‘Oh, thank you so much. I’ve only been over here for a few days, you see, and I was getting into awful muddles, always paying in bank notes, of which there seem to be dozens of different ones, and never knowing whether the change was right.’
‘I don’t think one need worry about the right change in Holland. I’ve never been done down since I’ve been here. The bank notes are for a thousand guilders downwards, and are perfectly easy to understand.’ With this, Laura nodded and was about to walk on, when the girl said eagerly,
‘And about the presents. Will the English customs be very grabbing?’
‘I shouldn’t think so. Show them what you’ve got is my advice. I don’t believe in trying to dodge them. I should think it must be so wearing to the nerves. Apart from that, my husband is a policeman and I have to guard his reputation.’
This time Laura really did walk on, and went back to the hotel for a second breakfast.
CHAPTER ONE
A Conference Ends
The country which we call “Holland” is, in reality, The Netherlands, and the people we call “Dutch” are, in reality, Netherlanders.‘
Bernard Pingaud, trans. Harold Myers
« ^ »
At the end of a fortnight, the Scheveningen Conference was over. The experts in higher education laughed, clattered and nattered — the last in a dozen different languages. They gathered up papers and pens, surged around their Dutch hosts and, (but for the melancholy fact that there was nothing to drink except the water in an austere carafe on the chairman’s table), they managed to produce the kind of cacophony usually associated with cocktail parties.
The chairman disentangled himself from an enthusiastic group and went over to where the distinguished alienist, Dame Beatrice Adela Lestrange Bradley, was the centre of a no less enthusiastic but a very much quieter circle. She was regaling them (by request) with details of some of the more bizarre and interesting deaths by murder and suicide which had fallen within her wide experience.
‘Extraordinary,’ thought the Dutchman, ‘how that mouth, so like the beak of a little bird, can produce those exquisite sounds.’ He paused on the outer fringe of the group to listen to these sounds before he muscled in and cut Dame Beatrice off from her circle of admirers.
‘Ah, Dame Beatrice,’ he said, ‘I am now giving a small luncheon party in the English manner. May I hope that you will join us? There will be just twenty people or so — the amusing ones, of course. I would like you to meet Professor van Zestien and his brother. They were so interested in your paper on Traumatic Regicides With Special Reference to the Death of Charles I. Professor Derde van Zestien has made a special study of the period, your English Puritans having points of interest for all Netherlanders, of course.’
‘Ah, yes. The Pilgrim Fathers came originally from this country.’
‘From Rotterdam. You should visit that city. There is much that is of interest. And do persuade Professor Sweyn van Zestien to describe to you Amsterdam. If you go there, be sure to look for the street organs, the barrel-organs, you know. They are a particular feature. He is sure to mention them. He admires them very much and is an authority upon their manufacture.’
Still chatting, he led her away, and it was not until some three hours later that she rejoined her secretary in the lounge of their hotel.
‘Did you talk Higher Thought all the time?’ asked Laura.
‘Talking shop was outlawed, politely but firmly, by Professor Derde van Zestien,’ Dame Beatrice replied. ‘I was seated between him and his brother at table and he told me of some of the places of interest which we ought to visit before we return to England.’
‘We?’
‘Well, as your dear Robert seems to be fully occupied with that tiresome Curlew murder, and your son Hamish is away at school, I had hoped that you would see your way to remaining here with me while I go on this promised tour. After all, sightseeing counts for nothing unless one is in a position to point out the obvious to one’s long-suffering travelling companion.’
‘There’s bound to be a lot of stuff that needs attention at your London clinic, you know. Oughtn’t I… ?’
‘Nonsense! Dr Anderson will cope. I will tell him to employ a temporary secretary.’
‘Oh, well, naturally, I’d love to stay here, especially if there’s nothing to stop us from gallivanting. We do propose to gallivant, I take it? — not all museums and art-galleries?’
‘We will Venice in Amsterdam, even if we also rijsttafel at the Bali restaurant there. We will cheese at Alkmaar. We will flower-market at Aalsmeer, seaside at Zandvoort and national costume at Bunschoten-Spakenburg or Staphorst. We will sheep and bird-watch on Texel, and you may swim there. We will yacht at Sneek, spice-bread at Deventer, labyrinth at Maastricht and walk, grotto, miniature-golf (and anything else you like) at Valkenburg.’
‘I didn’t say I didn’t want any museums and art-galleries.’
‘Very well. There are sixteen Rembrandts in the Mauritshuis at The Hague, and Delft and Leiden are museums in themselves, so we will visit all.’
‘You seem to know an awful lot about Holland.’
‘No, no, very little, in point of fact, and most of what I do know I gained at lunch-time from Professor Sweyn van Zestien, Professor Derde’s younger brother.’
‘Sweyn isn’t a Dutch name, is it?’
‘No. The professors had a Danish mother. I received much information about the van Zestien family tree from both the brothers. At present there are three branches, one might say. The Colwyn-Welches were fathered by Francis of that ilk, who married into the van Zestien family represented by the professors’ Aunt Binnen. She has three children, Opal, Ruby and Frank. After her husband’s death, and after the war, during which she served with the Resistance, Binnen returned to the family home in Amsterdam, where she lives with her two unmarried daughters.’
‘So that’s why Professor Sweyn is so interested in Amsterdam? — they are natives there.’
‘It seems so. The son, Frank, married a Scotswoman, Flora Beith, and lives in Scotland, where they own three hotels.’
‘Up with the bonnets of Bonnie Dundee!’
‘They have two children, Florian and Binnie, aged twenty-three and nineteen respectively. These, however, no longer live at home, but with their granduncle, Bernard van Zestien, father of Derde and Sweyn, and brother to Binnen.’
‘Couldn’t they thole home life in Caledonia stem and wild?’
‘I gathered, but only by putting some apparently unrelated scraps of information together (and most probably, in the process, making an error of one, or even minus one, in the simple addition sum of two plus two), that their parents had an eye to their future.’
‘Granduncle stinks of money, I suppose.’
‘Not only that, but he has lost the companionship of his sons, Derde and Sweyn, who prefer to live over here and who hold professorships in the Universities, respectively, of Groningen and Amsterdam.’
‘Oh, the children and he don’t live in Holland, then?’
‘No. The granduncle is a diamond merchant, with contacts, of course, in his native city, but it seems he has a house in North Norfolk and an office in Hatton Garden. I gather that he has an extensive fortune, as you suggest.’
‘Which, obviously, somebody will inherit.’
‘Exactly. He was a lonely man when his Danish wife, Ingeborg, died and his sons and daughter left home. The daughter’s name is Maarte and she married a wealthy Jew named Sigismund Rose. They have one son, Bernardo, named after his grandfather.’
‘For obvious reasons, no doubt.’