White Sand and Grey Sand

by Stella Gibbons

  Dear Ydette,

  Christopher says don’t forget about being a film-star one day and he really means it. What do you think!! Exciting news!! He is engaged (fiancé) to a girl, Susan Ryder, who lives near us. She’s rather bossy. I am to be a bridesmaid. Mummy is having a very pretty dress made for me, white net with sort of yellow rosettes on it and my flowers will be yellow roses. They are going to be married next year. Nora sends her kind remembrances. Thank you for your pretty card last year. I hope you are quite well. With love

  From

  Ida.

  So he was fiancé. Ydette, who was not at all disposed to feel sentimental about Christopher Ruddlin, heard the news with emotions which could all have been applied equally well to a brother. As for being a film-star—he said that he ‘really meant it’, but she herself could neither believe that he did, nor could she believe for a moment she could ever become one.

  What did film stars do? She had never thought about the matter. They were not real people, to her; she saw the girls at the packing-station, where she now worked at despatching Monsieur van Roeslaere’s orchids, reading magazines with photographs of Marilyn Monroe and Kirk Douglas and all the others, but such magazines did not interest her, and she never bought them, preferring the French Elle, in which there was often a serial story which she could enjoy. And in the same way she enjoyed the films and the stars, watching with wide eyes, completely absorbed, as a child might have been, by what was happening on the screen. The film stars were ‘real’ people to her in quite another sense from that in which they were real to her fellow-workers at Sint Niklaas. They lived in her mind, fellow-dwellers with that Person in the peaked hat who had watched her throughout her childhood, and the delicate white sand out at Zandeburghe, and the big house.

  They were not real people who had villas outside Hollywood, and earned astronomical sums, and frequently got divorced. And how could you imagine yourself becoming one of those figures who moved and lived, for your pleasure and delight, in your own mind?

  But although she did not take Mijnheer Chris’ idea seriously enough ever to consider that her life might, in a year or two, be completely changed by it, she took it seriously enough to make a habit of going to the cinema much more frequently than either the aunts or Jooris approved.

  For the first time in all her life, Ydette was now doing something (in going twice a week and sometimes three times to the pictures) which Jooris did not like. The pictures! what a waste of precious spare time, when you might be playing football or sitting with friends and neighbours drinking in some cosy café where the tourists never went, gossiping about the market price of chicory or bacon! The pictures! a waste of hard-earned money, sitting in the dark watching a pack of idiots acting lies! He was willing—more than willing, he liked very much—to take Ydette for an evening stroll along the ramparts and end up at a café in the Markt eating an ice-cream, but although he had himself taken her to the pictures once, it made him feel so cross to see her sitting there, staring up at the screen with that look on her face as if she were a hundred miles away from him, that he never asked her again. And as for what the young Englishman whose little sister still wrote to her had said about Ydette herself some day becoming a star, it was such nonsense, and it made him so angry even to think about it, that the subject was never again referred to between himself and Ydette.

  He supposed, and hoped, that she had forgotten all about it.

  Dear Ydette (said the Christmas card showing a chastely-coloured and embossed shield, with a pair of gates and a Celtic cross and some swans all worked into a design about the letters C.G.S. on a dead white ground, which reached Ydette a few days before the fourth Christmas since she had seen Ida Ruddlin). How are you? I’m in my first term at Claregates, my sister Nora’s old school, and having a wizard time. What are you doing? I’ve decided on my career, I’m going to be a P.T. Instructor (teaching people how to do exercises). I expect the horse that used to be with you at Zandeburghe must be dead by now. But I hope not. Can you imagine—this time next year I shall be an Aunt! It makes me feel very ancient. Chris says next summer he really will write to you about being a film star. Do write to me when you have time.

  With love, yours very sincerely,

  Ida Ruddlin.

  “Dead, indeed!” was Marie’s vigorous exclamation on hearing the card read aloud, “why should he be? Thanks to the Saints, he is in excellent health and stronger than ever.”

