White Sand and Grey Sand

by Stella Gibbons

  But, as usual, the mere thought of Claregates had exerted a calming effect, and when he came across to them, announcing amiably that if they were ready, he was, she accepted his placating tone without hesitation. They all walked homewards without further disturbance, and Nora assured him, as they ran down to the sea for a late bathe, that she would ask Madame van Roeslaere if Ydette might come to see the running through of ‘her’ film.

  Ydette and Jooris came upon a fine prospect of the Belfort as they walked quickly towards the wide Market, but this evening, although she looked upwards as usual at the elongated, fantastic, yet strictly ordered, shape soaring against the blue of the sky, it seemed to her (as can sometimes happen to us when we meet, on a day that has held wonderfully good news for us, the oldest friend who has the strongest influence) that its power came to her through a sunny mist. She could still see the inside of the tea-shop, and taste the cakes which Jooris had bought for her; but more clearly than anything else she could see the eager faces of the Ruddlins, telling her that she had a face like a film star’s.

  It was a completely new, strange and just-beginning-to-be-gratifying thought. No-one had ever spoken to her about her face since the days when Mijnheer Adriaan had said those things about it, on his way to school every morning. She felt triumphant, as she walked silently beside Jooris, her long legs almost keeping pace with his stride. (Beetles indeed! Just let Mijnheer A. try that on with her now!) But of course, he would not say such things, now. He was almost grown up. He sometimes spoke to her in rather a rude voice, and he always stared so hard that sometimes she wondered what was the matter with him, but for a very long time now there had been no insults.

  Jooris, who had been glancing from time to time at her dreamy face, suddenly stopped in his stride, and drew himself upright.

  “Now! The roomijs,” he said, and, wheeling smartly about, marched in the direction of one of the more expensive cafés, which had tables and chairs set outside, under a striped canvas awning.

  “Oh Jooris! Thank you …” Ydette was almost running now to keep up with him. “I thought …” (really, this afternoon was just one good thing after another).

  “Did you think you weren’t going to get it?”

  “I thought—when you said you’d got to catch your train—we shouldn’t have time.”

  “I said that an hour before I really had to. Didn’t want them hanging on while we had our ice-cream.” His voice was rather curt, and she glanced at him tranquilly: didn’t he like the young English people? But it was not Ydette’s habit to ask questions which might lead to a disturbance of the peace.

  “Here we are.” He pulled out a comfortable armchair of scarlet cane-work and held it while she settled herself, then sat down opposite. “Now.” He indicated the menu, on a board outside the door of the hotel, “You choose.”

  “Aren’t you going to have one?”

  “No. Beer for me.” He beckoned sharply to a lounging waiter.

  As Ydette slowly spooned up the sweet, icy stuff flavoured with chocolate, she felt that the afternoon could scarcely have ended better; with the sun touching the soaring tower of the Belfort to a last gold, and the sky almost directly over her head containing one of those stupendous curving trains of cloud, faintly resembling thousands upon thousands of minute human heads glorified to a misty supernatural whiteness and sweeping halfway across the heavens, which always made her think that they might be angels. It was the week of the Fair; and the great square of the Markt was almost filled up by red-and-yellow booths and a carrousel playing the latest American music so loudly and stridently that it almost drowned the noise made by the crowds of giggling girls and boys strolling past, playing, and shouting to each other; and at the other side of the square, directly by the low, massive archway leading into the gateway of the Belfort, the woman who sold fried goodies in her coffee-stand was cooking away for dear life and adding the smell of hot fat to the clamour and noise and confusion … but Ydette saw the Belfort, and the far-off train of angel faces, and tasted the elfin sweetness of the food in the heavy spoon.

  Presently she looked up, and found Jooris staring at her. She looked down again at her ice without having done any more than smile at him in thanks for the happy end to the afternoon. In a minute or two she looked up again, and he was still staring, so she asked placidly, “Have I got some ice on my face?”

  He shook his head. Then he seemed about to say something, but stopped. Ydette went on peacefully eating.

