Long did the mejuffrouws sit up that night, going through Hilary’s Biology paper and wondering what exactly had happened to the Belgian creature? Hilary and Evelyn both carefully refrained, over the coffee and shortbread, from saying that Ydette was just the type who would have a shady man up her sleeve; Evelyn even tried not to think it; but their opinion was plain to see, in spite of themselves; and Nora, for once, was not grateful to them for their delicate tact in not blaming her for the spoiled week-end. Even less was she grateful for their tolerant concessions to ‘the Belgian creature’s’ lack of education, and her immaturity. But then, Nora always had been inclined to a fondness for Ydette.
Before eight o’clock the next morning, Ydette was sitting in Madame Maes’ old chair, in charge of the shop.
It was a still, early autumn day, with the cobbles of the plaats still damp from yesterday’s rain (so they had had rain here, too!), and while the water of the canal looked nearly black, the walls and roofs of all the buildings surrounding the plaats displayed every shade of grey from lightest pearl to darkest slate. Ydette’s eyes dwelt with a delicious sensation of homecoming on the subdued, familiar tints; already the red brick and gaudy advertisements, which were now, unfortunately, her strongest impressions of England, were beginning to fade from her memory.
Oh, the peace, the pleasure, of home! the joy of seeing it all again, from the moment last night when Aunt Marie, wrapped in a variety of hastily-caught-up garments, had snatched open the door in answer to her niece’s knock with the forthright statement that anyone coming home so late and unexpectedly was enough to kill them all from shock … but Ydette had scarcely heard, being so occupied with taking everything in: the gloxinias, the red armchair, the photograph of Queen Astrid and the bowls set out on the table for breakfast.
The relief of not having to sit through another meal with the mejuffrouws, eating their horrible damp English bread and drinking their unfamiliar coffee while trying to understand what they said in their quick, cool-sounding English voices! Even the rather disturbing information that Jooris had been in for a cup of coffee that very evening, and had sat like a dumb stone off the beach for best part of an hour without giving a bit of news to a body who might have liked to hear it—even this (though the stone part certainly was alarming) was heard by Ydette with pleasure. And the aunts had shown neither amazement, nor suspicions of a certain kind, on hearing that Mijnheer Adriaan had been so good as to fetch Ydette home; and by aeroplane, too! They had assumed that he had gone on some hint from his mother that there might be perils in England about which they, the aunts, knew nothing. It was very good of them at the big house to show so much interest, let alone spending the money. As for Ydette’s ever being a star—a fine idea that was. Aunt Jakoba had laughed until she cried, telling Jooris about it.
“What did he say?” Ydette had demanded, pausing in her filling of the kettle for that nightly hot wash about which the aunts rather proudly teased her.
“Not a word. (I told you, he sat there like some great stone off the beach.) But he turned red.”
“Turned red?” faintly.
“Quite red. Like as if he was going to burst a blood vessel. (Rage, we reckoned it was.) But never said a word, not a word.”
“Oh.” It was almost a sigh. “… When’s he coming again? Never?”
“‘Never’! What sort of talk is that?—off the pictures, I suppose. He’s coming at eight o’clock tomorrow morning with the van—that Karel’s fallen into a dyke again and hurt his leg this time. What was it like on the aeroplane?”
“I don’t know. Rather hot. I was asleep.”
“Trust you! You get a free ride on an aeroplane and you go to sleep! And so you aren’t going to be a star after all. Just what I expected—though I can’t get over you crying like that in front of the gentleman—what he must have thought of your manners, and them that brought you up, I don’t know …” Marie went across to her niece and felt her shoulders with her big, hard hands. “Cold, are you?” she muttered. “What a time to come home. … But you always were a stupid girl. ‘Be thankful she’s a good girl, for clever she is not’, them up at the Béguinage has always said to your Aunt Jakoba and me. Never mind. Go up and get your sleep now; no need for you to be up tomorrow before seven.”
“No; that’s good.” It was a drowsy murmur, lingering comfortably with Marie’s promise of the humblest imaginable treat to come, in the quietness of the small, ancient room.
Freshly washed and carrying her best shoes in her hand, Ydette yawningly climbed the tiny flight of stairs. The little window of her bedroom was, naturally, tightly shut, but she could see the stars through it, and, almost indistinguishable against the dark autumn sky, the blacker mass that was Our Lady’s Tower. The calmness of it all, the comfort of again going to bed surrounded by the mild, familiar faces of home; the chipped basins with their border of green leaves downstairs on the table; the old wooden clock in her room whose loud, fat ticking she no longer noticed, her narrow bed with its counterpane of coloured woollen patches knitted by grandmother, the faded blue paper on the wall—everywhere she looked, there was something good to see. And tomorrow morning Jooris was coming. That ‘going-red’ needn’t be taken too much notice of; really, she could as sooner imagine one of the old apple trees in the orchard at the farm getting really cross with her, as Jooris.
She felt lighter in spirit, as if some load that had been weighing upon her for years had rolled away, as she knelt beside her bed, but she was also so sleepy that it was only the familiar hard pressure of the floorboards through the worn little mat under her knees, that kept her from falling asleep while she was praying, lovingly and long, for Mijnheer Adriaan’s soul.
In her narrow bed, in the next room which she had shared with Marie for the better part of fifty years, Jakoba had lain awake in the darkness. A shouted conversation up and down the stairs had soon informed her that their niece’s late and unexpected return was not brought about by any disaster, and, neatly disposing behind her head with a flick of one hand, the long plait whose greyness was now beginning to be touched with white, she prepared to sleep again. But she heard the bells chime one, and then two, and three.
All that day she had been thinking, on and off, of Klaas; perhaps because it was getting near the time that he had died four years ago. She still missed him, the more because she could not tell anyone that she did; she could not even mutter to her sister, because Marie never spoke of him without thanking the Saints that he had gone—with his ‘drop-of-something’ and his sulks—and congratulating them upon having a much more satisfactory helper in Sophie’s young Moritz, who now devoted all his spare time (a commodity in which, he saw to it, he was rich) to helping the Maes sisters down at the bathing-huts.
Jakoba resented young Moritz’ presence: who was he, to be young and strong and alive, when better people who had once been as young and as strong had grown old and died? More and more, as she herself grew old, Jakoba liked her own solitary habits; she liked among other things to pedal along the road to the sea with her face set in a certain expression that she need not trouble to change into a smile (God knew that she had to smile often enough, during her day’s work at the huts) and the flat, rich, untroubled countryside going by, looking just as it used to before the Germans came.
Sometimes, as the stiff figure in its dark clothes passed swiftly along beside some field where a blue-bloused shape was bent over the rows of cabbages or hoeing with a slow and steady movement between the crowded stems of the wheat, an old man would glance up and wave to her, or perhaps stand with a hand shading his eyes to watch her out of sight; she always knew who they were, the name of each one, and the exact number of his years, these silent figures, and always returned their greetings. They were her living Past. The sight of them gave—or seemed to give—her back some of the strength, and the appetite for life, which grew a little, just a very little, less with every year.
Jakoba turned restlessly in her narrow bed.
We
ll, she had been a sinner, there wasn’t any getting out of that, and one day she would have to pay for it. But there had never been another like Klaas. He had always been the one. First come, last lov—but the word refused to shape itself, even in her thoughts.
She wondered just how much he had known about the parentage of Ydette? A good deal, Jakoba sometimes suspected, from hints that he had dropped from time to time. It had all been mixed up in some way with Doorwaden, anyway, where he had lived as a child, but now he was dead and they would never know anything more. Jakoba had grown tired of questioning him … and often she had thought that his hints were nothing but teasing and spite. He always had hated Ydette. He could be very cruel, Klaas could.
Yes, very cruel. But before she fell asleep two terribly bitter drops had wrung themselves from under Jakoba’s eyelids and dried away on the leathery skin of her cheeks.
It was almost eight o’clock. Ydette had set out the trestles and trays ready for the vegetables and fruit; the children were idling across the plaats on their way to school; their voices rang through the still air, and some of them waved to her. The carillon had already sounded the quarter.
She sat upright in the chair that had always been Mevrouw Maes’, expectantly, but with her hands—that would never, now, wear jewels, or pose for a photographer—linked soberly on the lap of her apron.
Her eyes were fixed placidly on the front of the big house. Marieke had already, some half an hour before, been out for her morning inspection, and they had exchanged the restrained gestures of greeting to which Ydette’s (supposed) years of discretion had now promoted her.
Everything was just as it always had been and, Ydette imagined, it always would be—for not only had she absorbed all that Adriaan had said to her yesterday without its making one shade of difference in her feelings towards the van Roeslaeres, but she made no allowances for these sudden transformations in a nineteen-year-old female life which may be brought about by a passionate and determined young man.
Really, I might never have been to England at all, thought Ydette, staring with peaceful devotion at the big house. It’s so good.
The carillon for the hour, silvery, joyful and fresh, came floating across the roofs, and as it died away the lesser bells of the city took up the sound, far and near, until the air was crossed and criss-crossed again with voices of ancient harmony.
And here was the lorry. Turning the corner into the plaats, it swung bumping across the cobbles and drew up in front of the shop. It carried an unusually fine load this morning; a mass of large, rich brown swedes, two or three sacks of scarlet string packed to bursting with golden carrots, and a pile of stiff green and white celery. There was also a box of large dahlias, so bright in their yellow and white and pink that they seemed to make an actual glow above themselves in the grey air. And the lorry was a nice, gay, sharp green.
Sitting amidst all this rustic colour and autumn ripeness was Jooris, red-faced indeed, but only with the morning’s chill, his very blue eyes smiling out from under a smart English velvet cap. His arrival was heralded by a scent of roots and fresh earth.
When he saw Ydette standing inside the arch by the empty trestles he saw at once that everything had happened exactly as he had told her it would; the picture-man had not given her a job, she had not enjoyed herself, and so she had come home again, and four whole days (not quite a week, she had been lucky there) of her holiday had been wasted.
But now that she was home, he was going to see to it that she did not stray away again. She always had been rather silly, Ydette. How long had it taken him to make her understand that the chickens in the yard at home would not hurt her? Ten years, was it? That showed you what she was like. All the same, ‘home’ was where he was going to take her (after he had unloaded the van, of course, and filled up those empty trays) to finish out her holiday in the place that they both liked best.
It would be a surprise for his mother and grandfather.
But he would be prepared to bet that neither they nor anyone else in all the city of Brugge would be surprised at the next thing he was going to do with Ydette.
“Hullo!” he called, waving, and—
“Hullo!” she called back. She stood there, looking at him.
If, somewhere deep within her spirit, there were the faint voices of certain childhood dreams and reveries calling to her … the lonely whisper of the wind over the white sand of the dunes, the watching eyes of Our Lady’s tower, the noble façade of the big house, the scent of the orchids out at Sint Niklaas, and, farther back yet, the drooping leaves of a great willow-tree … she did not hear their cry for aid. Save us, we are in danger, we are threatened, we are vanishing, like mist in the sunlight. … But she was listening to an older and a stronger voice, and smiling as she heard.
The bells had stopped now, but their echo was floating on, over the roofs of the city, out towards the distant sea.
“Right on time, aren’t I?” Jooris said. “Had your breakfast yet? Or how about an ice-cream?”
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Copyright © Stella Gibbons 1958
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First published in Great Britain by Hodder & Stoughton Ltd in 1958
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White Sand and Grey Sand Page 34
