There was a small easy chair by the window and a writing table and a little shelf of books. Leading from it was a well-appointed bathroom; after the tiny room in Aunt Emily’s cottage, it seemed like luxury to Cressida. Someone had put chrysanthemums in a vase by the bed too; she smiled and touched them and looked at Juffrouw Naald who smiled and nodded and said something Cressida couldn’t understand, but it sounded friendly.

When the housekeeper had gone, Cressida unpacked quickly, tidied her hair and did her face and repaired downstairs, to find both doctors waiting for her.

‘We drink Jenever, but for you we have sherry—shall we take a glass now before lunch? You are hungry?’

They both stood looking at her with eager kindness and she hastened to assure them that she was—a pleasant sensation after weeks of not bothering what she ate. She accompanied them into the dining-room, a lofty apartment, furnished with mahogany as solid as her bedroom was and with a crimson carpet underfoot and crimson curtains at its windows, a suitable background for the snow-white tablecloth and shining silver. The meal was a simple one; the doctors, they assured her, liked their dinner in the evening after surgery, but she found the soup, dish of cold meats and the basket of various breads more than sufficient. There was no surgery that afternoon, she was told, so that there was no need for them to hurry over their meal, and after it she and Doctor van Blom could retire to his study while Doctor Herrima did the afternoon round. If he explained his work, suggested the doctor, perhaps she might make a start on sorting out the manuscript and preparing it for typing? She could have the evening too, while he took surgery. He passed his cup for more coffee and while she was pouring it, the door opened and in walked the man who had taken her back to her hotel in Amsterdam the day before. Cressida put down the coffee-pot carefully, and with the cup and saucer still in her hand, sat staring at him, her pretty mouth very slightly open.

‘Giles,’ boomed Doctor van Blom, ‘what good fortune—now you can meet the young lady who is to help me with my book—Miss Cressida Bingley.’ He waved a hand. ‘Cressida, this is our senior partner, Doctor van der Teile.’

He closed the door after him and crossed over to her chair. ‘You look surprised,’ he observed blandly.