The Book of Ebenezer le Page Read online

  When I got outside and was standing on the edge of the pavement in St Julien’s Avenue wondering whether to go home, or stop in Town for the evening, I felt somebody nudge me, and looked, and there she was standing beside me. ‘Are you lost?’ she said. ‘No,’ I said, ‘but I am trying to make up my mind where to go to next.’ ‘I’m going to have my tea,’ she said. I took that as a hint. ‘Righto, come along, then,’ I said, ‘we can go to Le Poidevin’s.’ Le Poidevin’s was a bit cheaper than Le Noury’s. She said, ‘I’m sorry; but I don’t allow a man to stand me treat.’ I thought well, she is different from every other girl I have ever met. I looked her over in the light. She was older than I had thought, but looked more of a lady. If I hadn’t known, I would never have guessed she was a chocolate girl. ‘How about coming to my place and having tea with me?’ she said. ‘Thank you very much,’ I said. ‘I’ll be pleased to!’ I didn’t think she could be a whore.

  She had a couple of rooms in Pedvin Street. They was very clean and nicely furnished. I saw she was an educated woman. She had a whole shelf-load of books by Marie Corelli. She gave me a good tea of bread and butter and jam and cream cakes; and then got down to what she had brought me there for. It was her made the first move. I wouldn’t have, because I didn’t know quite what I was letting myself in for. As it was, I had never imagined before that Saturday afternoon that there was so many ways of doing the same thing. At seven o’clock she said she would have to be getting back to St Julien’s Hall for the evening performance. I walked with her up High Street and down the Pollet; but my knees was knocking together. She was as fresh as a daisy. At the bottom of St Julien’s Avenue she shook hands with me like a man and said, ‘Come the same time next Saturday, if you like.’ ‘I’ll see,’ I said. The way I was feeling I didn’t think I would ever want to do it again.

  By the next Saturday, I felt different; and I went to her place every Saturday for two or three months. I learnt a lot. While I was having a spell between goes, she talked to me quite serious. She had a religion I had never heard of. She believed she had lived many times before and was going to live many times more. She had been Cleopatra and Mary, Queen of Scots, and Madame de Pompadour; and goodness knows who she was going to be next. She said that if you had been good in this life, you got a better life next time; but that if you had been bad, you got a worse. She was going to become perfect in the end; but I didn’t quite understand what was going to happen to her then. Anyhow, for the present, it didn’t matter much, because she wasn’t in a hurry. She didn’t want to get too good too quick: she wanted to live as many lives as possible. At the same time, she must be careful not to go downhill. There was some things she must not do. I wondered what those things could be. She said she must never go with a man she didn’t want to go with, and she must never do it for money. I said I hoped she wasn’t losing marks over me. She said far from it. I was making her better because I was good. Well, a chap likes to be told he is good for something; but I have always had the idea in my head I got something more in me than that. I was glad when she went to Jersey. I didn’t like her really.

  I often saw Liza about in Town; but I tried to keep my eyes off her. She was so beautiful those days it hurt. The way she walked with her long legs and swung her shoulders and threw her head back when she laughed was a poem; but I wasn’t going to be the slave of a poem. I saw her round with young Guille a lot, though he was married by then; and after he was killed, I didn’t see her for months. Then I saw her going round with a Captain in the Scots Guards. He was a Goliath of a chap and I knew I didn’t have a chance in hell against him. I found out his father was a lord in Scotland and that he was staying at Castle Carey while he was getting better from a wound. He went back to the War and the next time I saw Liza she was dressed as a nurse. I have never seen any actress on the Pictures, not even Greta Garbo, to come up to Liza when she was dressed as a nurse. She was nursing the wounded in a hospital in London and was only in Guernsey now and again for a few weeks at a time. I saw her out with one fellow after another, but only officers I noticed; and sometimes she looked sad and haunted, and at others wild and gay.

  I ran into Ada Domaille from time to time. Good old Ada was doing good work. She was helping Miss Penelope Peele to send hundreds of parcels of food and socks and warm clothes to the Guernsey boys in the trenches. I asked her about Liza, but Ada got it firmly fixed in her head Liza and me was meant for each other from the start, so she didn’t tell me all she knew. It was Jack Domaille, her brother, who let the cat out of the bag. He wasn’t in the Army because he had something wrong with one lung; but he had learnt to drive a motor-car and was carrying on as a chauffeur for the Careys. Naturally he knew all about Liza’s goings on. She already had two babies. In fact, it was at the Domailles’ house at the Marais they was born. Lady Carey knew. Of course, she couldn’t very well let them be born at Castle Carey; but she would always have Liza back to live there after. Though she did say to Jack once, ‘If my dear Elizabeth must have a baby once a year, I do rather wish she wouldn’t always choose to have it over Christmas.’ I had no idea what had been done with the babies; but I didn’t ask. The truth is I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to know they existed.

  Jim came home on embarkation leave. The very day he arrived in Guernsey he came round to Les Moulins in the evening. ‘We’re going to Town Saturday night, the two of us,’ he said, ‘and you’re coming back to the farm for supper and stay the night.’ ‘Then will you come to dinner and tea with us on Sunday?’ I said. ‘For sure!’ he said. I can’t write about that Saturday and Sunday. It was too good. Jim looked magnificent. He was the picture of health, as Liza said, and looked years younger than when he went away, and was upright again and held his head up. When I walked down the High Street with him, I was as proud as if I walked with a king. It wasn’t that they had made a smart soldier of him. He was God’s own comic soldier. He was Jim. It wasn’t three or four, nor five or six, it was dozens who shouted out ‘Wharro Jim! Comment s’en va, mon viow?’ and up went his big hand and up came his big smile. People wanted to talk to him, people wanted to touch him, and he talked to anybody; but, even then, he dragged me in and kept hold of me by the elbow, as if I might run away. Supper at the farm was like old times, except that Wilfred and Gerald wasn’t there. Gerald was then a cadet in a training school for flying in Bristol. Lydia had supper with us and couldn’t take her eyes off her brother; and for once I liked her. After supper we went up to his old room and lay and talked in his big bed until I fell asleep against him with his arm around me like when we was kids on Lihou. There have been times in my life when I have thought the Bible is right and it is a curse to be born; but when I remember that stolen day of innocent happiness, how not for one moment was we out of touch, not even when we was asleep, I know it was worth being born for that.

  He was up with the lark in the morning and out swearing at the cows. He was good at swearing before, but he was better now and used swear-words even I didn’t know. I think they was Welsh; but the cows didn’t take a blind bit more notice than when he used to swear at them in their own language. Tabitha came for dinner to our house that Sunday and, in the afternoon, when Jim and me was sitting on the rocks, he said, ‘A pity I couldn’t have married Tabitha. I would have loved Tabitha.’ I too wished he could have married Tabitha; though I liked Jean. He told me about his training. He was a good shot with a rifle, he said; but then he always had been. ‘If I can shoot birds, I suppose I can shoot men,’ he said; but I knew he didn’t like the idea. He didn’t like throwing hand-grenades. He said when he pulled the pin out of the Mills bomb, he was always afraid it would go off before he got it out of his hand. He hoped he wouldn’t be in a bayonet charge. ‘I couldn’t do that to a chap,’ he said. I said, ‘They’ll give you rum before you go over the top; and he’ll be trying to do the same to you.’ ‘I can’t rip a chap open,’ he said, ‘it don’t matter who he is.’

  He spent the rest of his leave with Phoebe and the kids. I got a po
stcard from him from Southampton, saying he was on his way. At the bottom, he wrote, ‘Don’t sigh-ee, don’t cry-ee!’ I got one letter from him from France; but there was black lines through most of it. All I could read was ‘Don’t think I have forgotten you, if you don’t hear from me for a week or two. I’ll write again as soon as I can.’ I saw the news in the Press. I had just come in from work and the Press was on the table where the boy had thrown it. My mother was frying some fish for our tea. I opened the Press as I always did, hardly thinking of what I was doing. I saw it at once. ‘Killed in Action. James Mahy, beloved son of James and Agnes Mahy of Les Grands Gigands, St Sampson’s. For God and King and Country.’ I went out of doors. I cried.

  20

  I wondered if I ought to go and see Jim’s mother; but I didn’t go. There was nothing I could say. My mother didn’t say nothing. When I came indoors she had laid out the tea on the table and put the Press away. I knew she knew. She did something to me she never did. She touched me. When she put my plate of fish in front for me, she stroked my head and neck with her big rough hand. I looked at her old eyes when she was sitting opposite me. She saw and knew and suffered more than anybody thought, my mother. ‘This is good fish,’ I said. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it was caught this morning.’ It was whiting and flakey. I could hardly stuff it down.

  I got a letter from Jim’s mother. It was in an envelope with a black edge and on paper with a black edge. It was written in her beautiful old-fashioned hand-writing, but I didn’t like it. She was the perfect lady, even over the death of her son. I would have had more sympathy for Hetty, who would have gone mad. She began ‘I know you will be sharing our grief in our great bereavement’. She went on to say she hoped I would visit them, though she understood why I had not done so. She invited me to tea the next Sunday. I didn’t like the idea of going; but I went. It was like going to tea after a funeral. She was in deep mourning and looked very tragic. I thought of Pauline Frederick in Madame X. Lydia was in black voile and looked as she had looked when she was going into a decline. Old Mahy wore a black tie and a black band on his arm. I wasn’t even wearing a black tie.

  They made no to-do, thank goodness. Old Mahy said, ‘He was a good lad, our Jim.’ I couldn’t help thinking how they hadn’t seen eye to eye about anything when Jim was alive. Mrs Mahy said she had been to see Phoebe. ‘She is taking it remarkably well,’ she said. ‘She is a brave girl.’ At first Mrs Mahy thought of having Phoebe and the kids to live at the farm, and Lydia was now quite willing; but Phoebe’s sister, Eileen, was getting married to young Sarchet before he was called up, and they all wanted to live together at Sous L’Église. Mrs Mahy decided, all things considered, it would be best. After tea, she asked me if I would like to have something of Jim’s. He had left some books behind in his room when he got married. Perhaps I would like to go up and choose one. I didn’t want to go into his empty room. I knew what books he got up there. There was a pile of Bibby’s Annuals he kept because he liked looking at the pictures. There was a Bible and a dictionary, but I didn’t want those; and there was David Copperfield and The Mill on the Floss and Robinson Crusoe. I said I would like to have Robinson Crusoe. She fetched it for me. When I had said goodbye to the others, she came to the gate with me. ‘I want you to come and see me often,’ she said, ‘you meant more to Jim than anybody.’ I said I would.

  I visited her about once a month until the old man died; and then she left the farm and went to live in her house at St Martin’s. It was never known from the Army how Jim was killed; but I know. His officer wrote the usual things, and there was a lot of letters of sympathy from all sort of people his mother showed me: but the best was from a boy in his platoon called David Evans, who had been wounded and was in hospital when he wrote. It wasn’t well written and was badly spelt and the paper wasn’t very clean; but in it he said ‘Jim was the only Guernseyman in our mob. He made us laugh, but we all loved him,’ and at the end ‘He was the first over the top and at ’em.’ Yes, Jim was the one to be ripped open. He couldn’t do it. I have dreamt of him many times over the years; but, thank God, it have never been in mud and blood. It have been the happy Jim coming to meet me across the meadow with his big smile and his hand up; and I feel in my sleep that a great happiness is coming to me, but then I wake up.

  I have something bad in me. I think it is a devil. I get very angry. I get so angry sometimes I feel I am going to break in two. The worst of it is that it is not for reasons anybody else would get angry; and nobody else would understand. I don’t understand why myself half the time. When the fellows at work, and many others, all with the best intentions in the world, said to me ‘Hard luck about Jim,’ I felt I could have murdered them. Raymond was the only one I opened my heart to. I am sure I would be ashamed now if I could remember all I said to him. I know I kept on saying, ‘Jim is not in the world any more! Jim is not in the world any more!’ ‘He is somewhere,’ Raymond said. ‘How d’you know?’ I said. ‘He has to be,’ he said. That was all he could say. He didn’t know really. When he left, he said, ‘I do wish old Horace would hurry up and come home.’

  Horace didn’t come over and win the War. When the Armistice was signed he was kicking his heels in America; and, soon after, he was demobbed and went back to work for the rich company that could have bought up Guernsey. It wasn’t until years later that he came home, and by then a lot had happened to poor Raymond. The last summer of the War Christine Mahy came over for the long holiday from the school where she was teaching in England. I reckon it was then she spotted that Raymond might be a boy like other boys, and not only a boy who read poetry and talked about religion. He didn’t chase after her, but she went to Town Saturday nights with her sister, Gwen; and he was usually about Town with one of his chums from the Fort. Christine saw to it he paired off with her, and Gwen was left with the other. There was nothing in the way of courting; but they would go for a stroll, the two pairs, to the end of the White Rock, or along the Castle Walk.

  Of course La Hetty got to know. La Prissy was round to the back door full of it. ‘Is it true what I hear?’ she said, ‘that your Raymond is engaged to that Christine Mahy from Ivy Lodge? I couldn’t believe my ears! They got nothing but debts, those Mahys. They are less than nobody!’ It was true enough. Christine’s father, who was a brother to Jim’s, was about as good as Jim’s at spending money, and quite as bad at making it; and the mother didn’t have a penny to bless herself with, and wasn’t even of a good family. She was from over the fish-and-chip shop in Fountain Street and you couldn’t come from lower down than that. Hetty said, ‘If Raymond was to marry that dirty little Mahy, she would never put her foot inside this house!’

  I am quite sure Raymond didn’t have a thought in his head of marrying Christine Mahy. He was friendly with her, as he was friendly with all fellows and girls alike. Later on, when he was blaming himself for everything, he said to me, ‘I made a great mistake when I was a young chap. I used to think girls were human beings like us; but they are not. They are always after something. They are either after your body, or your money, or a father for their children; and, if they are not after your body, or your money, or a father for their children, there is always something they want you to be, or do, that will bring them glory. They are never satisfied to let you be; and be with you.’ I said, ‘Well, men are after their own ends too, you know.’

  Raymond had the sense not to take Christine to his home; but she took him back to her house Saturday nights when he had a weekend pass. He was made welcome. Bill Mahy, her father, was a long, thin, dreamy chap, who didn’t say much, as a rule; but he liked talking to Raymond. He was another for reading books and was much more interested in the why’s and the wherefores of everything than in making a living growing, which was his business. Emmeline Mahy, the mother, was a scallywag of a woman; but she was easy-going and made anybody who went there feel at home. There was a daughter-in-law, Edna, who practically lived at Ivy Lodge with her little girl, though she had a home of her own, Rosamunda,
across the road. The son, Herbert, who was the eldest of the family, was in the trenches. He had always been the big fat jolly boy, and looked like a barrel in his uniform. He would have finished up like old Dredge, if he had lived; but he was killed through some misunderstanding the day of the Armistice.

  Raymond didn’t get home sometimes until the early hours of Sunday morning; and when he walked in, he would find Hetty sitting up waiting for him with a face like death. She guessed where he had been, but she daren’t ask. Instead, she had laid for him a lovely supper of crab, or lobster, which she knew he liked. ‘Thank you, Ma,’ he would say, ‘but I have had something to eat.’ He told me how those nights he hated his mother when he came in and found her sitting up waiting for him. If she had gone to bed at her usual time, he would have told her openly in the morning where he had been. As it was, he didn’t say a word more; but went to bed and couldn’t bring himself even to kiss her good-night.

  Hetty breathed again when Christine went back to England. Christine didn’t write to Raymond. That ought to have pleased Hetty; but it didn’t. ‘Fancy that girl not sending Raymond as much as a postcard,’ she said to me. ‘It only go to show how much she think of him.’ Hetty was a woman and ought to have known Christine better. She was sure of herself, that girl. When, alas and alack, she had got what she wanted, she said to me once in her sing-song holy voice, ‘I always knew Raymond would be mine in the fullness of time.’ She had a way of speaking as if God told her things He didn’t tell to other people. The trouble was He didn’t tell her everything. However, Hetty soon had another worry. The powers-that-be at the Fort decided the young instructors must do their bit in the trenches, and Raymond was sent back to his platoon to finish his training. ‘If he got to go, I’ll die!’ she said.