White Sand and Grey Sand

by Stella Gibbons

  The noise sounded clearly in the stillness now that the distant clamour from the streets was shut away and the three women were momentarily quiet, and it aroused Ydette. She slowly opened her eyes, as she lay comfortably in the softness surrounding her, half-awakening from the sleep into which she had been drifting, exhausted at last by the sheer length of a day whose beginnings—the milk, the brioche and butter given by a gentle hand into her obediently opened mouth, the sound of quiet tones warm with love, the comfortable feel of familiar lights and shadows and colours and the great green thing surrounded by brightness, towards which her eyes, while she ate and drank, continually wandered, a green thing that showered down onto more green—were already indistinguishable, by her, from hundreds of just such other beginnings to the light of a new day.

  Now her eyes, as they looked drowsily upwards, encountered first, cool blueness—spread out above her head, and making her mouth feel less parched. Next, beyond the blueness, and looming so high against it that she had to tilt her head back into the soft, soft, silvery warmth in which she was resting in order to see it properly—there was a blackness shutting off the blue, and then it was all black. And then, deep inside the blue and high, high—oh, higher than all the world and the sky—a tall, tall, tall Person, and it was watching.

  It wore a pointed hat; and its immensely long countenance was of a pale, ghostly lilac colour, and it was so enormous that all her tiny store of ideas and feelings, and the little sounds that served her as words, were powerless to express satisfactorily within herself the pressure of its hugeness.

  There it was, in its tremendousness; and it was watching. It had no face, and yet it was all faces; it had no eyes, and yet eyes looked outwards and downwards from every part of itself; it was solemn, and strange (the impressions of which these words are only the faint conveyings touched upon her infant imagination in all their primal purity and strength), and it was watching. She felt it to be neither kind nor unkind, neither a giver of fear nor a bestower of comfort; she was only unable to turn her eyes away from the monstrous and awesome thing, and, as she looked up into the infinite, darkening depths of blue in which the elongated shape of ghostly lilac reared itself, gradually the impression of terror, that had kept her numbed and silent throughout the day, began to dissolve, as if it were being slowly expunged by the severe, solemn, mysterious downward gaze of the Watcher’s myriad eyes.

  The terror had begun with a noise; far off, small, droning, like the noise that suddenly darted out at her on hot days from amongst the bright things that smelled sweet, making her jump. It came nearer and louder, louder, louder. Suddenly she was snatched and held close to the warmth and silvery softness and the sound that she liked best. There was a sharp noise coming out of the great loudness, and there was loud crying all round, and suddenly her mouth was full of coldness and salt. She tried to cry too. She crawled a long way in the horrible coldness that ran after her. Then there was warmth again, the softness and silveriness; under her feet, in her hands, warm beneath her cold, wet limbs … and then sounds once more, to and fro, going to and fro, above her head, but not the sound she liked best.

  Light fell suddenly across her face, and she turned her eyes away from the Watching thing because it had suddenly become dim and far away in a blueness that was almost black. Inside the new light there was a blueness low down, and shadows, and a glow. She turned her face again into the softness and warmth of the silver sand, and her eyes shut themselves.

  As she was sinking once more into sleep, a beautiful whispering and a trilling, a sound infinitely high up and far away, began to drift out through the low, far-off, threatening trembling of the air. Scattering outwards and downwards over the roofs of the city, it diffused itself through the winding alleyways and over the deserted, darkening reis and the motionless water of the canals; it washed with invisible fingers of music the empty places on the walls of the dark galleries whence great paintings had been taken away to safety, as if to assure them that the departed masterpieces would return, and it drifted outwards across the villas surrounding the city until, over the orchards of Sint Niklaas where old Lombaers waited upright and alert in his villa behind the drawn shutters, it died off into a mere whisper upon the wind. It fell softly and clearly into the quiet rooms where the people of Bruges awaited the enemy, and it came into the little house of the Maes sisters and their mother.

  It was the carillon; they were home.

