White Sand and Grey Sand

by Stella Gibbons

  At five o’clock, Adèle said, “Marieke, get me some tea, please. Just tea, nothing to eat.” She got up from her straight chair with the hard back, and settled herself in a more comfortable one near the window, and rested, and lit one of the cigarettes she had brought from England; cigarettes were still impossible to get over here.

  Marieke went away and roused Lyntje out of the kitchen, where she was yawning over a copy of Life. Tea! That French fashion, and so they did it in England, too.

  “All comfortable upstairs?” demanded Sophie, who had her great elbows on the table, with her chin sunk in her hands. They were only great, now, because her bones were big; no one would wonder nowadays whether Sophie could be called fat and her small eyes looked out steadily and sullenly from under a forehead deeply and redly scarred. Marieke did not answer, but quietly instructed Lyntje about what to take upstairs on a tray. When she had gone, she turned to Sophie.

  “Don’t say things like that in front of her. Madame wants her trained to be a good servant.”

  “Madame ought to know what she wants, after five and a half years living safe in England.”

  “They had the raids, Sophie. And they didn’t know what was happening to everything over here.”

  “Poor souls! I wonder they’re alive; must have been terrible.” She got slowly to her feet, easing them in the too-small, fragile, high-heeled shoes that had come in one of those parcels from America, nodded to Marieke and slouched out.

  “You coming in tomorrow?” Marieke called sharply after her.

  “Why not? Nothing else to do, is there?”

  “Then don’t be late. You was five minutes late this morning,” tartly.

  “Indeed I was not, it had not gone the hour from the Belfort, not when I was on the doorstep,” said Sophie over her shoulder, as she disappeared.

  Marieke did not resent this piece of lying impertinence; she knew quite well what was best for Sophie, and she meant to go on doing it, and she was perfectly certain that in time, when there was enough to eat again, and enough to wear, and things were cleared up, Sophie would be what Marieke thought of as ‘all right’ once more. Come to that, she wouldn’t mind a new hat herself, and as for her underclothing—if you’d told her, six years ago, that a woman’s underclothing could crumble to rags in her hand, she’d have called you a liar. A black hat with a grey ribbon; broad, tied in a bow …

  When she came in to see if the tea had been all that it ought to be, Madame van Roeslaere was looking out of the window.

  “Who is the little girl?” she asked, without turning, as Marieke came up; “one of old Matthys Maes’ grandchildren?”

  Marieke moved nearer to the window and looked out; she knew of course who Madame meant, but she liked, so much, to be with Madame again and telling her about the neighbours just as they used to six years ago. You could see right across the plaats from this window, and everything that was going on.

  She shook her head.

  “No, Madam. That’s Ydette. … Madame knows Mevrouw Marie, the younger sister?”

  “Of course I know Marie, Marieke.”

  “(Yes, Madame. I thought that perhaps Madame might have forgotten.) Well, Marie found Ydette on the great dune outside Zandeburghe, on the very day that Madame left for England, and she brought her home to live with them.”

  “Ydette? What an unusual name.”

  “Yes, Madame. But Jakoba (Madame will remember Jakoba, of course) she says it’s good Flemish.”

  “And the child’s been with them ever since? How old is she?”

  “They think, about eight, now, Madame. But of course they don’t know for sure, because they don’t know anything about her.”

  She had the tray in her hands now, but she lingered, and together they continued to look through the clear, old panes.

  The archway at the other side of the plaats received only a reflection of the splendid glow of late afternoon light, and the dim reds and browns and oranges of the vegetables, and the small figure in dark clothes with head muffled in a scarf sitting in patient, motionless guard over the pitifully small mounds exposed for sale, had the appearance—seen as it was through the soft radiance with a hint of autumn mist in it—of a painting. But Adèle van Roeslaere had not the habit of seeing human beings as if they were figures in a painting.

