White Sand and Grey Sand

by Stella Gibbons

  Jakoba took a last keen glance around, and went through into the kitchen. Behind her, the low mist was beginning to drift across the cobbles and veil the lights in the houses opposite. The three women moved about the kitchen, which, small though it was, the little low fire smouldering on its scanty fuel could hardly warm, and they avoided, by half a century of practice, touching one another or getting in one another’s way. The black curtains, not replaced by new ones because the stuff wasn’t in the shops, had been drawn across the window, the chairs were pulled up to the table. Marie looked critically around.

  Suddenly she darted to the door that led into the shop.

  “Ydette! What are you doing? Mooning about … you’ll get your death. Come on in.”

  Ydette had been standing between the half-drawn wooden shutters of the arch, her arms wrapped in the warm coat that had been a present from one of those kind ladies in America, staring across the plaats. It was dusk now; the lights of the big house glimmered clearly through the soft white mist.

  “What’s going on over there?” Marie said good-naturedly, but not troubling herself to leave the warmth of the kitchen, which, extending its benevolence as far as the door, made the shop feel the colder by contrast. “What’s going on?” she repeated.

  Ydette shook her head. She did not think it worth while to say that Madame and Monsieur van Roeslaere had just come home and got out of the car and gone up the steps of the big house, so—“Nothing,” she said, and, having closed the shutters and fastened their latch in place, followed her aunt back into the kitchen.

  That first autumn of peace, Saturday was the best day in Ydette’s week, because that was the day when they went out to the farm.

  It would begin with the door of the big house opening on the pealing of seven o’clock from the carillon, and there would stand Marieke, in her dark blouse and skirt and thick cotton apron, her white hair drawn back in its usual tight knot, surveying the wide, sunny, quiet plaats, the canal where a few wisps of mist were still drifting, and the people hurrying on their way to work; surveying it with no idle eye, but a severe and critical stare.

  “Good morning, Mejuffrouw Joostens.”

  Ydette, who always stole a few minutes from her task of arranging the counters on Saturday mornings to cross the plaats, would be standing—perhaps the ‘loitering’ with which Marieke had once come sharply out at her was not too far from the truth—at the foot of the steps, pretending to do nothing but take the air. She would accompany the greeting with a respectful movement, between bob and curtsey, which attracted from Marieke considerably less attention than she would have bestowed on its omission.

  “Good morning, Ydette,” Marieke would say—reprovingly, because that was the form, and then, as if to show that the intonation was only a matter of form, she would add, “going to be a nice day … or a bad day … foggy … cold”, as she began to turn back to the house, her head full of getting the coffee on, getting the mattresses off the beds a bit earlier, getting Lyntje on to polishing that floor while she went over to Maes’ herself this morning for the vegetables, there being too much geklets2 when the child was sent … and Sophie was late, as usual. When she was a kid of fifteen she used to bike in from La Panne; every morning; up at five and all those kilometres to go; and think nothing of it, and now she lived just round the corner at the charcuterie she was always late. She said it was having little Moritz’ breakfast to get; little indeed; what harm would even a few missed breakfasts do to a boy already as big as an ox …

  “We’re going to the farm today,” Ydette would make a highly unsuccessful effort to shout after the unbending figure already shutting the door; her voice was of the kind which arouses, in elderly grown-ups, uneasy suspicions of approaching deafness.

  “Well, you always do on Saturdays, don’t you?” Marieke paused, willing to promote her policy of discouraging, whenever possible, any notions about variation, particularly of an agreeable nature, in the procession of the week’s duties. Variety and treats for children, in her opinion, led invariably to trouble and hiccoughs.

  Ydette nodded. Impossible to convey to Marieke that it was the alwaysness, precisely that, which made the visit so much to be enjoyed. “Here’s Sophie,” she said.

  Marieke stood with the door open, in silence, about time too expressing itself in every pore.

