An Unlikely Romance

She turned her head to look at his calm profile. ‘Meet you? In the hall? Why?’

‘I told Mies to have dinner ready for half-past eight…’

‘Who’s Mies?’

‘My housekeeper. I’ve a small house near Harley Street; when I’m over here I have the use of some consulting-rooms there.’ He slowed the car. ‘Here we are at Lawshall.’

The hotel was small, comfortable and welcoming. They ate crumpets swimming in butter and rich fruit cake and drank the contents of the teapot between them, and the professor didn’t mention the endocrine glands once. He talked pleasantly about a great many things, but he didn’t mention their own situation either and Trixie, bursting with unspoken little questions, made all the right kind of remarks and thought about how much she loved him.

They drove on again presently, to reach the hospital with ten minutes to spare. The professor saw her out of the car and walked with her to the entrance. ‘I’ll wait here,’ he told her. ‘I expect to be about an hour.’

He gave her a friendly pat on the shoulder and she said, ‘Very well,’ and walked away towards the nurses’ home entrance because she suspected that he was hiding impatience. In her room she got out of the tweed and combed through her wardrobe, intent on finding something suitable to wear. Not the velvet or the crêpe; she kept those for rare parties. There was a perfectly plain jersey dress buried behind her summer dresses. She had had it for years because it was such a useful colour, nutmeg brown. It had a high round neck and long sleeves and a wide, rather long skirt.

She was ready long before the hour was up so she went down to the sitting-room, relieved to find no one there, and read a yesterday’s newspaper someone had left there. She was doggedly working her way through a long political speech when the warden poked her head round the door.

‘Nurse Doveton, Professor van der Brink-Schaaksma will be ready in five minutes.’ She added severely, ‘I must say I am surprised.’ She eyed Trixie’s heightened colour and sniffed. ‘I didn’t know that you knew him.’

Trixie was pulling on her gloves and making last-minute inspections of her face and handbag. The warden was a sour lady of uncertain years, overflowing with unspoken criticisms of the younger nurses and disliked by them all. Happy in her own small heaven, Trixie wanted everyone else to be happy too.

‘I expect you are,’ she said blithely. ‘I’m a bit surprised myself.’

He was there waiting, and he came across the hall to meet her.

‘Is everything all right?’ she wanted to know. ‘Has she settled in?’

‘Yes, and I think that she will be a good patient.’ He opened the door and they went out to the car and got in.

‘Have you finished for the day?’

He drove out of the forecourt and edged into the evening traffic. ‘Yes. There is nothing much I can do till the morning. I shall have to see her doctor—she’s a private patient—and talk things over with my registrar.’

She had the feeling that just for the moment he had forgotten that she was there. She sat quietly as he drove across London until they reached the quieter streets, lined with tall old houses, leading to equally quiet squares, each with its enclosed garden in the centre.

‘You’re very quiet,’ said the professor suddenly.

‘I was thinking how different this is from Timothy’s…’

‘Indeed yes. My house in Holland is different again. In a small village near Leiden—very quiet. You like the country?’

‘Yes, very much.’

He had turned into a narrow street lined with Georgian houses and he stopped halfway down. He turned to look at her. ‘This is where I live, Beatrice.’ Then he got out and opened her door. She stood and looked around her for a moment; the houses were what she supposed an estate agent would describe as bijou and those she could see clearly in the lamplit street were immaculate as to paint and burnished brass-work on their front doors, and the house they approached was immaculate too with a fanlight over the black-painted door which was reached by three shallow steps guarded by a thin rail. There was a glow of light behind the bow window and bright light streaming from its basement.

The professor opened the door and stood aside for her to go in, still silent, and she went past him into the long narrow hall, its walls white and hung with paintings, red carpet underfoot and a small side-table against one wall. Halfway down its length a curved staircase led to the floor above and there were several doors on the opposite side. It was the door at the end of the hall which was opened, allowing a short stout elderly woman to enter.

The professor was taking Trixie’s coat. ‘Mies…’ He spoke to her in Dutch and then said, ‘Mies speaks English but she’s a little shy about it. She understands very well, though.’

Trixie held out a hand and said how do you do, and smiled at the wrinkled round face. Mies could have been any age; her hair was dark and glossy and her small bright eyes beamed above plump cheeks, but the hand she offered was misshapen with arthritis and her voice was that of an old woan. Her smile was warm and so was her greeting. ‘It is a pleasure, miss.’ She took Trixie’s coat from the professor, spoke to him in her own language and trotted off.

‘In here,’ said the professor, and swept Trixie through the nearest door and into a room at the front of the house. Not a large room, but furnished in great good taste with comfortable chairs and a wide sofa, small lamp tables and a display cabinet filled with silver and porcelain against one wall. There was a brisk fire burning in the polished steel fireplace and sitting before it was a large tabby cat accompanied by a dog of no particular parentage. The cat took no notice of them but the dog jumped up, delighted to see them.

