ON AN AUTUMN morning nearly six years later, Adèle van Roeslaere stood at the window of her bedroom and looked, first to the left and then to the right, down the expanse of the canal.

This was the moment towards which her heart and mind had constantly been turning in anticipation during the time of exile, and now, standing motionless in the still, hazy sunlight, she drank in the moment as if it had been water. From the topmost rooms of the big house to those that were on a level with the plaats, there came soft rumours of domestic sounds, sober, satisfying intimations that her home was alive and in use again.

But suddenly, as she stood there, she ceased to hear them, and the deep pleasure that they brought to her ebbed away as if it were lifeblood from a wound. The water, lapping gently against the stones immediately beneath her window, was fresh as the realization of her hopes; lively,—for this was one of the wider canals down which currents and ripples flowed—and of no colour but the reflection of light, as water should be, and it danced; in spite of the chill in the air, and the October quality of the sunlight, it was dancing. And she had seen the houses on the opposite side of the canal, and had been looking eagerly at the façades of ancient, richly-coloured brick, for more than a minute before, with a frightful inward gasp and pang, she recollected what had happened in the last six years to her friends and neighbours.

Their windows were shuttered, and the hinges of the shutters were rusted into place, or they were curtainless, and dim with the settled dust of years. She had not been home for as long as a day, yet already she knew that she must live for the remainder of her life with the memories of the van der Goes, the Liedts, the Aadenburgs, who had all gone. Marieke had told her the news —although it could not be called ‘news’ in the ordinary sense, because it had all happened years ago. Years ago. For some years, now, Liz and Margot and Henri had been dead or—in one of those places.

Adèle quickly pressed both her preposterously long and milky and slender hands over her eyes. When she took them away again, the still, warm, sunny air gave her nothing: no echo of sedate, middle-aged voices chatting on, while the evening light died off the water under the windows; no pictures of her women friends, wearing the furs of winter and swinging their skates from their gloved hands, turning back to her with laughter. There was nothing left but the quiet, sunlit façades reflected in the water, with their shutters drawn over their windows like the eyelids in the face of one who has been granted a peaceful death.

I should have stayed on and died with them, she thought. Oh, how do people who don’t believe in God manage to go on bearing to stay alive? and, turning quickly away from the window, she went with her brisk step across to the narrow bed, a nun’s bed in shape, and fell, uncontrollably, with her face pressing against the lace of the coverlet. Using the prescribed words of her Church, she began to pray.

In a moment she assumed a position more reverent and more likely, from mere force of habit, to restore self-command, and was sending up petitions for mercy upon the worn, shaken, shabby city and its starved and haggard, but unbroken, people, who were already at work again. Grant them to lead the lives of human beings once more, she prayed.

But she soon checked the measured outpourings of petition, gratitude and praise, and got up from her knees and went across to the dressing-table.

Marieke had arranged the gold and silver trays and jars and mirrors and brushes there, and they looked just the same; no one would think that for nearly six years they had been buried under a stone in the paved garden. Once, they had been a cause of guilt and distaste, in their value and numerousness and luxury, to their owner; now, she scarcely saw them. She looked, with an almost equal lack of interest, at the reflection of her pale face, and mouth with its flattened lower lip. She glanced into the long glass, then her eye lingered on the yellow dahlias that Marieke had arranged around the room, and she remembered how she used to feel, before Father Jozef with his amused and impatient eloquence had convinced her otherwise, that her passion for flowers was a sin.

The new parlourmaid put her face round the door and announced, in a voice livelier than it would be after Marieke had had the training of it for six months, that luncheon was ready; and Adèle went downstairs to eat it. What a great tower of hair the child had, and a skirt almost touching her ankles; it looked like fancy dress.

Well, she could not be more than seventeen, at the most, and they were all dressing like that in the first blessed relief of being able to do, in small ways, what they liked again; all that—and it was harmless enough—could be put right with time. She would be given her dresses for her work. God in His mercy had spared much of the old life, Adèle thought, as she seated herself in the big chair with its leather covering and gilt studs; and this child, Lyntje, must have been under the special protection of some saint, that she hadn’t been taken off, like some wretched Austrian girls Adèle had heard of, to a camp where the women were compelled to … She inserted a spoon, bright as if it had never shared that six years incongruous interment under the paving-stones with the gold combs and the silver trays, into the dish containing a small quantity of some greenish-white substance.

“Creamed cabbage, Madame,” said Lyntje, in response to an enquiring glance. Her young hand looked red against the soft, old gleam of the silver platter she was holding.

“Ah yes … does it come from the shop across the plaats?” Adèle asked, and there was pleasure in asking the question, and there was fear too, and that was to become such a familiar mixture, with its bitter-sweet taste, as the weeks went on.

“Yes, Madame. Sophie went across and got it this morning.”

“They’re still there, then?”

“Oh yes, Madame.”

“Mevrouw Marie, and Mejuffrouw Jakoba, and old Madame Maes?”

“Oh yes, Madame, all of them. And the little girl.”

Adèle returned to her cabbage. Thank God they were still there. That was another piece of the old life spared. She could not remember any little girl at the shop. But she might be a relation who had come to live with them. She glanced across at the long windows, where the clear, thick white glass had formerly been diversified by a scene here and there in gold and red and violet, portraying a scene from the Bible or some shield displaying the history and genealogy of her family; from this window you could see across the plaats and take in Mevrouw Maes’ shop with the rest of the view, but the windows were still boarded over. Good Marieke … she had been so angry and distressed because she had not been able to get anyone to repair the damage before the family’s return. What reward could ever be made for Marieke’s care, and her devotion to the house?

This afternoon, thought Adèle, I’ll go through the lace with her; she’d like that, and there’s so much to be done that I don’t know where to begin first.

She knew that the lace was safe; it was a small family collection of old pieces that the women of the family all used, adding to the general store of collars and fichus and jabots and veils and cuffs as family occasions arose for buying more. Marieke had seen to the disposal of that, too. It had been fortunate that civilians, not soldiers, had been billeted in the house during the first part of the war; they were connected with the administration of the farms outside the city, and then they had been turned out in 1942 to let in some of the hundreds of thousands of refugees who came swarming in from Zandeburghe and La Panne and Oostende and Blaankenburghe when the enemy had made a defensive line along the coast twelve miles deep. But Marieke had still been there, and somehow she had managed to prevent the worst depredations.

Adèle removed her eyes from the boarded windows, where light was admitted only through the undamaged ones at the top, and let them rove, with a quiet yet exquisite sensation of homecoming and relief, over the walls of pale brown oak; they were hung with red-and-gold Spanish leather, stamped with a curvilinear design of leaves and stems and fruit … A thick arm suddenly thrust a blue bowl, containing three small green apples, under her nose, held it there for an instant, then slapped it down on the lace place-mat, with its pattern of peacocks and trees and flowers, in front of her. Certainly, Lyntje was going to need an intensive course of Marieke’s training before she was domestically ‘fit to be seen’.

Adèle peeled an apple, that she did not want, with a silver knife, thinking about the young grenadier standing on guard by the door. In England they had almost no tradition of domestic service left—and what little they did have, they were all, high and low, doing their very best to get rid of as quickly as possible. That shall not happen over here, Adèle decided, pushing aside the apple-rings and getting up from her chair; it’s uncomfortable for us and bad for them. She was critically pleased to see Lyntje spring like an athlete from the starting pistol to hold the door open for her. But that would have to be toned down, too.

She smoked a cigarette in the salon, while she read a magazine because she did not want to look at the façades of the houses across the canal (but that would have to be cured; she would have to pray until she had come to terms with that … and after all, if they were dead they were in Paradise … but suppose they weren’t dead? There were places in Russia …). She came out precisely at two o’clock, between the pilasters with their freshly gilt cornices, and went upstairs to find Marieke. Over the door of the salon, set in the woodwork itself, was a serene landscape of an Italian city with some shepherds in the foreground, under a rich blue sky, and she looked up at it thankfully as she mounted the staircase.

It afforded the greatest comfort and relief to Marieke to make a report, at last, of her stewardship and of the losses which she had been unable to prevent among the objects left in her charge. The severity of her everyday expression relaxed, a very little, while she and Madame van Roeslaere were thus occupied.

There they were, mistress and maid together again; the one sitting in a straight chair with a high back, the afternoon light falling through the tall windows onto the smooth, nutmeg-brown, panelled walls and on her white hair and pain-graven face, and the other standing in her black dress and white apron in front of the lofty press carved with apples, and wheat, and naked babies, where the lace was kept; and Marieke never had many words with which to express her feelings, or even thoughts to offer them relief, and this afternoon she was even more silent than usual. As each frail sheet of ancient creamy net, encrusted with knotted threads woven into leaves and love-knots and birds, was lifted swiftly and deftly from the press and held out for inspection, Adèle felt the peace of the home newly restored beginning to rise about her like a blessed tide. She knew that she must begin to work, and plan, and take up again the many duties dictated by her Church and her conscience that she had formerly performed (and how many more, now, with the entire country in the state it was, there were going to be!), but just for this afternoon, during this hour and a half spent with her old servant, she did not resist the temptation to be at rest.

But Marieke was silent for more than the reasons that she lacked words, and that it was not her place to chatter. She was wondering whether this was the time to tell Madame about Sophie.

She would have to know soon, of course. Everyone did know, and if Marieke did not tell Madame, someone else might, and then Madame would perhaps come to Marieke and say, what on earth do you mean by allowing Sophie to stay on in the house, when … because even the war didn’t make any difference to that sort of thing.

But Marieke did not feel like telling Madame this afternoon. Of course, it was a sin, but it was also a fact, and it was alive, and somehow when a sin took the shape of a great, healthy thing with a voice almost as big as Sophie’s own, and a body showing promise of being as large as its father’s had been, it did not seem like a sin. Father Jozef was always preaching that sin was ugly; well, Sophie’s boy was no beauty, but it did seem a bit hard to call him an ugly sin.

Marieke unfolded a christening veil with a ground of fond de neige edged by a Mechlin design of curling flowers, that had covered the downy head of many a van Roeslaere baby, and decided that for this afternoon, at any rate, she would forget little Moritz.

Madame was not asking many questions about the lace; she was going on about quite unimportant people in the town; people whose names Marieke didn’t know, sometimes; and how should she know what had happened to that smallest one of all the little boys who sang in the choir at Our Lady’s, the one with the spectacles, who strode about with his boots showing under his red skirts? or the old woman in the black bonnet at Sint Saveour’s, who sold candles and showed people to the seats there? … Marieke still had her own position and her own friends in Brugge, even though the Germans had tried to turn everything upside down for six years, and how could she possibly say what had become of such doubtless respectable, but entirely unimportant, creatures?

The afternoon drew on. The light of sunset began to tint the sky and touch with warm colour the two heads, the white one and the iron-grey, as they bent together over the creamy webs. Madame van Roeslaere was asking questions quickly, now, and as the answers—the rumours and the legends and the tales, all with their monotonous burden of dead, shot, disappeared, sent away, killed—went on, her face seemed to have taken on the yellowish-white hue of the lace. Outside in the plaats, cars went by, bells tolled with their high, remote voices, lorries rumbled across the cobbles, bicycle bells shrilly rang and everything sounded natural and right again. A little more lively than it used to be, that was all, and not so busy as it was in the main streets, because the plaats always had been rather a backwater, but there was no doubt that the city was busily, willingly, at work again, thank God. Only it still seemed … you couldn’t believe it.

At five o’clock, Adèle said, “Marieke, get me some tea, please. Just tea, nothing to eat.” She got up from her straight chair with the hard back, and settled herself in a more comfortable one near the window, and rested, and lit one of the cigarettes she had brought from England; cigarettes were still impossible to get over here.

Marieke went away and roused Lyntje out of the kitchen, where she was yawning over a copy of Life. Tea! That French fashion, and so they did it in England, too.

“All comfortable upstairs?” demanded Sophie, who had her great elbows on the table, with her chin sunk in her hands. They were only great, now, because her bones were big; no one would wonder nowadays whether Sophie could be called fat and her small eyes looked out steadily and sullenly from under a forehead deeply and redly scarred. Marieke did not answer, but quietly instructed Lyntje about what to take upstairs on a tray. When she had gone, she turned to Sophie.

“Don’t say things like that in front of her. Madame wants her trained to be a good servant.”

“Madame ought to know what she wants, after five and a half years living safe in England.”

“They had the raids, Sophie. And they didn’t know what was happening to everything over here.”

“Poor souls! I wonder they’re alive; must have been terrible.” She got slowly to her feet, easing them in the too-small, fragile, high-heeled shoes that had come in one of those parcels from America, nodded to Marieke and slouched out.

“You coming in tomorrow?” Marieke called sharply after her.

“Why not? Nothing else to do, is there?”

“Then don’t be late. You was five minutes late this morning,” tartly.

“Indeed I was not, it had not gone the hour from the Belfort, not when I was on the doorstep,” said Sophie over her shoulder, as she disappeared.

Marieke did not resent this piece of lying impertinence; she knew quite well what was best for Sophie, and she meant to go on doing it, and she was perfectly certain that in time, when there was enough to eat again, and enough to wear, and things were cleared up, Sophie would be what Marieke thought of as ‘all right’ once more. Come to that, she wouldn’t mind a new hat herself, and as for her underclothing—if you’d told her, six years ago, that a woman’s underclothing could crumble to rags in her hand, she’d have called you a liar. A black hat with a grey ribbon; broad, tied in a bow …

When she came in to see if the tea had been all that it ought to be, Madame van Roeslaere was looking out of the window.

“Who is the little girl?” she asked, without turning, as Marieke came up; “one of old Matthys Maes’ grandchildren?”

Marieke moved nearer to the window and looked out; she knew of course who Madame meant, but she liked, so much, to be with Madame again and telling her about the neighbours just as they used to six years ago. You could see right across the plaats from this window, and everything that was going on.

She shook her head.

“No, Madam. That’s Ydette. … Madame knows Mevrouw Marie, the younger sister?”

“Of course I know Marie, Marieke.”

