Tempestuous April Page 11

  She turned back to the portrait, feeling her cheeks warm. He had called her that once before—his dear Harriet—his very dear Harriet. Perhaps it was just a way of talking… She looked rather beseechingly at the owner of the crinoline.

  ‘My great-grandmother,’ said Friso from behind her. ‘A haughty piece—like you.’

  She turned without thinking, and found herself within a couple of inches of his excellently tailored waistcoat. She tilted her head the better to make her point. ‘I am not haughty,’ she said indignantly.

  ‘Let us put it to the test,’ he said suavely. It was no use to try and free herself, for he had her fast by the shoulders. She saw him smile before his mouth came down on hers.

  ‘And now tell me exactly what you meant at breakfast.’

  She had been floating between heaven and earth—now her dream was doused with the cold water of reality, and because she was an honest girl, she didn’t pretend not to understand him.

  ‘It was unpardonable of me, and it was not my business.’

  His hands tightened on her shoulders, but he was looking over her head with a curious intentness at his great-grandmother’s chilly stare.

  ‘You are sure that it’s not your business, Harriet?’

  She gulped back all the things she wanted to say. She would regret them bitterly later, and worse still, Friso would regret them too. Far better for them to remain the good friends they had become despite their frequent tiffs; there were only four days left now. She said with a casual friendliness which cost an effort, ‘Of course I’m sure. Your friends—girl-friends—aren’t my concern, but I hope you find one soon who will make you forget all the others.’

  He had strolled over to the window, and stood with his hands in his pockets, his back to her. ‘But I have.’ He sounded flippant, and she was quick to hear it. She achieved a laugh. ‘Until the next one comes along—I’ll get my things, shall I, if you’re ready to go?’

  She didn’t wait for a reply but went quickly upstairs to the charming room she had so happily slept in. As she passed the mirror she gave herself an angry look. ‘What a fool you are,’ she told her image, and blew her delightful nose with a violence calculated to check the tears she longed to shed.

  They went in the Bentley. Friso was going on to Groningen after he had been to see Mevrouw Bal and the baby and he hadn’t much time.

  ‘This old girl gets me there and back with time to spare,’ he explained.

  Harriet observed, ‘How nice,’ in a hollow voice. It seemed like sacrilege to refer to a Bentley ‘T’, by Mulliner Park Ward with a registration number barely a year old, as an old lady.

  He gave her a quick searching glance. ‘Don’t worry about Moses,’ he said, and his voice was so kind that the tears ached in her throat. ‘You’ll see him again, you know.’ He slowed down to thread his way through Franeker. ‘He and Wim are good friends already and he’ll be company for us all around the house.’

  He drew up outside Dr Van Minnen’s house, and dropped a hand over her clasped ones on her knee. ‘Thank you for your help last night, Harry. We would have been in a pretty pickle if you hadn’t turned up.’

  Harriet turned and looked at him; her eyes looked enormous and very blue. ‘I’m glad I was able to help, though I am sure you would have contrived something even if no one had come.’ There wasn’t time to say more, for the front door had been flung open and Mevrouw Van Minnen and Sieske were standing there waiting to welcome them. They all went inside, everyone talking at once and contriving to translate for Harriet as they went. Friso had just finished a rather brisk account of the night’s happenings, when Dr Van Minnen came in from his surgery and demanded to have the whole tale again. More coffee was poured, and Friso began his tale once more, but this time in Fries, sitting comfortably back in one of the great armchairs, smoking his pipe, as though he had all day in which to do nothing. Harriet, watching him covertly, thought what a tranquil man he was; he never appeared to hurry, but she supposed that nothing would stop him doing something he had made up his mind to do.

  Before she could look away he turned his head and stared across at her and suddenly smiled as though he had made a pleasant discovery. She caught her breath and heard Sieske say, ‘Harry, wake up. Those two will talk shop for hours. I’m sure Friso left a great deal out—start again and tell us everything from the beginning.’

  It took some time, for Sieske had to translate as she went along, and Mevrouw Van Minnen asked a great number of questions. She had only just finished when Friso got to his feet and said, ‘Well, I must be off.’

