White Sand and Grey Sand

by Stella Gibbons

  “Oh, are you going to The Link House? My brother goes there. But it’s going to Wales tomorrow. I expect you’ll go too. You’ll be all right there, as you’re Belgian; The Link House is all mixed up with Belgium.”

  It was ‘all mixed up with Belgium’ because its first headmaster and founder, the Reverend James Ruddlin, had taken into the school in 1914, to learn with the ‘sons of gentlemen’ for whom it had been founded in 1902, a number of small refugees belonging to some of the first families in Flanders. Doctor Ruddlin was an authority on Flemish history, painting, architecture and literature, and he felt that this was the best and most substantial way of helping the country, now overrun by the Germans, which he loved second only to his own. He had kept up warm and close relationships with his former pupils and their families until his death at a great age in the mid nineteen-thirties.

  When Adriaan had arrived at The Link House, the school had been in all the orderly activity of its evacuation to the West, but his hope that he might, amidst so much rushing about and busyness, be overlooked and able to do what he wanted, was not fulfilled: Mr Ruddlin, the old man’s son, the new headmaster, darting calmly and (now, as he remembered, Adriaan had to admit it) uncomically, amongst the boys and the suitcases and the packing-cases, had found time to pay especial attention to him, “because he was Belgian”, had lunched with his family at the hotel, and made himself at home with them, to Adriaan’s boredom and irritation; and on the day the school left for Wales had seen him, Adriaan, attached as if by a piece of string (indicated, but invisible) to one Michel Pourbus, whose parents had been on their way home to Brussels by air when the news broke and who had landed in England.

  Mr Ruddlin had noted every one of Adriaan’s determined, and finally successful, attempts to break the invisible string and to avoid the offensively cheerful and excited Michel Pourbus; but the headmaster had been as forbearing as he was kind, and Adriaan had disliked him.

  He had wanted nothing from Mr Ruddlin; he wanted nothing from anyone now; he desired only the satisfaction of certain private appetites whose presence within himself caused him no anxiety at all.

  He drank some of the café filtré, which he had made the waiter take back and reheat, and savoured its bitter taste that was, even after six years, familiar, and remembered with a sullen look in his eyes the sitting-room of the big old house at Port Meredith; he could feel the soft yet uncomfortable surface of the armchair in which he was sprawling; he could smell the three-day-old seaweed in a saucer on the big table, and see the shells of which Everard Ruddlin was making a beautiful and accurate little drawing, annotated in his exquisite minute script … yes, and the big microscope, and the three beastly curly black dogs—retrievers?—yes, retrievers—lying in a state of relaxed boredom under the large round table; all mixed up with Nora Ruddlin (reading a book) and Christopher Ruddlin (lost in some old magazines about films) and that little “wet” Pourbus, and perhaps Higgins and Whitcombe and Carlton or some of the rest of the twenty … scuffed slippers waving in the air as they lay on their stomachs, wrinkled grey jerseys, mousy heads … Mrs R. at the piano tinkling out something by Vivaldi or Scarlatti; and looking straight down on Adriaan through the wide, naked window streaming with rain, a mountain: an unnatural monstrosity of a thing demanding, by its mere presence there, that human beings should do something about it. But why do anything about it when there were plains, which were traversable without the expenditure of much effort?

  His dislike for mountains had been increased to detestation during those day-long walks with Mr Ruddlin and the rest of the school. The headmaster would not burden his one assistant, a young man whom defective sight had kept from active service, with the sole care of the twenty, feeling, Adriaan contemptuously supposed, that it was not fair to load him with all that responsibility—and therefore he always went with them himself—up the airy mountain, down the rushy glen, as he used to say, quoting from one of those poems about fairies which the English, that race long ago condemned by Adriaan, wrote quite well. Not once had Adriaan been given the satisfaction of seeing the Head becoming foolishly ‘hearty’ in a way that he could have despised, and not once had he himself been subjected to grown-up teasing because he was fat, and tired out; the troop would arrive home at twilight, satisfactorily drenched and ravenous rather than depressingly wet and hungry, and there was never a superior, yet pleading, “Hasn’t been so bad, has it?” from Mr Ruddlin.