Trixie bent to pat the woolly head. ‘He’s yours?’

‘Mies and I share him. I can’t take him to and fro from Holland—sometimes I am away from here for weeks on end, months even—so he lives here with her and I enjoy his company when I’m here. He’s called Caesar.’

‘Why?’ She sat down in the chair he had offered.

‘He came—from nowhere presumably, he saw us and decided to stay and conquered Mies’s kind heart within the first hour or so.’

He sat down opposite her and the cat got up and went to sit on the arm of his chair.

‘And the cat?’

‘Gumbie.’

Trixie laughed, ‘Oh, I know—from TS Eliot’s OldPossum’s Book of Practical Cats.’ She added in a surprised voice, ‘Have you read it?’

‘Oh, yes. I have a copy in my study. Gumbie belongs to Mies; the pair of them make splendid company when I am away.’

‘Mies doesn’t mind being alone here?’

‘There is a housemaid, Gladys. They get on very well together.’ He got up. ‘May I get you a drink? I think there’s time before dinner.’

They sat in a companionable silence for a few minutes then Trixie asked, ‘Do you have to go back to the hospital this evening?’

‘I shall drive you back later and make sure that all is well with my patient. I have an out-patients clinic in the morning, which probably means more admissions, and a ward-round in the afternoon.’

‘You don’t plan to go back to Holland just yet?’

‘Not for some time, but I hope to before Christmas. I’ve some examining to do in December and a seminar in January so I shall be over there for some time. I come over fairly frequently. It is a very short journey by plane and I need only stay for a few hours.’

Mies came to tell them that dinner was on the table then and during the meal the conversation, to Trixie’s disappointment, never once touched on themselves. Had the professor a father and mother living? she wondered, spooning artichoke soup and making polite remarks about the east coast and their day out and going on with the braised duck with wine sauce to a few innocuous remarks about the weather and the delights of autumn, and then with the lemon soufflé, fortified by two glasses of the white Burgundy she had drunk on top of the sherry, and with her tongue nicely loosened, she allowed it to run away with her.

‘I don’t know your name or how old you are or where you live exactly. I should have thought that by now you would have been married. You must have been in love…’

She tossed off the last of the wine and added, ‘Of course you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, only I’d rather like to know, because…’ She stopped just in time, going pale at the thought that she had been on the point of telling him that she had fallen in love with him. She finished lamely, ‘Well, of course you don’t have to tell me. I didn’t mean to be rude.’

‘Not rude—you have every right to know, in the circumstances. Additionally, one day when we have the leisure you must tell me all about yourself. Now let us go back to the drawing-room and have our coffee and I will answer your questions.’

Once more by the fire with the coffee-tray between them, with Caesar’s head resting on the professor’s beautifully polished shoes and Gumbie curled up on Trixie’s lap, he observed, ‘Now, let me see—what was your first question? My name—Krijn, I’ll spell it.’ He did so. ‘It is a Friese name because my family come from Friesland. I’m thirty-eight—does that seem old to you? I have a mother and father, they live in Friesland and my four sisters are younger than I and married, and yes, I have been in love—a very long time ago; I think that you do not have to worry about that. She is happily married in South America, leading the kind of life I would have been unable to give her. I must confess that since then I have never thought seriously about marriage and I am perfectly content with my way of life—or have been until recently when I realised that a bachelor is very vulnerable, and, having given the matter due thought, marriage seemed the right answer.’ He smiled at her. ‘Do I seem too frank? I do not intend to hurt your feelings, Beatrice, but you are such a sensible girl there is no need to wrap up plain facts in fancy speeches.’

She longed to tell him how wrong he was; the most sensible girl in the world would never object to fancy speeches, but all she said was, ‘Thank you for telling me. I’m sorry you—your love-life was blighted…’ It sounded old-fashioned in her ears and she felt a fool, but his face remained placid although his eyes, half-hidden beneath their lids, held amusement. The amusement was kindly; he liked her, he felt at ease with her and she would act as a buffer between him and the determined efforts of his friends and acquaintances to get him married to any one of the attractive girls he met at their houses. He would have more time for his book… and in return she would have anything she wanted within reason and lead the kind of life she deserved. He remembered the strange pang he had felt when she had fallen down in the ward…

‘As soon as I am free I will call upon your uncle and aunt. There is no reason why we shouldn’t be married within the next few weeks, is there?’

The mere thought of it sent her heart rocking. ‘No, no, none at all.’

‘Good. I’ll let you know when I’m free for a day or two. You should have the privilege of choosing the day, should you not? So I will tell you when I can arrange to be away and give you a choice. Will that do?’