White Sand and Grey Sand

by Stella Gibbons

  She felt distressed, as if it were her fault. He must be almost seventeen; it did seem unfair that she, presumed by the aunts and everyone else to be so much younger, should be the taller.

  She looked quickly back at the turnips, and in a moment Madame van Roeslaere, having said good-bye to Mevrouw Maes and given a smile to Ydette—who glanced up to receive it—went on her way. “Good afternoon, Ydette,” called Mijnheer Adriaan politely, looking back over his shoulder as they walked off and she muttered a response without again looking up. Her mood was that of the English schoolgirl who expresses her feelings with the word, Honestly—!

  He was a queer one. You would never think that he said those things to her on his way to school in the mornings. And on the morning following that incident, what he said was really bad; he, too, must have noticed that she was the taller, and he was angry; she bent her head as she tried not to listen.

  However, it happened to be a Saturday, and soon she was thinking about nothing but their weekly visit to the farm that afternoon, where she would see all the animals and have a good walk round and a game with Jooris … if he had time for a game. He was working so hard on the farm now, and his grandfather made him keep hard at his school work, too, but he still liked to dam a djik or climb a tree or throw stones at a bottle, and in spite of being taller than she was—almost a man, said the aunts, with a mingling of admiration and disapproval—he still helped her to choose the biggest flowers for the bunches that she always liked to pick, stooping swiftly and pulling the stems from the grass as they went through the orchard. They practised their English together, with shouts of laughter at the ludicrous sounds, but he never got any better at it or much further than thank you and please and good morning. Ydette, however, now knew quite a lot of English, and it was useful when tourists of that nationality paused at the archway to buy flowers and to admire the place (they always seemed to admire it—none of those to whom it belonged could imagine why), and when she helped Aunt Jakoba lift English children in and out of the yellow-and-blue cart down at Zandeburghe.

  The summer drew towards its end, and school was over. The holidays stretched ahead. Now Ydette could be down at the huts on three or four days a week; hard at it from eight in the morning until nine at night; getting as many cartloads as possible across the wide, shining expanse of greyish-golden sand and down to the waves before the tide should start coming in, and the close proximity of the sea should make the excursion à la plage appear a ridiculous luxury (“Ride down to the sea? I should think so, indeed—why, you can run down to it in half a minute!”) rather than a near-necessity which also happened to be a treat.

  The aunts discovered that Ydette was the one who was most successful with the children. They liked to be lifted up and helped to alight by someone nearer their own age than Marie or Jakoba, whose hands were in any case fully occupied with the business at the bathing-huts, and whose welcoming smiles, after some thirty-nine years of it and six of the Occupation, were grown, understandably, rather mechanical. As for Klaas, he was if possible even less popular with the clients than he had been before the war. The smaller children stared aghast at his white stubble and bloodshot eyes, and the mothers and nannis anticipated heaven-only-knew-what on encountering that blue, frozen, savage glint. Nothing ever did happen; Jakoba became angry when Marie suggested that it ever might; but you could not deny that he was a liability, rather than an attraction, as he lifted the children out in his huge, trembling hands and scolded them in his rumbling voice when they were nervous or slow. Many an irritable glance did Marie dart at him from the ticket kiosk, at the sound of a louder “na, na, that’s enough, come on now, you get down,” than usual, but, so far, she had never felt compelled to leave her post and “go down and stop Klaas”. In spite of his looks and his manner, Klaas was still all right.

  That summer, Ydette was allowed by the aunts for the first time to lead Klaartje down to the sea by herself. She suited her pace to the plodding gait of her charge, occasionally giving him encouragement in a low tone (encouragement totally unnecessary, for he could have done the journey in his sleep—in fact, sometimes did) and glancing from time to time at the children sitting, side by side and quiet from sheer pleasure, along the two benches in the vehicle. Afterwards, satisfaction in what she had successfully accomplished was, however, less strong than her relief that some day she would have made her last walk down to the sea beside Klaas.

