The Book of Ebenezer le Page Read online

  She put on a grey pleated jacket went with the skirt, and we went for our walk up as far as the Old Guard House. It was a lovely afternoon and the sea was like silk. I remember the wild daffodils growing on the hedges and, ever since, when I see wild daffodils I think of Liza. I didn’t say anything on the way; and nor did she. I wanted that walk to go on and on and on, for I knew somehow there wouldn’t be such another. At last, when we got to the Guard House, I said, ‘I have come to see you today with one purpose, Liza, and that is to ask you to marry me.’ She said, ‘Oh, why must you spoil it? I was feeling so happy to be with you!’ I said, ‘If you don’t want to marry me because you don’t like me, say so; but, for goodness sake, give me a reason.’ ‘I will die a virgin,’ she said. ‘A funny sort of virgin!’ I said. ‘I am a virgin, didn’t you know?’ she said. I said, ‘Well, you won’t be a virgin for long, if you marry me!’ ‘That is just what I am afraid of,’ she said. ‘Now what do you mean?’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t be me any longer,’ she said. I said, ‘You would be Mrs Ebenezer Le Page of Les Moulins.’ That finished it!

  ‘Mrs Ebenezer Le Page of Les Moulins! Mrs Ebenezer Le Page of Les Moulins!’ she said, ‘and all the people would say “I wonder what in the world that Liza Quéripel, who have lived for years among the English and the gentry, can be thinking about to marry that Ebenezer Le Page from Les Moulins, who is only a rough Guernseyman and a small grower and fisherman and got nothing and is nobody!”’ I said, ‘I got enough to feed you and keep a roof over your head, anyhow. I know you got money of your own, and I wish you didn’t. I don’t want it; but you can spend it on your clothes. I like to see you well dressed.’ ‘Oh my dear, my dear,’ she said, ‘as if I meant that! I am only saying what the people would say. They would say far worse things about me. “I wonder what on earth that Ebenezer Le Page, who is an honest, decent fellow and work hard and look after his mother until she die, can see in that Liza Quéripel, who for all her grand ways come from the lowest of the low and is a gad-about and a fly-by-night and think of nothing but to make a show of herself. She will never make a good wife for any man, that one!”’ I laughed. It was my old trouble with Liza. I felt I wanted to strangle her; and I laughed!

  She caught hold of my arm and said, ‘Come on, let’s go back across the fields, eh? I want to see the three churches.’ I let her drag me back across the fields. It was no use me being sulky. I couldn’t make her marry me, if she didn’t want to. We got to a spot from which we could see the three churches: Torteval Church and St Saviour’s Church and the Church of St Peter-in-the-Wood. I wasn’t interested in seeing the three churches; and I doubt if she was either. It was just something to look at like most people pass their time doing who come to Guernsey nowadays. She gave me a good tea when we got in; but I didn’t know what I was eating. She talked to me about her house and how she’d had it done up inside and out. ‘Eva Gallienne comes in to clean,’ she said. I didn’t know who she was talking about. ‘Remember Eva Robilliard?’ she said, ‘Queen Elizabeth. She is married to a Gallienne now and have five children. The eldest is a hulking great brute of nineteen who comes and does my digging for me.’ I found it hard to believe it was all those years ago Eva Robilliard was bowing and throwing kisses to the people at the Coronation Fête. Liza didn’t look a day over thirty, if that.

  After tea I said I must be going. ‘You’re not going yet, surely,’ she said. I said, ‘Well, I got to get home some time; and the bus don’t go late.’ ‘Why, you’re your own master,’ she said, ‘you don’t have to be at work at seven in the morning. Go home tomorrow.’ ‘Liza,’ I said, ‘I want you open and above board: before God and all men. Or not at all!’ ‘As you please,’ she said. I said, ‘Well, good-bye, then. I don’t expect I will see you again.’ I didn’t make to kiss her; or offer to shake hands. She made no movement either. ‘If there is ever anything I can do for you, let me know,’ she said, ‘I know it won’t be for yourself: you would be too proud to ask; but for anyone dear to you. I wish I could make you happy.’ She was crying when I left her.

  I caught the bus to Town and the tram to the Half-way and walked the rest. I was too down-hearted even to call in at Hutton’s for a drink. It was dark when I got indoors and I lit the lamp. The house was empty, empty, empty! I was alone and I knew I would be alone for the rest of my days. I don’t know how I have managed to live since then. I have had friends or, at least, people I have talked to; and many people have been good to me. I can’t ever say how good Tabitha have been to me; but I took it for granted while she lived. I have chased after this girl, or that girl, when the spirit moved me; or, more likely, as Raymond would have said, from force of habit. I have lived in Raymond’s tragic story as if it was my own; but it is a mystery to me yet, and perhaps I put things wrong when I tried to put things right. I have held my own against strangers and against enemies from another country; and against the double-faced behaviour of some of my own people. I have seen the funny side of things, and made a lot of people laugh; and I suppose they have thought I am the happy-go-lucky sort: but since that night I have lived without hope. I have often wondered what it is I can have done wrong to have to live for so many years without hope. It is no wonder I think a lot and am a bit funny in the head.

  The next night I went down to Raymond’s. I couldn’t face being in the house by myself. I didn’t altogether like the idea of going, because I didn’t want to get so as I would have to depend on Raymond and Christine; but, as it happened, it was a good thing I went. Christine was in the kitchen getting the meal ready. I thought she wasn’t looking as pleased with herself as usual; and I liked her better. ‘Will a cold supper do?’ she said. ‘Yes, of course!’ I said. ‘Raymond is in a mood,’ she said. ‘I can’t do anything with him. I wish you would go in and speak to him.’ I found him in the front room. For the moment I thought he was having a fit. He was sitting on the floor, pale as a ghost and trembling; and all around him was books I had seen in his room at Wallaballoo, books from when he was to school, his picture of The Light of the World, photos of himself from a baby onwards torn out of the Family Album, baby-clothes and the wickerwork cradle on rockers he had been put in when he was born; and he was touching this thing and that thing, and then pushing it away. ‘They are my things,’ he kept on saying. ‘They are my things! He has sent me all my things!’ ‘Who?’ I said. ‘My father,’ he said. ‘He has sent me everything might remind him of me. He doesn’t want anything of me left in the house!’ ‘Come on, sit up and pull yourself together!’ I said. I lifted him up and sat him in the armchair, and sat on the arm beside him. ‘Now tell me all about it,’ I said. He managed to tell me, more or less sensibly.

  Harold had sent a chap down with a hand-truck loaded with everything he could find in the house that belonged to Raymond, or had anything to do with him. There wasn’t only his toys from when he was a child, but even the letters he had written to his mother when he was in England. The chap said Harold was going to sell up Wallaballoo and buy another house and marry Mrs Crewe. It didn’t worry Raymond his father was selling up Wallaballoo. I don’t think it even entered his head he wouldn’t inherit a penny. Another house Harold could leave to Mrs Crewe. It was being turned out of his father’s heart hurt Raymond. ‘He needn’t have done this to me,’ he said. ‘He wishes I had never been born! He doesn’t want me to be alive! Christine doesn’t understand.’ ‘I understand,’ I said, ‘but it isn’t quite as you say. It is your father’s idea of being straight.’ It was, in a way. Harold wouldn’t keep a thing that had once belonged to Raymond; and then his conscience would be clear. ‘He wants to start on a clean sheet,’ I said. ‘He was the same over his first wife, when he married your mother. All her things was got rid of. She had to be forgotten. It is all, or nothing with your father.’ ‘I am rather like that myself,’ said Raymond. I thought, you are indeed; and you get that, not from Hetty, but from Harold.

  I said, ‘Now let’s get some order in this muddle,’ and I put the toys together and the letters togethe
r, and helped him sort out the books. He said he would hang the picture over the bed in their room. I said, ‘Anyhow, the cradle will come in handy.’ He smiled. ‘I hope so,’ he said. When Christine called us in for supper, he was quite himself again. I saw her give him a quick look; but when she saw he was all right, she carried on as if nothing had happened. I admired her good sense. Nothing was said to upset anybody during the meal; and, afterwards he said he would do the washing-up, and she came to the gate with me. She took my hand in both of hers. ‘Thank you, thank you for coming tonight of all nights,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what I would have done. I can manage Raymond on his own; but not when he got his parents round his neck. Mothers and fathers are all right, if you bring them up the way they ought to go. I have.’

  13

  My Cousin Mary Ann was the only one of the family who managed to keep on speaking terms with Mrs Crewe; or Mrs Martel, as I suppose I ought to call her now, but I have never been able to think of her as anything else than Mrs Crewe. Even during the Occupation, my Cousin Mary Ann went along to see her and Harold, when the old couple was living at Rozel Cottage, the house he bought at the Can’-du-Ré. Mrs Crewe treated my Cousin Mary Ann as everybody else did: that is, gave her the rough work to do and a few things to take home, though it wasn’t much she, or anybody, had to give away those days. For the rest, Mrs Crewe didn’t notice she was there. My Cousin Mary Ann never interfered, or said anything out of place; though she detested Mrs Crewe. She let be. ‘Ah, mais ch’est la misère pour tous partout!’ she said. As she only ever went to houses where and when there was misery, what she said was so.

  While Harold was yet living at Wallaballoo and Mrs Crewe was only housekeeper, my Cousin Mary Ann heard Mrs Crewe slowly and step by step pulling Raymond to pieces to his father. She was clever, Mrs Crewe; for, while she was pulling Raymond to pieces, she was at the same time buttering up old Harold. He was stupid about women. He didn’t know them as well as I do. ‘It is a great pity, Mr Martel,’ she would say, ‘how your son, Raymond, who take after his father and is such a clever boy, haven’t done better for himself, isn’t it?... It is a great shame, Mr Martel, when you come to think of it, after all the money you have spent on his education, he is only a clerk in an office now.... It must be a great disappointment to a man like you, Mr Martel, who have worked hard all your life and done well and is respected by everybody, not to have a son who can carry on the business, when it is high time you began to think of taking things easy ...’ and so on and so on and so on. She had another little way, according to my Cousin Mary Ann, of spreading herself out like a cat on Harold’s carpenter’s bench while he was working, so he could see her legs. Well, Harold was stupid; but he wasn’t that stupid. Myself, I don’t believe Mrs Crewe would ever have got round him, if Hetty hadn’t made that silly will. I am sure it rankled in his mind, as it would have in mine, and killed the love he had felt for Hetty, and any feeling he might have had for Raymond as his mother’s son. To cap it all, Mrs Crewe had the cheek to say, ‘Of course, it is only to be expected now Raymond have a wife and a home of his own, he cannot be bothered to come and visit his father, though he ought to know I am only too willing and ready to be a second mother to him.’

  A buyer for the house was waiting: a Mrs Dobrée from the Forest, a widow with an only son. She was of the gentry and well off, and gave four thousand for it. The furniture was put up for auction. Mrs Crewe wanted new. It was a great sale, and the advertisement was nearly a column long in the Press. I thought I would go along and buy some small thing in memory of Hetty; but the last person I expected to see there was Raymond. I knew the sort of people who go to sales. They go as much to poke their noses into other people’s private business and rake up the family scandal as to buy. Harold and Mrs Crewe had the sense to keep out of sight. I found Raymond wandering from room to room upstairs, as if he was walking in a dream. I didn’t like the way he looked, and I kept with him. ‘She is here! She is here!’ he said. The women was quacking like ducks when he came into a room; but they fell silent and watched him without a word while he passed through; and then the quacking began again. ‘These are her things,’ he was saying. ‘These are her things! She touched these things, she chose and bought them one by one, she arranged them lovingly and she thought they were beautiful. Oh my mother, my poor foolish little mother!’ The tears was streaming down his face.

  Downstairs pictures was being sold, and odd lots. A woman I didn’t know was saying, ‘I wouldn’t want those pictures on my wall, me; and have everybody who come to the house know I got them for nothing with a fashion book!’ ‘Ah well, one would do all right for on the back of the door of the double-u, eh?’ said old Mrs Renouf from L’Islet. The pictures was of a girl in a sun-bonnet standing by a stile, or of a deer in a forest, or of a shipwreck at sea, and such-like; and they had been given free with the Christmas Number of Weldon’s Ladies’ Journal. Hetty had treasured those pictures and got them framed by Gaved in the Arcade in good gilt frames. The auctioneer, young Fuzzey, made a joke of it. ‘The frames are good stuff,’ he said and everybody laughed. Raymond bought the lot. I bought the china fowl Hetty got from my Uncle Nat. It was sold with a lustre-ware jug for a few shillings, and I have since been offered twenty-five pounds for that lustre-ware jug. I said to Raymond, ‘Come on, I’ve got all I want.’ I didn’t want him to buy any more rubbage. He came with me, but insisted on bringing the pictures. I wondered what Christine was going to say.

  He walked so fast I had nearly to run to keep up with him. When we got to Rosamunda, he said, ‘In the back garden! I am having a bonfire.’ I let him. He stacked leaves and twigs in a heap and asked me for a match and lit a fire; and then tore the frames apart with his bare hands and smashed down pictures, glass and all, into the flames. I didn’t know he was so strong. ‘I am not having the people laughing at my mother!’ he cried, half in anger, half in tears. ‘The people are not going to laugh at my mother!’ Christine came to the back porch. ‘Whatever is happening?’ she said. ‘He will be all right presently,’ I said. ‘I can’t stand much more of this!’ she said. I felt sorry for her then; and stood by her, watching the sparks go up in the sky. Raymond looked like a devil; and I wondered if perhaps it wasn’t only the people he was in a rage with, but his mother as well. He stirred the fire until the flames died down; and then walked past me and indoors as if I wasn’t there. ‘Up the stairs, girl!’ he said to Christine. Christine’s eyes opened wide, and they really did look like a cat’s eyes do in the dark. He wasn’t thinking of a baby then. He grabbed hold of her hand and dragged her up the narrow stairs. I closed the back door quietly behind them and went home.

  I didn’t like it when Wallaballoo changed hands. I had been in and out of that house for years, as if I lived there. Mrs Dobrée had pine trees planted around to make it more private, and palms in front to make it look grand; and the yard was dug up for a lawn at the back, and a trellis-work summer-house put up. Harold’s work-shop was made into a garridge for her car and, later on, another for her son’s; and there was a gravel drive laid down from the road. Raoul Dobrée, the son, went to Elizabeth College and then to Oxford University; and afterwards he wrote pieces for the papers in England. They was pieces about books, and he wrote books about books, and made quite a name for himself I believe; but I noticed he didn’t lower himself to write for the Guernsey Evening Press. Mrs Dobrée didn’t mix with people like us; though I heard she did visit the Robins from Coloma and the Le Poidevins from the Grand Fort. I didn’t know the son to speak to until the Occupation, and then it would have been better for him if I hadn’t.

  It wasn’t so long before Timbuctoo changed hands as well. That was another blow. I hadn’t been in the habit of going there; but it made me feel sad to go along the Braye Road and pass the two houses, and it was strangers living in both. Timbuctoo went down and down, until it was as low as it could go. It was sold first to Harry Snell from the Truchett. I don’t know for how much, but I know he got it cheap. He didn’t live in
it himself; but let it out to three or four separate families. In a few years he sold it at a big profit, I forget to who; and it changed hands a number of times after. It was already in a filthy state when the Germans came; and, after German soldiers had been living in it for three or four years, it looked as if it had died of the D.T.’s like poor Prissy.

  For that was what she died of, I am quite sure. My Cousin Mary Ann said she locked herself in her room for days and wouldn’t answer; and when the door was broken open, she was found dead under the bed stark naked with empty bottles all around her on the floor. At the funeral, Lil Stonelake said it was brain-fever; and Percy called it cerebral meningitis. She was buried with the Martels; and hers was the last funeral I went to until Tabitha’s. I haven’t been to a funeral since; because, when my Cousin Mary Ann died, her eldest daughter, Dora, didn’t invite me.

  However, Prissy was very much alive her last summer, when Dudley Waine came over again in search of his prehistorical remains. He stayed at Timbuctoo from May to October; and his mother came over for August. It was lucky I saw him coming, the first day he came to Les Moulins. It gave me a chance to get out of the way. I thought it would be better if he made his great discovery without me having to point it out. He knocked on the front door and on the back, but I made out I didn’t hear; and he looked in the greenhouse, but I kept out of sight behind a row of tomato-plants. I watched him go nosing round the garden; and then he noticed what the rain had done. I expected him to be down the gully like a shot to have a look at it, but instead he came running back and shouting, ‘Mister Le Page! Mister Le Page!’ I thought I had better show myself, and came out and said, ‘Is somebody calling?’ He said, ‘What’s happened down there?’ I said, ‘Oh, there was a flood in the winter, and some of the rubbage got washed away.’ He said, ‘Haven’t you seen?’ ‘What?’ I said. Well, there wasn’t much to see. The stones was half covered with ground and brambles and looked quite natural. He said, ‘Come with me and look, please. I want you to be able to swear I haven’t touched it. It is much too important to disturb without witnesses. It is without doubt the most perfect specimen of an Old Stone Age barrow in Europe.’ I was glad he was satisfied.