  But she sighed as she watched Ydette’s tall, slender, black form going up the stairs to her room to put the little card away with the others. ‘Death’ could only remind them all, now, of old Mevrouw Maes’ passing, last summer. It had been peaceful, but they missed her painfully. Her hand had ruled the orderly little house and the widowed dutiful daughter and the wild, secretive, rough one, throughout some fifty years. Now the place continued without swerving upon its peaceful, useful, frugal routine, a household of schooled women, but they all missed the old woman’s frequent glints of gaiety and imperiousness as much as they did her controlling touch. Mother gone, Klaas gone (not that he was much loss, but he was a part of the old times vanished for ever) and Ydette as silent and—and (Marie had no word for ‘dreamy’ and had to use vaag)—as I don’t-know-what. Marie was more than a little disposed to believe that these twice-weekly visits to the pictures were responsible for Ydette’s dreaminess and her strange refusal to ‘go with’ with any of the local boys … the pictures, and working all day shut away from God’s good open air in Mijnheer van Roeslaere’s packing department.

  But Ydette loved working there.

  However greatly the weather in the outside world might vary under the rays of the sun, or the winds almost blow her and her fellow workers from their bicycles as they rode to work in the morning, the climate in the hothouses out at Sint Niklaas remained the same: warm, still, silent and faintly scented with moist earth and young growing leaves whose shapes, as well as their odours, seemed to have only a distant cousinage with the lively green things blowing about in the hedges.

  This unchanging climate through which sweet smells crept and wandered, where white stars that were flowers shone gently in the distance at the end of long corridors, under a roof of glass white as milk which shut out the changing sky—this mild and orderly jungle into which she went every morning had become what the children call my best place, in four years, to Ydette.

  The long shed where she worked at packing the orchids, with the other girls and women from Damme and Bruges, was of course neither so warm nor so quiet as the hothouses, but it was clean in a rough, rustic way that she liked: the clear windows looked out on the whitewashed glasshouses, the neat gravel rides and small lawns bordered by ordinary cheerful flowers, and the tall chimneys with their plumes of smoke, while the wooden floor and the benches were scattered with the soft brown fibre that went into the crates large and small. It gave out a dry, spicy scent that was a perpetual gentle stimulant to her dreaming fancy. When, as she did perhaps twice a day, she was sent alone or with some companions on an errand that took them into the houses themselves, this not-quite-sweet smell seemed to have prepared her, with its vague prophecy, for the almost unendurably regal scent that walked the places where the orchids were growing.

  Drip … drip … drip … the beads of water condensing throughout the hours fell with an intermittent musical ringing from the broad leaves and the milky glass of the roof, like the sensation of placid growth made audible; and sometimes, while she lingered behind for a moment when her errand was finished, and her companions were going back to the packing-shed, she almost expected some tremendous mystery to be revealed: when, turning unexpectedly around some corner, she came with a quiet gasp of indrawn breath on a plant with sombre leaves broad as her own breast and pink, curved flowers hanging motionless in their own swooning scent, she seemed to confront the spirit, the revelation, towards which all the hush and the warmth and the mysterious broken dripping of water were leading. Yet there was nothing there but growth, a com
plex, yet serene, mysterious activity going on under her eyes.

  Then there were the long, hushed walks, lined with green, fernlike fringes that hung gently over the damp, narrow paths and seemed as if they should nod to and fro in a warm wind, but which never did, because no wind was allowed to blow there; and in some of the houses there were the orchids growing in brown, hairy masses of root and leaf and fibre suspended from the wall, as if in their native tropic; these were knotted, contorted entities, unmistakably people, who looked at her without having eyes, even as the Three Towers had looked when she was a child, and each time she encountered them on her visits to the orchid-house in which they lived, she seemed to know them more intimately. These—the imperious yet subtle scents, the long vistas of green fern and blunt leaves in varying stages of growth, the coiling beings with a score of brown fuzzy faces who clung to the warm moist walls, the scent of damp earth and, every now and again, the sudden appearance of some flower like a star in shape and a jewel or a rainbow in colour, which presented the culmination of long, warm, silent years of growth—these were now her day-long companions. When she was with them, she was under a spell as strong as that imposed by the white sand and the big house in the recent years of her childhood.

