White Sand and Grey Sand

by Stella Gibbons

  But he had never thought that, not even at the beginning. It had seemed to him that she and her father lived in the middle of an idyll, so quiet and so beatified with domestic peace their lives had been, with every detail performed as if it were a small, well-loved ritual, and hovering above it all—small, quiet house, shady garden where vegetables flourished beyond the shadow of the weeping willow, the freshness and the cleanness of everything—were the great virtues which shaped both their lives, and which were never spoken of, perhaps never even by them perceived—duty, and piety, and content.

  Out-dated virtues. The present generation thought them dull … when they thought about them at all … the pain came back, having been kept successfully at bay for a minute or two by generalizations.

  And into that idyll he had broken, with his own confusion and the rebellion and unfocused passion that had suddenly overwhelmed him after his father’s death.

  There had been that sleepless twenty-four hours after the funeral: when he had wanted to get as far away as possible from the school and his work there under the guidance of his father in his wonderful and awe-inspiring old age, away from May and the children and everything that he loved most; he had felt that he never wanted to see again everything that he had cared for and worked for … and May (but May had been wonderful … if rather puzzled … she had been wonderful) had told him firmly that he was run down and must get away. Why not go to Flanders, and stay for three weeks—a month—six weeks—as long as it would take him to get really well again? She had spoken as if it had been an illness.

  So he had gone, taking with him the notes for the final chapter of the book that his father had been constructing on Flemish history and Flemish art, and its influence upon Europe, and he had wandered off the boat at Ostend, and through the shabby marine and industrial quarters on its outskirts, then taken a bus out into the country and ended up, late in the June twilight, he remembered, in Doorwaden: at the house of the Brandts …

  … This room was very beautiful, the panelling was almost the colour of a nutmeg, and the coffee-pot and cups had probably been made by Chinese craftsmen to the order of some Dutch ancestor of Adèle’s who had been an administrator in the East Indies. How thin Adèle had grown: those incongruous hands of hers, which should have belonged to a beautiful woman, looked disproportionately long and white as she waved them about while saying something to May, as the two sat together, chatting, at the other end of the room. She had made herself ill, he and May agreed, with worrying about Adriaan’s soul. That was exactly what her trouble must be, because Adriaan was doing well at the University, and his habits, although too luxurious, in a boy of his age, to be anything but alarming to an elderly couple inclined to a brisk asceticism in their way of living, were not so wild as to give genuine cause for anxiety; no, it must be his soul, and certainly, if his face provided any reflection of that (to Everard) hypothetical item, it must be in some peril.

  Peril of what? (Everard’s thoughts played determinedly on, keeping pain and memory at bay.) Hell? What did that mean, in contemporary religious terms of reference? Being shut away utterly and for ever from what “people whose minds were so orientated” called God?

  He himself had never felt the faintest need for a religion; never a whisper or a warning from anything outside his own brain and his own conscience had ever come to him: he lived by a set of personal ethics, based upon one bequeathed to him by his father, that had served him and the School very well—until the three weeks in Doorwaden when he had been insane.

  Sitting by the window, looking out across the sunset lights in the plaats, he was supposing that he never dared to let himself wander back, in thought, to the weeks in Doorwaden, because they had been the most fully lived, and the most—he could not think of a word that should not profane them—the truest days that he had ever experienced. It was difficult, so difficult as to be almost impossible, to realize that those days, beautiful, and calm, and filled with the radiance of love, had been ‘wrong’.

  But it was the harm! It was the harm that he might—that he almost certainly had done to her and to the life that she had lived before he came! It was the thought of that which had haunted him, day and night, ever since he came back to Flanders; staining everything; spoiling his memories; cheapening and soiling and destroying … if only he could have known that no harm had come to her and her life, if only (the hopelessness of the wish! the utter hopelessness of it) he could forget that when they said good-bye, on the last evening, she had been crying.

