‘Now that there is this business of Binnie and Bernardo,’ said Binnen, taking an appreciative sip of her gin, ‘Florian will probably leave his grandfather’s house until after the wedding. He does not like Bernardo and has no wish to see dear little Binnie married.’
‘To Bernardo in particular?’ asked Laura.
‘That, of course, but he says he does not wish to see her married at all. He thinks that, at nineteen, she is not old enough to be married.’
‘Our uncle van Zestien is in favour of the match,’ said Opal. ‘There is money in the Rose family. Our cousin, Maarte van Zestien, married Bernardo’s father, Sigismund Rose, and that with the full approval of both families. Diamonds, you see. The two businesses are connected.’
‘Diamonds are all very well,’ said Binnen, ‘but they do not grow, as bulbs do. There is money in bulbs, just as there is in diamonds, but a nicer way to earn it.’ She went on to talk of bulbs, bulb-growing and bulb marketing. When she paused, her daughter Opal said:
‘To me, Florian is like the flower of the hyacinth.’
‘Yes, a Delft Blue,’ agreed her sister. ‘That is why I would have preferred a painted portrait rather than a piece of sculpture. If we could find a good painter, I would pay for the portrait myself, if I could possibly afford it.’
‘No, no! A bust gives a much better likeness,’ protested Opal. ‘Besides, our mother, who is paying, prefers a bust, do you not, Mamma? But I wish to pay.’
‘While I live you have only what I am good enough to give you out of your father’s money,’ said Binnen. ‘After my death, you will have a fortune, both of you. If you sell my bulb-fields… as I suppose you will… you may even have quite a large fortune. I do not know what the land and goodwill may fetch, but my brother, your uncle Bernard van Zestien, will help you. Our family business was in bulbs until Bernard sold his share and went into the diamond trade, but he still understands our tulips and hyacinths and, to a lesser extent, our crocuses, daffodils and gladioli. You will go to him for advice.’
‘Yes, of course, Mamma,’ said Ruby; but Opal merely shrugged, as though in complete disagreement with this counsel. Almost immediately after this, lunch was announced. The Colwyn-Welch family moved away and Laura waited beside Dame Beatrice while the latter finished off a paragraph.
‘It was kind of you to side-track our friends,’ she said, putting her work together. ‘I shall leave this now, and go on with it this afternoon while you are out. I gather that you do not propose to avail yourself of Mr Florian’s invitation to take you to visit the grotto.’
‘I can’t stand the beautiful boy!’ said Laura. ‘Unless he smiles, he reminds me of a Harold Copping drawing in a religious book for kids… charming to look at, but remote from life as it has to be lived, and from boys as one knows they really are — thugs and criminals, for the most part — criminals, anyway.’
‘Dear me!’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘I hope we do not need to include Hamish!’
‘He’s a thug,’ declared his mother, ‘and will be a criminal as soon as he is old enough to know right from wrong.’
Immediately after lunch, during which she perceived that Florian had rejoined his relatives, Laura set off to visit the Knight’s Castle. She did not find the restored edifice particularly interesting, but she enjoyed the view and decided to mount the Wilhelmina Tower in order to obtain an even wider impression of the undoubtedly beautiful countryside.
She took the chair-lift to the top of the tower and was astonished, and not at all delighted, to find Binnie, among other visitors, in possession of the view. Binnie came to the subject which, apparently, was exercising her mind to the exclusion of much else.
‘I say!’ she exclaimed. ‘I did hope you’d be here! I’m so glad you’re not with your little old lady. She absolutely terrifies me! I say, you do think I’m doing the right thing in marrying Bernardo, don’t you? You see, it’s such a sensible arrangement. I do wish Florian wouldn’t be so sticky about it. After all, I can’t remain a spinster all my life, can I?’
‘How do I know?’ asked Laura. ‘By the way, I thought you were in Amsterdam to hold your brother’s hand at his sitting.’
‘Oh, Gran and the aunts wanted me to, but I got bored as soon as they left, so I hired a car and had lunch in Maastricht and then came on here to pick up and go back with them, but so far I haven’t set eyes on them. I suppose I’ll run into them later. What are you going to do next? I bet you’re thinking of the grotto. Let’s do it together. I shall probably scream when we get inside. I suffer from claustrophobia, you see.’
‘I suffer from schizophrenia,’ said Laura. ‘It makes me violent. If you screamed I should probably knife you.’
Binnie giggled.
‘I do so awfully admire you, if you don’t mind my saying so,’ she observed in ardent tones. ‘So we’ll do the grotto together, shall we? Have you really got a knife on you? I knew a man who threatened his wife with one. It was called a lethal weapon, and he was fined something quite appalling for possessing it. That was in England, of course. We live in England. I think I must have told you. Now that I’m engaged to Bernardo, though, Florian says he’s going to live over here with Grandma Binnen. I only hope he likes it. If you ask me, Aunt Ruby is a man-eater.’ She giggled again. ‘Come to think of it,’ she added, ‘she looks as though she could do with a square meal or so, doesn’t she?’
Laura declined to comment on Aunt Ruby’s undoubtedly cadaverous appearance, and found herself committed to accompanying Binnie to the grotto. The guide counted heads at the beginning of the expedition, and at times repeated this procedure. It would have been easy enough, Laura realised, to lose a tourist or so on the journey if this had not been done. To her satisfaction, Binnie remained almost entirely silent during the tour, breaking into loquacity only once or twice to remark that the effigy of the dragon and that of the crocodile reminded her of Laura’s formidable employer, saying which she giggled violently.
‘I wonder,’ she said, when they emerged, ‘what it would be like to get lost down there? I should try to make for the chapel, and pray and pray and pray until somebody found me. They’d have to find you, wouldn’t they?’
Laura replied, rather shortly, that some tourists were utterly irresponsible and deserved to get lost if they refused to obey the rules. She added that she had enjoyed the trip and that she agreed with the guide that ‘nature and art had combined to make one of the wonders of the modern world.’ Binnie assented wholeheartedly to this tongue-in-cheek paraphrase, and added that they had been walking on the bed of a prehistoric ocean. She particularised.
‘That underground lake!’ she exclaimed. ‘I suppose that was just the ultimate remains of the sea!’
‘Fresh water, and drinkable, according to the guide,’ said Laura. ‘Doesn’t sound much like the sea.’
Binnie giggled.
‘There shall be no more sea,’ she quoted. ‘A funny idea, don’t you think?’
‘I don’t care about it at all,’ Laura replied. ‘Patmos may have been one thing, but the British Isles are quite another.’
‘You are too utterly with it,’ said Binnie earnestly. ‘I think I should agree with every word you ever uttered. Your voice is sheer magic in my ears.’