  “Don’t know anything about her?” she asked, “I suppose they’ve made enquiries?” But even as she said the words, she felt that they were only an echo from the number of times that she had said them, or something like them, while she was working on those committees in England whose purpose it was to help her dispossessed and homeless countrymen and women. She spoke briskly, hopefully, authoritatively, even, but she knew from experience what “making enquiries” could mean … and in Belgium during the last six years there hadn’t even been those in authority who were willing to help make enquiries—no, by God in His Heaven and His Mother and all the Angels, there hadn’t. Well—the terrible world was all about us, and in it we must love and help our fellow-men. She was praying that one day she might want to love and help the Germans.

  Marieke was trying to explain, in her stupid old way, that it hadn’t been all that easy to “make enquiries”.

  “I know, Marieke. But it will get easier, now that so many people are coming home and wanting to make them, and it will get better organized as time goes on.”

  “They think her people may have come a long way, Madame, and then sat down to rest and then perhaps they were machine-gunned. From an aeroplane, Marie thinks. And then somehow Ydette fell in the sea——” She went on, telling the little that was known and the much that was guessed at—or had been, some time ago, but now everybody living round the plaats took Ydette for granted and there had been more to think about, during the past six years, than where a small foundling might have come from. Jakoba had never spoken about the boat that had been floating away into the path of the sun; after all, the dark objects that she had thought she saw in the water near it might have been shadows, pieces of wood, anything; and the day that they had found her now seemed so long ago; in another world; in another life.

  “They wouldn’t want to part with her, now. They’ve got used to her,” Marieke concluded.

  “I daresay they have. But of course if her parents ever were discovered … is she a good child?”

  “Oh yes, Madame. She’s made her First Communion. Marie and Jakoba had such a business getting the stuff to make the dress, as Madame will imagine, and …”

  “And has she been able to go to school?”

  “On and off, Madame. Like most of the children. When it was very cold they shut the schools sometimes, and of course Ydette has to help in the shop … but she does go to school; the good Sisters teach her, at the school in the Street of the Little Red Lion.”

  Adèle turned to the window again. The small, patient figure across the plaats was at work now, selling something to two figures in black shawls.

  “And she’s a good child—obedient, and so on?”

  “Oh yes, Madame. Madame remembers, I expect, that Marie knows them—the good Sisters, I should say—round at the Béguinage and she often has Ydette round there, and I dare say they tell her things.” (Marieke meant things about Our Lady, and the Saints, and the good life; she herself went to Mass regularly, of course, but some people were always on about the Saints, weekdays as well.)

  “Yes … well … I will go across and see her later on, when things are more settled … they still sell flowers, I see.” There were some late-flowering ones, phlox, or chrysanthemums, probably, in a blue jug on the trestle table just inside the arch; they showed up white amidst the soft shadows under the archway. “And how is old Mevrouw Maes?”

  “She’s getting on now. But she can still get out to the farm (Madame remembers the farm, at Sint Niklaas?) at weekends. It was hating the Germans that’s kept her going through it all, that’s what we think.”

  Adèle indicated that the inspection of the lace had better be resum
ed.

  She did not see her husband until just before dinner, when he put his head round the door of the salon and asked her if she would excuse him and told her not to wait; he would be down in a minute, but he was very dirty; he must get the dust and plaster off himself first. He looked white and tired (after all, he’s over sixty, she thought, and although we may not have had to go through what everyone else here has, we haven’t had an easy war; it would be unfair to say that we have). She was feeling concerned for him, until he came into the dining-room, where she sat at the head of the long table arranged with silver and fine china and a marvellous glowing Chinese porcelain bowl of flowers and a small dish of fish covered in a cheese sauce—then she was pleased to see that he was, in spite of his pallor and the slowness with which he moved to his place and sat down, not noticeably depressed.

  “Well,” she said, when she had explained that she had had his place set beside her, rather than at the end of the table, because, that way, they both got the benefit from the radiator, and he had nodded his approval, “how is it, out there?”

  “Oh—,” he answered, slowly eating the fish in cheese sauce, “pretty bad.” He put his napkin to his lips. The napkin was neither so stiff nor so shiny as it used to be, but it was quite as white. “Marieke can still cook, can’t she? although she doesn’t have much to cook with.” He held out the napkin, “Is she responsible for this, too?”

  “Oh yes. She’s absolutely determined—and you know what she is when she’s determined—to have things just as they used to be for us, and she’s made a start already. But is it very bad out there, Hubert?”

  He nodded, and she asked no more questions.

  He had spent a day out there, with the new manager from Brussels. He seemed a good man; keen, and knowing what he was about; he was young, married and with a young family, and Hubert van Roeslaere thought that his enthusiasm for the villa where he and his family would live was genuine, although some men might have shown pardonable dismay at the sight of all the ceilings on the floor. The walls were standing, and the roof; that was something. The villa, even with no glass in its windows and its ceilings down and the garden that had been old Lombaers’ pride a flat and trampled waste, looked more hopeful than the greenhouses: without a whole pane, not one, over the entire twelve acres of them, and their smashed and blackened and scorched frames open to the sky.

  It had been a grey morning when they got there, and if he lived to be very old, he would never forget how the place looked under the enormous, indifferent, pale sky with the clouds blowing quickly over it in the cold wind. There wasn’t a sound. The paths between the houses were knee-deep in grass. And there was one chimney left standing; just one; the others were heaps of bricks almost buried in weeds; you had to look twice to see where they had stood. When had that happened? They told him in Sint Niklaas, where he stopped the car, that most of it had been done in 1940 when the R.A.F. had been blasting the invasion barges collected on the Astrid Canal. After that, the Germans had used what chimneys and greenhouses were left for growing tomatoes, and then the R.A.F. had blown them up in the pre-invasion bombings last year. Standing there, looking at it, he remembered that once he had thought this was the ideal site because the communications were so good.

  But towards evening, while they were walking about with the architects and engineers and builders who had arrived after lunch, making notes, the weather had cleared, and when, about half past six, they drove away, the sunlight was making everything look, if not more cheerful, at least less desolate. While he ate, and the sense of being once more at home surrounded by at least some of the beautiful and ancient objects amidst which he had lived for fifteen years was beginning to establish itself as the accepted thing and no longer unbelievably strange, he gradually felt less shocked and dejected. The house was almost undamaged; some of his fortune was invested abroad; Adèle was sitting beside him, and Adriaan would be home in December from the Link House. In a month they would start rebuilding the plant. He supposed that he ought to consider himself the luckiest man in Bruges that evening, instead of sitting there in a silence partly due to feeling guilty because he had—well, hadn’t he?—run away.

  He looked across at his wife and smiled and lifted his glass, and she smiled and lifted her own. The smiles were not hearty; each shared the other’s thoughts and feelings too closely to permit them to be; but neither were they forced.

  “In three months from today I want to bring you the first flower from the new place,” he said.

  “Oh! I shall look forward to it. What will it be?”

  “Come, that’s asking too much! I can’t possibly tell. It depends on all sorts of things—what the market for bulbs is like, the amount of coal we can get—hundreds of things. But if I can possibly manage it you shall have it, the very first one that comes into bud.”

  “That will be lovely,” she said again.

  Afterwards, while they were drinking coffee in the salon with the long curtains of faded Lyons silk drawn against the chill of the mist-filled night, she sat looking into the shadows beyond the one light that was burning, remembering the bunches of orchids that he used to bestow with gallantry on any woman who was taken over the hothouses before the war; if she was pretty, she got an even larger and more generous supply of exotic red trumpets, and scented white stars and pale mauve Slippers. Poor Hubert—her eyes strayed to the top of the bald head and the gold-and-crystal spectacles just visible above the sheets of Het Laatste Nieuws—how he did love beauty in women, as much as he loved it in orchids, and he had been faithful to her own unbeautiful face and body for fifteen years. Her dignity, her position as his wife, their social life amidst the circle of old friends belonging to the most aristocratic circle in the city, and their unsullied reputation with the clergy at Our Lady’s Church—all these had been, before the war, supported immovably upon the fact of Hubert’s faithfulness. How grateful she was to him.

  It was a dear little joke between them, her fondness for flowers, because flowers had led to their friendship and then to their marriage: he had become a widower lateish in life, childless and sad because of the loss of his wife (who had been beautiful, but, discreet rumour said, neither responsive nor kind), and Adèle had been thirty-five-ish or so; a shy and very well-born young woman living alone with her servants and her charitable work and her pot-plants in the big house in the Sint Maria Plaats after her parents had died; she and Hubert van Roeslare were distantly related but did not move in the same social circles. Chancing to learn that her passion was flowers, he had arranged that she should come to see the hothouses. She remembered the bunch of orchids that he had presented to her at the end of that afternoon of wandering through the long, silent, warm, dim sheds where the only sound was the irregular musical falling of water from the pointed ends of the leaves, and how her friends had teased her about its size. She had made a conquest, they said.

  She had been extremely surprised. She had never expected to make one, nor even mused upon the possibility that she might. But now that she had—and as the days went on it became clear beyond a doubt that she had—she was pleased. Her life had been lacking in the companionship of men, but she found herself able to be friends with this man without effort, and to enjoy the experience. They became such close companions that Bruges was not surprised, although it was pleased, when they married, and when a daughter, and a year or so later, a son, were born to them, there was happiness indeed—such happiness—that the sudden death of the little girl had shadowed for ever.

  It seemed very much to belong to that life behind the war—beyond the war—that life now over and never, in spite of the efforts of Marieke, to be the same—the fact that, once, they had both been untroubledly happy about Adriaan.

  Adèle looked down at the knitting-needles flashing in her long white fingers. The jersey of finest wool, the colour of that English porridge, was almost finished; it was odd, she thought (resolutely turning her thoughts away from Adriaan, because there would be time for thinking abou
t him when she knelt down by her bed that night)—it was odd that wool of that soft, uninspiring colour could look so well when it was made up.

  She turned the work about in her hands, looking at it critically. But she was thinking about her starving, weary, exhausted city. There was so much to do. She thanked God that He had let her stay alive, to work for His creatures.

  She intended to make a special visit to the shop across the plaats and talk to that little foundling, but the days went past so quickly, each one bringing its round of domestic or spiritual duties; she began to go to Mass again every morning at Our Lady’s Church, as she used to before the war; and then there were her visits to the old women in the various almshouses throughout the city, comforting them and taking them food and flowers and fuel, and she was going down every afternoon to a room where milk and tinned foods sent from America were being distributed to the children, and although she sometimes happened to glance across and see the white face wrapped in the faded scarf presiding over the trestles and their starveling display, she had never managed to find the time to go across.

  Once, standing by the windows of the dining-room, now rid of their disfiguring boarding, she saw, just before Marieke drew the curtains, the creature managing a broom almost as tall as itself. The sisters, evidently, made good use of their waif. Then, in the press of ever-increasing duties, she would forget the child again. And then, on some morning when she was walking swiftly back from Mass through autumn air grown keener and more sparkling as winter approached, she would see the small figure walking along slowly, rather doggedly, on the opposite side of the plaats—on her way to school, presumably, for she carried an old carpet bag that might contain books. Adèle had got so far as speaking to Mevrouw Maes about her, pausing one morning on her way homeward to greet the old woman as she too came out from the church, and ask how she was, and say that she had heard they had a little girl living with them now, but Mevrouw Maes had not been responsive. She was growing very old, and although she kept her black eyes fixed steadily on Madame van Roeslaere’s face, Adèle was not certain that she could see who was talking to her.