  The matter-of-fact fair play and the kindness with which he had been treated for nearly six years had not affected in the least Adriaan’s boredom with the Ruddlin tastes and habits and with the atmosphere of the school (would he ever forget the sound of those recorders? the anæmic warbling was in his ears yet), and when he remembered the Ruddlins’ quick exchanges in their authoritative English voices, he scowled: have you seen to Betsy’s paw; where’s the typewriter oil; fetch me that HB pencil from the left-hand bottom drawer of the desk in Room B; go and pick me some cherries, Adriaan, you’ll find the bowl on the middle shelf on the left side of the pantry—they were always doing something, and making him and everybody else do things too, and they were always bloody useful things, and although, even up until this, his last day at The Link House, he had never ceased from trying to persuade Christopher that it might be fun sometimes to pull things down, hang back from things, just lounge about destroying things, he had never succeeded.

  Christopher was so crazy about the cinema that he seemed to care about little else. Old Chris: now, as Adriaan took a large bite of a baba oozing rum and cream, he could see the yellow lock falling across Chris’ forehead, and the look that came over his face when you tried to stop him doing something he wanted to do … and then he saw skinny Nora, who had more than once been known, most monstrously, to boast that she was cleverer than any boy in the school except Ashton … Mrs Ruddlin, with her big feet and her flat chest … thank God he hadn’t got to see any of them perhaps ever again.

  As this thought struck him, he felt at the same instant an intoxicating sensation of freedom and promise and fresh, unbounded opportunities opening before him, and at the same time, surprisingly, that he didn’t want never to see the Ruddlins any more. It wasn’t that he wanted ever to see them again, he just didn’t want not ever to see them again. …

  A girl came in wearing a fur coat which she opened, as she sat down, to display a beautiful bosom in a closely fitting dress, and he watched her with his bold, yet wary, dark eyes while he paid the bill. He wasn’t a child any longer; and it was high time (he told himself as he shut the door of the café and, with a quick backward glance at her long, falling, light hair, strode off through the shells of shrimps and winkles in the gutter) that he got out of the society of children and made a start towards getting what he wanted, in his own way, in his own world.

  It was beginning to get dark; the sun had gone, leaving long, melancholy orange streaks between two eyelids of darkest grey cloud far out at sea, the lights were coming out one by one in the scaffolded hotels, the wind blew inshore with great swoops and almost took his breath. He walked very fast towards the station and the train for Bruges, not looking into the shop windows, whose glass might reflect his image, and avoiding mirrors in the cafés (he had taught himself to do that, long ago) because he did not like the sight of a short, fat shape with sloping shoulders and thick features too large for an odd, pear-shaped face.

  “That fat, ugly little Belgian.”

  He had never forgotten that; the overheard sentence spoken by the visitor to The Link House on Prize Day seemed to be burned into him: a scar, shaped like the words, and painful, and burning, and red: but he had taught himself, just as he had taught himself not to look at mirrors, not to ‘mind’ it.

  His pleasure at being for the first time for years in a place where he felt himself at home, was not spoiled for him by a conviction, lying in the hinterland of his mind, that later on he would have to train himself to look into mirrors and not to feel angry at what he saw there. He dealt with that p
rospect by telling himself that a man could always dress well, and if he was also strong and had plenty of money, girls wouldn’t mind what he looked like. Yet, again, it wasn’t, entirely, that he was always thinking about what girls might think of him; that they might find him (all right, go on, say it to yourself) ugly and small and fat, because sometimes a rather different sensation came upon him when by accident he saw his reflection in the glass. He would experience a cold and angry distaste, mingled with disgust; it had something to do with what he felt for the plainness of Mrs Ruddlin and Nora, and for the chairs and pictures in their drawing-room, a kind of …

  But it was no use. He hadn’t got the words, and he supposed—here he turned aside from the gutter where he had been tramping along and crunching the tiny shells underfoot as he went, and ran down a long, massive, sloping groin that led onto the darkening sands—he supposed he’d have to admit that he just wasn’t old enough, yet, to have them. Kicking the grey stuff into loose mounds, and thinking that those big stones could be used to shore up a castle against the incoming tide, he reflected on his age for a moment: at a little over fourteen, it was perhaps excusable not to be in possession of all the words in which to pin down one’s every feeling? Anyway, he didn’t care if it wasn’t.