  What the neighbours, and the aunts, and the people who lived at the big house saw, now, when Ydette Maes rode away each morning on her bicycle to work, was a tall young woman who last May, on the date that she had been found in the dune, had celebrated her nineteenth birthday. She was usually dressed neatly but not prettily, and local opinion was as united about the stuck-up-ness of her silent manners as it was divided about the pleasingness or otherwise of her looks: those eyes! so big and beautiful—or such an outlandish shape—she was too thin—she had a figure like a film star—she was a queer thing, after all no one knows where she came from, she might be anyone—she was only Ydette and we’ve known her ever since she could walk.

  “Yddy doesn’t like a bit of fun; that’s the worst of her,” would say Sophie (now married to Albert Joos and his charcuterie, which was so unfortunately situated as to be a rival to that one belonging to her aunt in which Mrs Sophie had spent most of the war); “she’s as dull as a dyke these days.” And she would add to Jakoba or Keetje or whoever happened to be her gossip: “fact is, she ought to get married and have a kid, there’s nothing like it,” and the gossip would look at Sophie and reply, rather dryly, that it seemed to suit her, anyhow.

  Nora and Ida were the only members of the Ruddlin family who ever discussed Ydette at any length, during the next four years, and although—as was natural between an elder sister now out in the world earning a living and a younger one absorbed in the small universe of school—they did not often mention the girl who was no more than an interesting foreign acquaintance, her name (always introduced by Ida) did come up from time to time, when Nora was staying the week-end in Sussex and incidentally grudging every minute spent away from the flat in South Kensington which she shared with Evelyn Berrow and Hilary Perowne.

  Ida’s rather rudimentary imagination had been stirred by Christopher’s talk of his ambitions and hopes for Ydette; naturally, the difficulties in the way of their being realized did not occur to her. And, above everything else, it was her sense of fairness that had been aroused; she was a natural partisan; a taker of sides and a hater of domestic or social injustice, and his failure, as the years went on, to ‘do something about Ydette’, gradually led to Ida’s being in a state of permanent indignation about ‘unfairness’, and not slow to accuse her brother of practising it.

  “What do you expect me to do—fly her over here and arrange an interview with Jon Burke?” demanded the goaded Christopher on one of these occasions: he was going through an unusually prolonged spell of being in the red while awaiting a substantial rise in his salary, and he was also beginning to be rather disturbed by his young wife’s extravagant tastes.

  “I don’t know who that is——”

  “My dear Dogfight! He’s only the greatest living producer. Even the Russians have admitted that—or as good as.”

  “Well, why can’t you arrange an interview?”

  “Because I can’t—I’m very small change indeed compared to Jon Burke. And although he does like Ydette’s type—the Fairy Princess type—and although he does always like to pick them out of little back streets or hill villages in Greek islands, or from decaying suburbs in Irish towns—you have to be careful with Burke. He’s tricky.”

  “Why is he tricky?” Ida was leaning forward with stout elbows planted on the knees of her tweed skirt and unmovably staring at him.

  “Well, he won’t stand for the least hint of a gimmick about one of his ‘waxlets’, as he calls them——”

  “What an extraordinary name. What on earth does it mean?”

  “It’s like ‘starlet’—he calls them ‘waxlets’ because the type he likes best are as soft as wax and he can mould their potentialities into what he can see they can become. He likes them innocent and dim—and Ydette is all of that—but teachable too. (I say, do you understand all this?)”

  “Yes, of course. Well, why can’t you make him see her?”

  “Because I can’t, I tell you. To start with, he’s in America directing a very important film involving millions of pounds, and besides, I’m far too busy just now myself. If only he were over here I might manage a shot at it, but as it is, it’s quite out of the question.”

  “If he could have an interview with her, would he want to make her into a ‘waxlet’?”

  “How do I know? He can be very tricky indeed. And the one thing that puts him clean off a girl is any suspicion of a gimmick. I should have to get Ydette under his nose very, very carefully—it would really be best if he were to meet her at a party or at a friend’s house—if he thought I was trying to make her interesting or dramatic or unusual he’d be off like a scared rabbit. He loathes tricks, especially publicity ones.”

  “Well, I think you ought to try. It isn’t fair—making me mention you every time I sent her a Christmas card and then not doing anything about it. Nolly and I both think it isn’t fair.”

  “You and Nolly!” Christopher waved her away with the newspaper.

  This reverse had no effect upon Ida beyond increasing her conviction that unfairness was, as usual, being perpetrated. She continued—having now developed a strong and obstinate desire to stand as Ydette’s champion in an unjust world—to goad Christopher whenever she saw him, and at last she succeeded in arousing Nora—who disliked being involved in any affairs beyond her own, but who shared, in a more sober way, her sister’s passion for fair dealing—to taking action.

  “Good heavens, what are you doing here? Why aren’t you at school?” demanded Christopher, opening the door of his flat in Bloomsbury one Saturday morning in the summer of the year that Ydette was assumed to be nineteen, and quite failing to keep a note of dismay from his voice as he saw both his sisters, dressed in chaste light summer suits, confronting him on the doorstep.

  “I’ve come up to see the dentist; it’s Half-Term and I’m staying with Nolly,” said Ida instantly, in whom four years had not lessened the capacity for righteous indignation. “I know, you thought I’d got some disease, and you and Susan would have to have me. Well, I just haven’t. What are you doing? Do-it-yourself?” for Christopher’s very old pullover and trousers were splashed with whitewash and in one hand he had a roller-brush.

  “Yes. Susan’s down with her mother for a few days, so I’m doing our bedroom. Come in. Everything’s in a hell of a mess and I can’t give you any lunch. I’m going out, almost at once.”

  “We don’t want any; Nolly’s going to take me to a nice place she knows in Fitzroy Street.”

  “Good God,” said Christopher absently. “Well, come on in, and don’t fall over that bucket.”

  The large, square, light rooms of the mansion-flat in a block behind the British Museum looked desolate and rather bare in the light of the July morning. Susan’s taste, like Christopher
’s, inclined to the ‘contemp.’, and contemp. does not look at its best unless completely uncluttered.

  “I’ve brought these.” Nora held out a large bunch of damp and thorny roses, wrapped in tissue. “I thought Sue would be here.”

  “Oh—thanks—no, she’s been rather fat and sorry for herself, so we thought a change was the thing for her. I’ll put them in something.” He looked irritably about him.

  Nora, who had not seen him for several months, thought that he was getting ‘rather fat’ himself, the charming sturdiness of his early twenties was being replaced by a John-Bullish thickness, with more than a hint of heaviness to come. The back of his neck was already a rich, dark red.

  His job as personal assistant to one of the more important directors at Commonwealth Associated Films made long, rich lunches and a great deal of drinking simply a part of his daily routine. He was as lucky as hell, he knew, to have the job, just as he was lucky to have the flat, and Susan, and her eight hundred pounds a year that had just made possible their early marriage, and which also made all the difference between feeling that the rat-race was at any moment going to be too much for him, and being able to sit back occasionally and draw his breath without a sensation of guilt. But he still kept, in some part of him that had remained unchanged, the desire to help create a film that was both true and beautiful. Only, the last four years had passed so quickly and had been so full … and he sometimes wondered whether the anonymous carvers and masons who had helped to build, say, Chartres or Louvain, had had to endure the snake-house miasma which existed at Biggin Hill Studios; was it the price that must always be paid for being associated with the co-operative making of a work of art, or had the building of the cathedrals taken place in a less competitive atmosphere?

  “We’ve come to talk to you about something,” said Nora, sitting down.