Last April Fair Read online

  In the kitchen her mother said to Phyllida: ‘Of course Pieter will stay the night. Beryl, run up and make sure that the cubbyhole is just as it should be.’

  Beryl giggled: ‘Mother, isn’t he a bit big for it? Hadn’t he better have the room next door? Phylly and I can make up a bed in no time.’

  Mrs Cresswell nodded to her younger daughter, as dark as Phyllida was fair, small and pretty too. ‘Of course, dear, he is rather big, isn’t he—he might be a bit cramped.’

  Phylly finished drying the tea things. The cubbyhole was kept ready for Willy’s friends from school or the younger nephews and nieces. She smiled at the idea of Pieter trying to fit his bulk into the narrow bed. ‘Very cramped,’ she agreed. ‘I’ll come now, Beryl.’

  They all sat down to supper later, and Willy, who should have been in bed because he still wasn’t quite fit, somehow managed to persuade his mother that he was well enough to stay up. It was a nice old-fashioned meal, with cold meat and pickles and potatoes baked in their jackets smothered in butter, and a very large rice pudding with cream and raisins for afters. Phyllida watched Pieter a little anxiously, remembering the delicious food they had had on Madeira and on the ship, but she need not have worried. The doctor consumed a vast supper with every sign of content and enjoyment.

  Going upstairs to bed later, it struck her that she had exchanged barely a dozen words with him during the whole evening, although his goodnight had been as friendly as it always had been. Tomorrow, she promised herself, she would find out when he was going.

  Only she didn’t. True, they met at breakfast, but by the time she had helped with the washing up and made the beds, her father was calling for her to drive him on his morning round, and Pieter and Beryl were at the other end of the garden, picking the rhubarb from under its forcing bucket, ready for one of her mother’s super pies.

  ‘I’ve heard it all from Pieter,’ her father told her as they started off down the hill, ‘but I’d like to hear it again from you, Phylly.’

  It was a relief to talk about it, she felt better when she had told him about it, and better still when her father said: ‘You did all you could, you have no reason whatsoever for blaming yourself. Put it behind you, my dear. Have you thought what kind of job you want?’

  She hadn’t; somehow she hadn’t been able to put her mind to thinking about her future and she said so.

  ‘Then take a holiday,’ advised her father.

  They got back a little late for lunch, and found the doctor in the kitchen, sitting in one of the old Windsor chairs by the Aga, his long legs stretched out on the rag rug at his feet. Willy was there too and Dick as well as Beryl and her mother. They looked as thick as thieves.

  Everyone turned to look at her as she went in, and it was Dick who said: ‘Hi, Phylly—we’ve hatched a simply super scheme.’ He grinned round at the doctor, who was standing, staring at nothing. ‘You tell her, Pieter.’

  She looked at them in turn. Their expressions reminded her forcibly of Meg, their elderly spaniel, when she hoped for a biscuit, all except the doctor, who looked half asleep. Phyllida sat herself down on the edge of the table, picked up a raw carrot from the dish and began to crunch it, and asked: ‘Well?’

  The doctor sat down again. He looked quite at home in the rather shabby old kitchen, just as though he had been a family friend for years. ‘I have been talking to your mother about the flowers in Holland at this time of the year. Bulbs, you know, fields full of them and a rather special park where one can go and see them all growing in a charming setting. I live quite near the bulb fields and I wondered if she might like a brief holiday so that she might see them for herself—Willy would come too, of course,’ he sounded very bland, ‘a few days’ holiday might set him up ready for school again. Only there is one snag; Willy and I would like to go fishing and we don’t feel that we can leave your mother alone while we fish, and as I’m told that if she accompanied us she would only remove the hooks from the fishes’ mouths and throw them back into the water, I feel that it would be hardly conducive to our enjoyment.’ He contrived to sound sad. ‘She would be lonely.’ He gave Phyllida a long look. ‘We wondered if you would consider joining the party?’

  It was a neat trap and she wondered which of them had thought it up. ‘I must look for a job.’

  The doctor’s voice was all silk. ‘You did tell me that you might take a holiday first.’

  She bit into the carrot. ‘Father…’ she began.

  He answered smoothly. ‘We did—er—discuss it vaguely yesterday evening, after you had gone to bed.’

  The trap had closed and she was amazed to find that she felt nothing but pleasure at its closure. All the same, she wasn’t a girl to give in tamely. ‘How will Father manage?’ She looked at her mother.

  ‘Beryl will be home for at least another two weeks— she doesn’t get her exam results until then and the job she’s after depends on those—she might just as well be here, and she’ll love to look after him, and Dick can come down for the weekends.’ Her mother smiled so happily that Phyllida, peering at her from behind her fringe, knew that she couldn’t disappoint her; she didn’t have many holidays.

  She said quietly, ‘I’d love to come. When?’

  There was a kind of concerted rush towards her, while her family, all talking at once, told her. When they paused for breath, Pieter said from his chair: ‘In three days’ time, if that suits everyone?’

  Phyllida was sure that by everyone, he meant her; the rest of them would have already agreed happily to anything he might have suggested—even her father, who had just walked in, exclaiming: ‘Well, is it all arranged? It’s most kind of you, Pieter. My wife is a great gardener, nothing will give her more pleasure, but I do hope you know what you’re taking on—three of them—you’re sure you can house them all?’

  The doctor answered him gravely. ‘Oh, yes, I think that can be done. I hope you’ll allow them to stay as long as possible—ten days? Two weeks?’

  Willy looked anxious. ‘If we’re going fishing, two weeks would be super—I mean you have to work as well, I suppose?’

  ‘I suppose I do,’ he was gravely assured.

  So Phyllida spent a good deal of the next two days unpacking and packing again, helping her mother to do the same, and going through Willy’s wardrobe. Which left Beryl free to entertain the doctor, for Dick had gone again. She made a success of it too, judging by the way she made him laugh.

  They left after breakfast to catch an afternoon Hovercraft from Dover, seen off by Doctor Cresswell, Meg the spaniel, an assortment of cats and Beryl, looking fetching in a large apron. She had flung her arms round Pieter’s neck as she wished him goodbye and given him a hug and begged him to come back soon, and he had said something softly to make her laugh and kissed her soundly. Phyllida wondered why she was going and not Beryl. It should have been the other way round.

  Their journey was a pleasant one, with a stop for an early lunch and a great deal of talk, mostly on Willy’s part, concerning the joys of fishing, until they reached the Hovercraft, when he switched to engineering. Neither topic interested the two ladies of the party; they listened with one ear to make sure that Willy wasn’t being rude or cheeky and carried on a desultory chat about clothes, the chances of Beryl remembering that her father couldn’t stand lamb cutlets at any price, and what sort of presents they would buy to take back with them. But once on board, the conversation became general while they drank coffee and ate sandwiches and listened to their host explaining the rest of the journey to them.

  It was well into the afternoon by now and it seemed that they still had a fair distance to go. They would land at Calais, travel up the French coast into Belgium and from these cross over into Holland at Sluis, then take the ferry to Vlissingen and from there drive all the way to Leiden on the motorway. He lived, explained the doctor, in a village bordering one of the lakes a mile or so from that city.

  ‘Handy for your work, I expect,’ chatted Mrs Cresswell. ‘Do you have bed
s in a hospital there?’

  ‘In Leiden, yes, also in den Haag.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ said Mrs Cresswell knowledgeably, ‘Leiden’s a medical school, isn’t it?’

  So now we know, thought Phyllida, a thought peevishly, all this while and never a hint as to exactly where he lived—to her, at any rate.

  They were actually disembarking at Calais when she wondered about the car. They had left the one he had hired in England and she hadn’t given it another thought. She glanced round her and the doctor answered the question she hadn’t asked. ‘It’s waiting for us, it should be over here.’

  It was—a Bentley, not a new model, but a much cherished fifteen-year-old motor-car, sleek and gleaming and powerful. There was a man standing by it, a corpulent, middle-aged man, with a bald head and a round, cheerful face. The doctor spoke to him, shook his hand, and waved to a porter to load the luggage. The man had gone before that was finished and the doctor installed his guests without saying who he was.

  ‘Such a nice car,’ observed Mrs Cresswell, ‘and what a lot of room!’

  ‘Yes, I think so too—I’ve had her for a long time now and she suits me perfectly. She has a good turn of speed, too.’

  Which proved to be the case. They went so fast through France, Belgium and then into Holland that Phyllida was hard put to it to know just where they were. Only as they crossed on the ferry to Vlissingen was there time to pore over a map while they drank coffee in the bar on board, and then she didn’t take it all in, there was so much to see from the deck.

  The spring evening was turning to dusk under a wide cloudy sky as they took the road northwards; Bergen-op-Zoom, Rosendaal, Dordrecht, by-passing them all, so that there was nothing to see of the actual towns. But there were plenty of villages, with their great churches and neat clusters of houses, and in between, wide water meadows striped with canals. Phyllida, sitting in the back with her mother, looked about her with interest. It was so very different from Madeira, from England even, but she liked it—it was calm, placid country and only as they skirted the bigger towns was she aware of factory chimneys and bustling industrial areas. It was nice when the doctor turned off the motorway on to a secondary road which took them across country to join another motorway just south of Leiden. He left this too after a few miles to turn down a country lane, brick built and with a canal on either side of it. They were back in the country again and presently she could see water; a wide lake stretching away into the dusk. The road ran beside it for some distance until they reached a village. ‘Leimuiden,’ said the doctor. ‘The next one is Kudelstaart; I live just half way between them.’

  There wasn’t a village when he slowed the car presently, just a group of houses and cottages and a very small church, and then a high brick wall pierced by wrought iron gates, wide open.

  The sanded drive was straight and quite long and the house at the end of it was so unlike anything that Phyllida had expected that she gave a gasp of surprise. It was a large square building, painted white, with single-storey wings on either side, connected by short covered passages. Its orderly rows of windows and all the ground floor ones were lighted, illuminating the great front door with its elaborate decoration of plasterwork picked out with gilt.

  ‘How very grand,’ observed her mother, who had a habit, sometimes embarrassing, of saying what came into her head. ‘I’m quite overwhelmed—it’s a good thing it’s almost dark,’ she added obscurely. But her host understood, for he assured her:

  ‘It’s not in the least terrifying, even in broad daylight, and I’m told it’s wickedly inconvenient to clean.’

  Willy hadn’t said anything, but now, as they stopped on the sweep before the door, he observed: ‘I say, what a super place for a holiday—I’m glad I came!’

  The doctor laughed and got out to open doors and usher his guests out of the car, and by then the house door had been opened too and a welcoming light streamed out to meet them from the hall beyond.

  There was a tall thin woman standing just inside, looking so exactly as a housekeeper looked that there was no mistaking her; dressed severely in a dark grey dress, neat greying hair pulled back into a bun, a sombre face; but when she smiled she wasn’t sombre at all, and she was delighted to see the doctor, who flung an arm round her as he introduced her.

  ‘This is Lympke, my friend and housekeeper. She doesn’t speak English but I’m sure you’ll manage to understand each other. Her husband, Aap, who brought the car to meet us, will be here presently and he speaks it very well.’

  He swept them all inside, through the wide hall and a pair of arched doors into a high-ceilinged room of vast proportions. It had wide windows at one end and at the other there were a few shallow steps which led to another, much smaller room, lined with books. The furniture was exactly right for its surroundings; glass-fronted cabinets filled with silver and porcelain, splendid wall tables carrying vases of flowers, a lacquered cabinet—and nicely arranged between these antique treasures were sofas, wing-backed armchairs and a variety of tables. The walls were white, the panels picked out with gilt and hung with paintings, mostly portraits, lighted by crystal sconces.

  The doctor waved them to chairs amidst this splendour. ‘Tea?’ he enquired of Mrs Cresswell, unerringly guessing her one strong wish, and at her pleased nod, said something to Lympke who had followed them in. She went away and returned almost at once with a tea tray which she set on a small table by Mrs Cresswell’s chair and while the two ladies drank their fill, the doctor gave Willy a glass of lemonade, pouring a whisky for himself.