  “Hullo, Marieke,” he said, off-handedly but smiling, to the tall figure that opened the door of the big house to him three-quarters of an hour later.

  “Mijnheer Adriaan,” observed Marieke quietly, after a pause for inspection, “well, it’s good to see you home again. But where have you been, mijnheer? Georges has taken the car down to the station to meet you.” Both were determined not to show any emotion in what could have been an emotional situation.

  “Has he? Well, if he waits long enough he’ll give it up and come back without me.” He walked past her, as she stood aside to let him enter the high, square hall where the dim light from globes held in a massive wooden framework fell dimly on the black-and-white marble tiles of the floor. “Is anybody in?” He threw his beret down on a settle and began to unbutton his coat, looking round him with an expressionless face. But it was big and it was … stately … and it was grand. He had forgotten how grand it was. What was the English word? Sumptuous. (He had been thinking in Flemish ever since the boat put him ashore.) It was also beautiful; there was not much chance, now that he was in his own home again, that he would have to experience that mixture of anger and dislike which he felt for his own appearance, when he looked about him here.

  “Madame is at home … she is giving lessons”—Marieke’s face suddenly ceased to be that of the perfect old servant receiving the son of the house after prolonged absence and became cross, concerned and rather sly, and she went on in Flemish—“she’s giving English lessons to Lyntje Pieters, if you please—she’s our parlourmaid now—and another girl, Ydette Maes—a nobody, a little thing the greengrocer found wandering about in the dunes—it’s some idea of your mother’s about making our country good friends with England.”

  He looked at her sideways out of his dark eyes. “Seems a funny kind of idea, doesn’t it?” They were both speaking Flemish now. “What good does she expect it to do?”

  “Yes, Mijnheer Adriaan, that was what I wondered. What good will it do, I said to myself, teaching English to two silly girls, giving them ideas they’re better without …”

  “Where is she?” he interrupted, already bored with what old Marieke had said to herself; it had been amusing to see her face get angry and sly, and he had been pleased with himself for knowing at once who she was, but now he was rather angry: hadn’t it been enough to have spent six years of “excellent motives” and “service for others” at The Link House? must he come back to find the same sort of thing going on at home? But his mother always had been a doer of good works. She didn’t even seem to care about the family money.

  “In the little salon, Mijnheer Adriaan. You remember where that is?” and as he shook his head, impatient because he would have liked to walk unerringly towards it, she added, “Across the hall and down a little passage and then the second door; the lesson is nearly finished, I think; Madame said it was to be from six o’clock until seven, and it’s nearly seven now, I heard the carillon just as you came in …”

  He made a dismissing gesture as he walked away; yes, he had heard it, too, as he stood waiting for the door to open; the silvery, remote sound falling from high up in the darkness and spreading itself out across the dim roofs and spires standing up in the winter sky, and it had sent a great shiver down his spine that had made him suddenly, involuntarily, twist himself sideways: plunged, at the sound, back into earliest childhood. He hadn’t liked it.

  He opened the door of the little salon and went in.

  His first impression was that the room was full of rich, dark colours; his next, that it was too hot, the warm air seemed to envelop him as he opened the door; and then the first object which he noticed—for the impressions of colour and heat had been instantaneous—was a girl (and immediately he thought of her as a girl and not as a child, although he saw almost at once that she was a child) who was sitting facing the door and looking directly across at him; wearing a dark dress so short and made of so small a quantity of material that on either side of its skirt he could see the dark apple-green damask covering the chair on which she was sitting; with an exceedingly pale face in which he now noticed nothing but the eyes; their shape, their darkness, the drooping of their lids; and legs so long and so thin as to appear really (he told himself at once, angrily) ridiculous and absurd, like some bird’s at the Zoo. She was sitting in rather a relaxed position that—some fussy instinct in Adriaan told him—wasn’t sufficiently respectful, either to his mother or to the fact that she, the girl, was occupying a valuable antique chair in a sumptuous house; and on either side of her, on the gleaming brocade, rested her very long, greyish and slender hands. She looks, he decided, even as his mother hearing the door open, turned and got up with a quiet exclamation of his name, like a starved bird.