  He lifted a hand in general farewell and when he got to the door called to Sieske to go to the car with him; there was a medical journal he wanted his partner to have. They went out of the door together, and Harriet, who was sitting by the window, could see them standing on the pavement deep in conversation. She turned her back; he hadn’t even bothered to smile at her when he went. She didn’t look up when Sieske returned either, but went on trying to decipher the morning paper’s headlines.

  ‘Friso’s taking us down to Amsterdam tomorrow.’ said her friend, ‘and he thinks he’ll probably come and fetch us home again too.’

  Harriet was up early the next morning and spent a great deal of time on her face and hair. She would be wearing the green outfit again, not, she told herself, because she would be seeing Friso, but because she was going to Amsterdam and wanted to look as nice as possible. She went down to breakfast, smelling deliciously of Fête. Everyone else was already at table, and as she slipped into her seat there were appreciative sniffs. Dr Van Minnen, deep in his morning paper, glanced over the top of it.

  ‘You’re both dressed to kill, I see,’ he observed mildly. ‘And very nice too.’ He smiled at his daughter and Harriet. ‘I wish you both a good trip—enjoy yourselves.’

  He looked at his watch, drank his coffee and folded his paper neatly. On his way to the door he stooped to kiss his daughter’s cheek, waved to Harriet, and disappeared surgerywards. Maggina and Taeike got up too, grumbling that they should have to go to school while everyone else had fun. Taeike said slowly, ‘Do you think Friso would take us to Leeuwarden first, before you go?’

  Sieske gave a little snort. ‘Whatever next! Why should he? It’s hard enough for him to find the time to take us as it is.’

  ‘Then why does he?’ asked Taeike rebelliously. ‘You could quite well go by yourselves.’ She went out, banging the door behind her, and Sieske said in answer to Harriet’s questioning eyebrows, ‘It’s all right, she dotes on Friso—you see, she’s known him most of her life and hates to be left out of anything he does.’

  Harriet would have liked to pursue the subject, but there wasn’t time. She went upstairs and put on the fetching turban picked up her handbag and overnight case and ran downstairs again in time to see Friso come in the front door. Her heart jumped and raced so that her breathlessness wasn’t entirely due to the stairs. He stood in the hall, impeccably dressed and very assured, and his ‘Good morning, Harriet’ was coolly friendly, only as she got nearer she could see how his eyes twinkled. ‘How very glamorous,’ he observed. ‘Enough to steal my heart, if you hadn’t already done that.’

  She blushed and looked uncertain, almost, but not quite, sure that he was teasing. It was fortunate for her peace of mind that Sieske and her mother came out of the dining-room and he turned, just in time to receive Sieske’s nicely proportioned but not inconsiderable weight in his arms.

  ‘Friso! You are a dear to take us—I telephoned Tante Tonia and she says you must stay to lunch. You will, won’t you? I said you would.’ She gave him a slow sweet smile. ‘We shall be there long before midday, and you’ll have time enough.’

  He gave her an avuncular hug. ‘I see that you have got it all arranged, you scheming girl! Poor Wierd,’ he added in mock horror. ‘Has no one warned him of your true nature?’ He gave her a gentle push. ‘Go and fetch your things. Harriet’s sitting here like Patience on a monument.’

 
Harriet drew her brows together. ‘That’s quite inapt,’ she said tartly, ‘for I’m not smiling at grief, nor am I turning green and yellow.’

  He gave her a mocking smile. ‘My apologies to you and Shakespeare, my dear girl. You’re neither green nor yellow, and I’m quite prepared to take your word for it that you’re not smiling at grief—if you say so.’

  Harriet inclined her head slightly, looking, she hoped, remote, but it was lost on Friso, who went to the stairs to bellow at Sieske to hurry herself up and then started talking to Mevrouw Van Minnen in Fries, with a casual apology over one shoulder for doing so. Harriet had the darkling thought that Friso might not be best pleased at taking them to Amsterdam—she would have dearly loved to find out who had suggested it in the first place, but Sieske came racing down the stairs and into the car, and there was no chance to say a word to her. She wasn’t sure how she came to be sitting beside Friso; but there was Sieske, sitting in the back of the car, reading a letter from Wierd which she hadn’t had time to open, and here he was inquiring if she was comfortable. She said, ‘Yes, thank you,’ in a meek voice, and he let in the clutch.