“(Yes, Madame. I thought that perhaps Madame might have forgotten.) Well, Marie found Ydette on the great dune outside Zandeburghe, on the very day that Madame left for England, and she brought her home to live with them.”

“Ydette? What an unusual name.”

“Yes, Madame. But Jakoba (Madame will remember Jakoba, of course) she says it’s good Flemish.”

“And the child’s been with them ever since? How old is she?”

“They think, about eight, now, Madame. But of course they don’t know for sure, because they don’t know anything about her.”

She had the tray in her hands now, but she lingered, and together they continued to look through the clear, old panes.

The archway at the other side of the plaats received only a reflection of the splendid glow of late afternoon light, and the dim reds and browns and oranges of the vegetables, and the small figure in dark clothes with head muffled in a scarf sitting in patient, motionless guard over the pitifully small mounds exposed for sale, had the appearance—seen as it was through the soft radiance with a hint of autumn mist in it—of a painting. But Adèle van Roeslaere had not the habit of seeing human beings as if they were figures in a painting.

“Don’t know anything about her?” she asked, “I suppose they’ve made enquiries?” But even as she said the words, she felt that they were only an echo from the number of times that she had said them, or something like them, while she was working on those committees in England whose purpose it was to help her dispossessed and homeless countrymen and women. She spoke briskly, hopefully, authoritatively, even, but she knew from experience what “making enquiries” could mean … and in Belgium during the last six years there hadn’t even been those in authority who were willing to help make enquiries—no, by God in His Heaven and His Mother and all the Angels, there hadn’t. Well—the terrible world was all about us, and in it we must love and help our fellow-men. She was praying that one day she might want to love and help the Germans.

Marieke was trying to explain, in her stupid old way, that it hadn’t been all that easy to “make enquiries”.

“I know, Marieke. But it will get easier, now that so many people are coming home and wanting to make them, and it will get better organized as time goes on.”

“They think her people may have come a long way, Madame, and then sat down to rest and then perhaps they were machine-gunned. From an aeroplane, Marie thinks. And then somehow Ydette fell in the sea——” She went on, telling the little that was known and the much that was guessed at—or had been, some time ago, but now everybody living round the plaats took Ydette for granted and there had been more to think about, during the past six years, than where a small foundling might have come from. Jakoba had never spoken about the boat that had been floating away into the path of the sun; after all, the dark objects that she had thought she saw in the water near it might have been shadows, pieces of wood, anything; and the day that they had found her now seemed so long ago; in another world; in another life.

“They wouldn’t want to part with her, now. They’ve got used to her,” Marieke concluded.

“I daresay they have. But of course if her parents ever were discovered … is she a good child?”

“Oh yes, Madame. She’s made her First Communion. Marie and Jakoba had such a business getting the stuff to make the dress, as Madame will imagine, and …”

“And has she been able to go to school?”

“On and off, Madame. Like most of the children. When it was very cold they shut the schools sometimes, and of course Ydette has to help in the shop … but she does go to school; the good Sisters teach her, at the school in the Street of the Little Red Lion.”

Adèle turned to the window again. The small, patient figure across the plaats was at work now, selling something to two figures in black shawls.

“And she’s a good child—obedient, and so on?”

“Oh yes, Madame. Madame remembers, I expect, that Marie knows them—the good Sisters, I should say—round at the Béguinage and she often has Ydette round there, and I dare say they tell her things.” (Marieke meant things about Our Lady, and the Saints, and the good life; she herself went to Mass regularly, of course, but some people were always on about the Saints, weekdays as well.)

“Yes … well … I will go across and see her later on, when things are more settled … they still sell flowers, I see.” There were some late-flowering ones, phlox, or chrysanthemums, probably, in a blue jug on the trestle table just inside the arch; they showed up white amidst the soft shadows under the archway. “And how is old Mevrouw Maes?”

“She’s getting on now. But she can still get out to the farm (Madame remembers the farm, at Sint Niklaas?) at weekends. It was hating the Germans that’s kept her going through it all, that’s what we think.”

Adèle indicated that the inspection of the lace had better be resumed.

She did not see her husband until just before dinner, when he put his head round the door of the salon and asked her if she would excuse him and told her not to wait; he would be down in a minute, but he was very dirty; he must get the dust and plaster off himself first. He looked white and tired (after all, he’s over sixty, she thought, and although we may not have had to go through what everyone else here has, we haven’t had an easy war; it would be unfair to say that we have). She was feeling concerned for him, until he came into the dining-room, where she sat at the head of the long table arranged with silver and fine china and a marvellous glowing Chinese porcelain bowl of flowers and a small dish of fish covered in a cheese sauce—then she was pleased to see that he was, in spite of his pallor and the slowness with which he moved to his place and sat down, not noticeably depressed.

“Well,” she said, when she had explained that she had had his place set beside her, rather than at the end of the table, because, that way, they both got the benefit from the radiator, and he had nodded his approval, “how is it, out there?”

“Oh—,” he answered, slowly eating the fish in cheese sauce, “pretty bad.” He put his napkin to his lips. The napkin was neither so stiff nor so shiny as it used to be, but it was quite as white. “Marieke can still cook, can’t she? although she doesn’t have much to cook with.” He held out the napkin, “Is she responsible for this, too?”

“Oh yes. She’s absolutely determined—and you know what she is when she’s determined—to have things just as they used to be for us, and she’s made a start already. But is it very bad out there, Hubert?”

He nodded, and she asked no more questions.

He had spent a day out there, with the new manager from Brussels. He seemed a good man; keen, and knowing what he was about; he was young, married and with a young family, and Hubert van Roeslaere thought that his enthusiasm for the villa where he and his family would live was genuine, although some men might have shown pardonable dismay at the sight of all the ceilings on the floor. The walls were standing, and the roof; that was something. The villa, even with no glass in its windows and its ceilings down and the garden that had been old Lombaers’ pride a flat and trampled waste, looked more hopeful than the greenhouses: without a whole pane, not one, over the entire twelve acres of them, and their smashed and blackened and scorched frames open to the sky.

It had been a grey morning when they got there, and if he lived to be very old, he would never forget how the place looked under the enormous, indifferent, pale sky with the clouds blowing quickly over it in the cold wind. There wasn’t a sound. The paths between the houses were knee-deep in grass. And there was one chimney left standing; just one; the others were heaps of bricks almost buried in weeds; you had to look twice to see where they had stood. When had that happened? They told him in Sint Niklaas, where he stopped the car, that most of it had been done in 1940 when the R.A.F. had been blasting the invasion barges collected on the Astrid Canal. After that, the Germans had used what chimneys and greenhouses were left for growing tomatoes, and then the R.A.F. had blown them up in the pre-invasion bombings last year. Standing there, looking at it, he remembered that once he had thought this was the ideal site because the communications were so good.

