She glanced at the clock and began to coil her hair rapidly; the dining room was only open for a short time each evening; the hotel guests were expected to dine out, the snacks were for those who had just arrived, or who, for some reason or other, were going to spend their evening in their rooms.
There was a very small room by the entrance where one could get a drink or coffee, but Cressida had never seen anyone in it. She did her face and washed her hands and went down the staircase once more, to the basement, where she sat down at a table for one, drank the coffee she ordered and ate two ham rolls. They were excellent, but she had very little appetite. Indeed, she had grown thin during the last few weeks; meals, like so many other things, had become just something to get through as best she might. She supposed that in time everything would be normal again, as the incoming rector had assured her when he had called to make himself known to her and arrange to move into the rectory. Time he had said, healed everything, and she hadn’t disputed that fact; only time, when it lay heavy, took a long time to pass.
She went back to her room presently and packed her case, had a shower in the cramped cabinet down the passage, and got into bed. She wasn’t sleepy, but bed gave an illusion of cosiness. She had a sudden, vivid memory of the sitting room in her old home, with a log fire blazing in the hearth and the shabby armchairs pulled close to it, and for a moment she couldn’t see the map she was studying for the tears in her eyes, but she brushed them away resolutely and applied herself once more to its perusal. Molly’s uncle had told her that Doctor van Blom lived in a village between Groningen and Leeuwarden, he had told her the name too, but the two cities were thirty miles apart and from the numerous villages between, not one of their peculiar-looking names rang a bell of recognition. She would have to wait and see.
The tram Cressida took to the station in the morning was packed with early morning workers, but the train, when she eventually found the right platform and caught it by the skin of her teeth, was almost empty. She sat in her corner seat, watching the small flat fields give way to the woods and heaths of the Veluwe and then fields again, but now they had become wide and rolling and the towns less frequent. She had chosen to go via Groningen, and that city, when the train reached it, looked invitingly picturesque as well as large and bustling. As the train pulled away from the station she craned her neck to see the last of its spires and towers and then turned to look at the countryside with some eagerness. Somewhere close by was the village where she was to spend the next few weeks. She stared at the strange names on the station boards as they passed, but both Dutch and Friesian names were quite incomprehensible to her. However, she had been told not to worry about the language; Doctor van Blom spoke excellent English and the people she would meet would have a sufficient knowledge of it to make her lack of Dutch no problem at all.
She got out at Leeuwarden station with much the same feeling as she experienced when she entered a dentist’s surgery; her future employer might be bad-tempered, impatient, a slave-driver… She stood under the clock on the platform as she had been told to do, and looked around her, and a great many people looked back at her, for she was quite eye-catching, her beautiful face pale with excitement and apprehension, her nicely cut tweed coat showing off her slenderness to perfection, the brown fur hat perched on top of her shining bun of hair highlighting its vivid darkness.
She didn’t have to wait long; from the people around her there emerged a short, stout man in his late middle years. He came straight at her, beaming all over his nice round face, beginning to talk to her long before he reached her. ‘Miss Bingley—Miss Cressida Bingley—what a charming name! I am delighted to welcome you; you see that I knew you at once.’ He was pumping her arm up and down as he spoke. ‘My old friend Doctor Mills described you so well…you have luggage with you? This case only? Then we will go to the car at once and return to my home as quickly as possible. We will drink coffee together and talk of my book which I am so anxious to complete.’
He walked as he talked, his hand on her arm, edging her towards the station entrance where a splendidly kept dark blue Chevrolet stood. He ushered her into the front seat, put her luggage in the boot and got into the driving seat. ‘Fifteen of your English miles,’ he observed, ‘we shall be there very shortly.’
But not as shortly as all that, Cressida discovered. They drove very slowly through the city, a busy, bustling place she wanted to explore, and she wondered if there was something about Dutch motoring laws she didn’t know—a twenty-mile speed limit in towns, for instance, and yet everyone else was travelling twice as fast. Perhaps her new employer was just a very cautious driver. On the outskirts of Leeuwarden he achieved a steady thirty, while cars flashed past at thrice that speed and Cressida, who in happier times had driven her father’s car rather well, longed to stretch out a neatly booted foot and slam it down on the accelerator, for it seemed to her a crying shame to own such a powerful car and not make use of it. She kept her itching foot still and watched the slowly passing scenery while she answered her companion’s stream of questions. Even if he was a shocking driver, he was rather an old dear.
They turned off the main road presently and trickled cautiously down a narrow lane. ‘Eestrum,’ the doctor informed her as they approached and passed through a smallish village. ‘We go to Augustinusga, that is where I live, so well placed between Leeuwarden and Groningen. It is convenient for me—and my partners—to travel to either place.’
‘Partners?’ asked Cressida. No one had mentioned them.
‘Doctor Herrima—we share a house and a housekeeper—and Doctor van der Teile, who is the senior partner and does not live in the village. We consult him, you understand; all the more difficult cases, but for the most of the time he is either at Leeuwarden or Groningen, for he has beds in both hospitals as well as consulting rooms. He is a distinguished physician and travels a good deal.’
Cressida murmured politely; he would be a very elderly man, she imagined, for Doctor van Blom was certainly in his sixties and this other partner was the senior…the third partner would be the youngest and the junior. The three bears; she suppressed a giggle.
Her companion had dropped the car’s speed to a smart walking pace and began pointing out local landmarks. A windmill, standing lonely in the wintry fields by a canal, a little wood on the other side of the water, bare and dull in the morning’s grey bleakness, but, she was assured, a charming place in the spring. An austere red brick church with plain glass windows came into view and a cosy little house beside it. ‘The dominee and his wife live there,’ explained Doctor van Blom. ‘A good friend of ours, and here, at the beginning of the village, is an excellent example of our Friesian farms.’
Cressida was still craning her neck to see the last of it as they entered the village itself, circled the square lined with houses and stopped cautiously outside one of them, a red brick house with its door exactly in the centre and its windows arranged across its face in mathematical rows. She hoped it wasn’t as plain inside as it was out, and had her hope realised; the front door opened on to a long, narrow hall, lofty-ceilinged and a little dark and from which numerous doors opened. Doctor van Blom threw open the first of these and ushered her in, at the same time raising his voice in a mild bellow. This was instantly answered in person by his housekeeper, a tall, thin woman, no longer young but with such a forceful air about her that one could have imagined her barely in her prime. She smiled at the doctor, smiled at Cressida, shook her hand and followed them into what was obviously the sitting-room, comfortably furnished, the leather chairs a little shabby perhaps, but there was some beautiful china and silver lying around on shelves and tables, rather as though someone had just been admiring the objects and set them down haphazardly. There were shelves of books, too, and an old-fashioned stove giving off a most welcome heat.
Cressida took the chair she was offered and surrendered her coat to the housekeeper, her unhappy heart much cheered by her kindly reception, and when Juffrouw Naald went away and came back a moment later with a tray laden with coffee-cups and biscuits, she partook of these refreshments with more pleasure than she had felt for some time.
They had been sitting for perhaps ten