White Sand and Grey Sand

by Stella Gibbons

  “Yes, Madame,” in the same softest imaginable tone short of an actual whisper.

  “Do you learn English there?” the questioner went on; she was speaking Flemish.

  ‘“Oh yes, Madame.”

  “Ydette knows quite a lot of English; Madame knows there were some English soldiers in the town last week, and Ydette told them the way when they asked; they were in a lorry; all the other children tried, but Ydette was the only one who could tell them,” proudly said Mevrouw Maes.

  “That’s good,” said Madame van Roeslaere. She was almost compelled to turn her eyes away from the steady, unwavering stare of the child’s; how lovely they were; too large, of course, in a face that size, but the shape and the colour and the length of the lashes were striking, and she wondered where she might originally have come from … really, it was almost embarrassing to be looked at so steadily.

  “Do you like to learn English?” she asked.

  This time Ydette could manage only a kind of rather awkward ducking movement of her head and a foolish smile. It was the first sign she had shown of belonging to her peasant background, and Adèle actually felt some disappointment, for she had seemed like a little girl of gentle blood dressed up in a peasant’s clothes, and now the gesture had spoiled the picture. But of course it wasn’t important.

  “I am sure you do,” she said firmly. “Now, you must go to school regularly, and work hard at your English, and when you haven’t missed a day for two months, your aunts can let me know, and I will give you English lessons twice a week.

  “You understand, don’t you?” she went on with a touch of impatience as Ydette stared and stared without answering. ‘Work hard, and I’ll teach you English myself.” She did not know what impulse had caused her to add that rather less impersonal last word, but it had its effect. The palish lips moved uncertainly in the pale face; then there came a kind of pipe—

  “Over—at the big house—Madame?”

  “Yes. At the big house. So you go to school regularly for two months, and then we’ll begin.”

  She nodded to them, smiled, and turned and walked quickly away.

  “There,” said Mevrouw Maes, whose hearing was keener than her sight, approvingly, “always so full of bonté, Madame is.” But she said no more, not being given at any time to the utterance of pious sentiments, and feeling in any case that God and His Saints owed them all something for what they had been through these last six years, and Ydette’s dreams, which were still wandering around the appearance, face and voice of the lady from the big house and had not yet directed themselves to the prospect of actually being taught English by her there, were at liberty to proliferate, that morning, undisturbed.

  A brief smile or two which Madame van Roeslaere gave to her from time to time when they chanced to meet kept, however, the plan well forward in her mind and soon she was consciously working at her English as hard as she could. But that wasn’t very hard, because the day-dreaming, which was the very essence of which her being was formed, drew into itself the energies which might have directed themselves into the more useful qualities—concentration, memorizing, competitiveness and so forth—and even endeavour (and she did work, as far as she could) will not make up for sheer lack of brains.

  The teaching nuns, some of whom were clever, accurately judged her intelligence to be of a lowish order; her writing was painstakingly bad, her reading of the kind which compelled you to take a firm grip on your patience, and as for her mathematics—well, to give a fair opinion of Ydette Maes’ mathematica faculty you would really be forced to draw upon metaphor and simile—stone walls, swamps, donkeys with their heels dug in and so forth—and the nuns, who saw no reason why one should be a fool even if one was good, had decided, after some two years of as severe and unremitting a perseverance with her as conditions under the Occupation would permit, that they must concentrate upon the improvement of her soul. They would continue, of course, to teach her as carefully as everybody else in the school was taught. But they came to a decision amongst themselves not to waste valuable time and energy on hammering at Ydette, in the hope of better scholastic results, because there just wouldn’t be any.

