White Sand and Grey Sand

by Stella Gibbons

  “You had sausage and bread and butter and Reine-Claude,” said her mother.

  “That isn’t my idea of a proper lunch …”

  The car turned into the main road. It swung out into a thoroughfare whose smooth, wide, perfectly-kept surface stretched away into the seemingly endless distance, between splendid chestnut trees lifting their load of late summer foliage into the hot sunlight and on either side casting deep cool shade along the road; and Adriaan, smiling with the first sign of pleasure that he had displayed that afternoon, accelerated. They sped away, towards the forested slopes of the distance.

  Everyone was interested by the change in the scenery and there was an exchange of remarks about the landscape, the cultivation of the fields on either side, and that sort of thing (thought Adriaan) between the elder children and their mother; he listened contemptuously, and Everard, in a moment, slowly let out a long, stealthy sigh of relief. Hardly did he dare to let it come, but he thought that—for this afternoon at least—he was probably safe …

  Oh—Doorwaden—with the afternoon light that has hardly yet begun to decline into the west falling sleepily across russet bricks and grey cobblestones and little dark panes of glittering glass—the sky, that seems to hold perpetually in its blueness the pausing, benign depth of five o’clock, glowing above the roof-tops at the end of every street—the grass of the meadows outside the town coming into its narrow alleys; straying capriciously in, and settling undisturbed between the stones of the tiny plaats surrounded by the tall, richly-carved, ancient houses—and five miles away, across the meadows and the white sandy hollows of the dunes, where the coarse dark grasses bow in the wind or bleach in the sun of summer, the sea that retreated from Doorwaden more than three hundred years ago spreads itself in foam along the lonely shore.

  Sea-colour is in the sky above the descending stairways of the stepped roofs, where the black daws and silver pigeons perch and balance; on days when the wind blows inland its voice sounds through the quiet streets as if sighing faintly through the convolutions of a shell left high on the dunes when the waves have withdrawn; on days when the town is veiled in rainy mist, the smell of saltness and the taste of it comes in, blowing on the wind, past the dim old ruby and garnet-red houses that seem to have fallen asleep. That last day of all—when the delicate dark face is wet and streaked with tears—the sun has gone down; last light is fading off the grey-and-red roofs, now coolness is wandering through streets that have soaked up the sunlight of the long summer hours—later on that evening, the train will pass Doorwaden, on the way home to England—a little town that you go past in the night—nothing more than a cluster of lights shining faint and few, like mournful stars across the black fields, but in the house the curtains will be drawn, as usual, over the window looking out on the willow tree——

  “Here we are, Mr Ruddlin.” The car came gently to a stop; he looked up at tall grey-and-white buildings, people passing, afternoon sunshine, little trams painted a light dingy yellow, and Adriaan’s bored face, “Ida’s demanding tea—do you want to drive straight to a tea shop or see the house first and then——”

  Everard addressed himself, thankfully, to the settling of the question.

  “I like it very much at Zandeburghe, do you think we shall come here again next year?” Ida asked, while Nora was supervising her going to bed on an evening some days later. She was sitting up with a glass of milk in one hand and a biscuit in the other, spinning out her supper with an expertise due to long practice, and her hair (emphatically “curly” hair, rather than the more poetic and languishing “curling”) stood out round her face after an enforced and inadequate combing. “Do you like it here, Nolly?” she went on.

  “‘This side idolatry.’”

  Ida dealt with those answers of her sister’s which she did not understand by repeating her question; she now said patiently, “Do you like it here? Do you like it better than at The Link House?”

  “Of course I don’t like it better than at The Link House, ass, and you do know I don’t like anywhere much, except School.”

  Ida’s eyes, kept open with difficulty in a face already burned crimson by wind and sun, stared at her drunkenly over the milk which she was sipping, and the glass began to tilt.

  “Look out——” Nora swooped and made a dramatic rescue, “you’ll spill it all over the bed and we shall have Monsieur Ruisdael ‘fit to be tied’.”

  “Is Mon-sieur Ruis-dael a friend of Mad-ame van Roeslaere?”

  “You know he is—she told him about us, and he let us this house. Now hurry up, if you want to read James the Red Engine —although how you can like that baby book, when Daddy lent you his Violet Fairy Book especially to bring on holiday, I cannot think.”