  “Here I am at last, like the Second Front,” shouted Sophie, whose more agreeable characteristics were slowly beginning to revive under the influence of having enough to eat again, and who showed every sign of developing into what people who were only anxious to forget it all were already thinking of as a War Bore.

  “So I should hope,” Marieke said. “Twenty past.”

  They would go in, Sophie denying the evidence recently presented by the carillon, and the door would shut.

  Ydette went across the plaats at a run and resumed her duties. There would be nothing more of an interesting nature at the big house until Mijnheer van Roeslaere left for the hothouses (she had learned, now, to call the place where the big foreign flowers grew by its right name) at half-past eight.

  The morning would pass very quickly, because Saturday was always the big day for customers, and then, usually latish in the afternoon, when the stallholders in the Market were beginning to pack up the coloured tin basins and the bolts of cloth, the boxes of stockings and the saucepans and other necessities which steadily increased in quantity and in quality, every Saturday, as the country began to resume normal trading—when the rows of sabots, painted black and decorated with a carved and painted design of red or yellow flowers, which had been arranged on the cobbles under the shadow of the Belfort since early that morning were being collected, and everything was being packed into the lorries and vans of the traders—the party would set out for the farm. (They were usually sold out at the shop by the time they left, and the few vegetables remaining were carefully set aside, in water, to be offered at a very slightly reduced price on the Monday morning.)

  The autumn wind blew warmly across the fields. The van driven by Uncle Matthys’ new man Karel (just out of the army, and knowing more about the engine of the van than Uncle Matthys did, and rather fond of drink), went swiftly down the roads which were being repaired by gangs of very young men in grey frieze suits. They would sometimes wave to Ydette as the van passed them. (The wicked Germans. All captured now, and made to work for us. Ydette, prompted by the jeering voice of Aunt Jakoba, would turn obediently away and ignore the greeting.) The immense arch of the sky, in which the white clouds were couched comfortably along the horizon as if they did not want or intend to move, went slowly by; always appearing the same; curving over the farmhouses once again freshly whitewashed, with shutters newly painted green or rust-red; the late afternoon light shone through the yellowing leaves and on the red apples in the orchards. From her place in the van—which seemed to her to be quite high up in the warm air speeding by—Ydette could look at the golden poplars standing tall and motionless, yet moving past like everything else, and the golden-green willow leaves blowing in showers down onto the water in the dykes. Far away over the land, the spires and towers were rising up blue, or grey, or white where the sun caught them, in the clear distances. Thickly, and ever thicker, as though steadily applied by a brush wielded in some benevolent hand, its richness was being restored to the landscape of Flanders.

  The van would drive in under the massive whitewashed archway and come to a halt, and when Karel had got down from the driver’s seat and gone off on his own affairs, the three women and the child would get down after him; Jakoba climbing out with her usual rough energy, Marie in a dogged way and with compressed lips, Mevrouw Maes very slowly and with the help of a daughter, and last of all, Ydette. They would stand still, and look about them; the sisters curiously—had anything been bought? had there been any changes?—and Ydette and Mevrouw Maes hand in hand, both faces grave with satisfaction as they slowly surveyed the changing flowers of every season and the soft, clear colours, and breathed i
n the good smells floating in the sweet air.

  Sooner or later, someone would pause on the way across some distant part of the farm, see them loitering there, and shout, and the whole party would leisurely come together—and then, while the elders were unhurriedly exchanging their news as they moved into the kitchen, the children would—not ‘slip’, because there was no hint of secrecy in their manner—but walk off sedately together, Jooris keeping slightly ahead of Ydette with the air of someone having something definite to do, and Ydette following with a briskish air of being prepared to help him do it.

  One day that autumn when they came, his eyes looked swollen and red, and when they had wandered off into the orchard and were sitting on their favourite log under the oldest apple tree, he became very quiet, looking down at the ground. Ydette was busy picking the few grasses and flowers that had sprung up again after the hay-cutting, but she glanced at him from time to time, and, when he still did not suggest sailing paper boats in the dyke, or say anything, or move, she at last carefully put her bunch down beside her, and, sliding along the log, put both arms round him and held him close.

