Her eyes darted with some anxiety between her own simple black dress and Betsy’s grey satin gown.
‘Oh, there won’t be anyone else besides Emilie and her brother. But since you told me you’d be leaving early, I thought we’d go to the opera afterwards. Uncle Verstraeten has let us have their box. So there’s nothing to upset yourself about, you were quite right to have come as you are.’
Henk came in looking blithe and affable in his smoking jacket, which Jeanne found more reassuring than Betsy’s casual response. Emilie, rustling with jet beads and ebullient as ever, was a close acquaintance, leaving only Georges — in a tailcoat with a gardenia in his buttonhole — to make her feel uncomfortable in her day dress.
Frans Ferelijn, a member of the East Indian colonial service, was on leave in Holland on account of his health, and his wife was an old school-friend of Eline and Betsy.
Jeanne was an unassuming little woman, very subdued, and bowed by her domestic troubles. Of slight build and anaemic pallor, with soft brown eyes, she laboured under the task of raising three sickly children with restricted financial means, and moreover she was racked with homesickness for the East Indies, the land of her birth, where she had loved the simple way of life in their remote outpost. She suffered from the cold, and counted the months remaining until their departure from Holland. She told Emilie about their home at Temanggoeng in the Kadoe, where Frans was Comptroller First-Class, and about their menagerie of Cochin chickens, ducks, pigeons, a Dutch cow that was milked every day, a pair of goats and a cockatoo.
‘Rather like Adam and Eve in Paradise,’ commented Emilie.
Then Jeanne related how she used to go out each morning to tend her Persian roses and her lovely crotons, how she picked the vegetables for the day in her own back garden and how her youngsters had begun to cough and fall ill the moment they arrived in Holland. True, they had been pale in the Indies, too, but at least there she wasn’t always worrying about draughts and keeping the doors properly closed. She also missed her baboe, whom she had been obliged to leave behind for reasons of economy. In the meantime the baboe, whose name was Saripa, was in service with other people at Semarang, but she had vowed to return as soon as they were back in the Indies, and Jeanne in turn had promised to bring her some lengths of pretty cotton from Holland for her to make into kebayas.
Emilie listened with friendly interest and plied her with questions, for she knew how talk of the East Indies could draw Jeanne out of her customary reticence. Betsy considered her unsuitable for larger receptions, so she usually invited her and her husband on their own or with just one or two other close acquaintances. The fact was that she found Jeanne boring and insignificant, lacking in dress sense and prone to whingeing, but that was no reason, she felt, not to invite her for the occasional informal gathering. Jeanne had been included out of pity, Emilie out of pleasure, and Georges out of duty.
While Frans Ferelijn held forth to Henk about his impending promotion to Assistant-Resident, and Georges listened politely to Jeanne’s account of how her husband’s horse had once strayed right onto their veranda in quest of its daily treat of a banana, Betsy leant back in her chair, thinking that Eline was taking a very long time coming. She was hoping to dine early, so as to arrive at the opera in time for the second half, and she prayed that the Ferelijns would not be indiscreet and stay too long. They were seldom amusing, anyway, she thought, and she rose, masking her impatience. She touched the peacock feathers in the Makart bouquet, adjusted some bibelots on a side table and with the point of her shoe straightened a wrinkle in the tiger-skin rug before the flaming fire in the grate. She was annoyed with Eline.
At long last the door opened and Eline appeared. Jeanne was struck by how elegantly fetching she looked in her pink dress of ribbed silk, simple but beautifully made, with tiny butterfly bows dotted here and there along the low-cut bodice, in the folds of the elbow-length sleeves and at the waist. In her tawny-brown hair, dressed in the shape of a Grecian helmet, she wore an aigrette of pink plumes; her feet were daintily shod in pink, her throat was adorned with a single strand of pearls and in her hands she held her long gloves, her pink feather fan and her mother-of-pearl opera glasses.
Ferelijn and De Woude stood up to greet her, and after shaking hands with them she kissed Emilie and Jeanne lightly on the forehead. As she enquired after little Dora’s health, she could not help noticing that all eyes, including those of Henk and Betsy, were fastened on her. Her toilette was clearly a success, and when Jeanne reported that Dr Reijer had pronounced the girl to be on the mend, she responded with a beaming, triumphant smile.
. .
At table, Eline jested incessantly with her neighbour, Georges de Woude. Betsy was seated between her two male guests, Emilie between Henk and Frans, Jeanne between Eline and Henk. In the slightly sombre dining room with its antique furnishings, the snowy damask tablecloth shimmered with silverware and fine crystal, while the soft gas light flickering on the decanters and glasses made the wines of purple-red or palest yellow appear to quiver. From a bed of flowers in a silver basket rose the prickly crown of a pineapple.
De Woude began describing the soirée at the Verstraetens’ to Eline, giving her a glowing account of how truly regal the Honourable Miss van Erlevoort had looked in her poses, first as Cleopatra and then as the Sense of Sight. Emilie, Frans and Betsy were discussing the Indies, with Jeanne joining in from time to time, but she was sitting too far away and was distracted by De Woude’s loquaciousness and Eline’s flirtatious, high-pitched laughter. Henk ate his soup and then his fish pastry in silence, save for the occasional offer of another helping or another glass to Jeanne or Emilie. Jeanne grew increasingly withdrawn, as much from her general malaise as from having conversed at such length with Emilie after a day filled with cares. It irked her to be sitting so close to Eline, resplendent in her dinner gown, for both she and De Woude looked as if they were attending a banquet — they made her feel quite dowdy in her plain day dress. Still, she was thankful to be sitting next to Henk, and was conscious of a vague sort of sympathy with him, as he seemed to feel just as out of place as she did.
She could not help comparing herself with Eline and Betsy; there she was, struggling with her three children on a small furlough-allowance, while Eline and Betsy spent their days in a whirl of sophisticated pastimes. Where was the warm friendship that had united them when they were young and carefree, walking to school together with their satchels, when Eline had filled the hood of her raincoat with cherries and Betsy had egged them on to make mischief in the classroom? She felt estranged from her young hostess, and even repelled by her condescending manner in conversation and her domineering tone towards her husband; she felt likewise estranged from Eline, whom she found vain and frivolous in the witticisms she exchanged with the dandy at her side. She could not fathom Eline; there was something strange about her, something mysterious and contradictory. Her all-too-ready laughter grated on Jeanne’s nerves, and she could not imagine how someone who by all accounts sang so wonderfully could sound so disagreeable and artificial when she laughed. Oh, if only they would pipe down! She wished she was back in the narrow upstairs apartment, with her little Dora. What was she doing here, anyway? Of course, when the physician had pronounced Dora to be out of danger, Frans had been keen to accept the invitation as a much-needed diversion, but this, this was no diversion by any means, it was only making her feel nervous and shy.