The Book of Ebenezer le Page Page 12

  My mother prepared some supper for us and sat reading her Bible while we ate it. I will say for my mother’s lot they didn’t go round trying to convert everybody. They knew they was right and it was other people’s own look-out if they wasn’t. Raymond started me thinking about Liza again. She was my idea of being saved. I didn’t want to have to keep on chasing after this one and that one for what I could get. The chance came. It happened it was that year Jim and me went to the Coronation Fête at St Peter in the Wood. There was a Fête in each parish on a different Thursday for the Coronation of King George V, and we went to them all; but it was the one at St Peter in the Wood was the red-letter day for me, because it was there I tried to get down to brass tacks with Liza.

  Before the free tea, which was what we went for, was a Grand Procession of farm waggons with chaps and girls in dressed up showing tableaux of the History of England. There was King Alfred burning the cakes and King Canute getting his feet wet and King John looking for the Crown Jewels in the Wash and King Richard murdering the Princes in the Tower and Queen Elizabeth sitting on her throne. Liza was Britannia. There was going to be three prizes given: first, second and third; and a lot of people thought Queen Elizabeth was going to win the first. Eva Robilliard was Queen Elizabeth. She was a very pretty girl and wore a lovely dress; but she was bowing and smiling and throwing kisses to everybody: not at all like a queen. Liza stood like a statue. She didn’t move a muscle. Her lovely hair was down over her shoulders and she was wearing a long white robe with a golden girdle and golden sandals. She was standing on shingle with a conch shell at her feet. She rested one hand on a shield of the Union Jack done in flowers, and was holding a sort of fork thing in the other. She had a helmet on her head like you see in pictures of Britannia in books. She came on the last waggon and, when the crowds of people saw her, they cheered so loud the judges had no choice but to give her the first prize. I thought that’s the girl for me!

  Jim and me was with the three Bichard girls from La Croûte. Jim always said there was safety in numbers and thought three was a good number because you couldn’t very well ask one to play gooseberry. The tea for everybody was spread on trestles set up on the grass at L’Érée, and each of us was given a Coronation mug. I have mine yet. When we was just going to begin, who should come along but Liza? She’d dropped the shield and the fork thing, but still had the fancy helmet on her head. She saw me and came over, all smiles. ‘Fancy seeing you right out here!’ she said. I said, ‘I’m glad you got the first prize. I’d have given it to you myself.’ She said, ‘Is there room for me?’ I said, ‘Of course there’s room for you!’ and pushed up and made room on the form for her between me and Jim. I had never known Liza be so nice to everybody as she was that afternoon. She went into raptures over the Bichard girls because they had such lovely hair, though it was nothing like as lovely as hers. She said Jim looked the picture of health and ought to have gone in the Procession as Richard, Coeur de Lion. After the tea there was going to be racing and games, but she said she couldn’t go in for racing and games in her present dress. I said, ‘How about coming for a stroll along the beach?’ ‘All right,’ she said, ‘then I can call in to my mother’s house and change. I don’t like being looked at by everybody.’ I thought well, that’s a lie to start with.

  She gave me her hand to help her down over the rocks, and we walked across Rocquaine Bay towards Fort Grey. She asked me if I knew the story of how it was Fort Grey came to be haunted. I didn’t. She said that hundreds of years ago, when it was called Rocquaine Castle, two young lovers sat on the wall in each other’s arms by moonlight and threw themselves together into the sea. ‘Whatever did they want to do that for?’ I said. ‘They was lovers,’ she said. ‘They was mad,’ I said. She said, ‘If you was in love with me, wouldn’t you want to throw yourself with me into the sea?’ I said, ‘If I was in love with you, I would want to live as long as I could and have you for my regular girl.’ She stopped dead in her tracks and threw her head back and laughed. I didn’t know if she was laughing at me, or if it was because she was pleased.

  I said, ‘Listen here, Liza: be serious for once. I like you and you like me: and I know it.’ I did know it. When she had kissed me, her lips was hungry enough to eat me up. I said, ‘I don’t want you to be going out with Don Guille and every other Tom, Dick and Harry in the town.’ She said, ‘How is Florrie Brehaut getting on?’ I said, ‘I don’t know how Florrie Brehaut is getting on. She have gone to Southampton and is working in a hospital.’ ‘I suppose she writes to you every day,’ she said. ‘She don’t write to me any day,’ I said, ‘and I don’t write to her neither.’ ‘I only wondered,’ she said. She had found out what she wanted to know. I was furious.

