White Sand and Grey Sand Read online

  The plaats looked dark and sad as they hurried feebly across it in the drifting rain.

  “You don’t want to get too thick with Sophie Bouckaerts,” snapped Marie suddenly.

  Ydette looked up at the sallow, sunken face draped in the black shawl. She knew that when people were given their full names by Aunt Marie—Jettje Kamiel, Jooris Gheldeere and so on—she was cross with someone.

  “You mean … not talk to her or kiss her or … anything?” she asked, and if Marie had been accustomed to listening for gradations of tone in voices, it would have struck her that this one was thoughtful rather than timid. But she wasn’t accustomed to such refinements, and now she was only half-listening because she was hurrying to get home as soon as possible—it always seemed worse at night—and the English bombers might be over, let alone them going over on their way to England—and there were the fried potatoes to get on—that shameless Sophie, no, she wasn’t likely to be lonely, not with probably André Kamiel to keep her warm—and if she thought that she, Marie, didn’t know he was in the Resistance and Sophie too, she was wrong, that was all—there was nothing better in bed than a kind, warm, sleepy man—well, Marie hadn’t got her own man now, and she knew it was the Will of God that she hadn’t, but she didn’t feel that it was, and as for Father Jozef and them saying so, what did they know, never having been married, about being a widow?

  Busy with all this, she did not answer Ydette’s question.

  Ydette had never in the four years that she had lived with them even questioned an order from the old woman or the aunts, but this evening, hurrying across the plaats in the wet summer twilight with her head in the old woollen hood bent down against the rain, she wasn’t quite ‘her usual self’. That head, already slightly swimming with the hunger which the few mouthfuls of poor food given them by Sophie had scarcely relieved, was now also swimming with drifting sensations of glory and importance and richness; beauty and wonder were wandering mysteriously through it, as if they had been the scents breathed out by those big flowers, shaped like stars and horns, which once lived in the hothouses near Sint Niklaas. Ydette had no name for the wandering glories which were making her move and see and hear as if she were in a trance, and yet feel wider awake than ever before, and their only outward effect was to make her take a second upward look at her aunt—with brighter eyes than Marie had yet seen in her face, and with an expression so prolonged as almost to be a stare—and then to utter, in the softest of her many hardly-audible pipes, the word:

  “Why?”

  “Why what?” demanded Marie, surprised into standing still in the middle of the now almost dark plaats.

  “Why mustn’t I get too thick with Sophie?”

  But that was very soon dealt with.

  “Because I say not, and not another word or you’ll get a good smack.”

  Ydette did not say another word, and they went on, at a pace which indignation on the part of the aunt, and other feelings on the part of the adopted niece, turned into an awkward blending of a march and a dawdle.

  Getting uppish was how Marie described to herself Ydette’s why? and the expression on her face as she looked up at her; there’s ungrateful for you, was her next thought, and us doing everything for her, but a single glance down at the misbehaving dawdler at her side changed the current of her musings, and she gave a great squeeze to the hand she was rather spitefully grasping. She couldn’t bear to think what it would be like if they hadn’t got Ydette, and she wasn’t a bad little thing (well, so she oughtn’t to be neither, she’d been brought up as well as anybody could bring her) and she hadn’t moped or made a fuss that day when she, Marie, had told her she and Jakoba weren’t her real aunties … except that perhaps she hadn’t understood. She was a bit slow for her age … if six really was her age.

  Ydette could remember that day, too, although the knowledge which was imparted to her on it seemed always to have been with her, for, while she felt peacefully content with Marie and Jakoba and old Mevrouw Maes, she also felt that her life with them was temporary; as if she were on a visit to them and would one day go back to somewhere else … she was not sure where it was, or if she belonged there more than she did in the house in the Sint Katelijnstraat, but certainly—oh, beyond any doubt there was a somewhere else, although when she tried to see it clearly, as if looking at a picture, it became dim, and faded away.

