White Sand and Grey Sand Page 13

  He really does seem less secretive and more like most boys of his age, Adèle was thinking as she opened the door on the room which she had planned and had carried out for him; suggesting, with its mahogany furniture and navy and white cotton curtains, the cabin of a ship; perhaps he was only going through a difficult stage, a kind of premature adolescence. (Thank you, dear God, that my prayers are a little granted …)

  “What’s he like?” Marieke was saying severely to Sophie at this moment downstairs in the kitchen; “why, just what he always used to be like, of course—downright spoiled and will have his own way about everything.”

  She paused, looking severely down into the basin filled with a not-very-rich cream which she was beating up for the dining-room’s dinner, and felt pleased with herself for having known Mijnheer Adriaan at once (well, almost at once; at first she’d thought it was some dwarf out of the circus standing there grinning up at her in that haughty way, it had given her quite a nasty moment). They, she and Mijnheer Adriaan, had got back at once into the way they had always had before he went away: him leading you on, and making you say what you knew quite well you oughtn’t to say about Madame and what Madame chose to do, and then turning on you …

  “Different?” She roused herself and resumed the beating of the cream; “why should he be any different? And he hasn’t grown, not more than a couple of inches, neither. Different! It would take more than six years in England to make any difference to him.”

  Now that it was deep winter, the nuns let the children out earlier from school. There was not yet enough wood to keep the central heating going for more than a few hours every day, and the Sisters knew that each child would have a better chance of keeping warm at home.

  Ydette would walk slowly back through hushed, winding, silent streets. Snow lay light and fragile and silver-white on the stepped roofs and along the black trees, and underfoot it was frozen into a clouded crystally grey carpet. Voices and footsteps and the purring noise of the cars that were beginning to be seen again in the city came softly and flatly back from it; a great patch, that yet looked small because it was so very high up, had been slapped by last night’s wind against the side of the Person’s peaked hat, dull white in the dark grey-lilac of the clouds. Hushed and cold and quiet were the streets, the canals were broad roadways of white with the sombre trees leaning down over them, the lamplight dimly sparkled on icicle, and frost tracery, and glared back from the slide where the boys had been playing that morning on their way to school. And terror had departed from the air; the hush was the harmless and mysterious one of Nature.

  Ydette would go straight to the shop, where an aunt was sitting over the oil-stove, with feet resting on the strip of carpet, waiting impatiently to be relieved so that she could go in and make a drop of something hot for mother; the aunt not on duty would be out hunting the shops for the best of the available food (and that was often very good, nowadays), and Mevrouw Maes would be sitting by the fire in the kitchen, not dozing, but looking steadily through half-closed eyelids into the steady glow of the coals.

  After Ydette had been given a handful of hot chestnuts or a juicy, green-brown apple, and answered a few sharp yet indifferent questions about the doings of her day, she would take the aunt’s place by the stove, and keep watch for half an hour or so while the last late customers came hurrying through the snow to buy what was left, and usually that wasn’t much; the shop was still sold right out before they closed the doors. She would be hungry, and far from enjoying that warmth which the Sisters had allowed her to go home early in order to secure, but she liked being there: sitting with her hands wrapped closely in her cloak, alone, watching the lights shining in the big house across the plaats.

  The snow came on the very night that he got home from England. She had not been coming back early from school for long when, one evening when darkness had descended early because of the clouds heavy with unfallen snow that hung motionless above the town, she saw him loitering back across the plaats. He must be on his way home from skating with his friends; he carried skates in one hand. He was walking with head down, kicking the snow as he went and cutting a deep furrow through the unmarred surface, for he chose to walk on those parts where no one else had previously gone. There was no one else about, just then. The air was full of glimmering ghostly light thrown up from the ground, and there was the solitary, smallish dark figure, dragging its way along the whiteness.

  Ydette got quickly up; she could not be sure that he was coming near enough to … but it looked as if he were … she bent, keeping her cloak held warmly about her against the bitter air, and felt in a recess behind one of the trestles; then brought out a large apple that ought to have been sold the day before yesterday, when it had arrived at the shop, and a small cluster of fresh Christmas roses; she held them out, admiring them for a moment, then glanced towards the idler in the snow. He was making a wide circle in his progress that would, undoubtedly, bring him past the shop.

  She waited, sitting forward on the stool and watching him as he wandered, dawdled on, still with bent head (but she could see that his dark eyes were looking straight at her, from under their brows), and when he was near, so near that she could see the crimson shell of his great ear, sticking out from the beret worn at an exaggerated tilt, she silently held out to him the apple and the flowers.

  He stopped shuffling, lifting his head and looked at her. She returned the furious haughty stare with her own mild one; this was the son of Madame van Roeslaere, of the big house. So they remained for a moment, confronting one another silently. Then he came slowly towards her, not looking at what she was holding out to him, but keeping his eyes on her face. He looked down quickly at the apple and the flowers.

  “That looks pretty mouldy,” he said; “what do you expect me to do about it?” He spoke in Flemish, and she listened with pleasure to the pure sound he gave the vowels: this was the first time that she had heard a young, cultivated voice.

  “They’re for you,” she said, her own voice even softer and more difficult to hear than usual.

  “For me? Those? Why, they’re stale; you’ve had them in your hole of a shop for days, I expect. I think it’s frightful cheek of you to expect me to take them.” He was keeping his eyes fixed steadily on her as he spoke.

  He was enjoying this; more than anything that had happened since he came home. Not even the skating, flying through the air that cut like ice against his face, with the grey, shining canal gliding away underfoot, and the grey sky skimming past overhead, and the shrill shouts of the others bursting out behind him as he flew on, alone and ahead, had been as good as this.

  He expected her to shrink away, looking what the English called squashed. But she glanced down at the things in her hand, then, looking up at him again, said in a sensible sort of voice:

  “No, they aren’t. The apple has been here for two days but it’s a beauty, and the flowers were only cut this morning; Mijnheer Pieters has got a little coke for his greenhouse and he grew them in it.”

  “Liar,” Adriaan said. While the word was coming out he was thinking that it was a childish thing to say and, only because of that, regretting having said it, but for the moment it was all that he could think of. He wanted her to offer him the things again, so that he could again feel the pleasure of spurning them.

  But she only stared at him, with eyes the shape and size and colour of which he so well remembered from that first evening in the little salon, then, without any appearance of disappointment, put the flowers carefully down on the trestle table and began to eat the apple. She did not look angry or hurt or squashed; he didn’t know how she looked; if it hadn’t been quite the silliest idea that had ever come into anyone’s head, he would have said that she was looking at him, not as if he were a person, but as if he were a thing, and one that she liked to look at.

  “Liar,” he repeated in his pure-vowelled voice; then, as he turned away, over his shoulder—“and you’ve got eyes like beetles.”

  He walke
d across the square without looking back, but it took the strongest effort he had ever made in his life not to; the figure in the dark cape with her face framed in the scarlet lining of the hood was pulling him as if it had him on a wire, and he could see nothing else but the picture of her, standing by the trestle table and eating the apple with her eyes fixed like that on his face.

  Any soreness which she felt at the rejection of her offering to the big house was tempered by a recollection that Mijnheer Adriaan was a boy; boys were always rude (except Jooris); they always pulled your hair (with the same exception); they said rude words and shouted at you (only Jooris was always kind). Mijnheer Adriaan had behaved exactly as you could expect a boy to behave: she bore him no ill-will; and her feelings for the big house remained unchanged by his behaviour.

  She saw him often throughout that winter: if she had been the kind of little girl that Lyntje Pieters had once been (and was still, for that matter) she would have thought that he came round by the shop only in order to say things to her. And sometimes to shove the piece of carpet aside in passing, with his favourite gesture of rucking things up and kicking them … and once, on an evening of lengthening blue light when spring flowers were spread out on the trestles, he launched with his satchel a truly frightening lunge at the oil-stove. He didn’t hit it, but it was a near thing. Ydette really was shocked this time, and told the aunts.

  “Mijnheer Adriaan tried to knock over the stove, Aunt Marie.”

  “Oh, did he?” growled Aunt Jakoba, who had just returned from the doctor’s with Mevrouw Maes’ tablets. “Well, you let him do that once again, only once—and I go straight across the plaats to his father. And you can tell Mijnheer Adriaan that, from me.”

  “And you won’t be let go there, not any more, not for your English lessons,” chimed in Marie.

  “No, you won’t.” Aunt Jakoba nodded her head.

  “So you mind and tell him. And if that’s the manners he’s come back with from England, the less you get near him nor talk to him, the better,” Marie ended up.

  “I don’t talk to him,” said Ydette, in rather a louder and clearer voice than usual.

  It was true: she did not; but it was chiefly because she did not get a chance to get in any words of her own; the gabble which he launched at her on his way to and from school twice a day was non-stop.

  “Good morning, beetle-eyes.”

  The voice with the pure vowels would begin to deliver insults in a quick, formal tone while he was still some yards away and she was forcing herself to move quickly about—struggling against her natural impulse to do every action quietly and slowly—in an attempt to get the shop ready for customers before she went to school: her fingers would be damp with the night-dews off the vegetables and muddy with moist earth from their roots. She would never look up, but she heard the voice, growing louder as he marched past:

  “… do you know what your eyes remind me of? They’re exactly like beetles; I don’t mean the kind the dirty English have in their kitchens, I mean the kind that live in the garden and sneak into the house in the summer. I’ve been trying to think for days what your eyes remind me of, and now I know: it’s beetles, so now you know, too, and good morning, beetle-eyes.”

  He never looked at her while he was going through the rigmarole. She would hear the voice dying away, and then she would at last look up from what she was trying to do, and see the squat, square back, dressed in a thick overcoat in winter or in the light clothes of summer (clothes which as the months, and then the years, went on, became ever more expensive and more elegant) receding across the square. Then she would turn with relief to her tasks again.

  But sometimes he would stop and stare: just stare, with dark eyes looking out of the face which had little of the smoothness and texture of youth: stand there for perhaps five minutes, following every movement of her hands, which might be embroidering or arranging vegetables or busy on a bit of the lace which Mevrouw Maes could no longer see to do and for which the shop in the Steen Straat paid a good price. Ydette would sometimes look up and return his stare: one ‘stared people out’ at school, and she was rather good at it. Usually, his eyes fell first. It was after one of these stare-fights that, on his way home one evening in late May, when she was about eleven and he almost sixteen, he suddenly stooped and viciously pinched her leg. The place was sore and blue for days, but she did not tell the aunts, this time, because she thought that if she did, her visits to the big house would be stopped.

  Were her eyes truly like beetles? On more than one morning, during the weeks after his return, she would sometimes snatch a moment before she ran downstairs and through to the shop, to study them long and earnestly in the looking-glass in granny’s room. The old woman would be dozing, perhaps, in her clean shabby bed, with an appearance of weakness and great age that Ydette did not care to glance at because she preferred the air of competence and dignity which Mevrouw Maes carried while she was awake; or she would be lying still, with her short, thick arms, covered with the brown marks of old age, linked quietly behind her head, and her thick hair, of iron-colour streaked with white, spread along the pillow. Sometimes she watched with a faint smile while Ydette, like a sparrow poised on a branch, stared into the mirror.

  Certainly, thought Ydette, her eyes were so dark that they did appear black, and their shape was not unlike that of a beetle, and there was a brilliant little light in each one suggesting the gleam on a beetle’s back. She turned her head slightly—and suddenly two tiny images of a long face under a pointed cap were reflected there! One of the Three People who lived in the town was watching her, out of her own eyes! She forgot the beetle as, long and wonderingly with the strangest sensations, she gazed at the minute reflection.

  “Good morning, match-legs, do you know what your legs remind me of?”

  Almost every morning, during that first winter of his return, she would hear the footsteps, and then the voice, coming through the quiet frosty air. Sometimes she was lucky, and left for school before he emerged from the door of the big house, and sometimes she knew that he must have gone on his way before she came down: that was on the mornings when she was late. But he was very often late for school; far more often than she was. There occurred some weeks in the following summer, when he ran past on the other side of the plaats without a glance at the shop; his full, dark face, suggesting something that had been designed for a ballet of trolls, set in sulky lines, and his satchel bobbing up and down on his shoulders as he ran.

  But their acquaintance was not confined to the early morning skirmishes. When she went across twice a week to receive instruction in English, which she continued to do regularly, she occasionally saw Mijnheer Adriaan passing through the hall or coming down the stairs, just as she carefully shut the front door after her under the unbending eye of Marieke. Then he would say, in a quite different tone from the one she heard in the mornings, “Good evening, Ydette,” or sometimes, if it were Lyntje who opened the door, “Hullo.” It was what Ydette thought of as an ordinary voice. Lyntje would always toss her head when this happened, and stare at him, but he never looked at her, and at the lesson afterwards Ydette would notice that her fellow-pupil was cross. Rude she dared not be—the girl was not born who could have ventured to be rude to Madame van Roeslaere—but her tone was sulky and she did not smile or look up from her book.

  That was a very hot summer: the leaves On the chestnut tree outside the big house were faded and curled into bronze scrolls by the end of July, and the tourists crowded, more and more of them, every week, into the city becoming ever more scrupulously clean and more filled with pretty things to attract them; all along the miles of coast, too, they were swarming into the reopened hotels and wearing their scanty bright clothes along the digues and on the wide, wave-smitten grey beaches, or pausing to stare reverently at the splendid canvases that were beginning to return to their place in the galleries of the ancient towns. Only the Belgians, working steadily from early in the morning until late at night to bring back
the prosperity of their country, had no time to pause and admire anything. The influx of tourists brought money into Bruges which its citizens spent in its shops, and that summer Marie Michiels seldom drew the shutters across the arched alcove upon anything but empty shelves, while she insisted that Ydette must hurry back from school in order to take her turn at the selling. Ydette would sooner have jumped on her bicycle—new that July, and another sign that the family was beginning to do well—and ridden down to Zandeburghe to help Aunt Jakoba with the bathing-huts and the excursion à la plage, but she did as she was told, and dull work though the serving of chicory and carrots and potatoes to the housewives was, she knew that whenever she happened to glance up, she might see someone coming out of the big house.

  There began to be plenty to eat again that summer, and, at last, she began to grow. There came a day when Madame van Roeslaere, walking homewards across the plaats from a visit to some friends who lived near and accompanied, as she so rarely was, by her son, paused at the stall to speak to old Mevrouw Maes, who was sunning herself there. Ydette, who happened to be standing at one of the trestles, glanced quickly at Mijnheer Adriaan, who was standing at a distance, and who happened to be looking stealthily at her, and knew, then, that she was taller than he was.