Eline Vere (12 page)

Eline and Paul sat down, and the conversation drifted to other topics, day-to-day affairs and the busy stir in the streets now that the feast of St Nicholas was upon them. Then the clock struck half-past nine and Mina came to say the carriage was at the door.

‘Yes, it is time I took my leave,' said Madame van Raat, rising slowly to her feet, and Eline trotted off, humming to herself as she went to fetch her wraps from the anteroom: a fur-lined cloak, a
woollen shawl, a hood.

The old lady placed her spectacles and crochet-work in her reticule and allowed herself to be muffled up by her dear young friend, after which she kissed everyone goodbye. Henk and Paul escorted her to the front door and helped her into her coupé.

Leaning back against the plump satin cushions as the carriage rolled off, her ears still ringing with the duets sung by Eline and Paul, she smiled wistfully as she wiped the condensation off the window to look outside, where the snow lay dirty and bespattered in the light of the street lanterns, and she thought of the good old days when she used to visit the opera with her beloved husband.

Paul remained for another hour and then departed, having celebrated the success of his duets with a good glass of wine. When he had gone Eline went upstairs – to freshen up, as she told Betsy. It was chilly in her sitting room, but the cool air felt fresh on her cheeks and hands after the overheated salon. She sank onto her couch with the Persian cushions and raised her hand to caress the leaves of the aralia, striking one of her favourite poses. And she smiled, her eyes widening dreamily as her thoughts flew back to Fabrice, with his handsome beard and splendid voice. What a shame Betsy was not more partial to the opera! They went so very rarely, while she, Eline, adored it. She would let Madame Verstraeten know in some polite, discreet fashion that she would appreciate being invited to accompany her once in a while. Mr Verstraeten never went anyway, and his wife usually asked some acquaintance to share her box. She had asked Freddie before, and Paul as well, so why not her?

She sprang to her feet, seized by an idea. Fabrice had made his third debut last night: the first had been in
Hamlet
, the second in
Le Tribut de Zamora
, in which she had seen him, and yesterday in
William Tell
. . .

She ran out of the room and leant over the banisters.

‘Mina, Mina!' she called.

‘Yes, Miss!' answered Mina, who was just crossing the hall with a tray of wine glasses.

‘Bring me the newspapers, please, if they've finished with them downstairs.'

‘Yes, Miss, certainly.'

Eline returned to her room and settled herself back on the couch. It made her laugh when she felt her heart beating with curiosity. Whatever was she thinking? In what way could it possibly be of any concern of hers?

There was Mina, climbing the stairs. She brought both papers:
Het Vaderland
and
Het Dagblad
.

‘If you please, Miss.'

‘Thank you, Mina,' said Eline, taking the newspapers with a careless gesture.

But no sooner had the maid left, shutting the door behind her, than Eline sprang into action. She quickly spread out the crackling sheets of
Het Vaderland
, scanning them excitedly for the Arts and Literature section. Ah, there it was:

The French Opera.
After successful performances in
Hamlet
and
Le Tribut de Zamora,
there could have been no doubt that Mr Théo Fabrice would find favour with this season's ticket-holders for the French Opera, and so it comes as a surprise to learn of the three votes cast against this brilliant baritone. Once again, in
William Tell,
Mr Fabrice has offered proof of his fitness to fulfil the role of baritone in the Grand Opera, and we sincerely congratulate him on his appointment. This commendable artist combines a strong vocal technique with impassioned yet tasteful acting, which testifies to much dedicated study. In the duo with Arnold (Act 1), and the grand trio in the scene with Jemmy, Fabrice displayed a standard of excellence rarely encountered on our stages today
.

Eline nodded approvingly. Yes, it was all true, every word of it, and she read the article to the end, exulting in his success. Then she turned to
Het Dagblad
to see what it had to say about him.