  She was stupid. She mightn’t look it, but she was, and as for the results of concentrating upon her soul, there was an atmosphere of restrained disappointment about that, too, because she was not exactly a good child. She was not actively naughty or rebellious either, but her prayers in class and her response to instruction in moral enlightenment were rather—and they were only rather, so you couldn’t even give her a good shaking up about her attitude—negative. She was a disappointment. Her height, which seemed to increase every week, and her eyes, made her stand out from the crowd of children, but her character and abilities did not fulfil the promise of her appearance. The nuns were no longer more interested, now, in Ydette Maes than it was their duty to be: almost unconsciously, during the last two and three-quarter years, they had tended more and more to leave her to God: He, of course, knew what He was going to do with her.

  As for what went on within Ydette’s head concerning Him: the Three who watched perpetually above the roofs of the city had gradually become identified for her with the Holy Trinity about which she heard the priests talking in Our Lady’s church. She felt that the prayers which Aunt Marie and grandmother had taught her to make there (Aunt Jakoba was not one for much churchgoing, except of course to Mass on Sundays) went straight up, up, into the dim, darkened air spiced with the scent of burned-out incense, and through the roof. Once there, they circled slowly round and around the topmost eyes and faces of the Person in the pointed hat. Ydette knew, because Aunt Marie had told her, that her prayers were offered to God and Our Blessed Lord and His Mother and were presumably accepted by them, but to know was one thing (as Marie had already decided when musing upon priests and widows) and to feel was quite another, and Ydette could feel her prayers going up through the lofty roof and then slowly round and round that solemn Face one hundred and twenty-two metres above her head. A great number of them must have gone up there by this time, for she was diligent in repeating the Hail Mary and other prescribed forms of intercession and praise, because the sound of the words fascinated her, and so the Person must be quite surrounded by her prayers; up there in the sky amongst the yellow clouds of autumn or the pink clouds of spring, and must always remember Ydette.

  She used to walk back from school on those autumn evenings. Some of the children had bicycles; old, battered, patched-up machines which had survived in attics and cellars throughout the war, and a very few of the richest and luckiest had new ones from England or America, but although the shop was beginning to do very well, so well that Aunt Marie had begun to buy fruit and vegetables from another farmer in addition to Uncle Matthys, the money went to buy sheets and blankets and saucepans and cups and there was none for bicycles. But towards Kerstmis the aunts told Ydette that she could put away her plaid coat and that scarf, and although she was sorry to see them go, how could she possibly regret them when she was told that the parcel they gave to her one morning on their return from Mass, containing a dark blue cape with a scarlet-lined hood, was a present, actually a present, from Madame van Roeslaere?

  “Well,” said someone to her one evening early in December, as she was making her way homewards across the plaats in the cold, fading light with her carpet-bag full of books almost dragging along on the cobbles, “how is your English getting on?”

  She looked up quickly, with a sudden startled smile, and there was the small, upright figure (in dark clothes this time, with something that flashed and sparkled between white hair and each tiny ear) looking down at her; almost on tiptoe, as if Madame van Roeslaere were pausing just for an instant on her way to some affair that had to do with her perpetually-active bonté.

  “Well?” Adèle repeated. The child looked less dreamy when she smiled, but what a time she did take to answer! “It looks warm and comfortable,” she said, in response to a murmur, which did at length come out, of than
ks for the cape, “but tell me about your English lessons?”

  “Sœur Angélique says it is better, Madame,” came at last; Ydette had been wondering, not what she could say that would be most likely to bring about the English lessons, because she lived almost entirely in the hour and the moment and had scarcely realized, even yet, that she was to have them in the big house, but what would best please Madame van Roeslaere.

  “Really better, is it?” Adèle asked in English, and Ydette, after a moment in which she looked blank, laughed and nodded. So she can laugh, thought Adèle; it’s a relief; and laughter came into her own eyes and touched her mouth and the pictures of the children all over Europe that pressed continuously and without relief upon her imagination receded a little; just a very little, for a moment.

  “That’s good. Now we’ll start our lessons,” she said. “Come across tomorrow evening at six o’clock, Ydette.” She added over her shoulder as she turned away, “Lyntje Pieters will be there, too; you know Lyntje, don’t you?”

