White Sand and Grey Sand

by Stella Gibbons

  They settled themselves into the car, and it rolled off: down one of the narrow lanes of tall, pale grey houses with white shutters and decorations of plasterwork in elaborate Edwardian scrolls, leading into Zandeburghe and away from the dazzling grey sea. There was a light like the reflection thrown by water upon a white ceiling in these lanes; diffused, very bright, extraordinarily calming and yet filled with excitement; and Everard Ruddlin, sitting beside his wife with the soft straight wisps of her rusty-grey hair blown every now and then against his cheek by the wind, thought that it came from the vast hidden presence of the sea. He turned his mind away from the knowledge that his own excitement, and his inward sense of pain, were caused by something more than this strange, nostalgic light.

  “What tempting things they do put out for us to spend our precious travel allowance on; it’s disgraceful,” May said briskly, as the car ran past shops displaying the pretty jewellery, the bright scarves of imitation silk, the mouth-watering sweets each with its indescribable air of being hand-made down to the last crystallized violet. “Nolly, you and I will have a prowl round here later.”

  “You know I hate shopping, Mummy.”

  “Yes, in England … but these shops really are entrancing.”

  “All shops and all shopping,” persisted Nora, “except bookshops.”

  “And shops for seeds and plants and gardening tools,” said May, stifling a pang of regret that she would miss the opening of the zinnias and the early dahlias at home … but of course, if one allowed oneself to become a slave to a garden …

  “Now … now you have a char-woman, Mummy,” began Ida, who had been preparing herself to make one of the long speeches which she occasionally delivered, “will you be able to—will you be able to have a nice holiday? I hope you will,” leaning forward from her seat on her father’s knee, and smiling graciously.

  “Have you been worrying about her health?” asked Nora in her snubbing elder-sister tone.

  “Never mind, Dogfight, it was very kind of you,” said her father, putting his chin for a moment against the curly hair, and feeling through it the warmth of her large, squarish head. “May, did you lock up the house?” he asked.

  “I didn’t think it necessary. No one else seemed to be doing it. And then the woman who’s got the bungalow just over the dune, a Miss Rogers, says that it’s like the country at home; no-one bothers to lock up. She said she was going to lie outside her front door sun-bathing all day and would keep an eye on Les Alouettes for us.”

  “That was very kind indeed of her, wasn’t it,” said Ida loudly, “is she a nice woman?” and May laughed as she answered, “Yes, I should think so. Rather talkative but quite nice.”

  “Oh dear.”

  “What’s the matter now, Nolly?” asked Everard, reminding himself that Nora was clever, and conscientiously helped her mother in the house, and did not deliberately get on his nerves.

  “Need we get ‘all matey’ with forlorn English spinsters alone on the ‘Continong’?”

  “She isn’t at all forlorn; she’s rather smart and seems to have come here for the sun-bathing, rather than to sight-see; I left her lying in a hollow of the dune wearing a very smart yellow-and-black bikini.”

  “More suitable for Le Zoute than Zandeburghe,” said Everard, “or so I should have thought.”

  “Yes,” said Adriaan, as he sent the car along the road, now out in the country, that led towards Ghent, “Le Zoute for smarties, Zandeburghe for stodgies.”

  “The stodgies being us. Thank you,” said May, “how well you’ve kept up your English.”

  “Thank you, Mrs Ruddlin,” he said with mock politeness.

  And your unpleasantness, thought the wife of his former headmaster; disagreeableness is too mild a word for you. Nevertheless, the thought was unaccompanied by condemnation or dislike, for it had been a fact, acknowledged by the Ruddlins for years now with mild amusement, that she accepted Adriaan just as he was, without feeling either; she was just brisk about him, as she was about dust on top of the wardrobe and answering awkward questions, and she invariably said that he would ‘probably grow out’ of his unpleasing mannerisms and qualities. But Everard Ruddlin, who had always felt strong repugnance towards his pupil which he had always perfectly controlled—he hadn’t even fallen over backwards with trying to be fair to him—thought that it was too late, now, for Adriaan to change his spots.

  The car rushed on, with a low, luxurious humming that was full of latent power, and its driver amused himself by driving just a little too fast in the hope of frightening the women … but, he thought irritably, that if they were frightened they wouldn’t show it. The Ruddlins were a very stiff-upper-lipped lot, and never had he known people who took their pleasures so unrelaxedly and with so much reserve; Everard’s interest in marine biology and the history and art of Flanders was practical and intellectual rather than æsthetic, and May played her Vivaldi and her Scarlatti and Bach with perfect touch and sensitive interpretation and never a word more about what she played than a ‘rather charming’ or ‘really very delightful’. As for the feelings fostered by lounging languidly about, or gossiping amusingly and maliciously, or responding with sensuous pleasure to experience—such feelings simply never seemed to get within the Ruddlin ambience. They make me think—(thought Adriaan gloomily, as he sent the car by a twist of his wrist down one of those Continental roads so straight, and extending so far into the distance, that they produce a hallucinatory effect of leading into permanent escape)—they remind me of the smell of that soap, Lifebuoy, that we were all soused with every day at Port Meredith. They’re so bloody healthy.

