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 Old Possum’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?’
She nodded. ‘I have to give a month’s notice.’
‘Don’t worry about that. I’ll arrange for you to leave whenever you wish. You will wish to go to your aunt’s house?’
‘Well, I’m not sure if it would be convenient. Up to now I’ve only gone when I’m invited…’
‘In that case we will have a quiet wedding and you can stay with some friends of mine for a few days before we marry. In a church?’
‘Please. But will they want me?’
‘They’ll be delighted. Your aunt and uncle and Margaret will wish to be at the wedding?’
She took a deep breath. ‘Would you mind awfully if we just got married—just us and two witnesses, I mean, then I could go straight to the church from the hospital? That’s unless you wanted your family to come to the wedding?’
‘I hadn’t intended asking them. We could go over for a couple of days so that you might meet them and I should very much prefer a quiet ceremony if that is what