Although the mornings were cold, the days were cloudless and hot. One afternoon about three o’clock, Marie glanced irritably at Ydette. Then, in silence, she handed her an apple. It was the smallest of those sent in that morning by Uncle Matthys, but it had a twig and a brown leaf still clinging to it. Marie asked what was the matter?
“My stomach’s talking,” was the matter-of-fact answer, given in a voice so soft that it could hardly be heard.
“Well, so’s mine,” not unsympathetically. “It’ll have to go on talking, and so will yours, until tonight. You know that as well as I do. You’d better go into the house and get yourself a drink of water.”
A year or so ago, the instruction would have been accompanied by a kiss. But Marie had now passed the emotional stage in the life of an ageing woman, and the charming, doll-like Ydette of six years previously had grown into a dark and silent girl with a white face and shockingly thin arms and legs, whose height and appearance did nothing to arouse any tenderness that might be left in an adopted aunt after endless months of terror and suffering and hunger.
Ydette went slowly through the massive door, shutting it carefully behind her, and drew the water into a pottery mug from the old leaden spout above the stone sink, and drank deeply. Then she sat down at the table and rested her head on her arms.
Auntie would not mind, just for a moment; and her eyes moved, in a sort of apathetic content, round the room while she held the apple to her nose and breathed its fresh juicy smell. It was one of the scents of the farm, and pictures of Jooris’s red laughing face came to her; this time, his hands were filled with pale brown eggs. Last Sunday they had eaten a mighty omelette made with a dozen and a half of them for their dinner; Uncle Matthys and Grootmoedertje and the aunties and Aunt Janine and Jooris and Ydette. Every bit had gone. There was no longer any François to keep guard over the eggs and all the other food at the farm, and make certain that the Germans got it. The people at Sint Niklaas had shaved François’ head and then shot him; Aunt Jakoba had told Ydette about it. He had once let Ydette have a drink of milk while hiding her behind a copy of The Cornflower,1 that he was pretending to read. A Rural Guard, François had been. Slowly, carefully, savouring every scrap, she ate half of the apple.
She sighed, a funny little breath that came through her nose. That was better; the pain in her belly had almost gone and the light, singing, droney feeling in her head too. But she didn’t want to get up and go back to the shop, and if it hadn’t been that someone from the big house might come out of the front door, as they often did of an afternoon, and she might miss the joy of seeing them, she would have wanted to stay where she was much longer. The air was dim and cool, and through the little window, over the stiff white curtain ironed by Aunt Marie while it was still wet in order to hold its shreds in place, the hot sunny plaats and the brown chestnut tree in front of the big house were like a picture.
She looked dreamily down at the old sea-blue tiles of the floor, scrubbed as usual that morning by Aunt Jakoba with the grey sand that ‘we have to use nowadays’ instead of soap, because soap must be kept for washing themselves … she could smell the faint freshness of their clean surface … she could smell, too, the grey sand in its wooden box beside the sink; a cold, sad damp smell which, ever since that day when Koenraed had pulled up the stones in the street, she had disliked.
Now, turning her head away so that she could not even see the box, she remembered how they had all been playing in the road—though Aunt Marie had told her not to—and Koenraed had begun pulling up the stones, and there was the sand underneath, all grey and crushed and damp and sad, and then the Germans had come. (You must never, never speak to one or get in their way. When you see one, run home without waiting a single minute. You must never, never say to anyone that they are the wicked Germans. Now promise. Say this Saint’s name after me, and promise.) Ydette had often seen the Germans. They were dressed all in grey, and they looked like men.
Koenraed had spat at them, and dropped one of the big stones on a German’s foot, and they had taken him away. He was shouting out bad words, and the Germans had told the other children to put the stones back and go indoors. But there was what he had spat, lying on the grey sand, and Ydette had stood against the wall of a house and hidden her face, refusing to look, while Lyntje, who was a servant now at the big house, had helped the boys put the stones back in the road. The sand was hidden, she could not see it any more, but Ydette knew that it was there, under the stones of the street; the sad, grey, ugly sand lying crushed beneath the big stones that were almost too heavy for all her strength to move. Poor sand; poor, ugly-coloured, grey stuff. She was sorry for it, and yet it disgusted her, and when she had to take some of it in her hands to scour a saucepan or clean the sink, the feel of the moist, gritty grains against her skin set it tingling unpleasantly.
She heard the carillon chime the quarter. She would sit here for another five minutes and then go back to the shop, and she would spend the time in looking at the big house.
That place, and the people who had come back to live in it, charmed and held her thoughts even as did the soaring tower of the Belfort, whose pale brown face diversified by the dark eyes of its numerous arched windows watched above the life of the market square, and although, of course, she could not go into the big house any longer, she found such silent delight in remembering the many times that she had followed Sophie through the high, grave, dignified door, that her memories almost consoled her for the loss of the reality.
They used to go while the Germans who controlled the farms round about were still working there, before the refugees from Zandeburghe and those places had spread their beds and things over the floors and Sophie and Marieke had hidden the pretty china ornaments away; the Germans went home at night, so the big house was empty. They would often go in the late afternoon, when the shadows were getting long across the plaats (that was in the days before Ydette went to school).
