The Book of Ebenezer le Page Read online

  I think Raymond was already gone to England when Liza came back to Guernsey, but I am not sure. If so, it was only a matter of weeks. I know Christine was gone; but she always had to go back to her school some weeks before Raymond had to go to his college. They didn’t go about together, but sometimes I saw him talking to Christine in Town. Christine would be with Gwen, and Raymond with one of the St Sampson’s Chapel crowd. I knew he went occasionally to Christine’s house for tea on Sundays. Hetty didn’t ask her back, but otherwise didn’t make anything of it. She said, ‘Well, if my Raymond is going to be a minister, I suppose he got to make himself with everybody: even the lowest of the low.’

  I spent a few evenings with Raymond up in his room before he went. It was mostly about the books he was reading he talked to me. He said, ‘It does me good to talk to you because you put the famous Ebenezer twist on everything. It’s cock-eyed; but it puts me straight.’ The books he was reading was a shock to me. They seemed to be all against what he was supposed to be going in for. I blamed Clive Holyoak for that. Raymond had several books from the Library by Bernard Shaw; and others in French by Anatole France. He said Anatole France was an atheist and didn’t believe in God, but was very gentle with those who did. He showed me a picture of Bernard Shaw in one of the books. I thought he looked a wicked devil but Raymond said he had a fine face. Bernard Shaw wasn’t a Christian, yet thought for people to do what Jesus said was the only way would work. He was a socialist. I said I thought socialism was nonsense. If you give everything to everybody, in the end nobody will have nothing. Raymond said there wasn’t much danger of socialism coming to Guernsey, so I needn’t worry. I said the book he ought to read is Robinson Crusoe. It is a good book. It show how if you go gallivanting all over the world instead of stopping at home where you belong, you only land yourself with a load of trouble. Raymond couldn’t stop laughing when I said that. I don’t know for why.

  He came to say good-bye to my mother before he left. He had been to say good-bye to Prissy. ‘Ah well,’ she said to him, ‘it take all sorts to make a world.’ It wasn’t at all what I would have expected Prissy to say. I couldn’t think what had come over her. I knew she had quarrelled with the Stonelakes and the sister was gone back to England with her children; and my Cousin Mary Ann was often going there. Something must be wrong. As a matter of fact, it was that winter La Prissy took to drink. It may perhaps have made her more forgiving of other people for their foolishness, and was why she was nice to Raymond. He had also received a comic postcard from Horace from America. He got it out of his pocket to show me. It was a picture of a sky-pilot hanging from a balloon by an anchor through the seat of his pants. ‘Good old Horace!’ said Raymond. ‘He is always there to knock the nonsense out of me.’ I walked down the road with him and, when we shook hands, he said, ‘Perhaps one day I will have a chance of preaching in Guernsey. A prophet is not without honour save in his own country and among his own people. That will be the test.’ Raymond, for all his big ideas, was a Guernsey boy first and last.

  4

  Liza turned up at Les Moulins. It was the last thing I would have expected her to do. After dinner one Saturday afternoon I was out in the wash-house stripped to the waist washing myself down, when I heard a knock on the front door. My mother answered. ‘Somebody for you!’ she called out. I thought it must be young Ogier from the vineries I had promised some cabbage plants to, though I couldn’t make out why he hadn’t come round the back. I went out as I was. It was Liza. She had never looked more lovely. She was wearing a tartan plaid skirt and a white silk blouse with frills round the neck and a short brown cape hanging from her shoulders and a round fur hat. She really did look like a princess. ‘Goodness, I’m not fit to be seen!’ I said. ‘I think you look very fit,’ she said. ‘Come in and talk to my mother,’ I said, ‘while I go and make myself proper.’ I went into my room and left them together. I wondered what on earth was going to happen now.

  It was naughty of my mother to call out ‘Somebody for you!’ when she knew I was washing. She did it on purpose to punish Liza, and put her off me; but it didn’t. She came in and sat down in my armchair and, as I went out, I saw my mother sit down in hers with her hands folded in her lap. When I had made myself decent and came back into the kitchen, I expected to find them sitting like two mommets looking at each other; but Liza was talking away in patois about Scotland, and my mother was listening and nodding her old head interested. ‘Mais es-che comme chonna là bas, donc?’ she said. ‘Je n’aurai pas cru.’ She had no idea where Scotland was, she thought it was somewhere down south; but she knew where every place in the Holy Land was. I had seen her again and again examining the maps at the back of the big Bible through her magnifying glass.

