A Matter of Chance

They left Afsluitdijk behind them and he slowed the car through Franeker and Leeuwarden and slowed it still more as they neared the village. Cressida, mindful of her manners, had sustained a conversation throughout the latter part of their journey; she would dearly have loved to sulk, but that would have been childish and got her nowhere; dignity was the thing. It made her sit up very straight beside him and talk nothings in a high voice, hurrying from one harmless topic to the next, giving him no time to do more than answer briefly to each well-tried platitude which passed her lips. Dignity, too, helped her to mount the steps to the front door beside him, still talking, to pause at the door and plunge into stilted thanks which he ruthlessly interrupted.

‘I’m not coming in,’ he told her. ‘I had thought that we might have dined together, but at the rate you are going, you would have had no social conversation left, and by the time we had finished the soup you would have been hoarse.’

Cressida’s mouth was open to speak her mind, but she didn’t get the chance. ‘My fault,’ he said, and didn’t tell her why, and when Juffrouw Naald opened the door he turned without a word and went back to the car. Cressida went indoors feeling as though she had been dropped from a great height and had the breath knocked out of her. It wasn’t a nice sensation and she didn’t go too deeply into it. She had her supper with the two doctors and went to bed early, expecting to lie awake with her disturbing thoughts, but surprisingly she didn’t; she was conscious of only one vivid memory; Doctor van der Teile’s lonely back as he had walked away from her on the doorstep.

CHAPTER THREE

THE FIRST THING she thought of when she woke up the next morning was Doctor van der Teile, and the second that he had made no mention of the Royal General, nor asked her a single question about herself. She got up and dressed rapidly, telling herself rather peevishly that quite likely he wasn’t in the least interested in her—and why should she mind that? She wasn’t interested in him. She scowled horribly at her lovely reflection and went downstairs to thump her typewriter with such speed and energy that Doctor van Blom, when he joined her presently, begged her not to tire herself out so early in the day.

They made good progress during the next few days; the book was taking shape, and Doctor van Blom, now that there was someone to sort out his muddle of notes and reduce his flowery prose to matter-of-fact English, was happier than ever. He worked too hard, of course; he and Doctor Herrima had scant leisure and quite often not enough sleep, and Cressida found herself wondering if their senior partner realised just how busy they were. And he? Most likely leading the well-ordered life of a top consultant, with only urgent cases disturbing his nights; junior doctors to do the spadework for him in hospital and almost certainly a nurse and secretary to help him in his consulting rooms. She worried away about it while it nagged the back of her mind, and when one morning, just as she was putting the finishing touches to a chapter before her coffee break, she heard the Bentley slide to a standstill outside the house, she got to her feet with the half-formed resolve to speak to him about it eddying around her head.

But half way to the door she paused. Mingled with the doctor’s deep voice, addressing Juffrouw Naald at the door, was a woman’s voice, light and laughing, saying something which made the doctor laugh in his turn. Cressida went back to her desk and put a clean sheet of paper in her machine and began on the next chapter. She would give coffee a miss; she had plenty of work to get on with and it would be a frightful waste of time to go to the sitting-room…the door opened and Doctor van Blom put his elderly head round it. ‘Cressida, coffee is ready—why do you not come?’

‘Well, I thought I’d get on with the next chapter—it’s going so well…’

‘All the more reason for you to take a little break.’ He smiled and held the door wide so that she had no choice but to go with him.

The moment she entered the sitting-room she wished that she hadn’t come; the woman sitting by the stove was everything that she had always wanted to be; her pretty face exquisitely made up, a fur coat tossed carelessly over a chair, a velvet trifle arranged just so on her fair hair, the hands she held out to the warmth white and narrow with pink nails. Cressida was all at once conscious of her hastily powdered face, and hair put up with more speed than style, and her tweed skirt, well cut though it was and its matching angora jumper, were no match for the visitor’s cashmere two-piece.