Eline Vere (19 page)

A romantic vision fired her imagination, now that her spirits had lifted somewhat thanks to Henk's cheering words, and in the heat of her fantasy she saw herself with Fabrice, waiting for their train with trepidation, fearful of being pursued.

‘Auntie, Auntie! Let me in!' cried Ben from the landing.

She slipped the album out of sight and opened the door. In came Ben, hugging the water-filled vase to his chest.

‘Well done, you clever boy!' said Eline. ‘And not a drop spilled on the stairs?'

He shook his head from side to side, proud of his achievement, for which he had Mina to thank. He began to put the flowers in the vase, and it crossed her mind that the initiative for the little boy's gift had doubtless come from Betsy, too. What a nuisance all this was.

But she braced herself and proceeded down the stairs with Ben. Betsy was in the dining room, issuing instructions to Grete.

‘Good morning, Betsy,' said Eline.

‘Good morning, Eline, many happy returns of the day!' said Betsy, without expression.

Eline did not wish to say any more in the presence of a servant, and told Grete she could clear away.

‘I shan't be having any breakfast today,' she said, and to hide her unease she turned to Ben and tried to make him laugh.

Betsy remained with her back to her, poring over the bills and receipts on her writing table with the air of a dutiful housewife.

Several seconds of awkward silence ensued, broken by Betsy scolding Ben for being such a dawdler and sending him off to the nursery, after which Eline stood up. She crossed the room and put her hands on her sister's shoulders.

‘Betsy–' she began.

She could not bring herself to say anything yet about the gift, the diamond spider.

‘Betsy dear, wouldn't it be better if . . .? I can't tell you how sorry I am that we should be so . . . oh please don't be angry with me any more, it was wrong of me.'

‘Well, Eline, I am glad to hear you admit it. And I'm not angry with you.'

‘Are we friends again then?'

‘Oh, of course. You know there's nothing I dislike more than unpleasantness. I am all for peace. So let's say no more about it, shall we?'

The coldness of her tone was like ice to Eline, but she bent over to give Betsy a kiss.

‘No truly, I am sorry; of course I had no right to go against your wishes in your own house. I do apologise.'

There was something else she wanted to say, but she could not find the words, and again touched her lips to her sister's brow, at which Betsy pushed her lightly aside.

‘All right then; let's drop the subject. I'm not angry any more. But please stop kissing me, you know I don't like it.'

. . .

Eline spent her birthday in a sombre frame of mind. The reconciliation with Betsy had not gone as she would have wished; she had expected there to be more affection, a sisterly embrace, shared tears perhaps, after which they would have carried on in cordial companionship for a long period of time. But the reality had been, on Betsy's side, nothing but icy condescension, which had made her own contribution appear rather feeble. She knew herself to be the weaker of the two, and yet she could not resist taking a stand against Betsy from time to time, but with each act of defiance, even if it resulted in temporary victory, she felt increasingly powerless to continue her struggle. The odds were against her, and their latest disagreement was yet another proof of the fickleness of her pride, which had let her down once more, casting a pall of doom over all her thoughts.

Nonetheless, she kept up an appearance of gaiety throughout the afternoon, in the cheer of friends as they came to convey their good wishes. But Madame van Raat, in whose pensive, pale-blue eyes she would have been so glad to detect a ray of sympathy, had sent a message through Paul saying she was indisposed. This was a great disappointment to Eline, which only deepened when Madame van Erlevoort and Mathilda arrived with the news that Freddie would not be calling because she had caught a cold, and again Eline wondered why Frédérique had taken against her. Jeanne Ferelijn spoke at length of her domestic troubles, and it required all the sweet civility that Eline could muster not to betray her impatience. Not only
had she been abandoned by Madame van Raat, also Cateau van der Stoor, another visitor she would have liked to receive, failed to put in an appearance. Worse, she appeared to have forgotten all about the birthday as she hadn't even sent a message. Fortunately Emilie de Woude did come, displaying her curiously irrepressible good humour. Her ebullience infused a touch of levity into the formal atmosphere of the salons, where the gas was not yet lit, and where the brightness of the gilded panelling, the sheen of the Havana-brown satin cushions, the burnished-gold plush of the curtains seemed to dissolve into the deepening shadows.