  He glanced round with leisurely half-smiling interest towards the upper end of the room, and saw that the screen was now set up; they were all gathered about a table, arranging the projector. It was a relief that soon there would be something to take him away from his own thoughts: until this holiday, he had never really understood the state of mind that makes people go to the pictures to be ‘taken out of themselves’; he felt as if he would like to walk out of himself and slam the door and never come back … really, how badly Nora wore her clothes; that was a pretty dress, but, on her, it hardly looked it.

  Nora, at that moment, was thinking how fortunate young men were to have a costume for the evening which was as correct and easy to wear as a uniform; how well Christopher looked in his dinner jacket, and even Adriaan appeared less hideous than usual, though surely something could have been done about his ears while he was a baby; pads, or something? But no doubt Mamma van R. had believed that their angle was due to the Will of God.

  Nora had been slightly shocked, as well as mortified and disappointed, when Madame van Roeslaere, gently but decidedly, and with no appearance of regret, had told her that it was impossible for Ydette to come to see the film.

  Madame van Roeslaere had shaken her head, when rather casually asked (too casually, May Ruddlin had afterwards told her daughter; Nora must remember that, in some respects, Continental life retained some of the formality that English life had lost) if “it would be all right if Ydette came along too?” and when Nora had looked surprised at the refusal, and tried to coax a little (an accomplishment in which she was far from being proficient), Adèle had said with firmness:

  “You must remember, you enjoy playing with Ydette, and your mother allows Ida to behave with her almost as if she were her younger sister, but we have to live with people of that sort after you have gone home. It would make awkwardness for Ydette, if she had been here as my guest. She would not know—how shall I put it? yes, ‘where she was’, she would be embarrassed, and begin to get thoughts, perhaps, in her head. She is a good child but she isn’t a bit intelligent. (The nuns at the school have been quite in desperation over her.) And …”

  But here Madame van Roeslaere had broken off, and said no more.

  And Nora had not dared to reopen the subject; she was quite sensitive enough to feel that to do so would have been exceedingly rude, and she also felt—in spite of her contempt for Madame van Roeslaere’s passive attitude to ‘the Will of God’—a kind of curiosity and awe concerning her religion, and the way in which it so plainly moulded and dictated her attitude towards every detail of her life. Nora knew no one else who lived thus, and, as she would have put it, “it fascinates me, in a grisly kind of way”.

  “So much for Christian charity,” said Christopher, rather awfully, when his sister reported back to him, “why didn’t you say something about us all being the same in the eyes of God … that would have floored her.”

  “I don’t think it would,” Nora said.

  “Well, never mind, can’t you get round it somehow? get Adriaan to ask her—no, that won’t do, damn it, he’s in the dog-house for not turning up at Mass for the last six Sundays—how about Papa van R., can’t you get at him?”

  “I don’t think I can, Chris, it really would be rather awful; Mummy would be furious, and so would our papa.”

  “Yes, I suppose they would, and I see what you mean. But I don’t mind telling you frankly that this has rather finished the van R.s with me; I’m no Communist, a
s you know, but any attitude more likely to make for Communism I never came across—and so utterly absurd, too; Ydette would—well, she’d be outstanding anywhere. I shall laugh like a drain if she’s world-famous in another five years or so and the van R.s are tumbling over themselves to say they knew her when she was unknown. They’ll be sorry enough, then, that they wouldn’t let her sit in their ruddy salon for half an hour and drink a cup of coffee.”

  Then he withdrew himself into preparations for the evening’s performance, which so engrossed him that he left it to Nora to break the news to Ydette.

  “But of course, Mademoiselle,” said Ydette placidly, when Nora, crimson and mumbling, had stammered through the rudiments of a sentence in which the words not convenient were repeated two or three times, “it is all right.”

  “Don’t you mind?” said Nora, relief at the calmness with which the blow had been received making her even more tactless than usual.

  Ydette indulged in a very Flemish shrug; yes, she minded; she always liked a reason for going to the big house; but she was not at all sure that she would like to sit on one of the chairs that she had so often helped Lyntje to dust, in the presence of Mijnheer van Roeslaere’s evening clothes and his twinkling eyeglasses of gold wire and crystal, and the tall young English mijnheer who had said such strange and thought-provoking things about her face, and under the dear but awe-inspiring eyes of Madame, and of Mijnheer Adriaan, staring. No.

  “I do not mind at all, Mademoiselle,” she said, with more decision than her soft voice usually carried, and she smiled at Nora.

  “Oh … good. But I’m sorry,” Nora said, remembering to give to her own smile its prudent touch of reserve as she turned away, “well, we’ll tell you all about it afterwards,” she concluded.

  When Adèle had checked herself on the verge of her sentence, she had been going to say that there was another reason for not inviting Ydette to the big house as an evening’s guest; she knew that Adriaan was interested in her protégée.

  She had noticed his prolonged stares in that direction, and had marked how ‘touchy’ (as the English would say) he was on the subject, and she was really afraid that something might come of it … occasionally, her mood growing darker as she brooded over the state of his soul, she wondered whether something had not already come of it? secret, apparently accidental, meetings, long talks, perhaps even kisses.

  To her sorrow, she knew that Adriaan was capable of doing such things (since the dismissal of Lyntje, Adèle had not employed a young woman in the house) but she also believed that Ydette was not. She was a good child, and still only a child; and Adèle had seen enough of her to know precisely what her character was: gentle, rather more sensible than it appeared to be, docile and conscientious and sufficiently devout—her chief fault appeared to be that ‘dreaminess’ (another expressive English word); she was vaag, as the Flemish put it; sometimes took a long time to come back from wherever she was wandering when you spoke to her; found it difficult to concentrate, and so on. But that wasn’t a serious fault, and hers was not the kind of nature that took its owner to meet a young man of superior social position in secret, and permitted kisses. Ydette was a good child.

  All the same, better to remember Adriaan’s interest in her, when it was suggested that she come to the house as a guest.

  Adèle looked at May Ruddlin, sitting beside her in the evening light with the skirts of that pea-green dress sprawling across the exquisite, carefully mended tapestry of the couch; animated, busy, cheerful, did she never think about the darkness lying outside the circle of a contented human life? Wasn’t she ever tortured—or puzzled, tortured was of course not the word to use in connection with May—puzzled, then, to ‘square up’ agonizing facts with the Will of God? What about all those who had never had what mankind called a chance?

  Yet of course we all had a chance; the chance; it was as if we went staggering, stumbling, blind with pain and thirst, past a well of such coolness and depth and refreshment that …

  “She will be delighted with it,” May was saying, looking down at the copy of Les Malheurs de Sophie in her lap; “it’s so kind of you … do you notice that children of Ida’s age read far more babyish books than we did?”

  “Don’t the parents wish to shut away everything that is frightening from children, because real life has become so frightening? and so the children read only sweet, baby books, like the Beatrix Pottaire?” Adèle said.

  “I shouldn’t call The Tale of Mr Todd exactly sweet,” and May’s loud laugh rang out, and Adèle said, “Ah, ah,” nodding and smiling in understanding while she clasped and unclasped her lovely white fingers, on which it was beginning to be difficult to keep the rings from slipping up and down and falling off, so tiresome …

  May was feeling rather glad that Adèle could not see Sunday evening supper at The Link House, with the cold scraps of food from the week-end’s meals, from apple-tart to beetroot chutney, spread out on the dining-room table for the feeding of the young people who dropped in, every week—students living in Ashbourne, sons and daughters of old friends in the neighbourhood, acquaintances of Nora’s and Christopher’s—drawn there by Everard and his charm for the young … of course, entertaining at the big house was much more elegant, but it wasn’t nearly so much fun, May decided, and wondered how Dogfight and her baby-sitter, Miss Rogers, were getting along?

  “And in two days you will be back with your family of seventy little boys,” Adèle was saying.