But towards evening, while they were walking about with the architects and engineers and builders who had arrived after lunch, making notes, the weather had cleared, and when, about half past six, they drove away, the sunlight was making everything look, if not more cheerful, at least less desolate. While he ate, and the sense of being once more at home surrounded by at least some of the beautiful and ancient objects amidst which he had lived for fifteen years was beginning to establish itself as the accepted thing and no longer unbelievably strange, he gradually felt less shocked and dejected. The house was almost undamaged; some of his fortune was invested abroad; Adèle was sitting beside him, and Adriaan would be home in December from the Link House. In a month they would start rebuilding the plant. He supposed that he ought to consider himself the luckiest man in Bruges that evening, instead of sitting there in a silence partly due to feeling guilty because he had—well, hadn’t he?—run away.

He looked across at his wife and smiled and lifted his glass, and she smiled and lifted her own. The smiles were not hearty; each shared the other’s thoughts and feelings too closely to permit them to be; but neither were they forced.

“In three months from today I want to bring you the first flower from the new place,” he said.

“Oh! I shall look forward to it. What will it be?”

“Come, that’s asking too much! I can’t possibly tell. It depends on all sorts of things—what the market for bulbs is like, the amount of coal we can get—hundreds of things. But if I can possibly manage it you shall have it, the very first one that comes into bud.”

“That will be lovely,” she said again.

Afterwards, while they were drinking coffee in the salon with the long curtains of faded Lyons silk drawn against the chill of the mist-filled night, she sat looking into the shadows beyond the one light that was burning, remembering the bunches of orchids that he used to bestow with gallantry on any woman who was taken over the hothouses before the war; if she was pretty, she got an even larger and more generous supply of exotic red trumpets, and scented white stars and pale mauve Slippers. Poor Hubert—her eyes strayed to the top of the bald head and the gold-and-crystal spectacles just visible above the sheets of Het Laatste Nieuws—how he did love beauty in women, as much as he loved it in orchids, and he had been faithful to her own unbeautiful face and body for fifteen years. Her dignity, her position as his wife, their social life amidst the circle of old friends belonging to the most aristocratic circle in the city, and their unsullied reputation with the clergy at Our Lady’s Church—all these had been, before the war, supported immovably upon the fact of Hubert’s faithfulness. How grateful she was to him.

It was a dear little joke between them, her fondness for flowers, because flowers had led to their friendship and then to their marriage: he had become a widower lateish in life, childless and sad because of the loss of his wife (who had been beautiful, but, discreet rumour said, neither responsive nor kind), and Adèle had been thirty-five-ish or so; a shy and very well-born young woman living alone with her servants and her charitable work and her pot-plants in the big house in the Sint Maria Plaats after her parents had died; she and Hubert van Roeslare were distantly related but did not move in the same social circles. Chancing to learn that her passion was flowers, he had arranged that she should come to see the hothouses. She remembered the bunch of orchids that he had presented to her at the end of that afternoon of wandering through the long, silent, warm, dim sheds where the only sound was the irregular musical falling of water from the pointed ends of the leaves, and how her friends had teased her about its size. She had made a conquest, they said.

She had been extremely surprised. She had never expected to make one, nor even mused upon the possibility that she might. But now that she had—and as the days went on it became clear beyond a doubt that she had—she was pleased. Her life had been lacking in the companionship of men, but she found herself able to be friends with this man without effort, and to enjoy the experience. They became such close companions that Bruges was not surprised, although it was pleased, when they married, and when a daughter, and a year or so later, a son, were born to them, there was happiness indeed—such happiness—that the sudden death of the little girl had shadowed for ever.

It seemed very much to belong to that life behind the war—beyond the war—that life now over and never, in spite of the efforts of Marieke, to be the same—the fact that, once, they had both been untroubledly happy about Adriaan.

Adèle looked down at the knitting-needles flashing in her long white fingers. The jersey of finest wool, the colour of that English porridge, was almost finished; it was odd, she thought (resolutely turning her thoughts away from Adriaan, because there would be time for thinking about him when she knelt down by her bed that night)—it was odd that wool of that soft, uninspiring colour could look so well when it was made up.

She turned the work about in her hands, looking at it critically. But she was thinking about her starving, weary, exhausted city. There was so much to do. She thanked God that He had let her stay alive, to work for His creatures.

She intended to make a special visit to the shop across the plaats and talk to that little foundling, but the days went past so quickly, each one bringing its round of domestic or spiritual duties; she began to go to Mass again every morning at Our Lady’s Church, as she used to before the war; and then there were her visits to the old women in the various almshouses throughout the city, comforting them and taking them food and flowers and fuel, and she was going down every afternoon to a room where milk and tinned foods sent from America were being distributed to the children, and although she sometimes happened to glance across and see the white face wrapped in the faded scarf presiding over the trestles and their starveling display, she had never managed to find the time to go across.

Once, standing by the windows of the dining-room, now rid of their disfiguring boarding, she saw, just before Marieke drew the curtains, the creature managing a broom almost as tall as itself. The sisters, evidently, made good use of their waif. Then, in the press of ever-increasing duties, she would forget the child again. And then, on some morning when she was walking swiftly back from Mass through autumn air grown keener and more sparkling as winter approached, she would see the small figure walking along slowly, rather doggedly, on the opposite side of the plaats—on her way to school, presumably, for she carried an old carpet bag that might contain books. Adèle had got so far as speaking to Mevrouw Maes about her, pausing one morning on her way homeward to greet the old woman as she too came out from the church, and ask how she was, and say that she had heard they had a little girl living with them now, but Mevrouw Maes had not been responsive. She was growing very old, and although she kept her black eyes fixed steadily on Madame van Roeslaere’s face, Adèle was not certain that she could see who was talking to her.

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 anything, 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.

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 years 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 outside 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.

Jakoba took a last keen glance around, and went through into the kitchen. Behind her, the low mist was beginning to drift across the cobbles and veil the lights in the houses opposite. The three women moved about the kitchen, which, small though it was, the little low fire smouldering on its scanty fuel could hardly warm, and they avoided, by half a century of practice, touching one another or getting in one another’s way. The black curtains, not replaced by new ones because the stuff wasn’t in the shops, had been drawn across the window, the chairs were pulled up to the table. Marie looked critically around.

Suddenly she darted to the door that led into the shop.

“Ydette! What are you doing? Mooning about … you’ll get your death. Come on in.”

Ydette had been standing between the half-drawn wooden shutters of the arch, her arms wrapped in the warm coat that had been a present from one of those kind ladies in America, staring across the plaats. It was dusk now; the lights of the big house glimmered clearly through the soft white mist.

“What’s going on over there?” Marie said good-naturedly, but not troubling herself to leave the warmth of the kitchen, which, extending its benevolence as far as the door, made the shop feel the colder by contrast. “What’s going on?” she repeated.

Ydette shook her head. She did not think it worth while to say that Madame and Monsieur van Roeslaere had just come home and got out of the car and gone up the steps of the big house, so—“Nothing,” she said, and, having closed the shutters and fastened their latch in place, followed her aunt back into the kitchen.

That first autumn of peace, Saturday was the best day in Ydette’s week, because that was the day when they went out to the farm.

It would begin with the door of the big house opening on the pealing of seven o’clock from the carillon, and there would stand Marieke, in her dark blouse and skirt and thick cotton apron, her white hair drawn back in its usual tight knot, surveying the wide, sunny, quiet plaats, the canal where a few wisps of mist were still drifting, and the people hurrying on their way to work; surveying it with no idle eye, but a severe and critical stare.