  When she next glanced up, he said at once, with his eyes still fixed on her, “What was he saying? Something about you being like a film star?”

  Ydette gave her soft giggle. “Yes. Just fancy!” There was no reason for saying anything more, so she industriously scraped the spoon round and round the already denuded glass in silence, but when he did not speak, she went on, “and the mejuffrouw said he thinks I could be a really big one——” She giggled again.

  “It’s because you’ve done your hair that way,” said Jooris quickly. “Have you done it like that before, when he was anywhere about?”

  She finished the last trace of ice off the spoon, sighed, slowly put the cup down on the table and leant back in her chair and smiled at him like a replete child.

  “This was the first time,” she said.

  He said nothing to this, but suddenly looked severely across at the fantastic cockerels and horses swirling up and down, up and down, as they went by on the revolving carrousel with its screaming, laughing load. He was thinking, for the first time in his life, about Ydette’s face.

  It wasn’t really pretty; at least, not what he called pretty, not like Angéle’s face, who worked in a hairdressers’ shop in a side street off the Boulevard Anspach in Brussels; Angéle, now, really was pretty, with a French figure and a smile rather like Marilyn Monroe’s—she was a nice girl, too; he had been to Sunday dinner with her family. But he did not like her face (he came to that decision instantly, although he had never made the comparison before) as much as he liked Ydette’s. The only time he had ever been reminded of Ydette’s face when she wasn’t there had been that time he and the others went to the bioscoop, and there was a close-up of a giraffe and everyone had laughed. That’s like Ydette, he had thought, and had gone on laughing with a kind of warmth in him. He liked (he was thinking it out now, to a conclusion)—he liked Ydette’s face better than any face he knew: better even than his mother’s.

  Ydette was looking at the cockerels and griffins and the royally maned lions careering by: not wistfully: just admiringly, and suddenly he leant towards her and smiled.

  “Like a ride?”

  “Oh, Jooris!” She got up at once, smiling, eager, with not a word about whether he could afford the money, as an older girl might have asked, or about the risk of being sick after that huge ice; yes, she was still completely a kid, and of course she wasn’t going to get any ideas into her head because of something a stuck-up English boy from Oxford College had said, and, after all, if anything did come of it, if the Englishman did try to start something when she was a bit older, he, Jooris would always be there, and he would see—yes, by God and His Saints he would—that she didn’t get hurt.

  He looked steadily at her as she hovered, smiling, poised on tiptoe and ready to mount, while the lion which she had marked for her own steed came slowly round and drew to a standstill in front of them. Half of his feelings were clear and decided, and made him feel good; and then there was something else—a kind of pain, a kind of impatience and wanting and sweetness that wasn’t clear at all, and made him feel rebellious.

  He put his arm round her to help her up, and felt the soft waist and slender bones that had been familiar to him ever since he had carried her round the courtyard at the farm when she was two years old—and all at once everything was all right, and they were just having the last treat on an afternoon that had been—(in spite of that rather disturbing new way of doing her hair, and what the young English fool had said)—a pretty good one.

&n
bsp; During the Ruddlins’ last week in Belgium, the weather changed. It continued warm but became very rough; the sea tore forward onto the beaches with a crash and a rolling fury of foam, and all along the miles and miles of dunes that fringe the coast the sand spun and drifted under the wind, with a sound so shrill and insect-like that only in the hollows of the dunes was it audible; broad patches of magnificent blue showed for an instant across the heavens and were gone again; then the sun positively leapt out, and all the hinterland spread wide behind the dunes lightened and darkened, lightened and darkened, under the racing shadows of the clouds.

  On the evening of a certain day of this weather, about seven o’clock, Klaas opened the door of the shack in which he lived and stood there, swaying, and looking out at the rapidly clearing sky and the glimpse of livid, white-ridged sea visible between the dunes to the west. Half an hour earlier, Marie and Jakoba had brought Klaartje up from the beach and stabled him in the shed which stood at a little distance from Klaas’ hovel, for they knew that in this wild weather only a few hardy bodies, racing down in raincoats from their hotels, would venture to bathe: there would be no tourists hopping in and out of the wavelets this evening, and who would want to make an ‘excursion’ down to such a sea? the sisters might as well pack up and go home.