  “I DO like the Violet Fairy Book, I took it down to the beach this morning while you were still asleep, and Ydette read me some of it.”

  “You oughtn’t to, then. You’ll get it all over sand and stuff. You know Daddy’s very precious with those books.”

  “There are hundreds of them, all different colours—the Red Fairy Book, the Grey Fairy Book, the Blue Fairy Book——”

  “Yes, I know; now get on, or no James the Red Engine.”

  “And it didn’t get all over sand and stuff, because Ydette took great care of it, she wrapped it up in her apron, and we sat on the sand and she read it to Klaartje and me. Of course I know Klaartje can’t understand. But Ydette said—she said he likes to hear us talking. He likes the soundings of our voices, she said.”

  “What else do you talk about?” asked Nora curiously.

  She was not going to let her gratitude to Ydette—for coming strolling along the dunes with the cheerful Ida in her hand, on that first morning when Nora, oversleeping, had awoke in mild dismay to find her sister’s bed empty—to lead her into an acquaintanceship which could too easily develop into an encumbrance. She was pleased to observe, as the holiday progressed, that Ydette’s manners and her behaviour seemed to match her strangely fascinating appearance, but she herself never went beyond the cool good-morning nod and the casual word of thanks for having taken Dogfight off her hands for odd half hours.

  “What do you talk about?” she repeated, as Ida remained silent, sipping with eyelids almost closing over her eyes.

  “We talk about—we talk about the children. The children that go in the excursion. There’s a very naughty boy called Tarmy——” her sister said slowly, at last.

  “Called what? Now come on, put that down, you don’t want any more, you’re only playing with it.”

  “Tarmy. He’s an American.” Ida allowed her to take the glass, and settled herself among the pillows.

  “Oh, Tommy.”

  “No, it isn’t Tommy, it’s Tarmy, I heard his mother calling him, and it’s Tarmy.”

  “Oh all right then, it’s Tarmy. Have it your own way.” Nora was bustling round the room, pulling curtains and straightening coverings.

  “Do you think Simon Broughton will have a new mouse next term? His old one—his other one—it was called Julius Cæsar—it was very sad—it died of a mys-ter-ious illness.” Ida’s voice was becoming slower and more repetitive and James the Red Engine was already drooping from her hand.

  “How on earth should I know whether Simon Broughton will have a new mouse next term? Now no longer than ten minutes, remember. Good night.”

  “Quick! Let’s have a pillow-fight!” Ida suddenly flew upright, wide awake.

  “Oh I daresay. Very nice, but I’m going downstairs.” Nora poked her quickly in the patch of plump brown flesh showing between pyjama top and trousers, and, leaving her chuckling, went quickly out of the room.

  The house called Les Alouettes, property of a business associate of Hubert van Roeslaere’s, was a small building of two storeys, and it stood with half a dozen others of the same type which their owner, eager to take advantage of the reviving tourist trade, had had built amidst the dunes. It was covered in rough-cast painted pale pink and had simple white-painted doors and wi
ndow-frames, but it was furnished more elaborately than might be expected in a house built for letting to summer visitors, and although the wooden stairs were uncarpeted save for the thin film of silver sand which the occupants brought indoors in their comings and goings throughout the day, there were thickish curtains with pelmets at the windows and May Ruddlin had—as Nora had said—already decided that she would not be bothered with telling her Belgian daily-help to brush sand out of that carpet and those chairs in the salon every few days. Although the salon commanded the view of the vast North Sea and all the changing panorama of the beach from its windows and the kitchen ones looked out only upon a steep wall of white sand a few feet away, the family ate in the kitchen.

