Strike Out Where Not Applicable by Nicolas Freeling

promptly. ‘They turn their names into something sounding English. She’s the daughter of some big oil in Utrecht that makes gearwheels or cogwheels or something, and she’s married to Robert who is tall, thin and sententious, something quite haughty in the civil service. I can’t stand her – she’s one of those women with an infallible nose for the misfortunes of others, who take the keenest pleasure in discussing them.’
    â€˜Lovely. Does me a lot of good, all this. I feel filled with useful activities.’
    â€˜Yes, well, don’t forget there’s the washing-up still to do.’
    Although the riding-school seems lost in a sleepy village atmosphere, Holland – and especially metropolitan Holland – isvery small. Lisse is roughly half way between Amsterdam and The Hague, and no more than an hour in the car from either. From Lisse to the seacoast is only a few kilometres, and the strip of bulb fields lies between. The sand dunes, which have been made into a sort of nature-reserve, form a barrier through which one cannot cut direct, but it is not far from Lisse to the seaside town of Noordwijk, especially for the fast sports coupé that Janine got for her last birthday.
    Janine and Rob were spending Sunday afternoon in the flat on the top floor of the hotel-café-restaurant Rob owned on the sea boulevard. It was a messy, ugly building of discoloured concrete that had several times had bits added by various owners in expansionist moments, and had climbed beyond modest seaside-café beginnings. It was on three levels – the café, with a big glassed terrace several steps above the sandy bricks of the boulevard; the restaurant, at the back and several steps lower, reached from the carpark on the landward side; and the hotel, an irregular cube perched above both, with balconies looking out to sea, an expensive but small hotel of twenty-four rooms or so.
    Well run, all this would be a moneyspinner, and Rob did run it well. He was not, of course, on the level of the gang that goes to London every week – besides being socially inferior, a hotel is too easy-come-and-easy-go: one is overdependent on Holland’s capricious summer weather, and the staff problem is always acute. But he was a lot richer than he seemed. Even staff was not too great a worry – he had friends in Italy, who kept him supplied with chambermaids from Calabria, and he even had a smattering of their dialect – he had always been popular in Italy. He taught them enough Dutch and German to understand the customers, and both restaurant and hotel ran smoothly.
    Rob had bought it a year ago, when it was, on the outside at least, much as now, though far more run down and slipshod. There is now little debt, though this is due more to Rob’s work than to Rob’s money. He has worked like a tiger and has got the place nearly up to the standard he knows he wants, and it has just begun to make real money again. It has lost the evil reputation for bad food, sloppy service and exaggerated prices for cut drinks, and next year, the German couples from the Rhineland tell Rob, they will be back for a second season. Throughout the summer he will have to go on working like fury, but in October this year, he hopes, hewill be at last free for a long lazy trip round Southern Europe, and take Janine with him, which she so longs for.
    Sunday afternoon was the only time of the week when he allowed himself to sit back for an hour, but though he was pretending to read
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he was busy thinking about all this. Janine had had a hard time all this year – all these years. And this last six months he had been too busy to pay much heed to her. Well, he would try and make that up to her. He thought this riding business kept her fairly content, but she deserved more.… He hadn’t said anything; he was intending to keep it a surprise. Say to her, casual, in the first week of September, ‘Next week,