  1 Kid; brat.

  2 Wise Men From the East.

  3 Mother.

  ON AN AUTUMN morning nearly six years later, Adèle van Roeslaere stood at the window of her bedroom and looked, first to the left and then to the right, down the expanse of the canal.

  This was the moment towards which her heart and mind had constantly been turning in anticipation during the time of exile, and now, standing motionless in the still, hazy sunlight, she drank in the moment as if it had been water. From the topmost rooms of the big house to those that were on a level with the plaats, there came soft rumours of domestic sounds, sober, satisfying intimations that her home was alive and in use again.

  But suddenly, as she stood there, she ceased to hear them, and the deep pleasure that they brought to her ebbed away as if it were lifeblood from a wound. The water, lapping gently against the stones immediately beneath her window, was fresh as the realization of her hopes; lively,—for this was one of the wider canals down which currents and ripples flowed—and of no colour but the reflection of light, as water should be, and it danced; in spite of the chill in the air, and the October quality of the sunlight, it was dancing. And she had seen the houses on the opposite side of the canal, and had been looking eagerly at the façades of ancient, richly-coloured brick, for more than a minute before, with a frightful inward gasp and pang, she recollected what had happened in the last six years to her friends and neighbours.

  Their windows were shuttered, and the hinges of the shutters were rusted into place, or they were curtainless, and dim with the settled dust of years. She had not been home for as long as a day, yet already she knew that she must live for the remainder of her life with the memories of the van der Goes, the Liedts, the Aadenburgs, who had all gone. Marieke had told her the news —although it could not be called ‘news’ in the ordinary sense, because it had all happened years ago. Years ago. For some years, now, Liz and Margot and Henri had been dead or—in one of those places.

  Adèle quickly pressed both her preposterously long and milky and slender hands over her eyes. When she took them away again, the still, warm, sunny air gave her nothing: no echo of sedate, middle-aged voices chatting on, while the evening light died off the water under the windows; no pictures of her women friends, wearing the furs of winter and swinging their skates from their gloved hands, turning back to her with laughter. There was nothing left but the quiet, sunlit façades reflected in the water, with their shutters drawn over their windows like the eyelids in the face of one who has been granted a peaceful death.

  I should have stayed on and died with them, she thought. Oh, how do people who don’t believe in God manage to go on bearing to stay alive? and, turning quickly away from the window, she went with her brisk step across to the narrow bed, a nun’s bed in shape, and fell, uncontrollably, with her face pressing against the lace of the coverlet. Using the prescribed words of her Church, she began to pray.

  In a moment she assumed a position more reverent and more likely, from mere force of habit, to restore self-command, and was sending up petitions for mercy upon the worn, shaken, shabby city and its starved and haggard, but unbroken, people, who were already at work again. Grant them to lead the lives of human beings once more, she prayed.

  But she soon checked the measured outpourings of petition, gratitude and praise, and got up from her knees and went across to the dressing-table.

  Marieke had arranged the gold and silver trays and jars and mirrors and brushes there, and they looked just the same; no one would think that for nearly six years they had been b
uried under a stone in the paved garden. Once, they had been a cause of guilt and distaste, in their value and numerousness and luxury, to their owner; now, she scarcely saw them. She looked, with an almost equal lack of interest, at the reflection of her pale face, and mouth with its flattened lower lip. She glanced into the long glass, then her eye lingered on the yellow dahlias that Marieke had arranged around the room, and she remembered how she used to feel, before Father Jozef with his amused and impatient eloquence had convinced her otherwise, that her passion for flowers was a sin.

  The new parlourmaid put her face round the door and announced, in a voice livelier than it would be after Marieke had had the training of it for six months, that luncheon was ready; and Adèle went downstairs to eat it. What a great tower of hair the child had, and a skirt almost touching her ankles; it looked like fancy dress.