The Ferelijns occupied a cramped apartment over a grocer's shop in Hugo de Grootstraat, comprising on the first floor two adjoining rooms, a kitchen and a small room to the side, and on the second two bedrooms with small side rooms. Over their living quarters hung a pall of straitened means: Frans had been left only a small inheritance by his parents, and consequently had to manage with wife and children on the small salary he received while on furlough. They had decided to take up temporary residence in The Hague, the city where they had both lived from an early age, where they had first met, and where they still expected to find their friends and acquaintances, although Frans maintained that they would have done better to have gone to live in a smaller town. But also in The Hague was Jeanne's father, Mr van Tholen, a retired colonial official leading a solitary existence, rarely sought out by old friends and relations owing to his intractable temperament, and infrequently visited by his offspring once they had married or taken up appointments elsewhere, which was why Jeanne had prevailed upon her husband to stay in The Hague notwithstanding their meagre income. She promised to maintain a firm hold on the purse strings, and she kept her word, for all that she was not thrifty by nature.

So they remained in The Hague, despite numerous disappointments. Jeanne found her father much aged in the four years that they had been abroad: grimmer and more irritable than she had known him. The good old days were truly gone, she thought; her
happy childhood in her sunny home with her mother and her brothers and sisters, her innocent pranks with schoolmates, her girlish dreams under the lilac and jasmine in the garden, those early days of her engagement to Frans, filled with idealistic fantasies. The memories she thought to revisit in Holland were scattered far and wide, like fallen leaves. She had yearned for the damp and mist of home when she was in the Indies, but now that she was back, with everything being so disappointing and the unrelenting struggle to make ends meet, she yearned for the uncomplicated, easygoing life she had enjoyed overseas in rural Kadoe with her cow and her chickens. But she put on a brave face and struggled valiantly to deal with the troublesome minutiae of her present existence. Dr Reijer came to visit little Dora every other day, but she thought she detected in the popular young physician a nervous haste, which made him count every second spent at the child's bedside. He would listen briefly to Dora's chest, assure Jeanne that the cough was getting better, remind her to keep the child indoors and then, after running the tip of his gold pencil down the interminable list of names in his notebook, he would jump into his coupé and vanish. It was he who had advised Frans to seek help for his migraines and fevers from a certain professor in Utrecht, with whom he had corresponded at length regarding the case. Frans duly went to Utrecht, but returned dissatisfied, for he objected to the vague, prevaricating manner in which the professor had given his opinion. So now when Dr Reijer visited Dora, Frans kept out of his way, resenting the fact that neither he nor the Utrecht professor had been able to cure him. He tried to ignore the headaches hammering at the back of his head and the fevers making him shiver as from a trickle of icy water down his spine, and took to closeting himself in the side room on the first floor, which did duty as his private little office. He remained there in sullen isolation, and although he felt a twinge of conscience when he heard Jeanne talking to the doctor upstairs and Dora loudly objecting to having her chest examined, he did not rise from his desk. All doctors were quacks as far as he was concerned, all talk, and unable to cure one when one was ill.

. . .

Jeanne accompanied the doctor down the stairs, conversing as they went, and Frans overheard Reijer enquiring after him and his wife replying, after which she called for the maid to show the doctor out. Then, as the carriage rattled off, she came into her husband's office.

‘Am I disturbing you?' she said in her soft, subdued voice.

‘No not at all; what is it?'

‘Why didn't you come upstairs for a moment, Frans? Reijer asked after you twice.'

He shrugged his shoulders.

‘There wouldn't be any point,' he huffed. ‘All he does is send one off to some celebrity in Leiden or Utrecht who charges ten guilders for a chat lasting no more than a few minutes!'

‘Be reasonable, Frans. You can't expect to be cured from one day to the next of something that has been troubling you for the past two years. I think you're being quite irresponsible, doing so little about your health – and it's already three months since we arrived here. Yet that was the reason we came to Europe in the first place, wasn't it?'

‘Yes, of course, but first I must find someone who inspires more confidence than Reijer. Reijer is a doctor à la mode, warmly recommended to you by the Van Raats, which is all to the good, but he's too superficial to my taste, altogether too hasty. He's always gone before you know it.'