  “Yes, in the thick of it. But I love it, you know.”

  “No one could live such a life if they did not love it,” Adèle assured her, looking at the red face of her old acquaintance. It was like that of a good, kind horse; an intelligent horse, that was quite ready to listen to your troubles—always provided that you didn’t ‘go on’ too long about them, and that you would take its advice when you had finished. She turned away, and stared down the room: at Adriaan.

  He was still looking very sulky, and his mother allowed the breast of her elegant dress to rise in a quivering sigh as she recalled his expression, and his tone, as he had flung at her the single word “Why?” just before dinner, when she had shaken her head in reply to her husband’s jovial enquiry as to whether the little Ydette was coming to see herself as a film-star?

  “Because it’s not suitable to ask her, my dear,” Adèle had said, in answer to that “Why?”, and she had used the most final and the firmest, yet the lightest, tone in all her large repertoire of dismissing tones. He had had, thank goodness, enough manners not to say anything more, but his look! a thunder-cloud, a black miasma, surrounded him throughout dinner, and she had wondered if everyone had guessed the cause of this latest ‘fit’?

  Then she wondered if she really knew it? Apparently he was sulking because the greengrocer’s adopted niece wasn’t invited to ‘drop in’ and see a film made by a visiting English friend, but was that the real reason? With Adriaan, she could never be certain what his reasons were, because he had never formed the habit of talking freely with his father and herself; his anger this evening might be based on some dangerous Communist nonsense about class equality, for all his mother knew; might be as easily explained by politics as by love—for certainly there was no trace of what Adèle had been brought up to recognize as love in the brooding gaze which she had seen him fix upon Ydette.

  Unsatisfactory boy! Cause of silent grief, of imploring prayers! yet loved, of course; oh yes, still so deeply loved. Her eyes were fixed upon him now, in a wistful stare; her little black thing, her weazened baby, born to her late in life: and such a delight to Hubert and herself in his infancy, when he would lie warm and heavy in her arms for hours at a time, his small, placid eyes fixed raptly upon flowers or the light, anything that was brilliant or strongly coloured. Yes, he had been a good baby; it was only as he grew into a little boy that the sulks and the obstinacy and the frightful, perverse, stubborn self-will, the unshakable insistence upon having his way no matter what anyone else wanted or said or di
d, that sometimes made Adèle literally shudder—because she knew what, in the eyes of her Church, it implied—had begun to show itself. It had been like an invasion by an evil spirit. Or hadn’t it been more like the gradual awakening and uncoiling of one that had always been there? asleep, securely lodged and implacable inside that dark, pear-shaped head and thick, ungainly body?

  “What on earth does the shape matter, so long as it does its job?” Christopher Ruddlin’s voice was as charming as the rest of him, thought Adèle.

  “I don’t suppose it does ‘matter’; it’s just bloody hideous,” and Adriaan darted a venomous look at the projector, now arranged in position on a boule table which had been carried in from the hall to accommodate it.

  “Fitness for purpose implies beauty, surely?” said Christopher; he was still feeling sore that Madame van R. had not finally relented from her incredibly snobbish and out-of-date standards and allowed Nora to walk across the square with a last-minute invitation for Ydette. But he had already learned that it did not increase one’s popularity, nor the likelihood of one’s getting on in life, if soreness were publicly displayed. For example, something had upset the old monster (his own name for Adriaan) just before dinner, and they were all being made very much aware that it had. What was the matter Christopher neither knew nor cared. Adriaan was in a stew about something again: but then he always had been, ever since the Ruddlins had known him.

  “For four hundred years”—he was now holding forth to the luckless Nolly, who could not be blamed for looking as bored as she did, even though it wasn’t good policy in public—“people have relied on themselves to make their own amusements in this room—oh, playing the lute, cards and so on, how should I know?—and now we have to rely for our entertainment on this,” and he launched a kick at the table supporting the projector, which received the blow from his elegant evening shoe without a tremor.