  He took the route over the great dyke across the Ijsselmeer, and kept up a gentle flow of conversation that needed little answering. Harriet listened to his slow deep voice with its faintly accented English, and tried to imagine what life would be like when she went back to England, and there would be no Friso. It did not bear thinking about, but of one thing she was sure, she would dream no more. She sighed, and stifled the sigh as he said, ‘You wretched girl, you’re not listening to a word I’m saying; I could have saved my breath.’

  ‘I did hear, indeed I did, but a thought came into my head.’

  He was looking straight ahead. ‘A very sad thought, I take it.’

  ‘Well, yes. I’m sorry, I’m not very good company.’ She peeped at his profile. It looked stern; then he turned and smiled before she could look away and she found herself smiling too.

  He said, ‘You are at all times a good companion, Harriet, and the only one I want.’

  She stared at him, the colour washing over her pretty face. He was looking ahead again. She longed for him to turn his head so that she could see his eyes, although common sense told her that he was unlikely to do so while driving the car past a huge trans-Europe transport at sixty miles an hour. When next he spoke it was over his shoulder to Sieske. ‘We’ll stop at Hoorn, shall we? We can have coffee at that place over the Weigh House—unless you can think of anywhere you’d rather go.’

  Sieske deliberated with her usual placid charm and said, ‘Yes, that would be delightful, and if there’s a telephone there I’ll ring up Wierd—he’s going to try and come over to Amsterdam the day after tomorrow.’ She subsided into a happy silence, clutching Wierd’s letter.

  The café over the Weigh House was delightful; it had somehow caught the atmosphere of the little town. Harriet peered out of the window and was quite prepared to agree with Friso when he said that Hoorn hadn’t changed very much in the last three hundred years. Presently Sieske went away to telephone.

  ‘How’s Moses?’ asked Harriet, very conscious of Friso’s calm stare across the little table.

  ‘Eating me out of house and home. Oh, don’t worry, he’ll be worth his keep—I’m sorry for anyone who tries to get into the house uninvited. The three of them would confound the enemy, tear him limb from limb and bring me the pieces in triumph. I think he misses you.’

  The softness of Harriet’s heart was reflected in her face.

  ‘I shall miss him too,’ she said regretfully. She was about to say something else when she caught the doctor’s eye. Something in his face set her pulse hurrying. His voice sounded different too.

  ‘And if I tell you that I shall miss you a great deal more than Moses, what will be your answer, my dear Harriet?’

  She didn’t say anything, because she was unable to think of the right words, but she felt her happiness bubble up inside her and smiled; not just with her mouth, but with her eyes too. A small sensible voice inside her head was reminding her that she was in grave danger of joining the luscious blonde and the beautiful brunette, and possibly a number of other young ladies on his list. She turned a deaf ear, for none of them seemed real; only she and Friso were real, staring at each other across the table’s width. He smiled. ‘You may have cautioned your tongue to remain silent, but you’re quite powerless to stop your eyes saying what they want to.’ He stretched a hand out to take hers and hold it fast; it was firm and cool and his touch sent a tingling up her arm. Sieske came back and he made no effort to release her, and the pink in her cheeks deepened, but her friend, after one swift glance, started a rather involved explanation of Wierd’s plans to meet them.

  ‘He’s arranged everything,’ she said happily. ‘You’ll be worn out with sightseeing, Harry, but it’s your only chance.’

  Harriet avoided Friso’s eye. ‘You’re a dear to arrange it all, Sieske, and I know I shall love it. Never mind if it’s a rush, I’ll have plenty of time to sort it all out when I get home.’

  ‘You won’t, you know,’ said Sieske. ‘You’ll be far too busy being a ward sister; your head will be full of cutdowns and operation cases and getting the off-duty worked out to please everyone.’

  Harriet sighed. ‘I’d forgotten. But I’ll have off duty and days off.’ Sitting there, with Friso’s hand over hers, the future looked singularly uninviting; after all, Friso hadn’t really said anything to alter it. She cast around desperately for another topic of conversation.