  He began to cry, pushing his knuckles into his eyes; the tears ran down without check, a child’s tears still, although his body, in the shabby clothes too short for him, was beginning to lengthen into the gauntness of early youth. Ydette was neither puzzled nor alarmed by his tears; he was Jooris, and he was miserable; that was enough. She said nothing, but hugged him in silence, and presently he stopped crying save for an occasional fluttering sob.

  “I’m going to kill six Germans,” he said at last, sitting quietly now in the embrace of the arms almost too short to hold him; “that’ll be … do you know about it?” turning his tear-stained face to her, and she shook her head.

  “They killed my father. You know he was wounded, and he came back here and we hid him away? But you didn’t know he went with the Resistance, did you? He used to come back and see us sometimes. … That was a secret. Mother made me promise I wouldn’t tell—not even you,” as she stared at him solemnly.

  “But they got him.” He began to cry again. “We’ve only just heard; there was a letter this morning. My mother’s been crying all day … and … and …” He turned and pushed his face into her neck, and she felt the warm tears running down; and held him closer. “And she won’t tell me what they did to him, but I’m going to find out, and when I’m a man—or before that, when I’m sixteen—I’m going to kill six of them. To get our own back. Killing him like that …”

  “That’s like André Kamiel,” Ydette almost whispered at last.

  “Yes … so I’m going to kill six of them. I’ll shoot them. I’ll save up what Grandpa gives me until I’ve got a gun of my own—Jean Wybouw says you can get one quite easily from the Americans—or the Resistance won’t want theirs, now the war’s over, or there are the deserters—I’ll get one easily, and then I’ll …”

  He talked on for a while, and she listened. Their arms were closely around each other now, and sometimes, as if without thinking, he kissed her pale, serious little face, but an hour later they were down at the dyke and she was screaming with excitement while he built a dam. She had washed his tear-stains away with one of Aunt Marie’s pieces of clean rag, and when they went in to supper he seemed better, but Ydette saw that Aunt Janine’s face was all swollen and red.

  Matthys Maes kept Jooris closely to school that autumn; it was as if the old man had a strong feeling that some outer authority must take charge of his grandson, in order that the misery and the childish passion for revenge set working in his nature by the news of his father’s death might not take a sinister turn when he grew into adolescence. But although Ydette long remembered what Jooris had threatened to do, and each time that she saw him she wondered if he had managed to get hold of the gun yet, she never heard him speak of the threat again. Sometimes he spoke of his father, telling her of jokes he had made and brave things that they now knew he had done. But the proposed killing of the six Germans seemed forgotten.

  She was relieved, because killing Germans would be as wicked as it was dangerous; you weren’t allowed to kill people; God said so; and if Jooris had still been meaning to he would have told her, because they were friends, and they did tell each other things.

  However, quite soon—as the weeks, and then the months, went on, and dozens of different kinds of sausage began to come back into Sophie’s aunt’s charcuterie and the other meat-shops; and cakes, that gave the impression of having each one been lovingly, lingeringly given their final gloss and twirl by hand, began to come back onto the glass shelves into the silver filigree baskets in the confectioner’s; and exquisitely-sewn simple dresses began to be shown in the Zuitzand’straat, and the small smart hats were changed in the shops three times a week, and people began to lose their pallor and put on flesh, and Sophie began to talk quite a lot and to kiss Ydette again … in no time at all, it seemed very queer to think of a boy who still went to school killing Germans.