  And, for the next three weeks, he had been told to keep an eye on them and drive them about and see to it that they enjoyed their holiday … his parents seemed to take it for granted that he wouldn’t mind doing it; would in fact even like it, simply because he had lived for six years with the Ruddlins during the war; his people had assumed, too, that he would have nothing better to do with three weeks of his long vacation, which had just started from the University of Louvain, than to run around wiping the noses of the Ruddlins.

  He was particularly affronted by the squareness and plainness of Ida. (He was simply not going to be lured, by their silence on the subject, into enquiring why she had been nicknamed Dogfight.) Her appearance was an insult, her manner to him noticeably offensive, and he did not agree with the prophecy made by his mother during the previous evening, when they had been discussing Nora: “That poor child, she is being over-educated and her hair-cut is deplorable: I shouldn’t think that she will ever marry—but no doubt May has told her that that doesn’t matter. The little Ida, now, she still has a chance to grow up attractive; I feel sure that May will do better with her.”

  Not if present omens are borne out, Adriaan was thinking. Dogs: she’ll live in the country somewhere and breed dogs, but I’ll bet that’s all she ever will breed.

  Behind him, the silence which he thought of as that typical-Ruddlin-chewing-over-something-interesting, had been broken by fuss about what they still called sweeties.

  “Hungry, Dogfight?” her father was asking, and, at her answering emphatic nod, “feel in my pocket, then—not that one, the other, on the left—and you’ll find something.”

  Nora reached over his shoulder and helped herself from the bag which Ida had taken from his coat, then passed the bag to her mother and Christopher, but Adriaan, on being offered a damaged but once highly superior piece of tinted sugar, shook his head.

  “Are you afraid of getting fat?” Ida’s tone was sympathetic. “I’m fat but I don’t mind. Nora minds getting fat. She says she’s fat but I don’t think she is, do you?”

  “Really, Dogfight,” sighed Nora; ten years of acquaintanceship with the young man in the driver’s seat did not enable her face to keep its ordinary colour, “how can that possibly be of any interest to Adriaan?”

  “It’s extremely rude to ask people if they mind getting fat,” Adriaan said forbiddingly, half-
turning his head to look at Ida’s bulging cheek and staring, sobered eyes. “As it happens, I’m like you. I’m fat but I don’t mind.”

  “You’ve lost weight, as a matter of fact, since last year,” May Ruddlin said.

  He shrugged, without answering, and the car went on down the straight, narrow lane between fields glowing in summer’s most placid green, with the whippy branches of the willows scraping along its sides. Everard crunched the last of an expensive piece of Bruges confectionery between some teeth which had recently been substituted for his own, and looked up to meet his wife’s smile.

  “How do they feel?” she asked.

  “Decidedly easier; less like wooden ones,” he said.

  “They look very nice.”

  He shook his head in mock resignation. “But they do,” May insisted, “it was more than worth while spending so much on them. I shan’t; when it comes to my turn I would sooner have the shrubbery turned completely out, re-dug and re-planted with exciting things; but I do think it’s been worth it for you.”

  “What are you talking about?” asked Ida, twisting round.

  “Daddy’s lovely new teeth.”

  “Mummy says I must look nice, and have teeth costing a lot of money, or new boys wouldn’t come to the school. But I think they would, just because I’m so nice myself, don’t you?”

  “YES! Have you got your new teeth in now? Let me see them … which are they? Those? That one, and that one, and that one——”

  “Steady on,” said her father, joining in the laughter, while he put aside the small, blunt finger that was investigating his gums, “you—make them sound like a mouthful. There are only three of them.”

  “Four,” said Christopher, amidst more laughter.

  “I meant four.” Everard bowed his head to the correction of family amusement, “but I can only feel three now, thank heaven; they did feel like a mouthful, at first.”

  While they were talking and laughing, the car had been entering, and was now travelling down, a broad quiet track that apparently led into the heart of a region where the usual features of the landscape seemed to be in some way heightened and intensified.

  Perhaps the solitude of its farms, separated by wide distances and half-concealed by rich masses of orchard trees, deepened the placid, sunny silence brooding over meadow and poplar and willow; were the slowly-running streams a little clearer here, reflecting more pellucidly through their screen of bordering leaves the tremendous sky? The poplars strayed across the meadows in a wayward procession, their tufty elongated shapes familiar from Flemish paintings; the sheep couching in the shady grass, cows and horses drowsing motionless in the shadow of the apple boughs, with tails switching lazily against the flies, glowed with the rich cinnamons and soft greys and glossy blacks of archetypal animals; it was like going on into the very heart of Flanders: yes it was like that; and there—there on the near horizon, coming up sweetly and austerely out of the wandering lines of the poplars and the silvery masses of low willow, and smitten into whiteness by the powerful light of the afternoon sun—there was the tower of the church.

  “Door-waden.”

  It was Ida’s, his daughter’s, voice, reading out the name that absolutely went through his heart. She was half turning back to look at a sign-post that was already receding into the distance.

  Well, here it was. He must get ready for what might be coming.

  “Door-waden,” she said again—and again he felt the stab—with surprise and dismay, for although he had expected to feel something, he had never expected to feel so much. After all, it was sixteen years ago.

  What was she clamouring about now?

  “I want to go there. I want to go to Doorwaden. Can we go there, Mummy?”

  May, now, full of lively interest.

  “Yes, do let’s … I’d like to see it,” turning to him, “your letters made it sound so charming. Is there time, Adriaan?” but the thick brown neck, where the black hair grew low, did not turn, so presumably he had not heard.

  “It was charming,” said Everard, trying to keep his voice normal, “but I doubt if it looks very charming now; our bombers were very busy up and down that coast in ’forty and again just before the invasion …”

  He mustn’t sound too irritable, nor yet too regretful; he mustn’t sound too anything, because (oh, it was horrible) any excess of feeling in his voice or manner might arouse suspicion. And all the time that he was keeping his voice and manner ordinary, he felt as if he were weeping inside; asking May to understand, and forgive, and be kind to him. If he had known that coming back was going to be as painful as this, he would never have come; he would have made any excuse not to. He hadn’t wanted to, anyway, but had not put forward strong objections to the Van Roeslaeres’ suggestion that they should take a house for three weeks near Bruges, because he had supposed that he would have to go back to Flanders some time, and he might as well get it over this summer as any other.

  Oh, couldn’t May keep quiet?

  “But is it on the coast? I thought you said that it was inland.”

  “So it is, about five or six miles. But it used to be on the coast, before the sea withdrew and left it high and dry, as so often happened to these little Flanders towns. But that was some hundreds of years ago.”

  “Why did we bomb it, then?” asked May. The children were quiet, Ida staring across the meadows at the tower of the church, and Christopher and Nora occupied with their private interests—which did not often include the war that had ended seven years ago.

  “Well, the Astrid Canal runs quite near it and the Germans had parked their invasion barges all along there. Then, just before our invasion of Europe, we pasted it again.”

  “‘Pranged’ is the correct term, I believe,” put in Christopher.

  “Pranged, then. So it may be rather knocked about,” said Everard, noticing with increasing relief that Adriaan was making no attempt to turn aside from this road which, Everard knew, only skirted the region of which Doorwaden was the centre. Nowhere did this road approach nearer to the little town than some two or three kilometres, and if they could only get as far as the point where it turned off to join the main Bruges-Ghent one, he thought, he would be safe … for that afternoon, at least. But there were going to be nearly three weeks of this to be got through.

  May was staring across the meadows now; the tower of the church was almost opposite, and he had to turn to look at it. Another stab, although he had seen it so often in memory during those first months after his return to England, he knew now that he had not been seeing it clearly in his mind’s eye. Because he had forgotten how beautiful it was. It absolutely hurt him to look at it.

  “The church is still standing,” May was saying, with a persuasive note in her voice. “Let’s just go quickly through there and see how much of it’s left—can we, Adriaan?”

  “The church is still standing,” said Adriaan suddenly—and Everard was waiting so intently for what the young man’s contribution to the situation was going to be—would it be helpful or would it make things worse?—that he missed the subdued grumble from Nora about bomb ruins being quite the dullest thing imaginable, with which he usually dealt severely—”it is still standing, but it’s about the only thing there that is,” Adriaan went on, “I drove through the place a week or two ago and it’s Doorwaden la Morte all right now. Quite a sight to see.” He blew a long, insolent, sonorous note on the horn as they rushed through a quiet village.

  “But I want to see the church …” moaned Ida in a die-away voice, “I want to see it, I want to see it—is that it, that tower-thing sticking up out of the trees? Let’s look what it says in the guide book,” and she sought about in the recess for maps and other objects between seat and hood, and for the next few minutes was quiet.

  “We won’t go there this afternoon,” Everard, seeing that this was the critical moment, said with decision, “I want to have plenty of time to see this house at Ghent. And I’m sure the sight of poor old Doorwaden would b
e depressing.”

  “There’s time, you know—if you want to go there,” said Adriaan carelessly. He had been idly balancing between his wish to do old Ruddlin out of a leisurely inspection of the house at Ghent, and the wish to side with May and Ida against him; now he came indifferently down on the side of depressing him with the sight of a ruined place which he had formerly admired.

  “No. Not this afternoon,” said Everard sharply, feeling his sweating forehead cold in the wind, cursing silently.

  “There!” Ida shouted suddenly. “‘The at-ten-tion of vis-it-ors is par-tic-u-lar-ly drawn to the un-us-ual steps of the Town Hall.’”

  “Good God, can you read?” demanded Adriaan, startled into turning round to look at her.

  “Of course,” was the chilly reply.

  “I could read when I was two. How old were you when you could?”

  “Two.” After a pause, during which they looked at each other and the words so sucks trembled on the air, she turned away and moaned, “I want to see it, I want to see it, I want to see it——”

  “Do shut up, Dogfight, you’re being a bore,” said Christopher. “There are much better things to see in Ghent and we’ll have a super tea there.”

  “I want tea now. I want it in Doorwaden.”

  “You can’t want it, it’s only just three o’clock.”

  “I do want it, I didn’t have a proper lunch.”