  ‘That reminds me,’ she said, and the relief of having thought of something showed on her face, ‘I wanted to ask you something.’ Her glance in Friso’s direction was so fleeting that she quite failed to see the look of amusement on his face. ‘You and Mijnheer Bal were talking in that attic and you recited something and he joined in, and you said that if I reminded you, you would explain it to me.’

  She tried, with no success at all, to withdraw her hand and felt his fingers tighten. ‘Ah, yes. Our ancient Friesian oath; you know it, of course, Sieske.’ He started to speak in his own tongue, rolling out the incomprehensible words in his quiet slow voice. When he had finished Harriet said, ‘There were two English words—ebb and flood.’

  ‘That’s right—our language has a certain similarity to your own. I’ll translate it, though it won’t sound so splendid. I imagine the men who first uttered it were tough, but they lived in tough times. It goes something like this. “With five weapons shall we keep our land, with sword and with shield, with spade and with fork and with the spear, out with the ebb, up with the flood, to fight day and night against the North-king and against the wild Viking, that all Friesians may be free, the born and the unborn, so long as the wind from the clouds shall blow and the world shall stand”.’

  Harriet said quietly, ‘I like it.’ She repeated, “’So long as the wind from the clouds shall blow”—that’s for ever.’

  ‘We are a persistent race; we do not give up easily, nor do we let go.’ The grey eyes bored into hers. ‘For ever is a long time—loving is for ever, too. So long as the wind from the clouds shall blow. Remember that, my dear Harriet.’

  She stared back at him. How could she forget, and what exactly did he mean? And now she would probably never know, for he had released her hand and was paying the bill, and telling Sieske that if they wanted to powder their noses they had better hurry up.

  For the rest of the journey the talk was of places and things and the world in general. She took but a token share in the conversation while she tried to remember everything that Friso had said, and in consequence became so bewildered that she had to be told twice that they had reached the outskirts of Amsterdam. Tante Tonia had a flat on the Weesperzijde. The houses were tall and narrow with basements and steps up to their front doors; on the other side of the street was the Amstel river, its broad surface constantly ruffled by the laden barges chugging one way or the other—a fact which, to Harriet’s way of thinking, more
than compensated for the basements. The street was quiet too, trams ran along the main street at the end, it was true, but their noise was quite drowned by the constant, hooting on the river and the peculiar thumping noise of the diesel engines on the barges.

  Friso stopped half-way down and told them to go on ahead while he got their bags. They mounted the steps and Sieske pressed the second bell in the gleaming row of bells, each with its little visiting card, at the side of the door. The door gave a click and opened, and they went up the precipitous staircase to the first floor.

  Tante Tonia was waiting for them—she was like her sister, but in a large, cosy fashion. Mevrouw Van Minnen was what was commonly called a fine figure of a woman, Tante Tonia was frankly plump, with grey hair severely drawn back from a face whose eyes were still a bright youthful blue; and held only lines of laughter. She greeted them warmly, speaking a fluent, ungrammatical and dreadfully muddled English which nonetheless lost none of its sincerity. The girls were bustled into the sitting-room where Oom Jan repeated the embraces and made them welcome in an English as pedantically correct as an old-fashioned textbook; but he broke into Dutch as he caught sight of Friso in the doorway, leaving his wife, after exchanging greetings with the doctor, to carry off her guests to the room they were to share.

  Ten minutes later, they were sitting round the square table in the comfortable old-fashioned dining-room. Harriet had combed her hair and done things to her face; she settled herself in the chair opposite Friso, conscious that she was looking her best, and that she had used just sufficient Fête to surround herself in a tantalizingly faint cloud of perfume. She saw Oom Jan’s nostrils twitch appreciatively and caught Friso’s eye across the table. He was smiling, but she didn’t smile back, for she discerned a mocking twinkle in his gaze; she gave Oom Jan her full attention and ate a good lunch and tried to pretend, without success, that Friso wasn’t there. It was a relief when they all went into the sitting-room for coffee, but the relief was tempered by her knowledge that he would get up and go at any moment. He did in fact do just that, much sooner than she had expected. She watched him say his goodbyes with a sinking heart and listened to his plans to fetch them in two days’ time stifling a strong desire to go back with him to Franeker. The time was so short—she would see him once, perhaps twice before she left. Her gloomy thoughts were interrupted by his cool voice.