  Where were all the Germans? You saw them sometimes, but only marching to their work on the roads, or riding back from it in lorries, and when Ydette went with the aunts for a tram-ride on Sundays that ended up by the sea at Zandeburghe or with Sophie’s old parents at La Panne, she saw the spiked wire and the concrete forts and the gun-emplacements being pulled down, and the ruins of houses being wheeled away in barrows by the very young men in grey suits; and soon the white hotels were being mended or rebuilt, and the sands were being cleaned of strange twisted lengths of metal and great rusty bulbous things studded with nuts and screws, and next year, said Aunt Marie, the tourists would begin to come back. Drifting steadily away into the Past, like a cloud swollen with bellowing thunder, like a hideous storm that has left half the world white and stunned and bloodless, went the war; and gradually—yet so swiftly, when compared with the endlessness of the months that had seemed like an enduring nightmare—the climate of peace was returning: and Jooris Gheldeere was beginning to be eager to get into the school football team.

  Ydette, too, was kept closer to school that autumn than ever before. This was partly because ‘them up at Our Lady’s’ had expressed themselves firmly in favour of such a course, and ‘them at the Béguinage’ had echoed their views; and partly because Madame van Roeslaere had, at last, made time to walk swiftly across to the archway one afternoon and—meet her? make her acquaintance?—‘make friends with her’ would not truthfully describe what she did, because her manner, as she stood just outside the shop on that day of late autumn, looking gently yet keenly at Ydette through the great lenses of her glasses, was not friendly: it was reserved, expressive of their being set at certain and clearly defined distances from one another—nothing so warm as ‘friendly’.

  Madame van Roeslaere wore a slender coat of pale brown fur that reached almost to her knees above a narrow skirt of blonde wool, her black suède boots were made in Italy by a master, a scarf of thick orange brocade was tucked into the neck of her coat, her small hat matched it, and she held an exaggeratedly elongated bag of bright reddish leather. If she was conscious of the contrast between her own elegant clothes and the thick and bundly garments, presents from kind ladies in England and America, in which Ydette and Mevrouw Maes were swaddled, her expression did not show that she was, and the two who stood before her—Mevrouw Maes having with difficulty got her seventy-seven year old body up from her stool and Ydette, at a sharp muttered word from her grandmother, having hopped up from hers—were not conscious of the contrast either; if they had been, they wouldn’t have resented it; it was only Aunt Jakoba who occasionally muttered something about roll on the day, when we can buy our own clothes again and chuck the charity-rags into the sea; and Ydette loved her plaid coat and woollen scarf, for she was one of those children who are always chilly; to be cold, for her, was worse than to be hungry.

  Now, her eyes were fixed immovably upon Madame van Roeslaere. Every tint of her clothes, every soft yet defined curve of the white hair lifting itself under
the soft yet airy hat, the very way she held her bag and the casual wrinkles of her gloves, was bathed, for the one of the two who could see her clearly, in a romantic glow. Behind this vision, Ydette knew that a delicate blur of dark red and white on the opposite side of the plaats was the big house, clearly visible, now, beyond the dark branches of the chestnut tree which had shed all but a few of its last bronze leaves.

  “You are often away from school, aren’t you?” Madame van Roeslaere said rather briskly, when, the preliminary greetings and the enquiries about Mevrouw Maes’ health having been asked, and gratefully and respectfully answered, she spoke directly to Ydette for the first time. As she did so, she made a mental note to tell one of the aunts that the child must be told it was rude to stare.

  “Yes, Madame,” Ydette whispered, staring.

  “That’s not good, you know, Ydette. Do you stay at home because you have to help with the shop, or because you aren’t well?”

  “Ydette has very good health, she’s never ill, all through the war she wasn’t ever ill,” said Mevrouw Maes, turning her dimming black eyes in the direction of the vague outline whence came the soft, quick voice. “No, we keep her at home to mind the shop; I can’t do what I could, and sometimes I must have a day in bed, and then the girls are busy, it takes such a time, still, getting anything from the shops to eat, and Jakoba’s often down at Zandeburghe fixing the cart up and getting a place for those new tents on the sands next summer—so that’s it,” she ended up.

  “You should go to school as often as you possibly can,” said Madame van Roeslaere.