Tempestuous April

It was Taeike who answered. ‘He has three. I go many times—also to his house.’

Harriet twitched a branch of forsythia into its exact position before she answered, ‘How nice.’ It would be easy to find out a great deal about the doctor from Taeike, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She asked instead,

‘Tell me about your school, will you?’ then listened to Taeike’s polite, halting English, aware that the girl would have much rather talked about Friso Eijsinck.

Wierd came after tea, with more flowers, and sat talking to Dr Van Minnen until Sieske, who had gone upstairs to dress, came down again looking radiant. It was the signal for everyone else to go and dress too, leaving the pair of them to each other’s company, to foregather presently in the drawing-room where they admired the plain gold rings the happy couple had exchanged. They would wear them until their marriage, when they would be transferred from their left hands to their right. It seemed to Harriet that this exchange of rings made everything rather solemn and binding. ‘Plighting their troth,’ she mused, and added her congratulations to everyone else’s.

The guests arrived soon afterwards, and she circled the room with first one then the other of the Van Minnens, shaking hands and uttering her name with each handshake. A splendid idea—only some of the names were hard to remember. She was standing by the door, listening rather nervously to the burgemeester, a handsome man with an imposing presence who spoke the pedantic English she was beginning to associate with the educated Dutch, when Friso Eijsinck came in. She had been right. He looked—she sought for the right word and came up with eye-catching; but then so did the girl with him. A blonde this time, Harriet noted, watching her while she smiled attentively at her companion, and wearing a dress straight out of Harpers & Queen. In her efforts to prevent a scowl of envy, Harriet smiled even more brilliantly and gazed at the burgemeester with such a look of absorbed attention that he embarked upon a monologue, and a very knowledgeable one, about the various theatres he had visited when he was last in London. It was fortunate that he didn’t expect an answer, for Harriet was abysmally ignorant about social life in the great metropolis, and was about to say so, when he paused for breath and Friso said from behind her,

‘Good evening, Miss Slocombe … burgemeester.’

He shook hands with them both, and the burgemeester said,

‘I was just telling this charming young lady how much I enjoyed “The Mousetrap”!’ He turned to Harriet. ‘I also went to see “Cats”.’ He coughed. ‘You’ve seen it, of course, Miss Slocombe?’

Both men were looking down at her, the speaker with a look of polite inquiry, Dr Eijsinck with a decided twinkle in his grey eyes. Her colour deepened. ‘Well, no. You see I live in a very small village on the edge of Dartmoor. I … I don’t go to London often.’ She forbore to mention that she hadn’t been there for at least five years. She withdrew her gaze from the older man and looked quickly at the doctor, whose face was a mask of polite interest; all the same, she was very well aware that he was laughing at her. She opened her eyes very wide and said with hauteur, ‘Even if I lived in London I think it would be unlikely that I should go to see “Cats”. I’m not very with-it, I’m afraid.’

She allowed her long curling lashes to sweep down on to her cheeks for just a sufficient length of time for her two companions to note that they were real. The burgemeester, who was really rather a dear, allowed a discreet eye to rove over her person. He said with elderly gallantry,

‘I think that you are most delightfully with-it, Miss Slocombe. I hope that I shall see more of you before you return to that village of yours. And now take her away, Friso, for I am sure that was your reason for joining us.’

There was nothing to do but smile, and, very conscious of Friso’s hand on her arm, allow herself to be guided across the room. Once out of earshot, however, she stood still and said,

‘I’ll be quite all right here, Doctor. I’m sure there are a great many people to whom you wish to talk.’ She looked pointedly through the open double doors into the dining-room, where the beautiful blonde, glass in hand, was holding court. Somebody had started the record-player; Sieske started to dance and half a dozen couples joined them. Her companion, without bothering to answer her, swung Harriet on to the impromptu dance floor. He danced well, with a complete lack of tiresome mannerisms. Harriet, who was a good dancer herself, would have been happy to have remained as his partner for the rest of the evening, but in fact it was long after midnight before he came near her again. She was perched on the bottom stair, between two of Aede’s friends, listening to their account of life on the wards in a Rotterdam hospital where they were housemen. She saw him standing in the open doorway of the drawing-room across the hall, watching them. After a minute he started to cross the hall, taking care that both young men saw his approach. When he was near enough, he said smoothly,