“Good morning, Mejuffrouw Joostens.”

Ydette, who always stole a few minutes from her task of arranging the counters on Saturday mornings to cross the plaats, would be standing—perhaps the ‘loitering’ with which Marieke had once come sharply out at her was not too far from the truth—at the foot of the steps, pretending to do nothing but take the air. She would accompany the greeting with a respectful movement, between bob and curtsey, which attracted from Marieke considerably less attention than she would have bestowed on its omission.

“Good morning, Ydette,” Marieke would say—reprovingly, because that was the form, and then, as if to show that the intonation was only a matter of form, she would add, “going to be a nice day … or a bad day … foggy … cold”, as she began to turn back to the house, her head full of getting the coffee on, getting the mattresses off the beds a bit earlier, getting Lyntje on to polishing that floor while she went over to Maes’ herself this morning for the vegetables, there being too much geklets² when the child was sent … and Sophie was late, as usual. When she was a kid of fifteen she used to bike in from La Panne; every morning; up at five and all those kilometres to go; and think nothing of it, and now she lived just round the corner at the charcuterie she was always late. She said it was having little Moritz’ breakfast to get; little indeed; what harm would even a few missed breakfasts do to a boy already as big as an ox …

“We’re going to the farm today,” Ydette would make a highly unsuccessful effort to shout after the unbending figure already shutting the door; her voice was of the kind which arouses, in elderly grown-ups, uneasy suspicions of approaching deafness.

“Well, you always do on Saturdays, don’t you?” Marieke paused, willing to promote her policy of discouraging, whenever possible, any notions about variation, particularly of an agreeable nature, in the procession of the week’s duties. Variety and treats for children, in her opinion, led invariably to trouble and hiccoughs.

Ydette nodded. Impossible to convey to Marieke that it was the alwaysness, precisely that, which made the visit so much to be enjoyed. “Here’s Sophie,” she said.

Marieke stood with the door open, in silence, about time too expressing itself in every pore.

“Here I am at last, like the Second Front,” shouted Sophie, whose more agreeable characteristics were slowly beginning to revive under the influence of having enough to eat again, and who showed every sign of developing into what people who were only anxious to forget it all were already thinking of as a War Bore.

“So I should hope,” Marieke said. “Twenty past.”

They would go in, Sophie denying the evidence recently presented by the carillon, and the door would shut.

Ydette went across the plaats at a run and resumed her duties. There would be nothing more of an interesting nature at the big house until Mijnheer van Roeslaere left for the hothouses (she had learned, now, to call the place where the big foreign flowers grew by its right name) at half-past eight.

The morning would pass very quickly, because Saturday was always the big day for customers, and then, usually latish in the afternoon, when the stallholders in the Market were beginning to pack up the coloured tin basins and the bolts of cloth, the boxes of stockings and the saucepans and other necessities which steadily increased in quantity and in quality, every Saturday, as the country began to resume normal trading—when the rows of sabots, painted black and decorated with a carved and painted design of red or yellow flowers, which had been arranged on the cobbles under the shadow of the Belfort since early that morning were being collected, and everything was being packed into the lorries and vans of the traders—the party would set out for the farm. (They were usually sold out at the shop by the time they left, and the few vegetables remaining were carefully set aside, in water, to be offered at a very slightly reduced price on the Monday morning.)

The autumn wind blew warmly across the fields. The van driven by Uncle Matthys’ new man Karel (just out of the army, and knowing more about the engine of the van than Uncle Matthys did, and rather fond of drink), went swiftly down the roads which were being repaired by gangs of very young men in grey frieze suits. They would sometimes wave to Ydette as the van passed them. (The wicked Germans. All captured now, and made to work for us. Ydette, prompted by the jeering voice of Aunt Jakoba, would turn obediently away and ignore the greeting.) The immense arch of the sky, in which the white clouds were couched comfortably along the horizon as if they did not want or intend to move, went slowly by; always appearing the same; curving over the farmhouses once again freshly whitewashed, with shutters newly painted green or rust-red; the late afternoon light shone through the yellowing leaves and on the red apples in the orchards. From her place in the van—which seemed to her to be quite high up in the warm air speeding by—Ydette could look at the golden poplars standing tall and motionless, yet moving past like everything else, and the golden-green willow leaves blowing in showers down onto the water in the dykes. Far away over the land, the spires and towers were rising up blue, or grey, or white where the sun caught them, in the clear distances. Thickly, and ever thicker, as though steadily applied by a brush wielded in some benevolent hand, its richness was being restored to the landscape of Flanders.

The van would drive in under the massive whitewashed archway and come to a halt, and when Karel had got down from the driver’s seat and gone off on his own affairs, the three women and the child would get down after him; Jakoba climbing out with her usual rough energy, Marie in a dogged way and with compressed lips, Mevrouw Maes very slowly and with the help of a daughter, and last of all, Ydette. They would stand still, and look about them; the sisters curiously—had anything been bought? had there been any changes?—and Ydette and Mevrouw Maes hand in hand, both faces grave with satisfaction as they slowly surveyed the changing flowers of every season and the soft, clear colours, and breathed in the good smells floating in the sweet air.

Sooner or later, someone would pause on the way across some distant part of the farm, see them loitering there, and shout, and the whole party would leisurely come together—and then, while the elders were unhurriedly exchanging their news as they moved into the kitchen, the children would—not ‘slip’, because there was no hint of secrecy in their manner—but walk off sedately together, Jooris keeping slightly ahead of Ydette with the air of someone having something definite to do, and Ydette following with a briskish air of being prepared to help him do it.

One day that autumn when they came, his eyes looked swollen and red, and when they had wandered off into the orchard and were sitting on their favourite log under the oldest apple tree, he became very quiet, looking down at the ground. Ydette was busy picking the few grasses and flowers that had sprung up again after the hay-cutting, but she glanced at him from time to time, and, when he still did not suggest sailing paper boats in the dyke, or say anything, or move, she at last carefully put her bunch down beside her, and, sliding along the log, put both arms round him and held him close.

He began to cry, pushing his knuckles into his eyes; the tears ran down without check, a child’s tears still, although his body, in the shabby clothes too short for him, was beginning to lengthen into the gauntness of early youth. Ydette was neither puzzled nor alarmed by his tears; he was Jooris, and he was miserable; that was enough. She said nothing, but hugged him in silence, and presently he stopped crying save for an occasional fluttering sob.

“I’m going to kill six Germans,” he said at last, sitting quietly now in the embrace of the arms almost too short to hold him; “that’ll be … do you know about it?” turning his tear-stained face to her, and she shook her head.

“They killed my father. You know he was wounded, and he came back here and we hid him away? But you didn’t know he went with the Resistance, did you? He used to come back and see us sometimes. … That was a secret. Mother made me promise I wouldn’t tell—not even you,” as she stared at him solemnly.

“But they got him.” He began to cry again. “We’ve only just heard; there was a letter this morning. My mother’s been crying all day … and … and …” He turned and pushed his face into her neck, and she felt the warm tears running down; and held him closer. “And she won’t tell me what they did to him, but I’m going to find out, and when I’m a man—or before that, when I’m sixteen—I’m going to kill six of them. To get our own back. Killing him like that …”

“That’s like André Kamiel,” Ydette almost whispered at last.

“Yes … so I’m going to kill six of them. I’ll shoot them. I’ll save up what Grandpa gives me until I’ve got a gun of my own—Jean Wybouw says you can get one quite easily from the Americans—or the Resistance won’t want theirs, now the war’s over, or there are the deserters—I’ll get one easily, and then I’ll …”

He talked on for a while, and she listened. Their arms were closely around each other now, and sometimes, as if without thinking, he kissed her pale, serious little face, but an hour later they were down at the dyke and she was screaming with excitement while he built a dam. She had washed his tear-stains away with one of Aunt Marie’s pieces of clean rag, and when they went in to supper he seemed better, but Ydette saw that Aunt Janine’s face was all swollen and red.

Matthys Maes kept Jooris closely to school that autumn; it was as if the old man had a strong feeling that some outer authority must take charge of his grandson, in order that the misery and the childish passion for revenge set working in his nature by the news of his father’s death might not take a sinister turn when he grew into adolescence. But although Ydette long remembered what Jooris had threatened to do, and each time that she saw him she wondered if he had managed to get hold of the gun yet, she never heard him speak of the threat again. Sometimes he spoke of his father, telling her of jokes he had made and brave things that they now knew he had done. But the proposed killing of the six Germans seemed forgotten.

She was relieved, because killing Germans would be as wicked as it was dangerous; you weren’t allowed to kill people; God said so; and if Jooris had still been meaning to he would have told her, because they were friends, and they did tell each other things.

However, quite soon—as the weeks, and then the months, went on, and dozens of different kinds of sausage began to come back into Sophie’s aunt’s charcuterie and the other meat-shops; and cakes, that gave the impression of having each one been lovingly, lingeringly given their final gloss and twirl by hand, began to come back onto the glass shelves into the silver filigree baskets in the confectioner’s; and exquisitely-sewn simple dresses began to be shown in the Zuitzand’straat, and the small smart hats were changed in the shops three times a week, and people began to lose their pallor and put on flesh, and Sophie began to talk quite a lot and to kiss Ydette again … in no time at all, it seemed very queer to think of a boy who still went to school killing Germans.

Where were all the Germans? You saw them sometimes, but only marching to their work on the roads, or riding back from it in lorries, and when Ydette went with the aunts for a tram-ride on Sundays that ended up by the sea at Zandeburghe or with Sophie’s old parents at La Panne, she saw the spiked wire and the concrete forts and the gun-emplacements being pulled down, and the ruins of houses being wheeled away in barrows by the very young men in grey suits; and soon the white hotels were being mended or rebuilt, and the sands were being cleaned of strange twisted lengths of metal and great rusty bulbous things studded with nuts and screws, and next year, said Aunt Marie, the tourists would begin to come back. Drifting steadily away into the Past, like a cloud swollen with bellowing thunder, like a hideous storm that has left half the world white and stunned and bloodless, went the war; and gradually—yet so swiftly, when compared with the endlessness of the months that had seemed like an enduring nightmare—the climate of peace was returning: and Jooris Gheldeere was beginning to be eager to get into the school football team.

Ydette, too, was kept closer to school that autumn than ever before. This was partly because ‘them up at Our Lady’s’ had expressed themselves firmly in favour of such a course, and ‘them at the Béguinage’ had echoed their views; and partly because Madame van Roeslaere had, at last, made time to walk swiftly across to the archway one afternoon and—meet her? make her acquaintance?—‘make friends with her’ would not truthfully describe what she did, because her manner, as she stood just outside the shop on that day of late autumn, looking gently yet keenly at Ydette through the great lenses of her glasses, was not friendly: it was reserved, expressive of their being set at certain and clearly defined distances from one another—nothing so warm as ‘friendly’.

Madame van Roeslaere wore a slender coat of pale brown fur that reached almost to her knees above a narrow skirt of blonde wool, her black suède boots were made in Italy by a master, a scarf of thick orange brocade was tucked into the neck of her coat, her small hat matched it, and she held an exaggeratedly elongated bag of bright reddish leather. If she was conscious of the contrast between her own elegant clothes and the thick and bundly garments, presents from kind ladies in England and America, in which Ydette and Mevrouw Maes were swaddled, her expression did not show that she was, and the two who stood before her—Mevrouw Maes having with difficulty got her seventy-seven year old body up from her stool and Ydette, at a sharp muttered word from her grandmother, having hopped up from hers—were not conscious of the contrast either; if they had been, they wouldn’t have resented it; it was only Aunt Jakoba who occasionally muttered something about roll on the day, when we can buy our own clothes again and chuck the charity-rags into the sea; and Ydette loved her plaid coat and woollen scarf, for she was one of those children who are always chilly; to be cold, for her, was worse than to be hungry.

Now, her eyes were fixed immovably upon Madame van Roeslaere. Every tint of her clothes, every soft yet defined curve of the white hair lifting itself under the soft yet airy hat, the very way she held her bag and the casual wrinkles of her gloves, was bathed, for the one of the two who could see her clearly, in a romantic glow. Behind this vision, Ydette knew that a delicate blur of dark red and white on the opposite side of the plaats was the big house, clearly visible, now, beyond the dark branches of the chestnut tree which had shed all but a few of its last bronze leaves.

“You are often away from school, aren’t you?” Madame van Roeslaere said rather briskly, when, the preliminary greetings and the enquiries about Mevrouw Maes’ health having been asked, and gratefully and respectfully answered, she spoke directly to Ydette for the first time. As she did so, she made a mental note to tell one of the aunts that the child must be told it was rude to stare.

“Yes, Madame,” Ydette whispered, staring.

“That’s not good, you know, Ydette. Do you stay at home because you have to help with the shop, or because you aren’t well?”

“Ydette has very good health, she’s never ill, all through the war she wasn’t ever ill,” said Mevrouw Maes, turning her dimming black eyes in the direction of the vague outline whence came the soft, quick voice. “No, we keep her at home to mind the shop; I can’t do what I could, and sometimes I must have a day in bed, and then the girls are busy, it takes such a time, still, getting anything from the shops to eat, and Jakoba’s often down at Zandeburghe fixing the cart up and getting a place for those new tents on the sands next summer—so that’s it,” she ended up.

“You should go to school as often as you possibly can,” said Madame van Roeslaere.

“Yes, Madame,” in the same softest imaginable tone short of an actual whisper.

“Do you learn English there?” the questioner went on; she was speaking Flemish.

‘“Oh yes, Madame.”

“Ydette knows quite a lot of English; Madame knows there were some English soldiers in the town last week, and Ydette told them the way when they asked; they were in a lorry; all the other children tried, but Ydette was the only one who could tell them,” proudly said Mevrouw Maes.

“That’s good,” said Madame van Roeslaere. She was almost compelled to turn her eyes away from the steady, unwavering stare of the child’s; how lovely they were; too large, of course, in a face that size, but the shape and the colour and the length of the lashes were striking, and she wondered where she might originally have come from … really, it was almost embarrassing to be looked at so steadily.

“Do you like to learn English?” she asked.

This time Ydette could manage only a kind of rather awkward ducking movement of her head and a foolish smile. It was the first sign she had shown of belonging to her peasant background, and Adèle actually felt some disappointment, for she had seemed like a little girl of gentle blood dressed up in a peasant’s clothes, and now the gesture had spoiled the picture. But of course it wasn’t important.

“I am sure you do,” she said firmly. “Now, you must go to school regularly, and work hard at your English, and when you haven’t missed a day for two months, your aunts can let me know, and I will give you English lessons twice a week.

“You understand, don’t you?” she went on with a touch of impatience as Ydette stared and stared without answering. ‘Work hard, and I’ll teach you English myself.” She did not know what impulse had caused her to add that rather less impersonal last word, but it had its effect. The palish lips moved uncertainly in the pale face; then there came a kind of pipe—

“Over—at the big house—Madame?”

“Yes. At the big house. So you go to school regularly for two months, and then we’ll begin.”

She nodded to them, smiled, and turned and walked quickly away.

“There,” said Mevrouw Maes, whose hearing was keener than her sight, approvingly, “always so full of bonté, Madame is.” But she said no more, not being given at any time to the utterance of pious sentiments, and feeling in any case that God and His Saints owed them all something for what they had been through these last six years, and Ydette’s dreams, which were still wandering around the appearance, face and voice of the lady from the big house and had not yet directed themselves to the prospect of actually being taught English by her there, were at liberty to proliferate, that morning, undisturbed.

A brief smile or two which Madame van Roeslaere gave to her from time to time when they chanced to meet kept, however, the plan well forward in her mind and soon she was consciously working at her English as hard as she could. But that wasn’t very hard, because the day-dreaming, which was the very essence of which her being was formed, drew into itself the energies which might have directed themselves into the more useful qualities—concentration, memorizing, competitiveness and so forth—and even endeavour (and she did work, as far as she could) will not make up for sheer lack of brains.

The teaching nuns, some of whom were clever, accurately judged her intelligence to be of a lowish order; her writing was painstakingly bad, her reading of the kind which compelled you to take a firm grip on your patience, and as for her mathematics—well, to give a fair opinion of Ydette Maes’ mathematica faculty you would really be forced to draw upon metaphor and simile—stone walls, swamps, donkeys with their heels dug in and so forth—and the nuns, who saw no reason why one should be a fool even if one was good, had decided, after some two years of as severe and unremitting a perseverance with her as conditions under the Occupation would permit, that they must concentrate upon the improvement of her soul. They would continue, of course, to teach her as carefully as everybody else in the school was taught. But they came to a decision amongst themselves not to waste valuable time and energy on hammering at Ydette, in the hope of better scholastic results, because there just wouldn’t be any.

She was stupid. She mightn’t look it, but she was, and as for the results of concentrating upon her soul, there was an atmosphere of restrained disappointment about that, too, because she was not exactly a good child. She was not actively naughty or rebellious either, but her prayers in class and her response to instruction in moral enlightenment were rather—and they were only rather, so you couldn’t even give her a good shaking up about her attitude—negative. She was a disappointment. Her height, which seemed to increase every week, and her eyes, made her stand out from the crowd of children, but her character and abilities did not fulfil the promise of her appearance. The nuns were no longer more interested, now, in Ydette Maes than it was their duty to be: almost unconsciously, during the last two and three-quarter years, they had tended more and more to leave her to God: He, of course, knew what He was going to do with her.

As for what went on within Ydette’s head concerning Him: the Three who watched perpetually above the roofs of the city had gradually become identified for her with the Holy Trinity about which she heard the priests talking in Our Lady’s church. She felt that the prayers which Aunt Marie and grandmother had taught her to make there (Aunt Jakoba was not one for much churchgoing, except of course to Mass on Sundays) went straight up, up, into the dim, darkened air spiced with the scent of burned-out incense, and through the roof. Once there, they circled slowly round and around the topmost eyes and faces of the Person in the pointed hat. Ydette knew, because Aunt Marie had told her, that her prayers were offered to God and Our Blessed Lord and His Mother and were presumably accepted by them, but to know was one thing (as Marie had already decided when musing upon priests and widows) and to feel was quite another, and Ydette could feel her prayers going up through the lofty roof and then slowly round and round that solemn Face one hundred and twenty-two metres above her head. A great number of them must have gone up there by this time, for she was diligent in repeating the Hail Mary and other prescribed forms of intercession and praise, because the sound of the words fascinated her, and so the Person must be quite surrounded by her prayers; up there in the sky amongst the yellow clouds of autumn or the pink clouds of spring, and must always remember Ydette.

She used to walk back from school on those autumn evenings. Some of the children had bicycles; old, battered, patched-up machines which had survived in attics and cellars throughout the war, and a very few of the richest and luckiest had new ones from England or America, but although the shop was beginning to do very well, so well that Aunt Marie had begun to buy fruit and vegetables from another farmer in addition to Uncle Matthys, the money went to buy sheets and blankets and saucepans and cups and there was none for bicycles. But towards Kerstmis the aunts told Ydette that she could put away her plaid coat and that scarf, and although she was sorry to see them go, how could she possibly regret them when she was told that the parcel they gave to her one morning on their return from Mass, containing a dark blue cape with a scarlet-lined hood, was a present, actually a present, from Madame van Roeslaere?

“Well,” said someone to her one evening early in December, as she was making her way homewards across the plaats in the cold, fading light with her carpet-bag full of books almost dragging along on the cobbles, “how is your English getting on?”

She looked up quickly, with a sudden startled smile, and there was the small, upright figure (in dark clothes this time, with something that flashed and sparkled between white hair and each tiny ear) looking down at her; almost on tiptoe, as if Madame van Roeslaere were pausing just for an instant on her way to some affair that had to do with her perpetually-active bonté.

“Well?” Adèle repeated. The child looked less dreamy when she smiled, but what a time she did take to answer! “It looks warm and comfortable,” she said, in response to a murmur, which did at length come out, of thanks for the cape, “but tell me about your English lessons?”

“Sœur Angélique says it is better, Madame,” came at last; Ydette had been wondering, not what she could say that would be most likely to bring about the English lessons, because she lived almost entirely in the hour and the moment and had scarcely realized, even yet, that she was to have them in the big house, but what would best please Madame van Roeslaere.

“Really better, is it?” Adèle asked in English, and Ydette, after a moment in which she looked blank, laughed and nodded. So she can laugh, thought Adèle; it’s a relief; and laughter came into her own eyes and touched her mouth and the pictures of the children all over Europe that pressed continuously and without relief upon her imagination receded a little; just a very little, for a moment.

“That’s good. Now we’ll start our lessons,” she said. “Come across tomorrow evening at six o’clock, Ydette.” She added over her shoulder as she turned away, “Lyntje Pieters will be there, too; you know Lyntje, don’t you?”

Ydette was still staring after her, walking with head turned sideways and feet moving draggingly along the cobblestones, when she reached the front door of the aunts’ house, and had to be asked sharply by Aunt Marie what she was gaping at?

“That Lyntje …” said the aunt, when she had heard what the news was, “she must be going on twenty-one … she doesn’t need to go back to having lessons again … what’s the idea of giving her lessons?” She was a little jealous of this division of an interest which she had hoped would be reserved entirely for her foundling. “And she’s a rough lot; always playing in the streets,” she added.

“She doesn’t play in the streets now,” said Ydette, after a pause in which she felt a vague impulse to defend Lyntje, the comrade, although certainly a rather unreliable one, of that always-remembered day when Koenraed had pulled up the stones in the road.

“She still stands there carrying on with the boys whenever she gets half a chance. I’ve seen her.”

There was no answer to this, which happened to be true, and Ydette did not understand the full significance of Marie’s disapproval because she was dreaming about the big house, and what she would see there tomorrow evening: having grown up in a household where mating and birth were spoken about frankly (although with the decency that was the result of Roman Catholic teaching) she took them for granted; and boys, in any case, were to her still the other members of the tribe; the strange ones, the unknowns, shut away, so to speak, in their own huts at the other side of the village, where they had their own mysteries and their own language, and whence they emerged only to put out their tongues at you or pull your hair. It was true that Jooris was a boy, but then she didn’t think of him as one, because he was also her friend.

On that particular Thursday—it happened to fall on the Feast of Saint Damasus but that didn’t seem to make any difference—it was resignedly noted by the nuns who taught Ydette Maes that she was attending even less than usual to what was said to her. But they were so accustomed to her dreaminess that they hardly troubled to reprove her; and the few little creatures of her own age with whom she was accustomed to dawdle homeward from school (rather silent amidst their lively babble, and attracted by them, and made attractive to them, only by the same instinct that calls small animals into groups) did not notice that she left them more quickly than usual. She did not go home first to look into the square of looking-glass in grandmother’s room to make certain that her hair was smooth and her ribbons neatly tied and her face clean, because she was not thinking about herself, but only of the big house; and when she presented herself at its door, just as the lamps came on in the twilit plaats, Marieke’s disapproval of Madame’s scheme to teach that chit, Lyntje, English in company with Ydette Maes (who would surely soon be getting ideas above her position as the local foundling), was able to find satisfying expression in the observation, “Don’t go in with your hair all over the place like that,” and a poke, with a knotted, red finger, at a wisp which was escaping from its plait.

Ydette stroked it into place, where it obediently stayed because she had the kind of hair that does what it is told, and stood looking up—expectantly.

“They’re in the little back salon; you go on down there, you know the way—and don’t kick up the rugs nor walk with those dirty shoes all over my floor.”

A moment later Ydette was knocking, so softly that she had to do it three or four times before the clear, quick voice answered, at one of the heavy carved doors.

“You are late, Ydette,” Madame van Roeslaere observed, “sit down—there, next to Lyntje—have you brought a book? Silly child—how can you manage without a book? Never mind, today we’ll have some English conversation—and don’t forget to bring what English books you have next week. Now: Lyntje, try again. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know where it is.’”

The room was warm and quiet, the long, lustrous curtains were drawn over the windows; there was a carpet of rich dark blue and dark yellow on the shining floor, and against one panelled wall a tall cabinet made of gleaming wood that was inlaid with pale red and yellow flowers, contained miniature figures in twisted silver; tiny cups so thickly encrusted with flowers and leaves and bells that they stood out beyond the rims; and some of the old friends of Ydette’s early childhood—the monkey fiddlers, and the little man with trousers that were the colour of one of the big plums now being sold over at the shop … and all these things, as they glowed and glinted in the soft light, were beautiful—that word which Ydette had once or twice heard used by Father Jozef in a sermon, and now used to herself when she saw something that pleased her.

When she glanced at Lyntje, whom she had not seen so frequently since she had gone to service in the big house, she was pleased again, in a different way. The expanse of creamy-pink face was wider than ever, while the small, clear blue eyes still made Ydette think of the wind that blew round street corners in January. The fair hair, which she remembered as blowing about unrestrainedly, was tidier: Lyntje must have had a ‘permanent’; but she still bulged out of her neat brown dress and delicate white apron trimmed with lace, just as she used to bulge out of the ragged old coverings she had worn while the Germans were in Brugge.

Ydette looked at her amiably. Lyntje was familiar: she belonged to the cobbled streets and the stepped roofs and the watching faces of the Three, suddenly looming severely down at you while you were playing; over a sweep of old grey tiles or a breadth of brown wall when you were least expecting them: and while Madame van Roeslaere was making Lyntje repeat words for the pronunciation, Ydette could look at Madame’s clothes and face and hair. It was all happiness; it was beautiful; and as soon as a word of English was launched into one of Ydette’s ears, it went blissfully out and away through the other.

Earlier that afternoon, while the low winter sun was yet shining on Oostende, with a delicate, thin radiance that did not seem the appropriate light for the gross, salmon-pink Edwardian protuberances of the hotels and the coarse, worn, vivid faces that thronged the cafés and the streets, a short, stout, dark boy in a blue overcoat was walking smartly along the digue. He had come off the English boat an hour ago, and, having wandered—if the brisk, purposeful pace at which he moved deserves the word—up and down the streets surrounding the harbour and stared avidly into the dingy windows of their shops, and yawned over funnels and masts and cranes, he was now keeping one eye on the interior of the cafés lining the digue, while looking for one that he fancied, and occasionally glancing off towards the sea, now rolled far back in low tide. Tiny figures prowled out there, black against the enormous pale expanse of the sands, with sticks, and baskets on their backs; the shouts of a few children playing on the beach came up shrill and sharp through the boisterous air. It was all grey—sands, breaking waves, clear desolate horizon and the sweep of the digue, the houses and narrow streets plunging back into the heart of the town—and all bathed in the thin gold light of the setting sun. My God, Adriaan van Roeslaere thought, this is what suits me: there isn’t anything here to stop you going as far as you want to, there’s nothing to say no, you can be alone, you needn’t bloody well be doing something useful all the time. I’ll come here often. I’d forgotten what it’s like.

The afternoon light coming in off the bright, grey, sun-smitten sea was pouring into the café that he finally chose: he sat at a table by the window, and the new paint gleamed and the chairs were covered in bright yellow leatherette, and the succulent paws of big, dark house-plants pressed themselves against the windows. There were stout, warmly-dressed old men smoking small cigars sitting opposite elderly women with the drooping flesh of bloodhounds and glittering, stiff fingers. The look of established prosperity was there again: already: like a wall. His father had told him that it was coming back, but until he saw it, sitting here with the café filtré and the dish of pastries in front of him, he hadn’t believed it. The air was warm and smelling of coffee and cakes and scent, and he didn’t know which he relished most strongly: this, or the rich salt smack of the sea that leapt at you, blowing down the narrow streets and against the hotels of the digue, the moment you stepped outside the door.

But he did know that he was never going back to England again if he could help it.

¹ Nazi-controlled agricultural paper published during the occupation.

² Chin-wagging.