  Yet there was a window that looked out from a rather dark room, on to a garden, and in the garden there was a big tree whose leaves hung down until they touched the green grass, and always when she went into that room she heard a voice, going to and fro, to and fro above her head as voices always did (that was how you knew they were voices) and talking to her—to her —with a sound that made her feel the sensation of warmth and silvery softness and contentment in the palms of her hands. These feelings lived in the small, quiet room; it was rather dark, she came to understand later, because the tree outside in the garden grew near to the window, and filtered the light through its branches, hidden in long, pale-green leaves. Yes, that was the other place; there were several other places in which she was in the habit of resting and wandering about, but this was the Other Place, the one where she belonged and to which she would one day return.

  It had been a winter day when Aunt Marie had told her that she did not really belong to the aunts—a Sunday, because people were walking along the ramparts in their best clothes (they seemed very fine, these patched, fading, carefully-saved garments, to Ydette), and she and Aunt Marie had been walking along there too; at a pace dictated by the fact that their breakfast had been a drink of hot water and a piece of four-day-old bread. The cold wind smelling of the sea drove the grey clouds low over the roofs of the town and a watery yellow light lay over the frosty grass where, near them, a few people were silently strolling. From this slight elevation (they had stopped in their walk to look up at the sails of the windmill) belfry, cathedral and church were all visible, but today, their towers were dark and almost featureless against the bitter pallor of the sky. The wind pulled at Marie’s darned and rusty shawl.

  Ydette had tilted her head to look up at the sails. How high! But she knew of three other people living in the town (she thought of them as individuals, undoubtedly related to one another, because of their stupendous elevation and brooding look, and as living there) who were even higher.

  There was a pinch on her wrist; sharp, because Marie had already spoken twice without result. Ydette turned slowly, and looked up at her aunt.

  “Didn’t you hear what I said?”

  Ydette shook her head.

  “Well, I’ll have to tell you again, that’s all (you should listen). You didn’t know me and Aunt Jakoba aren’t your real aunties, did you?”

  Again Ydette moved her head. She was not startled, but neither did she possess the words for that sensation, present with her ever since she had been aware of anything at all, of being only on a visit to the house in the Sint Katelijnstraat and its inmates.

  “Well, we aren’t. I found you—you lost little thing, you.” She stooped and swiftly hugged her. “You were lying on the sand, playing with it, as good as gold.”

  Having slowly and lovingly returned the embrace, Ydette said, “I don’t like the sand.”

  “I know you don’t, and very silly it is too; why, that’s useful stuff, that is; what would we do for soap without that?—no, it was the other kind of sand I found you on, all white and clean, down by the sea.”

  She looked keenly into the face uplifted to hers, to make certain that she had been understood, but although the dark, wing-like brows were drawn together in an effort of concentration, the total effect was not one of understanding.

  Marie did not feel capable of going into it all again … not just yet, anyway. “Come on … freeze if we stay here,” she said, and they went on. “I s’pose,” she began again in a moment, “that you can’t remember anything about your mother, can you?”

  They had given up asking her that, nearly three ye
ars ago. The gentle stare from the bright, dark eyes, the soft, wondering note in the repeated maman or maatje, had become irritating to the two sisters, full as they were of unslaked curiosity, and only Mevrouw Maes, usually much quicker-tempered than either of her daughters, had been patient then with Ydette. But none of the three had succeeded in making her say that she ‘remembered’ anything.

  Now, she silently shook her head.

  “Oh, come on. Not remember anything about your own maatje? ’Course you can.”

  Ydette made no movement this time, and Marie did not observe that she was staring, as if she were rapt, into the dull, silvery surface of the ice on the canal. No; she remembered nothing: but the word maatje called up within her those memories akin to sensations, which lived in the small, dark room: warmth, a gliding softness, a surprising yet soothing glitter beneath her feet, and all around her a shimmering warmth through which, every now and then, there came walking a beautiful, refreshingly cool thing that softly stroked her face.

  “Can’t you remember your house? (You must have had a house.) A big house, was it? Like the one across the plaats where Sophie takes us?”

  “I don’t know,” Ydette said at last, cold, hunger and a strong disinclination to reply giving to her voice an even softer note than usual.

  “Well, try and think … was it …”

  “Oh, can I go on the ice?”

  “If you want to. Here, catch hold,” and Marie, untroubled by fears of a child’s getting dirty or catching cold when there were so many other unspeakably terrible things that might befall it, stretched out her umbrella and watched smiling while Ydette went to its full length on the thick grey ice, and even with a fleck of colour in her cheeks, made a little slide down which she ventured, hunger and cold and dreams forgotten.

  But the dreams returned; indeed, they never completely left her; they lived always within the thin-walled house of her childish skull; like a group of friends whose company was both familiar and beloved … and yet they were also like a coven of enchanters, at work on transforming the world on which she daily opened her eyes.

  Now, as the sound of the carillon distantly chiming the half-hour came in through the window, she got up from the table and went into the shop again. Aunt Marie was sitting back on her stool and knitting fast; there were people busily coming and going across the plaats—but there were no more customers today, because everything was sold out except a few carrots that had got left over from the day before yesterday and were now very juiceless indeed. Ydette settled herself on her own stool and took out her own work, a bit of lace, and settled down to the long, quiet, hot afternoon.

  The hours crept by, without any sensation of weariness or waiting in their passing, and marked at the quarters by the cool, silvery falling of the carillon’s notes across the roofs and spires. Occasionally Marie would glance up and sigh and mutter something about Mother having a long hunt of it for something to eat in Oostende this afternoon, but it was no use, she would go, you couldn’t stop her; then she would settle to her task again.

  Ydette endured the emptiness in her stomach, and looked forward to supper-time, and every now and again she would refresh herself by a long gaze across at the big house, showing more clearly now, as autumn approached, between the branches of the chestnut tree that were beginning to shed their leaves. She was hoping to get a glimpse of Madame van Roeslaere; that small, thin, upright, elegant figure, in its dark clothes and close feathered hats, was one of deep interest and admiration to Ydette, although she had only seen Madame van Roeslaere in the distance, walking quickly across the plaats in the early morning on her way to Mass—“there goes Madame van Roeslaere, she hasn’t missed a morning since they got back”—or standing at the door of the big house to say good-bye to Father Jozef or some of them up at the Béguinage who had been there to see her about something.

  The figure of Monsieur van Roeslaere was one of almost more mystery and interest to Ydette, not only because she saw him at even greater intervals—usually only of a morning about eight o’clock, getting into the big car driven by Georges Dupont, who lived in the side-turning just across the plaats—but because out at the farm they often talked about the place near there where the big foreign flowers were grown, which Monsieur van Roeslaere owned. Ydette had seen its chimneys, standing up tall and black out of the willow trees and the orchards, when she and Jooris were out playing, and often in school, when she should have been bent over her books, she was staring out of the window and dreaming about those flowers that came from the countries far away over the sea. Monsieur van Roeslaere’s great height, his bald head and the quick glitter of his glasses, every aspect of him as seen from a distance of a hundred yards away, fascinated her, and when she had been fortunate enough to see his car drive up in the evening, while she was sweeping down and tidying up for the night, she felt throughout the rest of the day a sensation of happiness and content, a kind of soft glow, resting in the hinterland of her mind.

  It was well after sunset when Mevrouw Maes’s short, sturdy figure was seen coming at a quick hobble across the plaats, and with her, unexpectedly, was the tall, striding shape of Jakoba. They were welcomed by the two in the shop with exclamations of commiseration, satisfaction and surprise.

  “We thought you was lost, Mother!”

  “You been away nearly five hours!”

  “Come on, sit down, sit down,” and the old woman, without showing any signs of fatigue, let them put her into her usual chair, but she sat upright in it and replied to their enquiries with rather testy mutters as she indicated the carpet-bag at her feet.

  “What do you think I got in there? Pork!”

  “No!” Ydette and Marie, while Jacoba whisked the empty boxes about, joyfully exclaimed.

  “Where did you get it? In Oostende?”

  “Oostende! No, that’s full of soldiers … in Zandeburghe.”

  “In Zandeburghe? You’ve never been to Zandeburghe, Mother?”

  “Yes, she has,” Jakoba’s voice was dour; “me and Klaas was busy with our painting and up she come.”

  “And what do you think?” Mevrouw Maes continued triumphantly. “Klaartje knew me. After all these years. Didn’t he, Jakoba?”

  “He knew you’d got a carrot for him,” said the daughter dryly.

  “And those can go down to him tomorrow,” said the old woman, glancing at the withered few on the trestle, and when Jakoba said that he wouldn’t thank you for them, she retorted that he wasn’t fussy.

  “Not fussy! How about all those left-over flowers you used to make me take down to him before the war? Catch him eating those.”

  “Why should he eat dead flowers? or fresh ones, come to that?” demanded Mevrouw Maes with stout inconsistency. “He isn’t a cow.” She paused, thinking; Ydette had come near to her, and now Mevrouw Maes put out an arm and drew her to her side.

  “Getting better,” she said softly, with her firmly-shaped old purplish lips close to the small white ear, “just a little better, every day now.”

  “More to eat, Granny?”

  “Oh yes. Just a very little better, every day. I hope I’ll live to see the old times back again.”

  Jakoba hurled a box into a corner, with the thought that however far the country might travel back along the road to the good old times, she would never find on that road the lost strength of her right arm. Although she was horrifyingly thin, and the skin of her face was parched and yellow from years of half-starvation, the impression of vital energy and force which she had always conveyed did not appear to be impaired—until one saw that her right arm hung almost helpless. She had got into some trouble with the Germans while out working with a gang that was collecting wood for pit-props, and when she had injured it, the overseer had not troubled himself for a day or two about giving her permission to have the bone set.

  But she supposed that yes, even in six months, they had got some way back on the road towards the good old times. Klaas and Klaartje were at home again on the bit of land outs
ide Zandeburghe; she and Marie had gone over to the farm and escorted them there a week or so after the end of it all; and although Klaas was even thinner than she was, and hadn’t had a full meal for years until the British and the Americans came into Zandeburghe and there began to be food given out and things to steal, Klaartje was all right; although he had more than once been in the gravest danger of being sent off to work in one of those places east, Uncle Matthys had managed to save him somehow, and also to find a bit for him to eat; not enough, of course, but something.

  Klaas’s shed had fallen in. (He reckoned the noise from the anti-aircraft guns in the pits outside the town had done that; night after night.) But the place was still standing and he was patching it up again. And he had contrived to get hold of two pots of blue and yellow paint and they’d started painting the cart. There had been questions from Mevrouw Maes and Marie, of course, about the bathing-machines, but she had said loudly that they had gone for good, and added that it wasn’t no use asking where or how. Father had bought those machines forty years ago to start the business with—Jakoba knew the story backwards, how Father and maatje had saved their money to buy them, and gone without tobacco and meat … but if Klaas hadn’t broken them up for firewood he would have frozen to death. And then him going into Oostende, when the Twelve-mile Defence Zone was set up, and sharing the cellars with those German deserters—oh, he’d had a war of it. It was no wonder that when they were kneeling down side by side painting the cart on his bit of land, with Klaartje feeding just near, and the sun warm on their backs, that they hadn’t been able to believe it was all over. Neither of them had said anything, all morning, except when Klaas swore to himself in a whisper over the painting from time to time.

  Marie was rolling up the carpet. Mist was beginning to waver in white, ghostly swirls along the black, motionless canal, the last light was dying off the windows in Our Lady’s tower, and a deadly dampness was stealing out onto the air. The trestles were pushed against the walls, the scales had gone into the kitchen, the wooden box that held the money was already under Jakoba’s ‘good’ arm. Mevrouw Maes had gone on into the house, and already the pork was simmering on the little stove that Marie had lit about six o’clock. Now she was putting out the spoons and forks and three pieces of stale bread on the table; the kitchen smelt good with the four onions, saved from the bag sent in that morning from the farm, which were in the stew.