Emilie demanded to see Eline's presents, and was directed to a side table bearing diverse pretty trifles arrayed about a large basket filled with fruit and flowers.

‘What a splendid basket!' cried Emilie. ‘Peaches, grapes, roses, how lovely! From whom, Elly?'

‘From Vincent. Charming, is it not?'

‘I wish I had such charming cousins!'

‘Hush,' whispered Eline.

Vincent had just entered, and his eyes, slightly narrowed, went in search of the hostess. Betsy, ever on her guard with their cousin, received him with her customary display of careful cordiality. Eline thanked him for his gift, catching his hands in hers.

He apologised for arriving so late; it was already a quarter past five, and the Verstraetens and the others began to take their leave in the gathering dusk, after which Gerard came in to light the gas, close the shutters and draw the curtains.

‘Vincent, you will stay to dinner, won't you?' asked Betsy.

Betsy did not fancy the prospect of a dull evening at home. They had not been invited anywhere, and besides, she had not thought it right to make plans to go out on her sister's birthday while they were not on speaking terms. With Vincent being a close kinsman, she could easily extend an informal invitation at short notice. He had conversation when in good humour, and at least there would be a fresh face at the dinner table.

Vincent accepted the invitation with a laconic ‘Oh, with pleasure.' Henk, having declared his intention to take a walk, donned only his hat and hurriedly left the house, his collar turned up and
his hands in his pockets. Anna, the nursemaid, came to fetch Ben, whose chin was smeared with jelly and cream after the birthday feast. Betsy too disappeared upstairs, leaving Eline and Vincent alone in the spacious salon, now bright with gas light.

‘Let's go and sit over there,' said Eline, and Vincent followed her into the violet anteroom, where the small crystal chandelier diffused a soft glow that invited intimacy and confidences. To Vincent, however, the room merely breathed an atmosphere of relaxed wellbeing, and with a sigh he collapsed onto the sofa. He proceeded in his usual offhand way to enquire after the guests he had seen leaving. While replying to his question, she felt a great sympathy for her cousin welling up inside her. It was that need again, springing from her passion for Fabrice, that desire to be steeped in love, to be surrounded by it on all sides, and to bestow it on others. And just as it had struck Paul by the wan glow of a paraffin lamp, so it now struck Eline under the bright gas light flashing on the crystal pendants – Vincent bore a striking resemblance to her late beloved father, so striking as to transport her back in time to her girlhood, when her father would lean back in exactly the same way as Vincent was doing now, with the same pained expression about the mouth, the same soulful eyes contemplating some unattainable artistic vision; even the hand hanging limply over the side was exactly like her father's when he let the paintbrush slip from his fingers to the floor.

Eline felt her sympathy for Vincent reverberating with pity and poetic heartache as she listened to his murmured reminiscences of Smyrna, thinking how interesting he was, so much more so than the other young men of her acquaintance; how right he was to pronounce life in The Hague provincial and dreary, and how well she understood his desire for wider horizons, oh, if only she, too, could . . .

‘But I must be boring you with all this talk of my own dislikes,' he continued in an altered tone, ‘neither is it civil on my part.'

‘Oh, not at all, you're not boring me in the least!' she hastened to say, a touch dismayed that he had cut the thread of her fantasy so abruptly. ‘Do you think I can't imagine exactly how you feel, hating the routine of sameness day in day out, the endless going round in circles that we all do? I sometimes wish I could get away from it all
myself!' she exclaimed, waving her arms as if she were a caged bird flapping its wings. ‘Sometimes I feel very inclined to do something outrageous!' and she gave a secret smile at the thought of Fabrice.

He returned her smile, shaking his head, and reached out to pat her lifted hand, after which it fell gracefully to her side. ‘

Why would you want to do anything outrageous?' he asked. ‘You exaggerate. Just leading your own life without depending on others, taking no notice of what society expects from you, but following your own free will as long as it makes sense, to change one's surroundings as often as one pleases – that is my ideal. There's nothing like change to keep you young.'