  Klaas had been down to the huts that day; almost sober, for once, and had even made himself of some use; as they bicycled homewards along the deserted roads with heads bent into the pushing wind, Marie had been saying that he seemed better, and might be good for a year or two yet … if you could call it good … and Jakoba had said nothing; and then they had got themselves into an argument about just how old he really was, and when exactly their father had first come across him. … Ydette had stayed at home to take care of Mevrouw Maes and would have the fried potatoes and the coffee waiting, with perhaps a bit of fish, as it was Friday, and they were looking forward to it.

  Klaas stood for a little while in the windy sunset; wild beams were striking down on the land far away, whitening a tower, throwing a fading forest into a great glow of bronze, dazzling the eye. His mouth was full of the sound and taste of the sea and the wind blew rough and warm through his ragged clothes. Muttering to himself, he drew the door to and did some complicated twistings and fastenings and turned an old key in the rusty padlock; then he pulled his round cap down over his head and set out at a kind of stumbling run aross the rough grass towards Zandeburghe.

  Later that evening, Everard Ruddlin was sitting in the window of the dining-room at the big house, smoking, while, at the far end of the room, his elder daughter and his son and Adriaan van Roeslaere were assembling the implements for the film show.

  Leaning back comfortably, he stared out of the window, leaving behind him the young voices raised in suggestion or in quick argument, and wished that he were back at The Link House.

  The holiday, spent by him in frequent expeditions to towns and villages famed for some beautiful ancient building or object, and in day-long walks with his wife through the quiet—too quiet—countryside, had seemed to him endless, and it hadn’t done him a bit of good; he felt almost as on edge and as strung-up as he had been when he arrived here, and all he wanted now was to get back as quickly as possible to The Link House, and immerse himself in work again. He wanted to leave behind him for ever that sickening faint sensation of pain—suggesting the deathly scent that hovers perpetually about the corridors of a hospital—which had haunted the air of Flanders for him ever since he returned there.

  He was going to take good care that he never returned again. The experiment (and he had not been entirely unwilling to come, it hadn’t been altogether a question of May’s persuading him into coming) had been a mistake, as well as painful—God, it had been so painful! He felt sore from the pain; and from this eerie sensation, which he carried within him all the time, that something had been spoiled and made cheap. And there was the sense of loss! loss of someone he had known and loved (and he had loved her, oh God in Whom he didn’t believe, he had), someone he had known for only three weeks out of his entire life. Dead, perhaps, ten years or more, and he could still feel so much …

  “Do you mind if I just move these chairs, Monsieur van Roeslaere?”

  “Not at all, not at all, I don’t mind, Christopher. So … and what about the curtains? Must they be drawn?”

  “Of course they must be drawn; if they aren’t, you won’t see a thing.” Adriaan’s voice, at its sourest and most furious: he had been sulking about something all through dinner.

  “Really, Adriaan, we cannot draw them yet; with this heat—in spite of the wind—we shall all not be able to breathe.” Madame van Roeslaere, out of courtesy to her guests, was using her rather rusty English. “You want to shut out all the air.”

  “I don’t ‘want’ to do anything, even to show Chris’s film—particularly; but if the curtains aren’t drawn, the delicacy and drama of his camera-work won’t get full justice done to it.”

  Everard glanced down the room; really, Adriaan’s voice and manner sometimes sounded as if he would end up in that hinterland known to Christopher and his friends as round the bend: Everard himself knew, from six years’ teaching and handling of him, that Adriaan’s brain and health were far too stable to make such a catastrophe at all likely, but certainly his manner could be most odd …

  “Oh, la la! I’m sorry,” said Adèle, with a rueful smiling grimace at May Ruddlin that did not quite serve to mask the painful flush running up into her thin face, “by all means, then, please to draw them.”