  ‘If it comes to that, you don’t think anything of me really,’ she said, ‘you think more of that Jim Mahy than you do of me.’ I said, ‘What have poor old Jim got to do with it? I know where I am with Jim. I don’t know where I am with you.’ She said, ‘I am not going to be chained to you, or to anybody else, like a dog. I wonder who you think you are.’ ‘I am Ebenezer Le Page from Les Moulins,’ I said, ‘in case you don’t know.’ ‘I know, I know,’ she said. ‘Ebenezer Le Page from Les Moulins! Is there anybody can be more Guernsey? He is countrified, he is ignorant, he is small! Why, I am even taller than you are!’ ‘You are NOT taller than I am,’ I said, ‘I am an inch taller than you!’ ‘You are not! You are not!’ she said; and she ran up on a rock and stood feet above me. I ran up after her. She was standing on wet vraic and there was a pool of the sea on the other side. ‘Aren’t I?’ she said. ‘Say I am! Say I am!’ ‘It’s that thing on your head make you look taller,’ I said and grabbed it. ‘Give it me back!’ she said and started to fight me for it. I couldn’t fight fair because I had my Coronation mug in my other hand, and I didn’t want to let it fall on the rocks and break it. I gave her a push.

  She slipped on the wet vraic and went screaming down into the pool. I jumped off the rock on to the dry sand and went round to see: there she was sitting with the water up to her waist and her golden sandals tangled in the green seaweed and the little fishes swimming round her legs. ‘I hate you! I hate you!’ she said. ‘Here, have your silly hat!’ I said and threw it at her and it floated on the water. ‘Britannia rules the waves!’ I said and went off and left her. When I got back to Jim and the Bichard girls, he said, ‘What have you done with Liza?’ ‘I’ve drownded her,’ I said. ‘Well,’ he said in his slow drawl, ‘perhaps that’s the best thing you could have done.’ I felt miserable all the way going home.

  13

  Victor died. He wasn’t all that old for a bull-dog and I have always thought he must have got himself hurt inside on his last gallivant. He lost interest and wouldn’t move, but lay in his basket all day long and got fat and wheezy. The vet said there was nothing wrong with him: it was his breed and he would get over it; but he began to get shivering fits and had a hot nose. He wanted to drink a lot of water, but went off his feed. Jim’s mother said she was sorry but she couldn’t have him in the kitchen any longer because he smelt; so Jim put his basket in the stable and gave him plenty of straw. One Saturday afternoon we was all having tea in the kitchen when out comes Victor from the stable and trots across the yard. He was as lively on his bandy legs as when he was a pup, and grinning all over his ugly face. ‘Victor’s got better!’ said Jim. In came Victor and Jim’s mother patted him and Wilfred, who was there, said, ‘Hullo, Victor!’ though he didn’t like him much, and I said, ‘Well done! Good boy!’ and at last he got round to Jim, jumping and licking and wagging his tail; and Jim was nearly in tears, he was so happy. Victor went quiet then and rolled his black eyes at the rest of us and trotted back across the yard to the stable. Jim couldn’t wait to finish his tea but must get up from the table at once and make a mash of meat and potatoes to take to him. ‘He’ll eat this now,’ he said, as he went out with it. He hadn’t been gone two minutes when he came out of the stable with Victor dead in his arms.

  Jim lo
oked terrible. I went outside to meet him, but he turned away from me and went down the meadow. I followed him. He sat on the grass with his big shoulders hunched and laid Victor down in the sun beside him. He spread out Victor’s legs so the sun would get to his belly and sat there stroking his back and head. I think in his simple mind he thought the sun might bring Victor back. I was standing behind him, but I couldn’t say a word. All of a sudden, he jumped up and said in a rough voice, which was not at all the way Jim spoke to me as a rule, ‘Bring a couple of spades, you! What we wasting time here for?’ and bundled Victor under his arm as if he was a bundle of rags. I fetched the spades and brought a bit of sacking. Jim chose a tree by the stream and we dug a deep hole between the roots and I wrapped Victor up in the sacking and put him in it. Jim filled the hole and stamped down the ground. When we got indoors his mother said, ‘Well, he’s had a happy life for a dog. You can always get another.’ Jim turned on his mother as if he hated her. ‘I don’t want another dog!’ he said.

  Jim began to think about emigrating. He didn’t come right out with it at first, but asked me how Horace was getting on. I didn’t know. According to Prissy, he was doing wonderful; but you couldn’t believe a word she said. La Hetty said if the truth was known, he was begging for his bread from door to door. ‘I don’t expect he have made his fortune yet,’ I said, ‘or he would have been back to show us.’ Jim said, ‘Who wants to make a fortune? All I want is enough to keep myself alive.’ It was all very well for Jim to talk. If at any time he wanted a new suit, all he had to do was to have it made to measure by Carré in the Arcade and the bill was sent to his father. When I wanted a new suit I had to save for months, unless I spent some of what I already got put away; but I would never do that.

  Though I don’t suppose Jim would have been any different, even if he hadn’t had money behind him. It was his nature. He worked from morning to night in his slow easy-going way, and didn’t think any further. His brothers was different. Gerald, the youngest, was a smart boy and knew it. He was dark and not nearly as tall as Jim; but had a grin made everybody like him. I didn’t much. When he was a boy at the Secondary School, Jim and me went to see him act in a play called Twelfth Night, which the boys was doing in St Barnabas Hall. He played the part of Maria; who was a wicked little minx; and I couldn’t help thinking it was his own nature he was acting. When he left school, he worked in the Old Bank; but the hours was so short you could hardly call it work. He didn’t earn much but he knew how to spend it. He was out roller-skating at St George’s Hall most nights. Wilfred, the second, was fair like Jim, but had pale hair he kept neatly parted on one side: not like Jim’s mop of straw that flopped all over the place. He was slim and wiry; and quicker in the mind than Jim. He was for ever getting ideas for doing things different, and saving time and money. Jim would say, ‘Well, if there was better ways of doing things, they would have been found out years ago.’ Jim was satisfied to have vraic spread on the ground for manure, but Wilfred had to have patent guano and ordered oat-cakes from Bibby’s for the cattle. The cows didn’t die of indigestion, as Jim said they would. In fact, they won several first prizes at the Cattle Show that year. ‘There, you see!’ said Wilfred. Jim said, ‘Our cows won the prizes because they come of a good family.’ For all that, he did say to me once, ‘It’s Wilfred, you know, who ought to run this farm when Pop’s gone.’

  I didn’t dream Jim was thinking of going away, until one Sunday afternoon when we went for a ride on our bikes. I said we might as well go by Perelle and call on Tabitha and see how her and Jean was getting on. Jean was home. It was a pleasure going in that house. There was never any quarrelling, never any black looks. There was no fuss or bother either; and everything was as clean as a new pin, the way Tabitha always kept things. I saw how right Tabitha had been to stick to Jean. I don’t suppose you could call him handsome exactly. He had a rough face rather with curly black hair that grew well down on his forehead; but he had an honest, pleasant look about him, and you felt at once he was a chap you could trust. He wasn’t tall, but sturdy and strongly built. His face lit up when he saw Jim. ‘They haven’t burnt you for a boud’lo yet, then,’ he said. ‘Aw no, not yet,’ said Jim, ‘but they will one day.’ They sat on the sofa together talking and laughing, while Tabby and me got the tea ready. ‘I know why you’ve come today, you,’ she said, ‘you knew what we’ve got for tea.’ ‘I don’t know what you’ve got for tea,’ I said. ‘Spider crab,’ she said. When Jim and me got outside, I said, ‘I’d like a little home like that, me. I don’t know which of them I envy most.’

  I thought we was going to ride back home then; but Jim wanted to go on to Pleinmont, for some reason. I looked over at Lihou as we passed by L’Érée, and thought of the two of us on that little island by ourselves all night. I was wondering if he was remembering too. When we got passed Fort Grey, I pointed out to him the cottage where old Mère Quéripel lived. It was a real old witch’s cottage. It was built end-on against the side of a worked-out quarry, and the thatch was so low down you could hardly see the windows and they seemed to be looking at you sideways; and it had one crooked chimney coming out of the roof. Jim said, ‘I suppose Mère Quéripel come out of that chimney on her broomstick.’ I said, ‘I expect Liza do as well.’ ‘I wouldn’t be surprised,’ he said.

  He wanted to go right on to the end, so we took the right-hand turning in front of the Imperial and went along by the Trinity Houses and round by Fort Pezeries and left our bikes on the grass by the Table des Pions. We then climbed down between the two big rocks and stood on the edge of the cliff looking at the Hanois. Jim said, ‘This is as far west as we can get, isn’t it?’ ‘It is,’ I said. He said, ‘America is over there.’ ‘I can’t see it,’ I said. ‘Let’s go, you and me,’ he said. I thought he was joking. ‘We’d get on all right,’ he said, ‘just two Guernsey boys, eh?’ He was bubbling over with the idea. ‘I’ve been thinking about it for a long time,’ he said.

  On the way riding back he explained how he had it all arranged. His father was sending some cattle to the States and somebody had to go with them. Whoever went with the cattle would have his passage paid; and I could be the one to go and Jim would pay his own passage. His father was quite willing. ‘I would travel with you, of course,’ he said, ‘in the same part of the ship.’ I let him talk. I knew it was a wangle for them to pay my passage and not hurt my pride. He said, ‘We’d be sure to get work with the cows. What d’you think?’ I said, ‘How can I leave my mother?’ He said, ‘I suppose not.’

  He didn’t say another word for a long time. At last, just as we was turning inland at Gran’-Rock, he said, ‘Nothing perfect is ever allowed to happen in this world.’ I left him at Les Gigands. He wanted me to go indoors with him, but I didn’t feel like it. It was a grey evening and when I got round Sandy Hook the grey sea was coming over the grey stones and the clock of the Vale Church was striking the three-quarters. They was as sad as the bells. My mother was just back from the Brethren when I got in. I told her I had seen Tabitha and Jean and they was well. I didn’t tell her Jim had asked me to go to America with him and I had refused for her sake. It wasn’t true altogether. I didn’t really want to go away from Guernsey. I bet they don’t have spider-crabs in America.

  Jim didn’t go neither. When I went down on the Thursday evening, expecting to hear what I didn’t want to hear, the first thing he said was, ‘It’s going to be all right. Wilfred is going.’ His mother said, ‘As if we could let Jim go on his own, without you to look after him!’ I said, ‘I have always had the idea it was him looked after me.’ She laughed. Wilfred was gone within a month; and the night before he went I was invited to his farewell party. He was very excited about going. He said, ‘When I come back some of you people will have to buck your ideas up.’ He was going to stay over there six months, or a year; and study the up-to-date methods. Actually he didn’t come back to Guernsey again for ten years; and then it was only on a short visit to his mother after his father died. He had become an Amer
ican by then and was married to an American girl. I must give Wilfred his due. He had done well for himself. He had gone to an Agricultural College in the States and, so as not to be a drain on his parents, waited on the tables to pay his way. The girl he married was well-to-do and had influence; and he ended up as a judge of cattle at the big shows. His wife was a strapping wench, as I remember her; and I could see she had him well under her thumb.

  There was changes at the farm once Wilfred was gone. For one thing, Lydia came more into view. Until then she had hardly done a stroke of work. Once a blue moon she would go in the dairy and stamp a few pounds of butter; but afterwards she was tired and had to rest. Now she began to take charge of everything. She didn’t do much herself and still coughed from time to time to let you know she might drop dead at any minute; but she gave the orders and nobody dared to go against the wishes of Miss Mahy. Jim’s father was delighted with his Lydia. He was getting very heavy and wheezy like poor old Victor and didn’t do much. The brunt of it fell on Jim; but Lydia took on Phoebe Ferbrache to work in the dairy and help with the milking.

  I had known Phoebe Ferbrache to say hullo to ever since she could toddle. She was the youngest of the Ferbrache family from Sandy Hook; and there was at least a dozen. From a child she was a wilful little miss with a pointed chin and a pointed nose and eyes like black marbles. I couldn’t imagine what on earth Lydia was thinking about to have her on the farm; but when our Phoebe spoke to Miss Mahy, it was as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. She grabbed at every chance she could to be helping Jim. If I’d had any sense at all, I’d have seen what was going to happen; but it didn’t enter my head that even Jim could be such a fool.