  “Adriaan! You’re early—I told Marieke to tell me—how are you, dear? Quite well?” Lips soft and dry touched his indifferently inclined cheek; he had lowered his eyelids to receive the kiss but he could see the other girl, the fat thing with a bust and dry, fair hair, getting up and making a business of getting herself out of the room at a nod from Mamma. The one like a starved bird was just sitting there and staring at him. He didn’t look at her, while his mother was asking questions and he was answering them, but he knew that she was staring. This must be the one they’d found wandering about on the dunes.

  “I’m quite all right—no, eight o’clock will do perfectly for me, Mamma, I’m not hungry, I had something in Oostende … well, I caught an earlier boat and I wanted to see what it was like there—oh, just wandered about—they’re all quite well, I’ve got my report—haven’t the faintest idea—oh yes, I have, though, I believe it isn’t too bad … how’s Papa?”

  The answers came out smoothly, while his mother stood confronting him, looking down at him even although she was far from being a tall woman, and he was thinking how well she dressed and how wise she was not to use any paint but that faint colour on her lips. He supposed that he had to thank her for his own looks … was that starved bird going to sit there for the rest of the evening? Adriaan turned his head suddenly and looked full at her, and then she did look away: across at the cabinet with the Sèvres and Saxe figures in it—ah, he remembered that; there was the monkey orchestra—and his movement seemed to have attracted the attention of his mother, for she turned and said, “You can go now, Ydette; six o’clock on Friday, remember,” and smiled briefly at the starved bird before turning back to him.

  “What time does Papa get in?” He could keep his eyes fixed on his mother’s face, yet see perfectly well what she was doing; getting up slowly from her chair, with her eyes fixed now on him and his mother, and beginning to sidle out of the room. With violence, he shut his mind down on an infuriating fact: then recovered himself and looked
at it stonily: the girl stood on a level with his own head.

  When she got to the door, he thought he heard a kind of murmur, but even the intensity with which he was listening for her to say something didn’t bring to him what it was: good night, madame, probably; nothing more interesting than that, and apparently his mother didn’t hear it either, for she did not look round as the door noiselessly shut.

  The greengrocer: he seemed to remember an old woman over in the archway on the corner who used to sell cabbages and celery and flowers to them before the war, and wondered if they were the people who had found Ydette? (He had heard the name very clearly, spoken by his mother’s quick, soft voice: it was an extraordinary name; he put it away and wouldn’t say it to himself because he wanted to go on thinking about her contemptuously as the starved bird.) While he was looking up into his mother’s face (why must her expression always become sad and nervous whenever she looked at him? what did she suppose, in heaven’s name, he had had the chance to get up to during the last six years in that horribly boring place, that might give her any excuse for looking at him like that?) his mind’s eye was following the girl out of the house and across the square; she was walking slowly, with her head bent down, and it was so dark that he could scarcely see her; she was walking underneath the eerie sound of the carillon, falling in ever-widening rings of silver out of the dark sky.

  “Are you cold, dear?”

  “Of course not. I’m rather hot. Why?”

  “You shivered. (It is hot in here; we’ll go into the salon.) But first I’ll show you your room. Adriaan,” she slipped her arm round his shoulders as they went down the passage towards the hall, “how much do you remember? Did it all seem completely strange to you when you saw it just now?”

  He told her exactly how he had felt, sumptuous and all, and was amused to notice how her expression gradually changed while he was talking, until she looked almost cheerful. As it seemed comparatively easy to make her look less apprehensive merely by telling her the more ordinary (and, some people might say, the pleasanter) parts of his thoughts, there wasn’t any reason why he shouldn’t do it, from time to time. After all, what he wanted was to please himself; he didn’t want to do anything startling or violent or likely to upset his father’s plans for him—(“good” day school in Bruges, three years at Louvain University, then a career of some sort in commerce and presumably a suitable marriage and the rearing of an heir to all the sumptuousness)—he simply wanted to be able to please himself in his own way. If his own way was, as he was beginning to suspect with a kind of unholy amusement, very different indeed from the ordinary idea of pleasure—well, that was no one’s affair but his.