  “Not yet. Just before we start, we will.” Christopher’s voice, sounding calm and deep as it always did just before a showing of one of his films. “Nora, come out of there and give me a hand, will you?”

  Everard, not wishing to continue the train of thought in company with which he had been staring out of the window, saw his elder daughter emerge slowly from the niche between a Dutch cabinet and the tall porcelain stove, where she had successfully half-concealed herself, and go, too quickly, down the room. As he watched her, his irritation mounted; really, she did move badly; she would simply have to be sent for a month or two to one of those places where they taught girls to move and walk; it wasn’t fair to her, to let her go out into the world with that blend of scholar’s crouch and hockey-girl’s tramp … but what would May say? “Oh, you attach too much importance to these things, dear; they don’t matter nearly so much now that girls are properly educated …”

  But they did matter, to him. May had never known how responsive he was to grace and beauty. She suspected it; she sometimes teased him about it, bless her. But she didn’t know how strong it was in him: an appetite, a thirst: and what harm it might have done …?

  The pain crawled over him again. He turned quickly and looked out of the window.

  He could still hear May’s voice, earlier that day:

  “Oh …” on a funny flat note, as they turned a corner amidst the heaps of ruins which ended on the banks of the broad, quiet Astrid Canal.

  “Nothing of it left,” he had managed to say, looking at the mounds of pitted and broken old bricks, and the stumps of foundations still imbedded in the sandy white ground.

  “The whole place has simply vanished. … Was there a row of houses here?”

  “Yes. Very beautiful houses,” he said.

  “It would be this kind of town that would have to go, wouldn’t it? … poor old bricks … it seems sad to survive for four hundred years, and then come to such an end … but isn’t the colour still lovely?”

  He had suddenly tucked her hand into his arm, desperate for comfort.

  “You’re such a nice person, May,” he said briskly.

  “I am?”

  “You are,” with a laugh and a little pressure.

  “Because I was sorry about the bricks? But anyone would be … oh look, everything isn’t quite dead; there’s the root of a tree, and it’s budding. What is it?” She moved a little nearer, peering with her shortsighted eyes, “A w
illow? yes. A weeping one, I do believe; look, there’s a shoot already starting to bend over.” She looked up at him. “Was there a willow in the garden of ‘your’ house, can you remember?”

  “Yes. Yes, I believe there was.”

  “Bless it,” she murmured, looking at the shreds of green; she was moved to tenderness by plants and flowers as other people are moved by children, “I hope they’ll let it stay there if they rebuild.”

  They stood for a moment and Everard looked interestedly about him at what had once been Doorwaden. Then she had said, “Perhaps this is ‘your’ house, then … I suppose the poor old man must have been killed. I had his name on the tip of my tongue a second ago … Monsieur—it began with a B, I’m sure …”

  “Did it?”

  “I’m almost sure it did. But I can’t remember … I wonder what happened to him.”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea. I did ask Van Roeslaere about … the people who were living here but … but he didn’t know anything; of course, Doorwaden is some way from Bruges, but I thought he might know something: the hothouses are only about four miles from here, of course. But he didn’t.”

  “Had he any family?”

  “The old man? A daughter.” That had slipped out before he could stop it.

  “Poor things … why does it seem so much sadder because one knows a little about the people who lived here? … I wonder what became of her. Was she married?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Was she young?”

  “Middle twenties …” and then he couldn’t stand any more, and had turned abruptly away, saying, “Let’s be getting back. It’s rather sad here.”

  “It is indeed. What was her name?”

  “Who? The girl? I can’t remember; I don’t even remember what she looked like,” (he was driving himself, as if with a whip) “I was out a great deal, walking, and looking at places, and taking notes, and only used the house for eating and sleeping.”

  He had to resist the impulse to wipe his forehead, and then he had to stop himself from going on talking; from adding something about thinking it must have been a dreary life for her, the daughter.