REVIEW: Wedding Bells for Beatrice by Betty Neels
“You should marry again.”
Beatrice sympathized with Gijs van der Eekerk. A widower with a small child and a busy medical career needed someone to make sure his domestic life ran smoothly. What she hadn’t counted on was his decision to offer her the position. As his wife, she would have a comfortable lifestyle and everything that money could buy. But what was that, if Gijs couldn’t offer her what she truly wanted—love?
Review
I’m hop, skipping and jumping my way through the Neelsverse and picked this book because the Dutch doctor hero Gijs van der Eekerk (what a splendid name) and his heroine Beatrice (of the splendid figure and teeth – yes, even her teeth are described thus) are briefly seen in “The Vicar’s Daughter”. Since I’d already learned how to pronounce Gijs, I couldn’t waste the opportunity to read another book with that name.
Beatrice is not one of Neels’s squashed cabbage heroines. Instead she’s a woman of stature and bearing who efficiently administers the path lab department of an East London hospital whilst fending off a doctor who is far too full of himself. Tom is a cad who has seen in Beatrice – the daughter of a country GP but one with the right connections as well as the great granddaughter of an Earl – the way to smooth his path to greatness. As I said, he’s a cad who – to paraphrase Ado Annie – “can’t hear no.”
From the moment they meet Gijs and Beatrice strike sparks, too, with Beatrice getting ruffled at Gijs’s calm, unflappable nature and tendency to maneuver her into doing what she wants. More than once Beatrice regrets her inability to flounce. The difference between Gijs and Tom is that Gijs tells Beatrice he missed her rather than demanding to know if she missed him. Gijs also views life from the point of view of how to make things easier for Beatrice. He also takes her to eat and actually feeds her rather than leaving her just one small sandwich while he scarfs the rest. And guess who did that caddish thing? I’m sure you can guess.
Really Gijs manages Beatrice with “gentle remorselessness” so well that before she knows it, she’s wearing his ring – to help Tom realize that she truly means “no,” or so Gijs says – then planning a wedding and then has been whisked away to his ancient (though marvelously appointed) country house outside Leiden (which comes complete with devoted staff, a dog, a donkey, two horses, and two cats) and is now Mevrouw van der Eekerk. My that was fast. But they’re just friends, right?
So the usual Neels elements are in place and play here. Gijs is the fabulous as well as fabulously rich Dutch doctor (though he’s not one to flaunt anything). Tall, handsome, thoughtful, always thinking of others – he’s perfect. But oh, thinks Beatrice who has of course fallen in love with him, he doesn’t love her and after his first disastrous marriage, she’s not going to plague him about “feelings.” Tsk, tsk, tsk. Instead she’ll love her darling young stepdaughter Alicia, study hard at her Dutch lessons, learn how to fit in with the Dutch church ladies, do some power shopping (she has a nice collection of jersey dresses), eat delicious meals and pine for Gijs.
There’s also another relationship forming that is eye opening but then that woman appears easily able to handle the man and knows full well what he’s like.
Neels tosses in a rather silly last minute tiff which in a way serves to finally break the ice between our two main characters who are doing a marvelous job of not understanding the other one’s feelings. But once they do, well perhaps Nanny will have one last charge to look after before she retires. B
~Jayne
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Not top of the line Betty, but enjoyable. There is something so soothing about reading Neels.
I have that edition with the wedding couple and plot moppet on the cover. I have always thought he looked like actor George Hamilton (the one with the suntan who starred in that fabulous Dracula movie “Love at First Bite”).
@Barb in Maryland: That male cover model definitely looks as if he’s been overdoing the spray on tan.
I just finished reading The Summer Before the War (Helen Simonson) and unfortunately for me, summer bled smack into The Great War and instead of good book hangover I have good book overtaken by sad events hangover. A gentle Betty Neels novel is exactly what I shall read this evening for equilibration.
@LML: That is a good book that you just know is going to end badly. Have you read her other one?
I read “Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand” by Simonson and enjoyed it more than her later book, in part because it has a much happier ending. Part of the pleasure is that the reader at first thinks that the Major will be a stuffed shirt and stereotypical unimaginative retired military man, but he turns out to be a surprise in many lovely ways.
@Jayne, yes, I did and found it lovely and memorable. Alas, that is why I didn’t read any review of The Summer Before the War. The bicycle cover art reinforced my expectation of an entirely different tone of book.
@LML: Oooh, I hate cover and book tone mismatches. It doesn’t do a book any favors, IMO.