  ‘You have a very nice home, Pieter,’ observed Mrs Cresswell, passing Phyllida her tea. ‘I had no idea— you told Ronald that you were a GP and I hardly expected…’

  Phyllida stirred uneasily and hoped that the doctor wouldn’t take umbrage. He didn’t, only saying mildly: ‘Well, I do have a surgery here in the house, you know, and quite a few local patients, but I must confess that most of my work is done in den Haag and Leiden, and sometimes abroad.’

  ‘What do you specialise in?’

  He smiled very faintly. ‘Among other things, hearts.’ He was looking at Phyllida, who knew what he was and kept her eyes fixed on a family group on the wall opposite her.

  ‘Now isn’t that nice?’ asked Mrs Cresswell of the room at large. Neither of her children answered her because she had a habit of voicing her thoughts aloud and didn’t expect anyone to reply anyway, but the doctor chose to do so.

  ‘Well, I enjoy it; it’s work I’m deeply interested in and it’s a challenge.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Mrs Cresswell was well away. ‘And you, you poor man, without a wife and children, you must be lonely.’

  Phyllida gave her mother a look which that lady ignored, and the doctor’s smile widened. ‘I haven’t been until now; just recently I have found that work isn’t quite enough, though.’

  He was still looking at Phyllida, who felt rather like a rabbit with the snake’s eye upon it. She would have to look at him, she couldn’t help herself; she withdrew her gaze from the family group, whom she now knew very well indeed, and met his eyes.

  ‘You agree, Phyllida?’he asked blandly, then smiled so brilliantly that she found herself saying fervently:

  ‘Oh, yes, I do! Work’s very nice, but it—it…’ She had no idea what she was going to say, but sat there with her pretty mouth open, praying for some witty, clever remark to come into her empty head.

  It didn’t, and his smile became the merest twitch of the lip.

  ‘Would you like to go to your rooms?’ He was the perfect host again. ‘We’ll dine in an hour’s time if that’s not too late for you, but do come down when you would like. I shall be around, but if I’m not, do make yourselves at home.’

  Lympke led the way upstairs, up a handsomely carved staircase at the back of the hall, leading to a wide corridor above. Phyllida and her mother had adjoining rooms at the side of the house, while Willy, to his delight, was given a small room at the back of the house, well aw
ay from them. He could just see the gleam of water from his window even though it was almost dark now and came running back to tell them so.

  ‘That’s where we’ll fish,’ he told them importantly. ‘I’m going down to talk to Pieter; someone’s unpacked for me, so there’s nothing for me to do.’

  ‘You’ll wash your face and hands, comb your hair and take a clean handkerchief,’ decreed his mother, and when he had gone: ‘How beautiful these rooms are, Phylly, and such heavenly bathrooms. Are you going to change your dress?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so, just do my face and hair and change my shoes.’ Phyllida wandered over to the window and stared out into the evening, although she could see almost nothing by now. She said thoughtfully, ‘It’s a pity he’s rich—I didn’t know…’She sighed. ‘And not just rich, he’s—well…’

  ‘Yes, dear, but he’d be that whether he had money or not, wouldn’t he? And remember that your father’s family is an old and honoured one.’

  ‘Mother,’ Phyllida’s voice was rather high, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  Her mother’s reply was placid. ‘No, dear, I often don’t know either. Shall I back-comb my hair a bit in front? My head’s as flat as a snake’s after wearing a hat all day.’

  They went downstairs presently and found the drawing room empty, but almost at once the fat man they had seen at Calais appeared at the door. ‘Aap, madam, miss—the doctor’s houseman. If you should want anything I will arrange it.’

  They thanked him and Phyllida said: ‘What good English you speak, Aap. Have you been in England?’

  ‘Certainly, miss. At times I travel with the doctor, you understand. We also stay there from time to time—the doctor has many friends.’ He smiled at them. ‘The doctor and your brother have gone to look at the lake. It is now dark but MasterWilly wished to see it for himself. It is not large, but there is a canal which leads to the meer beyond.’

  He crossed to the windows and drew the heavy tapestry curtains, tended the log fire in the wide hearth, begged them to make themselves comfortable, and withdrew.