‘You should try being a little more forthright with him. I ask him all sorts of questions about Dora, so he's obliged to stay a while longer, and really, now that he has come to know us a little better, he seems to be taking more interest in us, too. And everybody says he's very clever; it's not just the Van Raats who think the world of him.'

‘Well, I shall see. There's plenty of time yet. Sometimes you remind me of water dripping on a stone, drip, drip, drip – the way you go on and on about this doctor business!' he snapped. He was annoyed with himself, and with a brusque movement opened his writing-case, as if to say he had matters to attend to.

She withdrew, restraining a sigh, and quietly closed the door behind her. Upstairs in the nursery she came upon their only servant,
a girl of sixteen in a grimy apron with her hair cut straight across her forehead. Mietje was making the beds while Dora and the two boys, Wim and Fritsje, were in the next room playing with a handsome set of building blocks, a gift from their grandpa, Mr van Tholen.

‘I'll shut the door, then you can air the bedroom, Mietje,' said Jeanne, and she drew the sliding doors together. Smiling at her children, she sat down by the window at a table heaped with small garments waiting to be sorted: socks and stockings, shifts and pinnies, freshly purchased yet already in need of repair. Oh, how quickly her children wore out their clothes! She gave a sigh, stirring the heap with her small, thin hand while her eyes filled with tears. If only she had a more robust constitution, how well she would have been able to manage her little household! It was so difficult at times to raise herself above the gloom into which she felt herself sinking as into an abyss, to shake off the listlessness that held her fast with velvet arms, and yet – there was so much to be done. She must not give in to idle daydreaming, nor must she rake up her old scattered memories like so many burnt-out cinders and lose herself in nostalgia for bygone illusions: reality was staring her in the face, in the shape of Dora's badly torn new woollen skirt and the dirty laundry that needed counting before being sent off.

Even now, fingering the small socks and shirts, she felt herself being drawn deeper and deeper into the muffled depths of weariness. Unable to summon her strength and set to work, she was oblivious to Dora and Fritsje squabbling over the building blocks. How she would have loved to fill her little abode with sunshine and harmony, but she was no fairy godmother, she felt so weak and ineffectual, so daunted by the small vexations of her daily life that she did not even dare hope for a rosier future. Indeed, whenever she thought of what the future might hold, her timorous nature was overcome with a vague sense of darkness and doom, which she found impossible to put into words.

She propped up her head with her other hand, and a few teardrops fell on the laundry. Oh, if only she could have gone to sleep, gently caressed by someone who loved her and whose tenderness would make her feel calm and carefree and safe! And she thought of
her Frans, and of the day he had proposed to her beneath the blossoming lilac in the garden, and of what had become of her: water dripping on a stone, drip, drip, drip . . .

Oh, she knew she hadn't made him happy; she was a bitter disappointment to him, but it wasn't her fault that he had refused from the start to see her for what she was: a simple, weak creature, someone in need of much, very much love, and much tenderness and intimacy, someone with a touch of sentimental poetry in her soul . . .

She took a deep breath and drew herself up, telling the children not to make so much noise, for Papa was downstairs, and Papa had a headache. She looked about her for her sewing basket, but she had left it in the sitting room, so she told Dora to be a big girl and take charge of her brothers for a moment. She was in the habit of addressing the child in a tone as if she were a grownup daughter, and Dora, flattered by her mother's trust, was glad to oblige. Casting off her lethargy, Jeanne went downstairs to her sitting-cum-dining room, and was hunting for her sewing basket when her husband came in.

Frans had heard her tread on the stairs and felt an urge to make amends for his harshness earlier. He crept up behind her in his slippers as she searched beside the chimneypiece, and gently caught her by the arms.

She looked up, startled, and in his eyes she saw the old warmth she so often longed for as he murmured with a pleading, almost anxious smile:

‘I say, are you angry with me?'

She shook her head, her eyes filling with tears. Then she put her arm around him and leant her head on his shoulder.

‘Really not?'

She shook her head again, smiling between her tears, and closed her eyes as she felt his bristly moustache on her lips when he kissed her. How quick he was to repent when he had been harsh to her, and how good it made her feel to forgive him!