  I said, ‘Mum isn’t very well these days, I’m sorry to say.’ Liza was all sympathy, and wanted to know what was the matter. My mother said her legs was swollen. She hadn’t told me that. ‘Then you must make that brute of a son help you with the heavy work,’ said Liza. ‘He do help all he can,’ said my mother. Liza said she had come to ask me to have tea with her in Town, as we were old friends; but now she wouldn’t think of it. Liza always put the convenience of other women first, before she thought of the man. My mother said I was getting ready to go to Town anyway, and Tabitha was coming any minute. ‘Come on, then,’ I said, ‘let’s go!’ I went to the cashbox in the drawer of the dresser, where we kept the money for spending. I knew my mother was watching me; but she didn’t see how much I took. I had an idea at the back of my head. I was going to strike while the iron was hot.

  When we got out of doors, Liza said, ‘I’ve never been as far round this end of the island before. It must be lonely out here.’ It was those days. Our neighbour-to-be, Monsieur Le Boutillier, was having his house built, but it wasn’t finished yet; and, of course, there wasn’t no places to have tea and châlets for visitors then. The Chouey quarry was long since worked out and filled with water; and there was quite a number of windmills around that part with their fans turning in the wind. They was small mills for pumping water only; not old mills with big vanes for grinding corn like the Vale Mill. They turned ever so fast in the wind. ‘The windmills are company,’ I said. They was, too; but mine is the only one left now. The one thing that haven’t changed over the years is the air. It have a tang is fresh and salty as it isn’t in Town, or any other part of the island I know. Liza was taking deep breaths of it. ‘Ah,’ she said, ‘it doesn’t matter where you go on this island there is a difference.’ ‘The North is best,’ I said. I got her to look down on our little bay. The tide was out and the sand was clean and glistening in the sun. I said, ‘Tabitha and me used to pick limpets off those rocks when we was kids.’ She said, ‘Is that your boat?’ ‘The Bijou, yes,’ I said. ‘Aren’t you a lucky man?’ she said. ‘You have everything a man can want.’ ‘Have I?’ I said. ‘I didn’t know.’

  I have been telling myself for thirty years I hate Liza, but now when I come to write about her, I begin to wonder if it is true. When she was in a good mood, as she was that afternoon, I doubt if any chap in the world could have hated Liza. She was a wonderful companion for a man. She was gay and warm and friendly, and a lady and not a lady: you could say anything you liked to her. She was so good to be with, I said, ‘Sometimes I wonder if you are really a woman at all.’ She laughed. ‘Sometimes I wonder the same myself,’ she said. I wasn’t hot for her, as I can be for a girl; but when I blow hot, I blow cold pretty soon. I wanted her; but not under the hedge.

  On the bus from L’Islet we sat on the top and nearly got our heads knocked off by the branches of the trees. Another girl would have screamed and been silly; but not Liza. She said, ‘I wonder if we’ll get to the Half-way alive. I don’t care, do you?’ ‘It’s all the same to me,’ I said. The tram was waiting at the Half-way. Usually you had to wait ten minutes. ‘It always waits for me,’ she said. I was sure it did. When we got off by the Town Church, I said we would have tea at Le Poidevin’s. I had a purpose in choosing Le Po
idevin’s, and it wasn’t because it was cheaper. ‘As my lord and master says,’ she said.

  The next week several people said to me they had seen me in Town that Saturday, but I had been too proud to look at them. It wasn’t that I was too proud. I hadn’t seen them. I had no eyes for nobody but Liza. At Le Poidevin’s we was lucky again and got a table to ourselves by the window. I could see Bachmann’s, the Jeweller’s, shop-window opposite; and felt the money in my hip-pocket to make sure it was there. When the tea was brought and Liza had poured it out, I looked straight into her eyes across the table. ‘Now, Liza,’ I said, ‘are you going to marry this Captain?’

  She said, ‘Am I going to marry this Captain’s mother and his uncle who drinks like a fish and old Angus who growls like a bear and the castle in ruins falling into the lake on an island not as big as Jethou?’ It wasn’t an answer to what I asked her; but I let her go on. She said she could laugh at it now, but she nearly went out of her mind when she was living there. It was the mother who was the worst. ‘She sits in a high-backed chair as stiff as a poker,’ Liza said, ‘and knits, knits, knits.’ She didn’t even knit like an ordinary human being. She had a bundle of straw stuck in her waistband and a needle stuck in the straw and she worked the other needles on it, on and on and on without ever stopping, while she would be laying down the law. ‘Talking to her was like trying to talk to a sewing-machine,’ Liza said, ‘and whatever she said was right. She has never been contradicted in her life. Besides, I was nearly starved to death: she was so mean.’

  I said, ‘That’s all very well; but what about your small boy?’ ‘Robert isn’t my small boy,’ she said. ‘He is grandmother’s small boy. She only wants me to marry her precious son to make it respectable. That is what I am for. To breed children for the mothers and the wives.’ She sounded extraordinary bitter; and there was that twist to her mouth I didn’t like. ‘Never mind, then,’ I said, ‘leave that for now.’ She hadn’t touched her tea. ‘You are very understanding,’ she said and put her hand on mine. ‘Eat up!’ I said. I was thinking Don Guille must have been the father of the other child and his widow had taken it. I knew they didn’t have any children of their own. After our second cup of tea I lit a cigarette. ‘Give me one, please,’ Liza said. It wasn’t many women who smoked in public places those days. I let her have one, and lit it for her. She smoked as if she was used to smoking. ‘I don’t really mind not having my children,’ she said. ‘I like children. I like seeing children about the place, but they don’t have to be mine; and they must be clean and well-behaved. I can’t stand napkins and snotty noses. I wasn’t made to be a mother.’

  ‘That’s not being natural,’ I said, ‘for a woman.’ She said, ‘Nature isn’t fair to women.’ I said, ‘Nature isn’t fair to men, if it come to that. Women have it all their own way.’ ‘Ho, ho!’ she said, ‘do they?’ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘A man got to go round on his bended knees begging for a woman to have him.’ She said, ‘I haven’t noticed you going round on your bended knees begging!’ I was then, if she had only known it. ‘Seriously, though,’ she said, ‘if you give a girl a baby and clear off, you can forget all about the girl. If a girl is given a baby, she is reminded of the father every time she looks at it. Robert is Ian all over again.’ I began to feel sympathy with poor Ian. I said, ‘What have Ian done to you that you hate him so much? He looked a fine chap to me.’ ‘Goodness, I don’t hate Ian,’ she said. ‘He was a nice little piggy wiggy.’ It was always the same when I argued with Liza: either I ended up in a rage, or else I had to laugh.

  I laughed it off; but I wasn’t being beaten, though. I thought then I was right and I still think I was right. Liza could have been happy married to me, if only she’d had the sense to see it. I don’t say it would have been perfect, but we would have got on better than most. In some way we was the same underneath. When we got out in the Arcade, I said I would like to look at Bachmann’s window. The window giving on the Arcade was full of silver plate and Guernsey milk-cans, and what not. The engagement rings was in the window giving on the High Street and that was where I steered Liza to look. There was some that was marked more than I had on me; but there was a lovely one with a red stone I could have bought. I said, ‘I want to buy you a present.’ She said, ‘I am always willing to receive presents.’ I pointed to the rings, and I said, ‘I like the third one from the top, do you?’ She said, ‘That is the one present I will not accept.’ I said, ‘Why not?’ She said, ‘Because I do not make promises I will not keep.’ I said, ‘I suppose you are thinking of going away again.’ ‘I will not leave Guernsey ever,’ she said. ‘That is a promise, if you like. I will be where you can always come and see me. I will always be within your reach.’

  I must have looked how I felt, for she took my arm, and herself looked sad. ‘Thank you for the very great honour you have done me,’ she said. ‘I am not worth it, I assure you; but now will you buy me a present I would really like?’ ‘What is it you would really like?’ I said. ‘A silver Guernsey milk-can,’ she said. ‘All right, let’s go in,’ I said. I bought her a silver Guernsey milk-can. She didn’t choose the dearest, but it was real silver. It was packed in a box and wrapped in brown paper, and she came out of the shop with the parcel as pleased as if she was a child with a toy. She said, ‘This is the one treasure I will never part with, even if I’m starving.’ I said, ‘You’ll never be that.’ She said, ‘I might be, some day. I have nothing, except what I am given.’

  I don’t know how I can have been so happy with Liza for the rest of the evening. By rights I ought to have been downright miserable. I remember we walked down the White Rock and saw the Reindeer come in from Weymouth and go on to Jersey. A lot of the passengers who came ashore was green from being seasick. They made me laugh. I was too happy to be sorry for other people. I saw Liza back to Castle Carey and kissed her goodnight; but it was more like a friend. ‘When do I see you again?’ I said. ‘How about next Saturday?’ she said. ‘Call for me here.’ She couldn’t have said anything to please me better, because it meant she was owning me before those grand people; yet now as I write it, I feel the old fury rising in me at the cheek and the conceit of Liza. She had it all her own way with everybody. I must admit she have kept the only promise she ever made to me. She have never left Guernsey. I have always known where she was living: not only before, but after she left Castle Carey. I hear of her now and then from people I meet in Town who live round Pleinmont; and, by all accounts, she is still going strong, though according to her reckoning she must be hundreds of years old. I could visit her tomorrow if I wanted to. I wonder if she ever made a promise to anybody else. I don’t think so. I don’t believe she have ever said ‘I love you’ to a single living soul; and she certainly won’t say it now.

  Christine didn’t come home that Christmas, but spent the holiday with a schoolmistress friend in England. Was Hetty pleased? When Raymond came home she had him all to herself. He went to see Christine’s people to wish them a happy Christmas, and to Chapel Sunday evenings, but otherwise he hardly left the house. La Prissy and Percy was invited for Christmas Day, and all at Wallaballoo went to Timbuctoo for Boxing Day. There was goodwill in the air. I stayed home with my mother Christmas and Boxing Day; but Tabitha came for the New Year and I went to Hetty’s. She really was happy, poor Hetty, that first holiday of Raymond’s. He kept on saying how glad he was to be back, and played ‘Home Sweet Home with Variations’ until I was sick of it.

  I didn’t think he looked so well, myself, and Hetty thought he’d got thinner. It suited him better being a soldier than studying to be a minister. He said it was awful having to live with a gang of professing Christians. ‘I don’t want to be a professing Christian,’ he said. ‘I want to be a Christian who doesn’t have to think about it.’ He couldn’t stand the Holy Willie smile, as he called it; and the voice they put on when they say ‘Our Lord’. ‘Give me the chaps in the guardroom any day!’ said Raymond. I said, ‘What the goodness is there you can have to learn for all the years y
ou are going to be in college?’ He said, ‘Ah, I am being grounded in my theological position.’ His face was wrinkled up with his wicked smile. He was making a joke of something else he didn’t ought to have done. ‘You don’t know any theology, do you, Ebenezer?’ he said. ‘Not that I know of,’ I said. He said, ‘There is Catholic Theology and there is Anglican Theology and there is ours. Ours is a hotch-potch of John Wesley, who broke off from the Church of England, and Martin Luther, who broke off from the Catholic Church, and Calvin, who broke off from everybody but himself and who your mother follows, more or less.’ I didn’t know that, me. He said, ‘Before you begin, it has been decided what you have to believe; and, after reading hundreds of pages of closely reasoned argument, you end up by proving what it was decided you have to believe is true. It is like a theorem in geometry at school. It gives me a headache. The others think it is religion.’

  I said, ‘Well, it’s a chance a lot would jump at: to have no work to do and only study.’ ‘I know, I know,’ he said, ‘you mustn’t take notice of half I say. I use you to let off steam on. They are good fellows, really; but I am a stranger there. When they sing: