The Book of Ebenezer le Page Read online

  I suppose Horace was a good-looking boy: everybody said he was, but I couldn’t see it myself. He was big built with heavy shoulders like his Uncle Harold, and he had thick black hair and very dark eyes and full lips and a mouthful of big white teeth he liked to show when he smiled; but when he smiled, you could bet your bottom dollar it was because he wanted to get round you for something. He started to throw his weight about the moment he got in the boat. He wanted to show me how clever he was and had no more idea than the man in the moon how to handle a sail. If I’d let him have his way, he’d have had us capsized in two shakes. ‘Now you just sit where I tell you; and do what you’re told!’ I said to him. He was already bigger than me and looked quite surprised. He put on his smile; but I didn’t smile back. ‘I mean it!’ I said. ‘If you get yourself knocked overboard, who is going to fish you out? I won’t.’ I couldn’t swim. He couldn’t swim far. Raymond was a much better swimmer.

  It was the only thing Raymond could do well as far as sports go. Horace played football for the Secondary School and was captain of the first team Raymond kicked a ball about in the second. I saw the school match against the High School once. The Secondary won, but more by luck than good management. Horace was no good as a footballer really. He played half back but was always getting off-side and would keep the ball to himself when he ought to have passed it to the forwards. He wasn’t out for his team to win. All he wanted was to show everybody that Horace Martel was the best footballer on the field. I know perhaps I’m not being fair to Horace. Well, he’s gone now. He was the way he was made.

  Perhaps things would have turned out better for Raymond if it hadn’t been for his mother; yet I don’t like to throw the blame on Hetty altogether. She suffered. I know she did wrong. By rights, it was Jack Bourgaize who ought to have been Raymond’s father; but then Raymond wouldn’t have been Raymond. He was one of those who ought never to have been born; but, at that rate, I wonder how many of us ought to have been born?

  At least, as far as Raymond was concerned, Hetty did everything she thought was for the best. It was a pity she didn’t know her boy. I came to know much more about him than she ever did; but even now I can’t pretend I understand Raymond. She gave him everything he wanted, or that she thought he wanted, or ought to want. He was well fed and clothed and cared for; he was given a good education; he was taught to play the piano, first by Miss Annette Cohu and then by Mr Pescott from the Vale Avenue, who was the best pianist on the island; and he always had plenty of money in his pocket, though he wasn’t one to spend much. At least, he never had to worry where his next penny was coming from. Yet, if she had only known it, she kept him in a cage. I wish I could think he got out of that cage in the end; but, if so, it was not in this world, though perhaps he did die happy.

  Nothing could have turned out more different from how she planned. In her mind she had it all arranged. Harold was years older than she was and was going to die first. The house and everything would be hers. Raymond would live with her until she died; and then the house and everything would be his. There might be a wife: she had thought of that. ‘I don’t want my Raymond to grow up to be a funny old bachelor like some people I know,’ she said to me once. I wondered where the wife was coming from who would satisfy Hetty. She would have to come of a good family and have money and, of course, be a good-living girl and no gad-about; and she would have to be willing to live with her mother-in-law and give her first place. I didn’t think there was a girl in Guernsey, or in the world for that matter, would have done. I remember Raymond telling me years later how when he lived at home, if his mother heard he had been seen as much as talking to a girl, she would kick up a dido. I am willing to bet they wasn’t talking about nothing but books. He belonged to the Guille-Allès Library, and you never saw him about without a book under his arm. I am not sure all that reading do a fellow much good. Me, I used to read the Gazette, and now I read the Guernsey Evening Press, and I have read Robinson Crusoe.

  Raymond didn’t go into a bank, after all. He could be very stubborn when he wanted to be. He said he didn’t want anything to do with figures. It is true at the Secondary School he hadn’t been all that good at sums. It was History and Literature he was good at. Anyhow, he got his own way and went as a clerk to the Greffe. He didn’t earn much, but that didn’t matter then; and he got to know about the Court and the States and the Advocates, and rummaged among the old papers that had to do with the past history of the island. Hetty was quite pleased, as it turned out. She could say ‘My son is in the Greffe,’ and it sounded as grand, if not grander, than ‘My son is in a bank.’

  He didn’t do a thing to help his father. I don’t think he ever sawed a plank of wood. He was the greatest disappointment to Harold. He had no children by his first marriage and had always wanted a son; but his idea of a son was somebody who would carry on with the business, when the time came for him to give up. He didn’t grumble much and he wasn’t rough with Raymond. He would shrug his shoulders and say, ‘Well, he’s his mother’s boy, that one.’ He always let Hetty have her way. Hetty didn’t think any the more of him for that. I remember her saying to my mother: ‘All I hope is that Raymond don’t grow up to be like his father.’ I didn’t know why at the time. Nobody knows what goes on between a married couple inside the four walls of a house. I liked Harold, myself. There was nothing behind-hand about him.

  Horace worked for his father when he left school. That is, when he wasn’t hanging about on the Bridge with the boys. I doubt if he ever gave his father a full day’s work. Raymond went around with him on his own, but openly now. I would often see them going off together of a Sunday afternoon with towels round their necks; and now and again Jim and me would run into them at Pleinmont, or Icart, or one of the bays. They would be lying on the rocks in the sun talking. It was then I noticed Horace was different with Raymond from how he was with his other pals. He was cock of the walk among the rougher boys and his word was law; but with Raymond he was almost humble and willing to listen to what he had to say.

  By then the partnership between the two fathers was broken up, and the sisters was neighbours but no relations. The last job Harold and Percy did together was to build the wall between the two houses. Prissy said, ‘I don’t want strangers to see every time I go to the back, me.’ Harold went on building plain, solid houses and, later on, greenhouses. Percy branched out and went in for moulded concrete pillars and ornamental railings and windows with spikes that had no use nor beauty. Then he employed a young chap from Town who had done a lot of work in the Foulon Cemetery and went in for grave-stones and crosses and vaults for the dead. His last craze was for having angels made to decorate the crosses. Raymond, who knew about such things, said they wasn’t angels, but cherubs. I don’t know the difference, myself. I used to see what was going on when I passed down the Braye. The board that used to stand in front between the two houses with the words MARTEL BROS. BUILDERS on it had been taken down. At the side of Wallaballoo was a board with the words H. MARTEL. BUILDER on it; and at the side of Timbuctoo was another with the words P. MARTEL. MONUMENTAL BUILDER.

  It was a pity they wasn’t in partnership; for together they would have made a fortune. They supplied everything needful. If you was going to live, you went to Wallaballoo; and if you was going to die, you went to Timbuctoo. There was some people who went to both at the same time, to get it all settled and done with. I remember Muriel Bisson, who was a distant cousin of mine and a pretty little thing. She married Frank Nicolle from the Saltpans; and they was like turtle-doves, those two, while they was courting. After they had been to Harold to arrange about having a house built, Muriel happened to see one of those crosses with angels, or cherubs, climbing up it in Percy’s yard. ‘Oh I’d love one of those for you, darling!’ she said. ‘All right, my sweet,’ he said, ‘get it!’ It was ordered. I don’t know if it was paid for. Anyhow, she died before they had been married a year. She was never strong. Prissy hoped he would put it on her grave and order another for him
self; but he said, ‘No, it’ll do for the next.’ Marriage is a terrible thing, when you come to think of it. Perhaps it’s as well I’ve never married. Mind you, I’ve had it a few times under the hedge.

  6

  I thought a lot of myself when I was a young chap. I wasn’t bad-looking for a Guernsey boy. I was dark with a round museau of a face and thick lips and a pug nose and high cheekbones and deep-set brown eyes and a bush of black hair. I haven’t got much of that black hair left now, and what there is of it is white. I’ve still got enough teeth to eat with and I can hear all right and have never had to put spectacles on my nose, though I have to look through a magnifying glass to read the Births, Deaths and Marriages in the Press, and I write big in this book so as to be able to see what I’m saying. I didn’t grow very tall and wished I was taller; but I had broad shoulders and a good chest which I used to go round with stuck out like a pigeon. I was given fine strong legs, but they was a trifle bandy even then, and have got bandier and bandier the older I’ve got. I wish now I could straighten them out a bit; but I can still get along on them all right. With a stick.

  I was very particular about my clothes. At work I wore a guernsey, or a singlet if it was too hot in the greenhouses; but when I sat on the galley wall of a Sunday evening watching the girls pass, I was wearing my best. It was a suit made of good blue serge with the jacket braided at the edge and the trousers narrow at the top and wide at the bottom; and I wore a white shirt with it and a starched white collar and a shiny silk tie. I stuck my cap sideways on the back of my head, and my hair was done in a curl across my forehead. I had done it with the curling-tongs my father used to heat over the fire to do his with; and, as soon as I could, I grew a moustache. I wasn’t sure about myself in a moustache. Sometimes I thought my face looked better without, and would shave it off. Jim used to laugh at me over my moustache. He didn’t have one himself and would make out he didn’t know me when I grew it. ‘Why, if it isn’t old Ebby!’ he’d say. ‘I’d never have known it was you, if you hadn’t spoke.’ When I cut it off, he would again make out he didn’t know me; until one day he said, ‘If I was you, I would let one side grow and cut the other off for good; and then everybody would know who you are.’ After that I cut both sides off for good; and have never kept any hair on my face since. I still shave every morning with a cut-throat razor; and sometimes my hand shake and I cut myself.

  I didn’t have a moustache the day I went to my Cousin Mary Ann’s wedding; but I had a big flower in my button-hole. She was only a third cousin really, but she was a cousin both sides; and all the Le Pages and all the Martels was invited. I don’t want to say anything against my Cousin Mary Ann, because in her old age she was one of my very best friends, and you didn’t notice her looks as an old woman; but when she was young, she was downright ugly. She was short and squat with a coarse skin and a snout of a nose and a sulky mouth and a heavy jaw. La Prissy said she looked like a mule, but I don’t know, because I have never seen a mule. She got married to the chap who must have been the best-looking young fellow on the island. He had a boyish face with crisp curly ginger hair parted in the middle and bright blue eyes and a skin as smooth as a girl’s; and he was slim yet well-built, and so light on his feet he might have been an acrobat in a circus. It was said he didn’t have a very good character, but I don’t believe Eugene Le Canu was nearly as bad as he was painted. The girls was round him like flies round a jam-pot, and he had to do something to get rid of them. He came of a very mixed family: Guernsey and French and, I think, Jersey as well; and nobody quite knew which was the fathers and mothers of which. He was coachman for La Princesse Zubeska.

  There was a mystery about La Princesse Zubeska. She had red hair like Eugene, but it was grey when she came to Guernsey. I don’t know if she was a Russian princess, or a German princess, or what; but Eugene said she could speak French and was easy to wind round your little finger, if you let her think she was having her own way. La Prissy said she wasn’t a princess at all, but a cook who had been left some money by her mistress and come to live in Guernsey where nobody would know who she was. If so, she must have been left quite a lot of money, because she had a lovely carriage and pair and covered herself in scent and when she passed you could smell her for a mile. I think myself she was a real princess; but perhaps not very high up as princesses go.

  My Cousin Mary Ann had set her heart on a white wedding, but La Prissy said, ‘Mon Dou, but you wouldn’t have the cheek, you!’ so the bridesmaids was in white, but she wore a blue dress cut loose and with a long train. In the wedding photo she was taken sitting down with the handsome Eugene standing behind her. Her father had given her a cottage in the Robergerie with a vergée of land and a greenhouse. He thought Eugene would be able to work in the greenhouse in the evenings; but it was in the evenings La Princesse wanted him to drive her all dressed up to visit the gentry in the Grange and Queen’s Road. She left him very little time for his wife. She didn’t go to the wedding, but she sent a present. It was a big bowl made of solid silver; and you could see it was old, it was brown at the bottom. La Prissy said she had bought it second-hand.

  They was married in the afternoon; and there was a good meal at the house afterwards of cold fowl and ham and wedding cake, and plenty of everything to drink. For once my mother drank a small glass of wine when everybody stood up and drank the health of the happy couple. In the evening there was dancing in the packing shed. It was done up like for Christmas with paper chains and coloured lanterns; and the boys played the concertina for the dancing. I remember La Prissy danced with my Uncle Harold, and I heard her say to La Hetty after, ‘Well, I will say this for you, my sister: it is a man you are married to.’ My mother didn’t dance, but tried to look as if she didn’t think it was sinful. My father danced with Hetty. He couldn’t dance, but just jumped about. He’d had a few drinks and was sweating, and I remember the smell of his sweat. My Cousin Mary Ann didn’t dance, but sat in an armchair with her train arranged around her like a queen. Eugene danced with all the young girls.

  I had no more idea of how to dance than my father, but I made out I did. Big Clara Fallaize said I would become a good dancer if I practised. She was three or four years older than me and a big jolly girl with fat legs; and every fellow knew she was easy. She had been one of the bridesmaids and had flowers in her hair. After she’d danced with me a few times, she said she was tired and wanted to go back in the house and have a rest. On the table in the front room was the ruins of the meal and a number of open bottles of different sorts of drink. I tried them all and she had some; and then pulled me down on the sofa. I mustn’t put the blame on Big Clara and say I was backward, because I wasn’t. It was the first chance I’d had of doing it properly and I wasn’t going to miss it. All the same, if I am going to be honest, I must say I was disappointed. I thought it was going to be more than that. It was all right while it was happening because I forgot myself; but afterwards I expected something else. I didn’t want her to smother me, but I did think she might have said something nice. All she said, when she had done up her clothes, was, ‘Now I want to dance, me!’

  She went back to the packing shed straight away, but told me to wait a little, so as the others wouldn’t know we was together. I didn’t mind because I was afraid it might show in my face. When I plucked up courage and went back, she was dancing with Eugene; and she danced with him most of the rest of the evening. When supper-time came she sat on his knee, and everybody laughed and thought it was a joke. I didn’t dance any more. I wished Jim was there so I could talk to him; but he hadn’t been invited because he wasn’t a relation. I heard the dancing went on until three or four in the morning; but I walked home with my mother and father hours before that. ‘Well, I wonder what’s going to happen there,’ my mother said. ‘It won’t be nothing good.’

  The baby came in a few weeks and there was two more children after. My Cousin Mary Ann had to work the greenhouse herself, though her brother did come round a few times to help. Eugene was
never home. The people said, I don’t know if it was true, that while he was waiting for La Princesse of an evening outside big houses in Town, he often had one girl or another in the carriage with him. The last baby wasn’t born yet when La Princesse decided Guernsey wasn’t grand enough for her and she was going to open up her Town House. It’s only fair to Eugene to say he didn’t want to go with her, but she said he was the only one of her servants she could trust. She promised she would pay him high enough wages for him to be able to send some to his wife every week. La Prissy said it was the chance of a lifetime: the old woman would leave him everything when she died. So off went Eugene to London with La Princesse. He wrote a few times to Mary Ann and sent money; but he said he wasn’t satisfied with his job. The Town House turned out to be two shabby rooms in a hotel in Bloomsbury, and he had to sleep in the garret and eat with the servants of the hotel in the cellar. It also got about in Guernsey that La Princesse had to leave because she owed money right and left.

  After six months my Cousin Mary Ann didn’t hear any more. She wrote and wrote but got no answer. At last she thought she would write to La Princesse. Prissy helped her to write the letter. La Princesse answered on mauve paper that stank of scent and said that if Mrs Le Canu knew how to keep her husband under control he might be able to leave the maids alone. Then my Cousin Mary Ann wrote to Eugene himself: a letter full of tears saying she would forgive him for everything, if only he would come home. She didn’t hear another word. A year or so later, Mr H. Le Marquand from on the Esplanade was in London on business and saw Eugene Le Canu driving a hansom cab down the Strand. I think to her dying day my Cousin Mary Ann hoped Eugene would turn up on her doorstep; but he never did.