Armanda saw her father’s fingers tapping quietly on the arms of his chair. Uneasily, she felt the impulse to go sit on one of the arms and put her hand in his. All men, the conversation went on, young unmarried men and fathers of households with withdrawal symptoms, basically they were expected to wait. But it wasn’t for long. A holiday bus from Leiden swept festively into the old marketplace, where it disgorged its passengers in front of a well-known small hotel. It was almost evening. The entire waterfront street was full as the girls, roughly twenty of them, climbed out, laughing and waving at the men, to get rooms.
Smiles all round. A very strange atmosphere, Armanda remembered later, without a single drop of anything high-proof doing the rounds. A cousin, the daughter of a certain Aunt Noor, had burst out laughing loudly, but then checked her laughter to tell a quick story about her fiancé, who had spent the summer with a colleague from the national police in one of these half-drowned villages. The girl, a rather brainless creature, gave some totally tactless details about her fiancé’s summer. Beautiful weather. At high tide you could sail through an opening in the sea dike to the highest point of the village, where it rose up out of the water, and you could moor behind the pastor’s house. Residence permits were almost never granted to the actual inhabitants of the village, not even if someone’s house was still standing and they absolutely wanted to return. The only people there were a rescue team, a tavernkeeper with an ancient mother on whom they, the fiancé and his colleague, could unload entire boxes full of cats they’d fished up, and a few boys who collected the machinery from the farms and set it out to dry in the sun. The two policemen had their hands full. Even late at night they would sometimes be awakened by the approaching buzzing of a motorboat with a troop of merry thieves on board, who assumed the village was totally abandoned. All in all, a terrific time: driving around, hilarious evenings in the tavern, fish to catch by the pound just by lowering a net in front of the opening by the dike, idiotic games with a pig that was running around, the Handelsblad sent a crate of oranges, and naturally going swimming, jumping into the water, which they did right from …
The cousin, a little uncertain now, had begun to pull at her lip.
“Oh, I’m boring you.”
“Not at all! Which they did right from … yes?”
Armanda had already stopped looking at the storyteller some time ago, but as the account began to pull her in, she had turned her eyes toward her father, her mother, and her brother. She saw her father pick up a matchbox and examine it carefully, while her mother bent forward with a lifeless smile to pour some cream into Jacob’s coffee. In the meantime she heard, as did her parents, how the cousin’s fiancé and his colleague had jumped right off the makeshift landing behind the pastor’s house to go for a swim. Of course, only when the water was as clear as glass, and with their eyes open, because as her fiancé had said, man, you had no idea what was floating around down there!
At that very moment everyone looked up, laughing and saying hello. Sjoerd had come in, a little late, he’d had some things to do in the city after dinner. Armanda, who had hardly been able to move for the last fifteen minutes, felt a surge of relief go through her. With a sense of everything’s-okay-now she got to her feet to take the empty coffee cups into the kitchen, knowing that Sjoerd would take up his duties as son-in-law at the sideboard in the back room where the bottles and glasses were standing ready. As the two of them did the rounds shortly afterward with wine, vermouth, egg liqueur, and gin, most of the guests barely detected any difference between this and earlier parties here in the house, and after the first glasses nobody saw any difference at all.
Shortly after eleven the door to the living room opened. A little barefoot creature with dark sleepy eyes came toddling in: Nadja. The entire assembled company immediately stopped all conversations, looked at the child, laughed and cooed, and in general presented a picture that would make anyone wonder what kind of spooky effect it would have on a stone-sober almost-three-year-old. But — at this moment the little one discovered the face of her mother and steered for a pair of open arms.
Nothing special. Armanda, who had been called Mama by Nadja for so long already that she’d forgotten it had ever been otherwise, kissed the copper-red curls on the head of the toddler now sitting on her lap. Then, contented, as she looked around the room, where conversation had started up again, she realized that Betsy was trying to meet her eyes, and looking acutely interested. It was the look of a friend from a far corner of the room, but so penetrating that her inner ear could pick up the whispered arguments that came with it.
“Sweetheart, fate has certainly intervened in your life, hasn’t it?”
Calm, persuasive. Armanda stared back.
“A little effort on your part, and my brother, shall we say, gets his wife, whom he misses, back again. But à propos, do tell me why you behaved so impossibly to him after the movies last week.”
Without dropping her gaze, Armanda had carefully picked up her glass from the occasional table and taken a sip. Then, with Nadja’s hot little head resting against her neck, she had telegraphed back: “Dear Betsy, I do understand — you want to see your half brother and his family settled with a competent woman to run the house again. I myself am conscious of certain powers that sometimes encourage this, and sometimes suddenly rule it out altogether. When the three of us went to the Rialto last week to see La Città Dolente, to begin with I liked it that you arranged things so that Sjoerd sat in the middle and I could feel his shoulder against mine as soon as the lights went down. When afterward you wanted to excuse yourself quickly so that Sjoerd and I could spend a few minutes in the rosy dimness of the foyer talking a little about the really moving story of the man who got left at the North Pole, I was already ahead of you. Two quick kisses for each of you, then I beat it. And now you want an explanation. All I’m going to say is that because of the short that ran before the main film, I didn’t register a single thing about the North Pole business. It was about Schouwen-Duiveland. Do you remember? The weekly newsreel once again was delivering the most heroic report, and in the most heroic voice: all forces had been deployed to close the last breach in the dike in Zeeland, near Ouwerkerk. Why this had to be done in night and fog was a mystery, but here were the pictures: the black expanse of water, sections of the dike, cranes, and on the foredeck of a ship the queen, a beret on her head, standing among the workers chewing her lip, because this job has already been done once, and failed miserably. But this time it works. Incredibly impressive, all these lights at night! The gap in the dike at Ouwerkerk is enormous, and four huge concrete caissons have to be pulled into it by tugs and then lowered. Three of the things are already in place, tonight it’s the turn of number four. The tugs have brought it into position as the tide goes out, and now, one and a half hours later, it comes to rest on the sea bottom, precisely placed to the inch. How diligent we are today. From now on, no more tides turning right there between the houses. All over the island, which I’ve long thought of as Lidy’s island now, bells begin to ring out in the night. Major celebrations. I kept hearing them, Betsy, in fragments, all through the other film about that man at the North Pole.”