‘But being independent, doing exactly as you please . . . that takes more moral courage than most of us possess in this over-civilised society of ours,' she replied, rather pleased with the epicurean-philosophical turn the conversation was taking.

‘Moral courage? Oh no, all you need is money!' he said firmly. ‘If I'm rich, have good manners, do nothing outrageous, and keep up appearances before the eyes of the world, it's well in my power to achieve my ideal, without anyone accusing me of anything worse than, say, mild eccentricity.'

This was rather too down-to-earth, too banal, to her way of thinking, and she countered by imposing her own, more romantic view.

‘Well yes, money . . . of course!' she resumed, dismissing his argument with feminine facility. ‘But if you're not strong enough to follow your will, you'll find yourself back in the same old routine before you know it. Which is why,' – he had to smile at her appealing want of logic – ‘which is why I would so dearly love to do something outrageous, you know, something unheard-of. Personally, I feel strong enough to go my own way whatever people might say, in fact I sometimes feel quite reckless.'

He was charmed by the ardour in her shining eyes as she flaunted her defiance, and her graceful, slight frame made him think of a butterfly poised to flit away.

‘But Eline!' he chuckled. ‘Whatever are you thinking of? What would you be reckless enough to do? Go on, confess, you naughty girl!'

She laughed.

‘Oh, to elope, at the very least!'

‘With me?'

‘Why not? But I'm afraid you'd leave me to fend for myself before long, you'd think me rather too expensive a companion, and I'd be back where I started, with my tail between my legs. So if that was meant as an invitation, much obliged, but I'd rather wait for a rich suitor.'

‘No log cabin, then, in the moonlight?'

‘Oh, Vincent, how dull! Never! I would die of boredom. Come to that, I'd rather be an actress . . . and elope with an actor.'

She sparkled with mischief and self-importance, exulting in her secret dream with Fabrice, and she looked Vincent boldly in the eye – he would never guess what she was thinking, anyway.

He laughed heartily; the vivacity that had replaced her languid elegance in the course of their conversation, combined with the radiance in her almond eyes and the way she kept patting her knee with coquettish impatience, amused him even more than what she was actually saying. And yet, her words struck a chord with him: her heartfelt longing for change was much like his own. They looked at one another a long moment, smiling, and the softness of his pale, penetrating gaze, had the mesmeric effect on her of a serpent's stare.

‘How extraordinary, he looks just like dear Papa, how very extraordinary!' she thought, marvelling at the sympathy she felt for Vincent as they rose in response to the bell summoning them to the dining room.

Madame Verstraeten remained at home with Lili, who was nursing a bad cold, while Marie and Frédérique set out with Paul and Etienne, their skates slung over their shoulders, to the skating rink at Laan van Meedervoort. Mr Verstraeten was reading a book in the warm conservatory surrounded by the shiny greenery of potted palms and aralias. Lili was out of sorts, responding to her mother's occasional remarks in listless monosyllables interspersed with valiant attempts to repress her coughing. She had pronounced herself quite recovered, and being cooped up in the house like this was not doing her any good, so she was resolved to go out again in a day or two. Looking out of the window she saw the garden looking positively Siberian, with crisp white snow lacing the bushes and the trees, and the untrodden paths resembling slabs of polished marble. Madame Verstraeten concentrated on her crochet, and the rapid movements of the needle working the wool into a knotty fabric grated on Lili's nerves, as did the regular sound, a little way off, of her father turning yet another page. She herself did nothing, her hands lying idle in her lap, and while she normally enjoyed an afternoon of dolce far niente, she was now bored to distraction.

Secretly she envied Freddie and Marie for their good health and high spirits, while she was still convalescing and obliged to wrap up against the slightest draught. But when her sister hesitated to accompany Freddie and Etienne on their outing, Lili herself had urged her to take her skates and go; Marie could hardly be expected
to stay with her all the time while she was ill, and besides, she had Mama to keep her company.

A sigh escaped her, and she took a cough lozenge from the sweet dish. Madame Verstraeten glanced at her from the corner of her eye, but made no comment, for she knew that Lili, in her irritable condition, would only huff at expressions of maternal solicitude.