“Goed hemel, Sophie, you don’t carry that key loose in your pocket? It might fall out,” Aunt Marie would ask, while Sophie, standing on the doorstep, hunting in the depths of her ragged jacket amongst ration-cards, bits of knitting, good-luck tokens and love-letters, would retort, “It hasn’t yet.”
Ydette would look up at the dark red-brick front, admiring the windows outlined in white stones and crowned by half-arches; then, enjoying every moment of the slow ascent made by her eyes, she would tilt back her head and send them high, higher, highest, until they rested upon the tall, stepped façade divided in three places by a gap in its structure which revealed the sloping dark crimson tiles of the main roof lying behind—all seeming to float solidly in a deep sky of afternoon blue. What would it be like to see out of one of those highest windows? One day Sophie took her right up to one of the very highest rooms and she found out: all the roofs of the town were spread out below, coloured red and dark blue and silvery grey and brown and cream and—oh! over them peered the Three, watching her from so much nearer than usual that she felt a strong emotion for which she had no name: it was embarrassment. But here Sophie screamed loudly and pulled her back into the room.
They stood outside the front door while Sophie inserted the key; the door was made of a pale glossy wood and set in a recess and it was overhung by a half-circle of smaller bricks repeating the curve above the windows. Between two of the latter there was a small white statue of Our Lady smiling down upon visitors, and along the brick course above the largest one three shields of arms in weathered white stone were embossed with devices of helmets, mailed gauntlets, mythical birds and snarling beasts with awkward, threatening paws.
It was all a picture, painted in dim soft red and rain-softened white, and when Ydette took a last long stare upwards, for the sheer pleasure of looking, she saw in the final, sweeping wave-shaped white scrolls of the roof … something … it was something she knew, a very, very long time ago, and it was moving over her and above her, and there had been the coldness that ran horridly after her, pulling
at her, and then the warmth and the silveriness and the softness … a long, long, long time ago.
“What can you see up there, Yddy? Birdies? Good Lord, don’t sigh like that; you’ll blow us all away. You’d better take your shoes off here, put ’em down on that old Cornflower, it’s good for something else besides you-know-what at last … read it? yes, I should think so, I’ve got something better to do, and it’s all farmer’s stuff anyway … put your sabots on that, Yddy.”
Her small sabots stood side by side with Aunt Marie’s on the newspaper. Beyond them, the black-and-white marble tiles went away into the distance as far as she could see, and there was a dazzle of brightness striking down through the high dim air. For the sun had come out and was pouring between the black curtains at the windows.
“Come on.” Sophie waved a great arm like one of the sails on the windmill on the ramparts, and then she stooped and picked Ydette up.
“No need to carry that great lump, Sophie,” said Marie, who had her reasons for not encouraging intimacy with Sophie Bouckaerts. She spoke almost in a whisper, awed by the darkness and the stillness and the aura of the absent Germans, but Sophie retorted that there wasn’t no need to whisper, no one wasn’t dead yet, thank God, and carried Ydette across the hall to a window where the curtains had been pulled aside to admit the air.
“There. Aren’t they pretty? Little babies with wings.”
“Angels,” said Marie severely; there was going to be talk of babies quite soon enough, with Sophie, without starting now. She looked disparagingly at the cupids from a distance.
“And … the lady …” said Ydette, almost in a whisper, gazing dreamily.
“Yes; got no clothes on; must be cold, mustn’t she? Now you come upstairs and see the china ladies I got put away in my room, they’re much better; they are pretty, if you like.”
Sophie always carried her up the wide, shallow staircase whose gleaming surface was scented with the beeswax familiar to Ydette at home, where it was used on the six tiny steps leading up to the bedrooms, and Marie would creep along after them, in her black stockings, following their indifferently whistling guide. Ydette sat upright, resting comfortably against Sophie’s big bosom, and tasting with delight the airy, spacious, richly-coloured dusk all about her, to which no bounds seemed set. Marie, for her part, never lost a sensation of guilt at being there at all (well-founded enough, for Madame van Roeslaere, for all her piety, was no encourager of democratic theories, and would have been annoyed indeed to see decent Marie Michiels creeping in stockings up her staircase—Germans in the big house were one thing, but people who knew their proper place tramping all over it were quite another), and Marie also retained from these visits an impression of old men in queer hats staring disapprovingly down at her from the walls, and bad women in outlandish dresses that showed their chests: all of them—the ones in the pictures, the ones in the big books, and especially the little ones made of china that Sophie and Marieke kept hidden in those old cupboards in the walls of their bedrooms—they were all doing this, and Marie wondered whether the sight would harm Ydette? On the whole, she was inclined to agree with Jakoba, who after one visit had said that there was nothing in the big house to interest people like the Maes. But Marie always went there when Sophie asked her to; because she would not trust Sophie alone with Ydette.
For Sophie was no longer a good girl. Marie had long suspected it, and now the contours of Sophie’s dress were confirming her suspicions. It was not the baby; had Sophie and André been married she would have welcomed the baby—with reservations, it was true; babies made work, babies cost money to keep—but she wouldn’t have disapproved. No; it was all this shameless whistling, and making no attempt to hide anything, that was so affronting. Sophie did not seem to care what anyone thought.
“There’s a heap of stuff here, Sophie,” Marie would say hoarsely, at last.
“Oh, you ought to see what we got stowed away; this isn’t worth nothing,” said Sophie, shrugging. Marie glanced at her, but she knew that the broad, flat lips would reveal as little as did the round, pale eyes. It was funny; Sophie did not mind everyone knowing she was going with André, but there were some things you would never get out of her, try as you might. Marie would dearly have liked to know where Madame van Roeslaere’s gold and silver things were hidden.
“But why do they want so many things?” she persisted, as they climbed the last flight of stairs; “one, I can understand, or perhaps two; you put it on your table or on the wall and everyone can see you’ve got something worth a lot of money—but whole walls and drawers and rooms full of ’em …” She shook her head.
“Oh, this is nothing,” was all Sophie said again.
“I wonder the Germans haven’t had them.”
“They have had some—couldn’t stop ’em—but not so much as you might think. They’ve been told to behave proper, see, so’s we shall get really fond of ’em … and me and Marieke, we keep on the soft side of them so’s we can keep the place clean … but don’t you worry. When the Second Front comes …”
“You think we’re going to win then, Sophie? Still?”
“’Course we’re going to. Come on, Yddy, now here’s something you’ll like.”
They were only a few of the choicest china figures hidden in Sophie’s cupboard, but Ydette could have looked for ever at the monkey musicians fiddling away on violins and blowing and beating on trumpets and drums, and the shepherd with his lambs placidly curled at his feet, and the goddess with her tiny bosom gleaming white above her green draperies, while best of all were the three china ladies, those “regular princesses” of whom Sophie had told Ydette long before she had seen them; the dashing belles wearing tricorne hats and dancing arm in arm, with their six pale-blue slippers kicking up saucily under the seven rows of white lace that swelled out their pink, hooped skirts.
“I s’pose, if ever things do come right again, those’ll all be Mijnheer Adriaan’s,” Marie said drearily as they went down the staircase again. “Do you still believe they got to England all right?”
Sophie nodded her head. “I know they did. I’ve heard the Mevrouw’s name on the English—” She checked herself, then hurried on, “oh yes, it’ll all go to him, and let’s hope it does his temper a bit of good.”
“P’raps there’ll be another one,” Marie tittered. “They’ll have time for it … if they’re safe in England.”
“Why, she must be getting on for sixty, Marie! … You remember there was another one? The little girl? It was a shame they lost her.”
Ydette was still resting contentedly in Sophie’s arms; there had even been a fleeting impulse to suck her thumb, but she found that she did not like it, and stopped. However, she had gradually allowed her head to droop until it rested upon Sophie’s massive shoulder, and through her eyes, half closed, she looked up drowsily at the pink curve of Sophie’s cheek.
Marie did not reply. Sophie’s voice seemed to reverberate through her bosom into Ydette’s reclining body. There was a little girl but they lost her. Her eyes opened a little wider, she stared up at Sophie’s white lashes touched to gold by the light pouring in through the windows. You was lost, you poor little thing … that was what Aunt Marie had said. They lost her. You was lost, you poor little thing. Lost. … The tips of her fingers were tingling softly, through her hands poured a stream of warmth and silvery whiteness, warm and comforting beneath her limbs. …
“Hey, don’t you go to sleep!” She started up as Sophie gave her a none-too-gentle shake. “It’s not bed-time yet, worse luck!” with a grin at Marie, who tried to look disapproving but could not help returning it, “now, you come along to the kitchen and we’ll have a bit of something.” She allowed Ydette to slide out of her arms and down the considerable expanse of herself, now augmented by André Kamiel’s baby. “There. Did you like the pretty ladies?”
Ydette nodded, and while Marie, who did not have the habit of thanking people and in any case would not have thanked Sophie Bouckaerts for anythi
ng, was glumly resuming her sabots, she whispered “Dank U.”
“That’s a good girl. Why, I could eat you up, I could.” Ydette staggered slightly under the impact of a kiss. “Now you come on round the back.”
“Good Lord, Sophie, how you can sleep here alone beats me; it’s as big as the Palais de Justice up at Brussels,” marvelled Marie, when, the pick-nick of substitute coffee and bread sprinkled with a few grains of sugar being concluded, they were being seen off at the front door. It was early summer twilight now, with a harmless soft rain drifting down, yet there was no peace in the little square surrounded by its beautiful old houses; the air seemed to be silently choking back a scream. Behind the tall shape of Sophie, standing squarely in the doorway of the big house, the black-and-white marble floor and the broad staircase were just visible, going off into stillness and deep dusk.
“Lord, I don’t mind,” she called back, looking full at Marie with a face even more stolid than usual, “I’m used to it.”
She waved a great hand at them and shut the door.