  Ydette was still staring after her, walking with head turned sideways and feet moving draggingly along the cobblestones, when she reached the front door of the aunts’ house, and had to be asked sharply by Aunt Marie what she was gaping at?

  “That Lyntje …” said the aunt, when she had heard what the news was, “she must be going on twenty-one … she doesn’t need to go back to having lessons again … what’s the idea of giving her lessons?” She was a little jealous of this division of an interest which she had hoped would be reserved entirely for her foundling. “And she’s a rough lot; always playing in the streets,” she added.

  “She doesn’t play in the streets now,” said Ydette, after a pause in which she felt a vague impulse to defend Lyntje, the comrade, although certainly a rather unreliable one, of that always-remembered day when Koenraed had pulled up the stones in the road.

  “She still stands there carrying on with the boys whenever she gets half a chance. I’ve seen her.”

  There was no answer to this, which happened to be true, and Ydette did not understand the full significance of Marie’s disapproval because she was dreaming about the big house, and what she would see there tomorrow evening: having grown up in a household where mating and birth were spoken about frankly (although with the decency that was the result of Roman Catholic teaching) she took them for granted; and boys, in any case, were to her still the other members of the tribe; the strange ones, the unknowns, shut away, so to speak, in their own huts at the other side of the village, where they had their own mysteries and their own language, and whence they emerged only to put out their tongues at you or pull your hair. It was true that Jooris was a boy, but then she didn’t think of him as one, because he was also her friend.

  On that particular Thursday—it happened to fall on the Feast of Saint Damasus but that didn’t seem to make any difference—it was resignedly noted by the nuns who taught Ydette Maes that she was attending even less than usual to what was said to her. But they were so accustomed to her dreaminess that they hardly troubled to reprove her; and the few little creatures of her own age with whom she was accustomed to dawdle homeward from school (rather silent amidst their lively babble, and attracted by them, and made attractive to them, only by the same instinct that calls small animals into groups) did not notice that she left them more quickly than usual. She did not go home first to look into the square of looking-glass in grandmother’s room to make certain that her hair was smooth and her ribbons neatly tied and her face clean, because she was not thinking about herself, but only of the big house; and when she presented herself at its door, just as the lamps came on in the twilit plaats, Marieke’s disapproval of Madame’s scheme to teach that chit, Lyntje, English in company with Ydette Maes (who would surely soon be getting ideas above her position as the local foundling), was able to find satisfying expression in the observation, “Don’t go in with your hair all over the place like that,” and a poke, with a knotted, red finger, at a wisp which was escaping from its plait.

  Ydette stroked it into place, where it obediently stayed because she had the kind of hair that does what it is told, and stood looking up—expectantly.

  “They’re in the little back salon; you go on down there, you know the way—and don’t kick up the rugs nor walk with those dirty shoes all over my floor.”

  A moment later Ydette was knocking, so softly that she had to do it three or four times before the clear, quick voice answered, at one of the heavy carved doors.

  “You are late, Ydette,” Madame van Roeslaere observed, “sit down—there, next to Lyntje—have you brought a book? Silly child—how can you manage without a book? Never mind, today we’ll have some English conversation—and don’t forget to bring what English books you have next week. Now: Lyntje, try again. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know where it is.’”

  The room was warm and quiet, the long, lustrous curtains were drawn over the windows; there was a carpet of rich dark blue and dark yellow on the shining floor, and against one panelled wall a tall cabinet made of gleaming wood that was inlaid with pale red and yellow flowers, contained miniature figures in twisted silver; tiny cups so thickly encrusted with flowers and leaves and bells that they stood out beyond the rims; and some of the old friends of Ydette’s early childhood—the monkey fiddlers, and the little man with trousers that were the colour of one of the big plums now being sold over at the shop … and all these things, as they glowed and glinted in the soft light, were beautiful—that word which Ydette had once or twice heard used by Father Jozef in a sermon, and now used to herself when she saw something that pleased her.

  When she glanced at Lyntje, whom she had not seen so frequently since she had gone to service in the big house, she was pleased again, in a different way. The expanse of creamy-pink face was wider than ever, while the small, clear blue eyes still made Ydette think of the wind that blew round street corners in January. The fair hair, which she remembered as blowing about unrestrainedly, was tidier: Lyntje must have had a ‘permanent’; but she still bulged out of her neat brown dress and delicate white apron trimmed with lace, just as she used to bulge out of the ragged old coverings she had worn while the Germans were in Brugge.

  Ydette looked at her amiably. Lyntje was familiar: she belonged to the cobbled streets and the stepped roofs and the watching faces of the Three, suddenly looming severely down at you while you were playing; over a sweep of old grey tiles or a breadth of brown wall when you were least expecting them: and while Madame van Roeslaere was making Lyntje repeat words for the pronunciation, Ydette could look at Madame’s clothes and face and hair. It was all happiness; it was beautiful; and as soon as a word of English was launched into one of Ydette’s ears, it went blissfully out and away through the other.

  Earlier that afternoon, while the low winter sun was yet shining on Oostende, with a delicate, thin radiance that did not seem the appropriate light for the gross, salmon-pink Edwardian protuberances of the hotels and the coarse, worn, vivid faces that thronged the cafés and the streets, a short, stout, dark boy in a blue overcoat was walking smartly along the digue. He had come off the English boat an hour ago, and, having wandered—if the brisk, purposeful pace at which he moved deserves the word—up and down the streets surrounding the harbour and stared avidly into the dingy windows of their shops, and yawned over funnels and masts and cranes, he was now keeping one eye on the interior of the cafés lining the digue, while looking for one that he fancied, and occasionally glancing off towards the sea, now rolled far back in low tide. Tiny figures prowled out there, black against the enormous pale expanse of the sands, with sticks, and baskets on their backs; the shouts of a few children playing on the beach came up shrill and sharp through the boisterous air. It was all grey—sands, breaking waves, clear desolate horizon and the sweep of the digue, the houses and narrow streets plunging back into the heart of the town—and all bathed in the thin gold light of the setting sun. My God, Adriaan van Roeslaere thought, this is what suits me: there isn�
��t anything here to stop you going as far as you want to, there’s nothing to say no, you can be alone, you needn’t bloody well be doing something useful all the time. I’ll come here often. I’d forgotten what it’s like.

  The afternoon light coming in off the bright, grey, sun-smitten sea was pouring into the café that he finally chose: he sat at a table by the window, and the new paint gleamed and the chairs were covered in bright yellow leatherette, and the succulent paws of big, dark house-plants pressed themselves against the windows. There were stout, warmly-dressed old men smoking small cigars sitting opposite elderly women with the drooping flesh of bloodhounds and glittering, stiff fingers. The look of established prosperity was there again: already: like a wall. His father had told him that it was coming back, but until he saw it, sitting here with the café filtré and the dish of pastries in front of him, he hadn’t believed it. The air was warm and smelling of coffee and cakes and scent, and he didn’t know which he relished most strongly: this, or the rich salt smack of the sea that leapt at you, blowing down the narrow streets and against the hotels of the digue, the moment you stepped outside the door.

  But he did know that he was never going back to England again if he could help it.

  1 Nazi-controlled agricultural paper published during the occupation.

  2 Chin-wagging.

  “IF THERE IS a war, and we have to go to England, I am going to send you to school there,” his father had said to him nearly six years ago. “It’s the school your Uncle Raoul went to during the first world war. It’s called The Link House.”

  Then, on the first evening at the Burlcombe Down Hotel in Sussex, after the heat and the excitement, the waiting, and the crowds, and the thirst, and bawling women, and the endless journey across the North Sea in the steamer lying deep in the water with its load of hundreds of refugees, there had been the small English girl playing amidst the chintzy chairs and the copies of The Sphere in the hotel lounge: