But the mere thought of Claregates softened her feelings, and she looked less chillily at the bathing-girl. How odd, to see so much hair, and eyes like that, in the glass when one got up in the morning.
“I’m sorry my absurd junior interrupted your lunch,” she said, swept away by one of those impulses towards friendliness which she was apt to regret afterwards, and speaking in the manner which she thought of as abrupt and charming. “Please don’t hurry, will you—er, take your time—er——” the impulse drew back, like some sea-creature into its shell, and her voice faltered away.
What did the girl think of her? Oh, the eccentric English mees, probably, what did it matter anyway?
“You’ve nearly finished now, haven’t you?” Ida was demanding of the Belgian girl, who only laughed and threatened to throw the apple core, which she was industriously eating, at her. And if I do manage to stay in the house for an hour this afternoon, Nora was thinking, out of the glare and all this appalling outdoorness, there aren’t any books except the ones we’ve brought, and Daddy meant what he said about strictly bagging the Toynbee first … oh lord! Here’s Adriaan, now, as if everything weren’t tiresome enough.
Perhaps it was an unconscious wish to see how another girl would respond to the approach of the youth now running quickly down the steps leading from the digue to the sands, that caused her to glance again at the Belgian child. Yes, she had seen him all right—and really, what a change in her expression, it was quite dopey … it was a pity, Nora thought, that people who looked like that couldn’t see their own faces: it might cure them. The Belgian girl was standing up now, and it did not please Nora that she displayed a height at least two inches greater than Nora’s own. But they were both taller than that ghastly little Adriaan, which was something.
“Hullo, Nora; hullo, little fat Ida,” he said, coming up to the group with his usual casual bounce, and then his eyes just moved towards the bathing-girl, not really looking at her, and, he said pleasantly, “Hullo,” before they came back to Nora. “Look, can you come for a drive?” he went on. “I’ve got the car—it’s only the second-best one, but you’ll have to put up with that—on the digue and I’ve collected your parents; your father wants to go and look at a house in Ghent.”
“Oh … yes, thank you … we’d like to.” Nora, thinking that at least it would be better than an afternoon on the glaring sands, turned to Ida, who was circling round Klaartje and staring up, with an expression on her freckled face not unlike awe, at the lofty satin slope of his rump. “Dogfight, come along … we’re going for a drive.”
“Where’s Christopher?” Adriaan went on, taking out a case and lighting a cigarette and keeping his eyes fixed rather determinedly on Nora’s face.
“Need you ask? ‘Shooting’, as the mysterious jargon has it, the belfry, I imagine, or ‘shooting’ something, anyway.”
“I’ve got a new projector to show him. I hope to make him vomit with envy … What’s Les Alouettes like? Bloody?”
She looked curiously at the stocky confident figure, dressed in sharply-creased sailcloth jeans of light rust-red and a T-shirt of shrill lime-yellow. Really, it was rather beastly, how he always said spiteful things in strong language. His vocabulary was as ugly as his face.
“It’s rather intimidating,” she said; “the salon’s full of velvet sofas and polished tables, we’re almost afraid to breathe in there, and Mummy’s decided to lock it up for the three weeks we’re staying here. Most peculiar, velvet sofas in the middle of the dunes … but you’ve seen it, haven’t you? You must have, you arranged it all with your family’s friends and everything.”
“Yes I did, and a bloody bore it was … I just wanted to make sure that you thought the place was godawful,” and he laughed. “Come on, they’re waiting up there, and I’m in a hurry.”
“Dogfight! Marche!” Nora called, turning her head. When she turned back once more to Adriaan, she was just in time to catch his eyes fixed, but absolutely fixed, on the Belgian girl’s face. She was dusting sand off the floor of the cart with a hand-brush, and not looking at him, but he was staring at her with the oddest expression. Dear me, thought Nora, experiencing an uncomfortable mingling of excitement, curiosity and firmly-rooted distaste. It must be ‘the usual thing’. But the child couldn’t be more than fifteen (he, of course, must be getting on for twenty, so, she supposed, in his case it was more understandable, however peculiar his taste might be); the girl would only have been in the Fifth at Claregates, and if her dopey expression and his very odd one really meant that something of ‘that kind’ was going on between them, Nora thought it was rather disgusting.
Dangerous for the Belgian child, too. Because Adriaan was horrid; he always had been, ever since he used to tweak Nora’s hair (not in a handful but just one hair at a time, so that it really hurt her and had more than once set up a kind of neuralgia) when they had all been children together at Port Meredith.
A solemn, noble feeling began to stir in Nora. She looked seriously at the Belgian child and thought in a sensible off-hand way that if ever she should need rescuing from Adriaan, she, Nora, would help her. Then, glowing slightly, she turned to her sister.
“Dogfight! Come on,” she called, impatiently now.
Ida came dawdling round the side of Klaartje and said, with a determined look that matched her square, freckled face, “I’m going for a ride in the cart. You’ve finished your lunch,” accusingly, to Ydette, “come on.”
Ydette, who was slowly re-tying the strings of the white apron that had caused Ida to compare her to a programme-seller, looked at her and smiled.
“But first we must find some other children to make the ride,” she said soothingly, “if mademoiselle,” with a polite, but not shy, glance at the elder sister, “will wait here with you, I will go to see if other children are coming.”
“There isn’t time,” Adriaan cut in loudly, his dark face reddening, “I’m in a hurry.” He added, more quietly, to Ydette, “You heard me say that mademoiselle’s parents are waiting up on the digue” Now he was looking full at her, but Nora thought that although his voice had sounded angry, his face did not look it. “You’d better tell mademoiselle that you can’t take them in the cart.”
Ydette hesitated, glancing first at Nora with a questioning expression. Then slowly her eyes came back to his, and rested there, dreamily.
“Of course, there isn’t time,” said Nora with authority. “Come on, Dogfight, don’t be a bore, Mummy and Daddy are waiting.”
“There is time, there is time,” Ida exclaimed passionately. “I’ve been waiting all the morning to go in it, I got up espec-ially early and I was good all the time in the Bank while we changed the tra-vel-ling cheque, and now you say there isn’t time. It’s not fair.”
This fatal verdict, prelude to many an exhausting argument, landed threateningly amidst the elders and caused Nora to give a loud groan; but Adriaan turned quickly and said something to Ydette in what Nora, whose father spoke it fluently, knew to be Flemish.
“Tell her the cart isn’t going,” he said; “go on, tell her, I’m in a hurry.”
His eyes bored into, rather than rested upon, her face; it would have been better if no-one else had been there, but at least for a few minutes he could stop trying not to look at her. He couldn’t even guess at what she was thinking. There had come the usual change in her expression, when she looked at him. He knew it so well, having seen it during the past seven years that had passed with such extraordinary swiftness, and had changed so slightly her face, merely elongating and slightly rounding her body; he had seen that look in the light cast by winter snow, and in the windy, leaf-scattered glow of autumn evenings, and always he looked for it when he chanced to meet her, but still he did not know what it meant; the steady, bright, dreaming look. It maddened him.
Ydette turned docilely to Ida and knelt down beside her on the sand while the other two watched, and began to talk to her almost in a whisper; presently Ida nodded in a grudging way; suddenl
y she flung her arms about Ydette’s neck and bestowed upon her a strangling embrace. Then, portentously, she nodded.
“Mind—it’s a secret,” she said, in a tone mingling confidence with warning, and Ydette smiled and nodded too.
“Well, that seems to have ‘taken care’ of that,” said Nora, sighing loudly, “now, perhaps, we can get up and relieve the alarm of our waiting parents.”
She nodded pleasantly at Ydette and turned away; it did occur to her that she might say something about seeing her again soon, but she resisted the impulse; no doubt they would see her again, and many times, for Ida was already announcing in her most passionate tone that she liked that girl, she liked her, and Nora herself—she confessed it—found the Belgian rather interesting.
She was accustomed to such sudden, brief attractions for younger girls, which passed as rapidly as they came; something maternal and protective, something in her that was chivalrous and perhaps fated to wither, unless it found an outlet, was stirred from time to time by the face and personality of some newcomer—and, because of this latest interest for which she slightly despised herself, the holiday at Zandeburghe already promised to be a little less dull.
Now definitely in Adriaan’s charge, the party was walking as smartly as the soft, heaped, sliding sand would permit, towards the steps ascending the sloping stone wall to the digue. She said casually to him:
“Do you know that rather unusual-looking child?”
“Know her?” he said violently. “Of course I know her; her aunts keep a greengrocery on the corner of the plaats, just across from us.”
“Well … I was only wondering … she is rather unusual-looking, don’t you agree?”
She was well aware that she was trying to pump him, but, although she was a little ashamed of herself, she could not resist the faint, distasteful yet enjoyable excitement that came upon her at the idea of ‘something’ between those two. She also told herself that if she was to be in a position ever to help that long, dreamy-looking child to ‘get out of some hole with Adriaan’ she must know how he felt about her. At present it seemed that the mere mention of her put him into a temper. But that, Nora remembered from former days, had never been difficult.
“Is she? You think so, do you?” He stood aside to allow her to go up the steps, which she did awkwardly, made self-conscious as usual by any action which pointed to the fact of her being a girl, and she and Ida waited at the top for him while he came bounding up. He really does look much older than he is, she thought, perhaps it’s because he wears his clothes as if he didn’t care about being fat and small and ugly. As he joined them, he went on:
“Her looks might come from anywhere, I suppose—I mean, she might be anybody. She’s a foundling—isn’t that the word? Yes,” as Nora nodded, “a foundling.”
“Dear me. How very romantic. What’s her name?”
“Ydette,” put in Ida importantly, who was marching along beside them with her chest, in its striped jersey, stuck out, “she told me her name, Ydette Maes. That’s what we were whispering. I told her mine, too—Ida Ruddlin, The Link House, Ashbourne, Sussex, England, Great Britain, Europe, the world——”
“Yes, all right, very interesting.” Nora’s tone was crushing, because she wanted to hear more about Ydette. “Is she a war orphan, Adrian?”
“She was found just before the war—or when it had only just started, I believe. But I really don’t know all the details,” he answered, while he thought how often he had ‘pumped’ people—the shop-keepers, his mother, her old friends, even the Sisters at the Béguinage when he was dragged along to grin and stare at the floor while his mother jawed with them—he had cunningly, casually encouraged all the locals to relate, over and over again, the scanty details that were known about the finding of Ydette in the big dune. “My mother will tell you—if you’re interested,” he went on, “Ydette is a protégée of hers; she taught her to speak English.”
“I thought she had an unusually good accent.”
“Did you? It’s a wonder if she has—she’s a bloody fool at everything else—half-witted, practically, or so everybody round here says … and my mother says that the only thing for her to do when she does go out to work is to get a job packing the flowers at my father’s place; you don’t need brains to do that; any ass” (he gave it the long a and grinned as he spoke) “can do it. It’s mostly done by women. And the little swine will be able to keep her hands beautiful.”
“Dear me, does she make a fuss about them?” Nora screwed up the blunt members which were thrust into the pockets of her shorts and flushed at the memory of those repeatedly made, and repeatedly broken, vows to give up nail-biting.
“How in hell should I know? Females always do and hers are very long and … bony,” he ended quickly. He must pull himself together. Nora was a fool about everything that mattered (she was clever academically, but with a woman that neither mattered nor counted), but even she might detect his desire to talk about Ydette if he kept on doing it; she would see through the contempt he put into his voice and discover what was behind it. And what was behind it? He was damned if he knew.
“Oh, there is Chris,” he said, relieved to change the subject.
The three elder Ruddlins did not appear to be as tall as they actually were, while they waited in the van Roeslaeres’ car, but that was because they were sitting down and their long legs were folded; Christopher’s seemed as if his knees might at any moment touch his chin, and the books piled on Everard’s lap were pushed uncomfortably high against his chest; May, although not, of course, a Ruddlin by birth, suggested in her elongated gawkiness that she had both been chosen as a Ruddlin’s mate for that reason, and had, during twenty years or so of being one, become longer and leaner than she was naturally. They were all sitting quietly and they were all silent: Everard was looking down into one of the narrow lanes of old houses leading from the digue into the town; Christopher was staring off to sea with his eyes screwed up (“thinking about long shots,” decided Nora, as their party approached); and May was reading, with the wisps of hair to which she had long ago become resigned, making shadows, as they blew about, on the pages of her book.
“Here we are,” observed Nora, in whom there was an occasional impulse, that was not a family characteristic, to make unnecessary remarks, “did the Belgian Mrs Mop turn up, Mummy?”
“Yes, and most efficient she is. Speaks some English, too.”
“That’s a blessing. So now we shan’t have to rely upon Daddy’s doubtless rather rusty Flemish,” said Nora, surveying the accommodation in the car and feeling relieved that she would not have to sit next to Adriaan, who was going to drive. The car was so large, white and opulent as to appear to English eyes slightly vulgar, but at least there was plenty of room.
“My Flemish is decidedly rusty,” said Everard, turning away from his long gaze at the tall pale houses in the narrow lane, “but then it’s a long time since I’ve used it.”
May looked up from her book. “How long? I was trying to remember this morning.”
“Sixteen years,” he answered decidedly, “I was last here in the autumn of ’thirty-seven.”
“Here? I thought the delights of Zandeburghe were new to you,” said Nora.
“So they are—or almost. I was at a place called Door-waden, some distance inland.” He turned round to see what Adriaan, who had disappeared round the back of the car, was doing.
“You were getting material for the additions to Grandpapa’s history, weren’t you?” asked Nora.
Her father nodded without turning round, and at that moment Adriaan slammed the boot, with that violence of movement which was sometimes startling in him, and came round to the front of the car.
He offered no explanation of the delay in starting, and it was only Christopher, whose interest in cinema and pre-occupation with the techniques of camera work and habit of looking about for unusual ‘shots’ made him unusually observant of detail, who had noticed that ‘van Roeslaere’ had done noth
ing with the boot but stare into it for five minutes.
He meant to keep us waiting, he decided; he’s annoyed because Papa and Mama van R. have told him off to keep an eye on the old English friends and visitors and make himself useful to them; he didn’t like having to meet us at Oostende yesterday, it stood out about a mile, and I’ll bet he’d had to drag himself away from somewhere disreputable to do it, too. … He certainly doesn’t improve with time. But I’m damned if I gratify him by taking any notice of his goings on. He’s an odd one. And then some, thought Christopher, who affected the slang of the ’twenties.
He had the Ruddlin slenderness and height, but had inherited the rusty-golden fairness that had been his mother’s in her youth, rather than his father’s dark eyes and hair, and he was—although they seldom referred to the fact because they were not a family interested in looks—exceedingly good-looking, with straight features and good teeth and bright hair that fell in a straight Hitler-lock over his high white brow. He had a naturally brusque, rather managing way with him that his two years in the Army had developed; it broke out from long silences, and implied a capacity for getting things done in the best and quickest way; he wasn’t in the least inept; he gave an impression of being very interested in one thing, which kept him thinking about it during those long silent withdrawals of himself from whatever happened to be going on—as, in fact, he was; he might, when he grew older, seem just a little intimidating. He was rather clever, but not so clever as Nora, who cared for him better than anyone else in her world. He was nearly twenty-two, to her seventeen.