White Sand and Grey Sand

by Stella Gibbons

  Oh! for something … for something beautiful, loving, far-away, soft as the white sand that trickled lazily through one’s sunburnt fingers out in the great dune, on the long days of summer … for something …

  She did not know what. And she had no words for the feelings drifting through her heart.

  The feelings—too rooted in her nature and too persistent to be described as moods—passed over, their departure unnoticed, while she briskly addressed herself to pulling the chair over the doorstep, and settling it in its place amidst the other furniture in the dark, overcrowded little parlour, seldom used, and overlooking the few yards of damp garden and the black waters of the canal.

  Mijnheer Adriaan! So Mijnheer Adriaan had gone into Oostende on his motor-cycle, had he? the famous motor-cycle that was almost the only one in the city. Oh, Ydette knew all about that; Marieke had told them; it was a present from his father because he had won some prize at school. He was very clever, Mijnheer Adriaan, and Ydette, who knew that she was not clever at all, sighed as she remembered certain lessons which were due to take place tomorrow morning, at which her efforts would undoubtedly call forth sarcastic comments from Sœur Angélique. People always did get cross when they asked Ydette questions about anything—except things like making coffee or selling potatoes or giving out bathing-caps to the tourists.

  Even Madame at the big house—Ydette’s eyes strayed across the plaats—had looked severe and surprised when Ydette had been unable to remember all those dates and names that had to do with the building and history of the Three Towers … but it was no use. The Three were as familiar to Ydette as Aunt Jakoba and Aunt Marie and granny; if they ever fell down, she would feel as terrible as she would feel if either of the aunts or granny were to die—but she never could remember anything about them, except how they looked. And even if she had been asked that by Madame van Roeslaere, she wouldn’t have been able to tell …

  She stood in the doorway with her arms and ankles crossed, thinking about all this, and looking dreamily down the narrow lane that curved away amongst the ancient humble houses with their pale fronts and stepped roofs; the lamps were alight now and faintly shining their yellow glow into the air; it was getting cooler.

  “Good night, Ydette.”

  “Star-gazing, Yddy?”

  It was Sophie, walking arm in arm with Albert Joos on their way home from their evening stroll round the ramparts, and Ydette looked at them with the lack-lustre expression of a little girl who has more than once been bored by hearing a love-affair discussed in her presence by interested adults, as she shook her head.

  “Hear about Lyntje?” shouted Sophie, stopping in full stride and bringing Albert Joos, who was no light weight, to a stop also, “I’m not surprised, I can tell you—you and Marieke don’t know half what went on—oh, I’ve seen it—time and time again—pinching her, and that. … Well, many’s the time I’ve said to myself—and then I thought, only a bit of fun … but seems they, them upstairs, didn’t think so—but they can’t do a thing with him. Upsets his mother, too. I’ve seen her crying. Comes out of her room, face all over powder. I can always tell.”

  Albert Joos, stout and neat in his black suit and black hat, here gave Sophy’s arm a reproving pressure and muttered something which caused her to give a loud laugh.

  “But he’s getting to the age,” she ended vaguely, and began to move on, pulling Albert Joos with her. “So-long, Yddy—grandma keeping well? That’s right. Good night.”

  The sturdy, decided footsteps died away. Now the lane was quiet. There were stars shining round the towers of Our Lady’s church, and it was only a little paler than the sky. But it looked ghostly, and as though it were mourning, far away up there in the blue. Ydette stood looking across at the lights shining in the windows of the big house, and thought of Madame van Roeslaere. Crying? She did not believe it.

  The people at the big house were not like ordinary people; they did not cry or get cross or hungry or tired; it was a place where everything … where … everything was … good and all right … and when she was there, sitting opposite to Madame van Roeslaere and obediently repeating the English words and phrases at which she had slowly—oh, so slowly, but definitely—become better at remembering … there, while she was in the big house, she almost held the beautiful, loving, soft … she held it in her hands, the softness of the white sand.

  She shut the front door, in the brisk, sensible way that always hid the fact that she was dreaming.

  THERE CAME A morning, some years later, that was hot and clear and cloudless, with nothing relaxed or languorous about it. Summer in Western Flanders gets plenty such; then the massive stone groins of Ostend, covered in plump brown seaweeds that glisten stickily in the glare of the sun, are black with strollers and fishers and idlers; the narrow streets running down to the digue that can look, in a lowering twilight, both menacing and secretive, have all their shops open in innocent gaudiness to attract the tourist eye; the town hums and buzzes and buys and sells and eats and drinks in its typical, fierce, marine gaiety; out in the country the green shutters of the farms are closed against the shimmering light, while owners and employees alike work on stolidly through the heat, at what has to be done.

  They were busy, that morning, down at the bathing huts at Zandeburghe. Business was even better, this summer, than it had been last year—and that had been very good; if it hadn’t been for Klaas—ah, it was sad about Klaas. At least, Jakoba, with unaccustomed softness had been heard to mutter that it was sad, but Marie said forthrightly that it was a very great nuisance, not to say a disgrace, him lying there most days out of the seven with a bottle of something. The fact that many of the tourists remembered him from before the war, made the situation even more difficult.

  “And where is the old man who used to help you with the horse?” some mother from Birmingham or Harrogate, returning to Zandeburghe with two children grown tall beyond all recognition for the first time since the war, and buying bathing tickets for them all, would enquire, “not …? I do hope they didn’t …?”

  She meant, didn’t shoot him or starve him to death or take him off to one of those places.

  “Oh, no, madame,” Jakoba would show her big yellow teeth for an instant, “he’s still here. But he’s getting old. Old. Oh yes. Like me.” A loud laugh, and a bang with her “good” arm on her flat chest, “He can’t work like he used to. He’s up there,” nodding her head towards the high canvas fence which gave to the booth where the tickets were sold some slight privacy, “asleep, I expect,” and she would laugh again.

  “Oh, I am so glad to hear he’s still here. (Rosemary, Neil, the old man is still here … but I expect you were too small to remember) … er, is he quite well?” The gentle pink face would be smiling with pleasure, the two younger pink ones would be smiling too, because they were having a smashing holiday on the Belgian coast.

  “Oh yes, Madame. Quite well. But always sleeping.” Once again, Jakoba’s teeth.

  And behind the wall of canvas, shut away from the movement and the voices and the crowds, on a few yards of sand which, up here out of reach of the transforming tides, had gradually become as soft and as silvery as that of the dunes, with the full heat of the sun pouring down on the body so often drenched and frozen by the North Sea, Klaas lay, with a bottle by his side, drunkenly dozing.

  How this arrangement—and an arrangement it was, and they all knew it—had come about, Jakoba and Marie would have found it difficult to say. He had gradually grown more and more aggressive and intractable when working with Klaartje and the cart, and when they tried using him to help at the bathing-huts, his glances and his comments when young girls came to bathe, had caused indignation not unmixed with panic. So they had told him to occupy himself with cleaning out Klaartje’s stable, up at the field, and looking after his vegetable plot, and they would pay him as usual for the former task, but that had not kept him away from the bathing-huts for more than a day or two, and Jakoba, who had missed him silently, pret
ended indignation but was relieved when he came back.

  “Na, na,” he muttered, when reproached with not keeping to the new plan, “I don’t want no vegetables nowadays, nor not any food neither, the Germans taught me to do without all that—all I want is a drop of something and sit in the sun … that’s all I want.”

  The sisters looked rather helplessly at each other. He was standing between them, at the edge of the piece of meadow-land, rougher than most of its neighbours cropped into trimness by grazing animals, and they could see at the far end of it, where the wind blew in from the sea through a gap in the dunes, his lean-to shanty, propped up against the brick wall of an outhouse attached to a farm. More than once, it had fallen down during the war and he had shored it up again; with pieces of board from bombed buildings, which prowling deserters had afterwards stolen to light their fires, with petrol tins beaten flat, with sheets of flimsy cardboard, with broken branches from pine trees blown down by winter gales. But it looks smarter now, thought Jakoba, since we put that bit of paint on it left over from the cart.

  She stared at the place Klaas called home. When he was a child, sixty years ago, he used to live with his family in Doorwaden; they had been fisher-people there. Then he had left home and come to live in Brugge; she could not remember how he had first come to work for her family. It was very long ago, and all she could think of now as he stood between them, his head hanging down, sometimes darting a quick sly glance at her, and then at Marie—was that ever since she had known anything, she had known Klaas.

  “That’s all I want,” he repeated, in the hoarse broken voice that was like the cry of some bird of the dunes; “sit in the sun …”

  “You got your bit of land,” Marie pointed out severely.

  “Might take that away, any time,” he muttered.

  “How can they? You been there sixteen years and more,” Jakoba said roughly, while Marie, alarmed at a remark which implied that he might be dispossessed and have to find somewhere to go—which might well mean the Maes’ finding somewhere for him—repeated sharply, “How can they?”

  “Don’t make no difference. Mijnheer up at Doorwaden—you know he was blown up, all of it was, nothing left but a few … I don’t know. It was his land, they always said, but … there was some papers, but the time those swine got in, in ’forty-three, they took everything—my cup, and my bed … and the papers went too … everything.”

  His voice died off into a croaking mutter and he was silent, standing there with hanging head.

  The sisters were silent too. Both knew quite well what he meant; he wanted them to go on giving him the sum which he earned at the bathing-huts every week, in addition to that which they gave him for the stabling and foddering of Klaartje, and he was telling them that he would spend it on drink. He was asking that they let him stay in the space behind the booth, shut in by the canvas walls and get drunk.

  But they couldn’t believe it. That is, Marie could not; Jakoba instantly knew that he must have what he wanted, because … and then she knew why.

  The feeling was terrible; it struck her like a great blow of pain. But she opened her mouth and gave her loud laugh and said roughly, “Yes. I daresay … well, you come on down as usual tomorrow, and we’ll see.”

  He looked at her for a moment, then showed all his broken teeth in a grin and turned and shambled away.

  Riding home that evening over the long, straight road to Brugge, under the dark blue sky, between the dewy meadows where the willows hung motionless above the slowly gliding dykes, Marie spoke angrily.

  “It’s terrible—a man lying drunk just round the corner and all those children—anything might happen.”

  “Don’t be such a fool—‘anything’. What, I’d like to know? It wouldn’t hurt them to be frightened a bit—spoilt little tourist brats. Besides, it isn’t a ‘man’—it’s Klaas. You know Klaas. You ought to, by now.” Jakoba paused, while the two glittering bicycles and the two swiftly-pedalling black-clad figures sped over a hundred yards of road. “There’s no harm in him,” she ended harshly.

  Her sister glanced at her. But she said nothing, because an instinct more insubstantial and vague than the shadow of a cloud racing across the shallows of the sands at low tide prompted her to keep silent.

  “It won’t be too bad; you’ll see,” said Jakoba at last.

  “Oh yes, it will. He’ll get worse and worse. He’ll shout. And there’ll be trouble with them at the office at Oostende … the tourists’ll start complaining … and what’ll maatje say? … giving someone money to get drunk …”

  “Shut up!” Jakoba suddenly bawled the words, staring straight ahead of her down the long road, with a face whitey-grey under its sunburn. She shot ahead, bending lower over the handlebars. As Marie, startled, doubled her own pace to keep up with her, she caught the words flung back on the wind … “because he’s going to …” and then, louder still, “snuff it …”

  “Rubbish—snuff it,” she said sturdily when, Jakoba having slackened her pace slightly, they were once more riding side by side, “he’ll be going for a good many years yet … being a worry and a trouble to everyone.”

  Jakoba said nothing and her usual grim expression did not change; she only eased her almost-helpless arm where her hand grasped the handlebar, and thought that Marie was a fool. He was going to die all right, and soon.

  Silently, she set herself to get him what he wanted, and because of her mute, stubborn opposition to any other plan suggested by her sister, and her fierce insistence that their mother should not be told what was going on, they had gradually drifted into the situation existing on this clear, still, very hot morning some seven years after the war.