  There was a small verandah and porch on the side overlooking the sea, with steps leading down onto the dune, and here Nora found Christopher and Adriaan, lying in deck-chairs and laughing about something: by the fact that although they continued to laugh nothing was said by either of them to initiate her into the joke, she suspected that it was one of Adriaan’s. It wasn’t necessarily an indelicate story (this was Nora’s phrase for a dirty joke), because Christopher had told her that the telling of such was, rather surprisingly, not one of Adriaan’s almost countless unpleasing habits, but it was probably an anecdote about one of his own experiences—and that might very easily be indelicate; in fact, from the expression on Christopher’s long, fair face, which matched that on Adriaan’s pear-shaped, swarthy one, she was pretty certain that it was; and the silence that descended upon the verandah after she had gone over to a seat in the farthest corner—having waved aside with an impatient and embarrassed mutter Adriaan’s polite rising to his feet and offer of his own chair—convinced her. She took up one of the copies of Girl and Eagle with which Ida had armed herself against possible boredom on the journey from England, and began with a superior expression to turn the brightly coloured sheets while the young men smoked and looked out to sea.

  But she was fretting about Chris. Was he going to take her for a walk after the parents had been driven off to dine with the van Roeslaeres? They had not had a walk or a good long talk since they got here. In fact, he had been rather cool and casual: beastly, Nora called it, in an honest reversion to the language of ten years ago, she must have done something, she supposed. I have been awful, this last year; she always seemed to be doing something to annoy him. But it wasn’t her fault; she was never aware of doing anything that he might not like, and she had to be herself, didn’t she? it wasn’t her fault that frightful arguments always developed about the kind of girl he did like and the kind that Nora was: and the type he seemed to enjoy being with was the very worst type imaginable, in the verdict of Claregates; the type that got into such a state for weeks before the End of Term dance, with endlessly talking about what it should wear, and who it should bring as a partner, that all sensible people (which included herself and Evelyn Berrow and Hilary Perowne) were bored stiff. And he was “always” hinting, since he came back from that first term at Cambridge, about her clothes and the way she talked and her manner; covertly criticising; being almost catty.

  A heavy, dull sensation of muted pain began to creep over her as she sat slowly and intelligently studying the pages of Girl.

  He would probably go off and spend the evening with Adriaan.

  It felt worse when she disliked the person with whom he ‘went off’, because then disapproval—and in the case of Adriaan, fear of a bad example—was added to—well, a perfectly justifiable resentment at being ‘out of it’. Adriaan couldn’t help being a bad influence for even the best-brought-up person. And one of the worst things about it all was that it seemed such a short time ago—and it was a short time, it was less than a year—that she had had Chris almost to herself, to share her interests and share his (heavens! the times that she had forced, compelled herself to comment brightly and intelligently on his holdings-forth about films—which she certainly did like very far ‘this side idolatry’) and help her with her work at school. (But she prided herself that she so seldom had to ask him for help.) And now she was beginning to realize that he had given her that masculine society which she enjoyed and badly needed, but which she was not getting from other young men because, with them, there was always that embarrassment and shyness and sense of being—oh well, let’s face it—a failure.

  Males, ‘chaps’, that tiresome but (worse luck) necessary other half of the human race … at any hint of well, sex, between herself and one of them (oh, she admitted that so far there hadn’t been even a hint)—any question of that ‘tiresome business’ caused her to curl up inside herself like a hedgehog. She was not interested. She found the subject (briskly explained to her, at the age of thirteen, by her mother) tedious and strange beyond all words and more than a little repulsive. An emotion that was both within you, and able to attack you from without; a fact, that was likely, almost certain, to upset the cool, orderly, satisfying procession of your days.

  But the masculine mind—ah, that was something else again! She delighted in exercising her own brain with that of a young man, and she did not resent it when his mind was better than her own, in fact, she came away from such exchanges soothed and stimulated, and full of satisfying pride in her own powers; feeling none of that dull, resentful conviction that she was the victim of some fundamental and unchangeable unfairness which always afflicted her at the School Dances.

  Those dances! It was her one quarrel with Claregates. Then she suddenly remembered the sensation that she had caused in the middle of the Winter Term, when she had taken Ashton as her partner; Ashton, in his first term at Cambridge and already making his mark there as an athlete; six foot one and a half, dark, straight-featured, curly-haired, and so clever that her father said his taking a first in Greats was as near a certainty as anything could ever be … people’s eyes had nearly fallen out of their heads … and it certainly had been decent of him to wear tails and a white tie … people had treated her with surprised respect for weeks afterwards.

  She felt a little more cheerful suddenly. She sat up, dropping Girl on the floor, as her parents came out onto the verandah.