  She had never, even to herself, said I’m afraid of him, I don’t like him. But, when he stood near her, all of her seemed to shrink away in the effort not to see him and to prevent his seeing her; she could not endure to look at his bent, dirty, slouching body covered in the dark, ragged slops and the torn grey shirt that showed the grey hair on his breast; she was sickened by the smell that came from him and by the hoarse, broken notes of his voice that seemed actually to hurt her ears, and more than all else about him she detested and feared his sly, mocking looks at herself; the way his eyes slid over her while his bluish lips parted to show blackened and broken teeth—then, if they happened to meet her own, slid away.

  “You don’t want to take no notice of Klaas. Why, it’s only Klaas. He’s known you since the first day we ever saw you. He was there the day we found you on the sand,” Marie, observing her shrinking from him, had said to her more than once. Ydette looked sulky and did not reply. She wished that Klaas were—no, she didn’t wish him dead. That would be wicked. But she did wish that he would stop slouching down every morning to the bathing-hut and insisting on taking his part in the work of the day. Why couldn’t he stay up on his bit of land behind the big djuin there, looking after his vegetables, and cleaning out Klaartje’s stables—which, goodness knew, could have done with a clean—and leave her and the aunts alone?

  But now that she was going to be allowed to take Klaartje down to the sea by herself, without Klaas, one of the most disagreeable details of her life would soon be over.

  But as the weeks glided into months, and the months into years, Ydette was now as tall as Aunt Jakoba and wearing her hair in two braids crossed over her head, and Klaas’s behaviour towards her began to cause comments from the aunts.

  “He don’t like working with her,” said Marie. Jakoba only grunted, and Marie went on:

  “Pushes her away from the cart. Saw him, yesterday morning.”

  Still there was no reply from Jakoba. The sisters were riding home at the end of the day from Zandeburghe, on the bicycles which had replaced the inherited and carefully tended ones which they had used before the war; those had been stolen, ancient as they were, by the Germans. Dusk had fallen, but the roads were lively with the cars of cruising tourists; far away across the darkening grey-green plain the lights of the towns twinkled and glittered; along the coast, a glow went up into the grey-blue air as if from the shining eyes of Pleasure itself. Oh, the country was awake again, all right. But Jakoba, pedalling along with a dour face and her black skirt fastened severely down against the summer breeze, was neither forgetful nor beguiled. Once before, they had thought things were going along as they should. But never again. She was never going to be taken off her guard again, and she would never forget what had happened during the six years that they had been here, neither. The world was a bad place, and she had been a sinner, and them that lived in it was more like devils than people. Oh, she would never forget. But that didn’t give anyone the right to turn on someone they had known since they were children.

  “Klaas is all right,” she said, after a long silence while the new tyres propelled by the thrust of four strong legs sped swiftly through the dust; “he says she’s stuck-up.” There was another long pause. They dipped suddenly into cooler air, as they passed through the shadow cast by a great church, whose clustered saints and kings and burghers and sly little cats with curving backs and angels with eyes perpetually wide-open in holy surprise at the Beatific Vision, were hidden in the twilight. “And so she is,” added Jakoba.

  “Is what?”

  “Stuck-up
.”

  Marie did not answer. She knew that it was true—in a way. Ydette talked as they all talked; she never said a word that didn’t belong in the little house in the Sint Katelijnstraat; but wasn’t she always pleased to go over to the big house, where Jakoba found nothing to interest people of their kind and where Marie felt guilty and ill at ease? and Ydette’s long, long hands—with those fingernails shaped like the almond-nuts that were sold in the shop in October—didn’t she make a fuss about putting them into the grey sand they used to use for scrubbing?—and tall! she was as tall as the Belfort, none of the neighbours’ girls were as tall. She might be one of those great Swedes, or an English girl. From what family, rich as millionaires, perhaps, with two cars and one of those new machines they had in America where you could see the wireless people as well as hear them talking, did Ydette come?

  Then the question drifted out of their minds, as it had done so many times before. It was almost certain now that they would never know the answer to it. Hadn’t Madame van Roeslaere made all kinds of enquiries through those societies for finding who had been lost in the war (not killed; just lost, as if the war had been a great thing in which you wandered around, unable to get out) and got no answer from any of them? And what did it matter anyway? the shop and the huts were both doing so well that they could afford to keep one extra. Ydette was no trouble, and she was a help down at the huts, and them up at the Béguinage and them at Our Lady’s, and even them at the big house all spoke well of her.

  “Nonsense,” she said at last, in answer to her sister, “she’s only Ydette. She’s a good girl. And the customers like her.”

  It was the deciding fact: had the customers not liked her—had they found her stuck-up, then it would have been hard for combined affection and habit and the protective instinct to defend her in the eyes of her adopted aunts.

  As they wheeled the machines across the dimly-lit plaats, not wishing to jar the wheels and bruise their persons by bumping over the cobblestones, there came a series of small, sharp explosions followed by a snort and a roar, and a motor-cycle leapt out behind them and swerved off into the dusk. They withdrew not one inch, although Marie felt the puff of air and petrol vapour hot against her legs.

  “Thank you three thousand times, mijnheer, and may God and all His Saints go with you wherever you’re going, drat you,” she exclaimed, with the eloquence typical of an offended Brugeoise as the sound of the engine died away; she inclined her head in a sarcastic reverence, “It’s your poor mother I’m sorry for … off to Oostende, I’ll bet,” she added to Jakoba, “in one of those night-clubs you can see photoed in Match … hullo, Mother, sitting out? that’s right,” as they came up to their own front door and found the small, dark, shrunken figure of Mevrouw Maes seated in a comfortable chair placed on the cobbles, with Ydette on the step beside her.

  “Lyntje’s got the sack,” said Ydette at once, looking up.

  “Lyntje has? What for? Marieke said she wasn’t doing too badly.”

  Marie paused with the front wheel of her bicycle poised on the single-stone kerb; Jakoba, who usually disdained gossip, had pushed past the two seated near the doorway and gone on into the house.

  “It wasn’t anything to do with her work. It was Mijnheer Adriaan. Her mother has just been here … in such a state! Where will Lyntje get another job and so on and so forth,” said Mevrouw Maes, folding her hands more closely in her soft old knitted black shawl.

  “Mijnheer Adriaan! We’ve just seen him on his motor-cycle, flying off to Oostende or one of those places … nearly cut my leg in half, thank him very much,” said Marie. “But what for?—Lyntje, I mean—You don’t mean to say …” and she paused, looking at her mother with an expression in which eagerness was mingled with primness.

  “No, no,” Mevrouw Maes shook her head, “not as bad as that, but they’ve been playing about together, laughing and running up and down stairs, with him chasing her—that kind of thing—not at all the way for a girl to go on when she’s in service—and so of course she’s had to go.”

  “And if there was nothing worse than running up and down stairs my name isn’t what it is,” Marie muttered. She leaned the bicycle against the old plaster wall, and went over to the step and sat down on it, settling herself beside Ydette. “Phew … it’s hot. Well, I’m not surprised,” she went on; “Lyntje always was one for the boys. It’s her I blame, not him.”

  “He’s been properly brought up. He knows better,” said Mevrouw Maes in a tone of reproof. “He’s educated—I blame him.”

  “P’raps that’s why he’s been going about with a face like a fiddle lately.”

  “Perhaps. And that’s why Madame van Roeslaere looks so sad.”

  “Sad! She should look sad. What’s she got to look sad about, with their business bringing in all the money it does—doing much better than before the war—and two motor-cars?”

  Jakoba’s rough voice joined the discussion as she came out to stand in the doorway behind them. Her mother glanced at her sharply, but the rebuke that she would have given her in former days did not follow: the old woman was very tired, too weary to assert her will over that of her tall elder daughter … Jakoba had always been the rough one, the wild and wilful one who never told you anything, nor really cared about coming to church. And yet her mother understood her likes and dislikes and her ways; she did not, as Marie and the rest of the family did, think it crazy that Jakoba should want to walk along beside the angry waves that came thundering inshore when the autumn storms were blowing, or sit in the café with men … Mevrouw Maes would never have done such things herself, but she could understand Jakoba doing them. Jakoba, her mother mused, had always needed a man and children of her own. But it was often the ones who most needed them, who didn’t get them. …

  What a long time I’ve been here, she thought drowsily, as she sat in the comfortable new chair that her daughters had bought for her, and felt the coolness of evening—it was beginning to touch the face of Ydette refreshingly, and to wander, in a breeze so slight as to be scarcely felt by those who sat outside their doors, down the quiet cobbled winding street—strike into her ancient blood with an aching chill; so many, many times, the light fading off Our Lady’s Tower; so many times, the sound of Her bell starting to fall out of the sky. I do thank God and His Mother that I’ve lived to see most of the old life come back again. But I’m tired; I’m very tired now. And as for the old life … as far back as I can remember we’ve been afraid of the Germans invading us, and there was my own grandmother, telling me how afraid her mother used to be of the French … there’s always someone to come in on you and frighten you to death, and there always will be in the Netherlands, for all their Leagues and their promises and their talk. …

  She stirred wearily in her chair, and Marie glanced up at her. It was time that mother was taken in and helped to bed, but it was so pleasant, sitting here quiet in the fading light and knowing that there was plenty of food in the house and that tomorrow would be like today—ah, God, yes, that was what you wanted after six years of war; just to know that tomorrow would be like today. Let’s sit here a little while longer.

  “What do you reckon Lyntje will do with herself now?” she asked.

  “Mevrouw Halles says she’s going to try to get her into ‘Priba’,” said Mevrouw Maes, awakening, without any signs of a start or confusion, from the doze into which she had been drifting.

  “That shop in the Steen where they sell the stuff to put on your fingernails what smells to high heaven,” said Jakoba, with a loud laugh; “a nice change from carrying plates and polishing floors at the big house that will be.”

  “And Mijnheer Adriaan’s going to college soon, to Louvain,” said Marie; “it’ll be just as well to have him out of the way, chasing girls up and down stairs. … You’ve been over there twice a week, for getting on years now,” she went on, turning to the silent figure sitting beside her, whose pale face, and hair braided round her head, were painted in delicate darkness and pa
llor by the soft, clear light of the afterglow. “Did you ever see any of these goings on? He didn’t never chase you up and down stairs, I s’pose?” and at the question Jakoba again gave her loud, hoarse laugh.

  Ydette shook her head. She was not surprised by what had happened. She had felt, rather than known, for some time now that Mijnheer Adriaan and Lyntje were what she thought of as friends, and she had sometimes wished—without wistfulness, as it had been without any jealousy—that she could have been friends with him too. It would have made life easier in the mornings.

  “He wouldn’t dare do that, not with her being taught English by his mother,” said Mevrouw Maes, in her matter-of-fact voice.

  “He doesn’t never say anything he shouldn’t, not to you?” Marie persisted, having suddenly and rather belatedly realized that her adopted niece, assumed now to be aged twelve and some months, stood as tall as many girls of fifteen and more.

  Again Ydette shook her head, and Marie, who had been looking at her keenly, let her eyes fall to the slender legs that ended in white socks and childish, stout shoes and thought, with a feeling of relief, that of course Ydette was still only a child; there would be another good two years, yet, before they need start worrying about boys and Ydette, and as for that Lyntje (Sophie was always saying, why shouldn’t she have a bit of fun?), see where her bit of fun had landed her. Sacked from the big house for messing about with the young mijnheer. As she got up slowly and awkwardly from the doorstep, Marie was experiencing a sense of satisfaction.

  “Come along, Mother,” she said; “don’t you want to go to bed?”

  When they had gone into the house, Ydette stayed on for a little while, deliberately lingering over the task of gathering up the folded coat on which she had been sitting, and putting away Mevrouw Maes’ chair. The small room beyond the thick, ancient door was almost hidden now in the twilight but here and there its old-fashioned furniture gave back in a faint gleam the fading afterglow; the great white, velvety trumpet of the gloxinia, mottled and spotted with richest purple, glimmered by the small, white-curtained window. The tiled floor was all one smooth flow of dark blue. Ydette sighed, and looked up at the lofty spire of Our Lady’s tower. The severe myriad eyes still looked down at her with their air of intent watching, the opalescent glow of a calm day’s ending, neither rose nor lilac but a pale and delicate mingling of the two, still lingered upon those remote little archways and mysterious little dark windows, high, high up in the air; bathing them in its fading colour long after the sun had gone down over the dim blue and rust-red roofs and the flat meadowlands stretching away beyond the city’s ramparts; everything was just the same. It had seemed the same ever since she could remember.