  About twelve o’clock the mid-day meal began to be served in the hotels and at the cafés whose wicker chairs and glass-topped tables were set out along the digue de mer at Zandeburghe. Across the wide golden-grey sands, little parties of parents and children could be seen trailing inland towards dry land and lunch, buckets and spades and water-wings and swollen monsters made of rubber dragging along, with seeming unwillingness to leave the sea, in their wake. Quickly the beaches became almost deserted, as the digue became more crowded, and soon there were not enough children clamouring for the excursion à la plage to make it worth while taking out the blue-and-yellow cart. The window through which tickets were sold in the office was open (indeed, like the Windmill Theatre, it might be said that “it never closed”) and in the dimness within, amidst the coarse clean bathing-towels and gay plastic caps and ancient woollen bathing-dresses, sat Marie, eating her way rapidly through a frugal lunch.

  “There you are. I told you he’d be asleep. Now perhaps you’re satisfied.”

  The voice was low and strangulated and English. A shadow moved over the white sand and halted in front of Klaartje. A tall girl, wearing grey flannel shorts and a striped blouse, her pale face crowned by short and not very abundant dark hair, was standing there, with a smaller girl in her hand.

  “Let’s wake him up. I’m going to have a ride in the cart, I am.”

  The tall girl turned her head, sighing loudly. The thick lenses of her glasses flashed in the sun.

  “Really, what a trial you are. They’re all taking their siesta, or lunching.”

  “What’s a siesta?” Then, without waiting for a reply, “There’s someone. Let’s ask her. She looks like a programme-seller—you remember, you remember, we saw them at Giselle,—come on,” and a stout arm pointed energetically.

  There was an angry mutter that might have been shut up. Then the two, the elder lounging along as if unwilling to follow the younger one’s determined pulling, came slowly forward. Nora Ruddlin’s eyes were fixed on the face of the girl who was leaning back against the stone wall of the digue and eating an apple; the oculist had been right when he had told her that the new glasses would ‘sharpen everything up’, for the face of the apple-eater came close and near at hand and delicately, alluringly beautiful.

  “Oh—I’m sorry to disturb you.
Are you—er—in charge of this animal?” Nora asked, in very good French.

  Ydette finished a piece of apple before replying. She had been enjoying the pause in the bustle and activity of the day; the rustle of the waves drawing ever nearer as they crept forward with the incoming tide, the black shadow cast by the cart on the sand so soft to the touch and so silvery to the eye, the breath of the farm’s own smell that every now and again drifted over to her from the vast bulk of the dozing Klaartje, the cool blowing of the wind against her damp forehead, and, on the negative side, the absence of Klaas. She answered composedly, in a tone just short of disobliging:

  “Yes, Mademoiselle. But it is the lunch-hour.”

  “Oh, you speak English … there, Ida, you see, I told you they were all lunching.”

  “We’ll stay here until they’ve finished.” The child sat down decidedly on the sand, with stout legs thrust out in front of her, “Go on,” nodding at Ydette, “eat it up—we’ll wait.”

  Ydette suddenly laughed at her, and Ida laughed back. Nora, who was not only bored but wishing to dissociate herself from any notion that she might approve of this travel-allowance-wasting trap for tourists, this absurd “excursion à la plage”, stared aloofly out to sea. Then she turned to her sister. “Oh really, Dogfight, you are a trial …” she drawled, and slowly drew her foot in its large white espadrille along the sand. She wished they could have lunched at an hotel; the French bread and the sausage her mother had packed up for them that morning was lying heavily on her chest, and everything in sight was a bore: the sea so large and grey, the sands so devoid of anything to attract the intellect unless, like her father, you were interested in marine biology, and the frightful, frightful hotels along the front which had to be seen to be believed … like something off an old postcard … and she began to plan an amusing letter about them to Evelyn. This improved her spirits slightly, but what she was really wanting, continually and impatiently, was to be back at School. When one only had another year to be there anyway, it did seem the cruellest waste of time to spend any of the precious twelve months in unwanted and tedious holidays.