  “How elegant you look,” she said, but it was to her mother that her eyes turned behind her thick glasses; her father’s looks and appearance gave her, as usual, nothing but satisfaction, but Mummy so seldom bothered to make herself look nice.

  “It’s quite pleasant to be in evening dress again,” said May cheerfully, looking down at the pea-green taffetas of her billowing skirt, and the shoes which just did not match them, “and look …” she put up a capable freckled hand to her lips.

  “Why don’t you use it more often?” said Nora. “It really ‘does something for you’, as the Americans say.”

  “Haven’t time. I leave it to Daddy to fascinate the parents. Now, Adriaan, we’re ready … are you coming too?” as Christopher got up.

  “We’re going out somewhere after dinner,” said Adriaan, “my mother did tell me to ask Nora and Chris to come along, but I forgot.”

  “Well—” exclaimed Nora, “I must say, you are the absolute—extent, Adriaan.”

  “It wouldn’t have been any good, Nolly, you would have had to stay with Dogfight anyway,” said her mother. “I’m quite sure Madame van Roeslaere will ask you another time.”

  “You can come now if you really want to,” said Adriaan as they made their way down the steps. “Can’t you ask the lady in the bikini to keep an eye on Ida?”

  “There isn’t time,” said Everard rather impatiently, “we’re rather late now.”

  “I may as well walk up to the dune and see the last of you, anyway,” Nora said; she did not particularly want to dine with the van Roeslaeres, but that was no thanks to Adriaan, she might have been very disappointed, and she felt heartily sick with him. He had ‘forgotten’ on purpose. He really was—and why should she be the one to stay stuck at home with Dogfight? Why shouldn’t Chris?

  She glanced away towards the sea, lying far out under the sunset which cas
t a pathway of dim, rosy light across the placid, gently-moving, neutral-coloured swell. The glow was carried inland by a continued reflection across the wet sand, where a few dark figures strolled or loitered, too far off for the sound of their voices to break the evening quiet.

  “There’s Ydette,” she observed, her eyes now fixed on two figures strolling beneath them at the foot of the dune.

  “Ida’s ‘case’? Where?” Everard looked in the direction to which she was turning, but he never wore his long-distance glasses when dining out and he could not see the strolling figures clearly. “That tall girl with the soldier?”

  Nora nodded. “She is very tall. But she’s only about fourteen, and it does look—I mean, children of fourteen in England don’t usually go about with young men.”

  “They grow up so quickly over here,” said May Ruddlin. “I agree with you, Nolly, it does look vulgar, a child of that age. But of course, girls of that class … especially abroad … and perhaps he isn’t her boy-friend, they may be related.”

  “That’s Jooris Gheldheere, his father has a farm out at Sint Niklaas, near the hothouses,” Adriaan’s voice was quiet and toneless; his eyes were fixed on the two figures now passing immediately below them, “and they aren’t related—unless of course she’s a bastard of the old man, the boy’s grandfather. She might well be. No-one knows who she is.”

  “She’s extremely photogenic,” said Christopher suddenly, “I was watching her the other day while she was chattering with Dogfight.”

  “Is she? How can you tell, dear?” May asked, passing over Adriaan’s little contribution to the conversation with the technique first developed in the early days at Port Meredith, and known in the family as not-taking-any-notice-of-van-Roeslaere-it-only-makes-him-worse.

  “You can tell, if you know anything about it—she’s remarkably photogenic.”

  They were leaving the path of firm white sand that led along the ridge of the dune now, and beginning the descent that led towards the road, and the bathing-hut girl and her ‘escort’ (as people at Claregates would call him) had dropped out of sight. Nora walked along with compressed lips and a critical expression, and Adriaan was wondering why he hadn’t hated the spectacle of that brat—that bastard-foundling—walking with the lout from the farm. Usually, when he was interested in a girl, he hated everybody whom he saw her with; a black, hot hate that was a damned nuisance. But when he saw the bastard, the brat with the eyes, laughing down there (they were laughing, he had seen and heard them) with young Gheldheere, he hadn’t felt hatred; he had not felt what he had known, in the other cases, to be jealousy. There had only been the old, familiar, irresistible desire to look, to watch her.