  Well, she could not be more than seventeen, at the most, and they were all dressing like that in the first blessed relief of being able to do, in small ways, what they liked again; all that—and it was harmless enough—could be put right with time. She would be given her dresses for her work. God in His mercy had spared much of the old life, Adèle thought, as she seated herself in the big chair with its leather covering and gilt studs; and this child, Lyntje, must have been under the special protection of some saint, that she hadn’t been taken off, like some wretched Austrian girls Adèle had heard of, to a camp where the women were compelled to … She inserted a spoon, bright as if it had never shared that six years incongruous interment under the paving-stones with the gold combs and the silver trays, into the dish containing a small quantity of some greenish-white substance.

  “Creamed cabbage, Madame,” said Lyntje, in response to an enquiring glance. Her young hand looked red against the soft, old gleam of the silver platter she was holding.

  “Ah yes … does it come from the shop across the plaats?” Adèle asked, and there was pleasure in asking the question, and there was fear too, and that was to become such a familiar mixture, with its bitter-sweet taste, as the weeks went on.

  “Yes, Madame. Sophie went across and got it this morning.”

  “They’re still there, then?”

  “Oh yes, Madame.”

  “Mevrouw Marie, and Mejuffrouw Jakoba, and old Madame Maes?”

  “Oh yes, Madame, all of them. And the little girl.”

  Adèle returned to her cabbage. Thank God they were still there. That was another piece of the old life spared. She could not remember any little girl at the shop. But she might be a relation who had come to live with them. She glanced across at the long windows, where the clear, thick white glass had formerly been diversified by a scene here and there in gold and red and violet, portraying a scene from the Bible or some shield displaying the history and genealogy of her family; from this window you could see across the plaats and take in Mevrouw Maes’ shop with the rest of the view, but the windows were still boarded over. Good Marieke … she had been so angry and distressed because she had not been able to get anyone to repair the damage before the family’s return. What reward could ever be made for Marieke’s care, and her devotion to the house?

  This afternoon, thought Adèle, I’ll go through the lace with her; she’d like that, and there’s so much to be done that I don’t know where to begin first.

  She knew that the lace was safe; it was a small family collection of old pieces that the women of the family all used, adding to the general store of collars and fichus and jabots and veils and cuffs as family occasions arose for buying more. Marieke had seen to the disposal of that, too. It had been fortunate that civilians, not soldiers, had been billeted in the house during the first part of the war; they were connected with the administration of the farms outside the city, and then they had been turned out in 1942 to let in some of the hundreds of thousands of refugees who came swarming in from Zandeburghe and La Panne and Oostende and Blaankenburghe when the enemy had made a defensive line along the coast twelve miles deep. But Marieke had still been there, and somehow she had managed to prevent the worst depredations.

  Adèle removed her eyes from the boarded windows, where light was admitted only through the undamaged ones at the top, and let them rove, with a quiet yet exquisite sensation of homecoming and relief, over the walls of pale brown oak; they were hung with red-and-gold Spanish leather, stamped with a curvilinear design of leaves and stems and fruit … A thick arm suddenly thrust a blue bowl, containing three small green apples, under her nose, held it there for an instant, then slapped it down on the lace place-mat, with its pattern of peacocks and trees and flowers, in front of her. Certainly, Lyntje was going to need an intensive course of Marieke’s training before she was domestically ‘fit to be seen’.

  Adèle peeled an apple, that she did not want, with a silver knife, thinking about the young grenadier standing on guard by the door. In England they had almost no tradition of domestic service left—and what little they did have, they were all, high and low, doing their very best to get rid of as quickly as possible. That shall not happen over here, Adèle decided, pushing aside the apple-rings and getting up from her chair; it’s uncomfortable for us and bad for them. She was critically pleased to see Lyntje spring like an athlete from the starting pistol to hold the door open for her. But that would have to be toned down, too.

  She smoked a cigarette in the salon, while she read a magazine because she did not want to look at the façades of the houses across the canal (but that would have to be cured; she would have to pray until she had come to terms with that … and after all, if they were dead they were in Paradise … but suppose they weren’t dead? There were places in Russia …). She came out precisely at two o’clock, between the pilasters with their freshly gilt cornices, and went upstairs to find Marieke. Over the door of the salon, set in the woodwork itself, was a serene landscape of an Italian city with some shepherds in the foreground, under a rich blue sky, and she looked up at it thankfully as she mounted the staircase.

  It afforded the greatest comfort and relief to Marieke to make a report, at last, of her stewardship and of the losses which she had been unable to prevent among the objects left in her charge. The severity of her everyday expression relaxed, a very little, while she and Madame van Roeslaere were thus occupied.

  There they were, mistress and maid together again; the one sitting in a straight chair with a high back, the afternoon light falling through the tall windows onto the smooth, nutmeg-brown, panelled walls and on her white hair and pain-graven face, and the other standing in her black dress and white apron in front of the lofty press carved with apples, and wheat, and naked babies, where the lace was kept; and Marieke never had many words with which to express her feelings, or even thoughts to offer them relief, and this afternoon she was even more silent than usual. As each frail sheet of ancient creamy net, encrusted with knotted threads woven into leaves and love-knots and birds, was lifted swiftly and deftly from the press and held out for inspection, Adèle felt the peace of the home newly restored beginning to rise about her like a blessed tide. She knew that she must begin to work, and plan, and take up again the many duties dictated by her Church and her conscience that she had formerly performed (and how many more, now, with the entire country in the state it was, there were going to be!), but just for this afternoon, during this hour and a half spent with her old servant, she did not resist the temptation to be at rest.

  But Marieke was silent for more than the reasons that she lacked words, and that it was not her place to chatter. She was wondering whether this was the time to tell Madame about Sophie.

  She would have to know soon, of course. Everyone did know, and if Marieke did not tell Madame, someone else might, and then Madame would perhaps come to Marieke and say, what on earth do you mean by allowing Sophie to stay on in the house, when … because even the war didn’t make any difference to that sort of thing.

  But Marieke did not feel like telling Madame this afternoon. Of course, it was a sin, but it was also a fact, and
it was alive, and somehow when a sin took the shape of a great, healthy thing with a voice almost as big as Sophie’s own, and a body showing promise of being as large as its father’s had been, it did not seem like a sin. Father Jozef was always preaching that sin was ugly; well, Sophie’s boy was no beauty, but it did seem a bit hard to call him an ugly sin.

  Marieke unfolded a christening veil with a ground of fond de neige edged by a Mechlin design of curling flowers, that had covered the downy head of many a van Roeslaere baby, and decided that for this afternoon, at any rate, she would forget little Moritz.

  Madame was not asking many questions about the lace; she was going on about quite unimportant people in the town; people whose names Marieke didn’t know, sometimes; and how should she know what had happened to that smallest one of all the little boys who sang in the choir at Our Lady’s, the one with the spectacles, who strode about with his boots showing under his red skirts? or the old woman in the black bonnet at Sint Saveour’s, who sold candles and showed people to the seats there? … Marieke still had her own position and her own friends in Brugge, even though the Germans had tried to turn everything upside down for six years, and how could she possibly say what had become of such doubtless respectable, but entirely unimportant, creatures?

  The afternoon drew on. The light of sunset began to tint the sky and touch with warm colour the two heads, the white one and the iron-grey, as they bent together over the creamy webs. Madame van Roeslaere was asking questions quickly, now, and as the answers—the rumours and the legends and the tales, all with their monotonous burden of dead, shot, disappeared, sent away, killed—went on, her face seemed to have taken on the yellowish-white hue of the lace. Outside in the plaats, cars went by, bells tolled with their high, remote voices, lorries rumbled across the cobbles, bicycle bells shrilly rang and everything sounded natural and right again. A little more lively than it used to be, that was all, and not so busy as it was in the main streets, because the plaats always had been rather a backwater, but there was no doubt that the city was busily, willingly, at work again, thank God. Only it still seemed … you couldn’t believe it.