The Book of Ebenezer le Page (43 page)

The day came when I went down and there could be no doubt about a baby coming. Raymond said, ‘Christine is expecting an addition to the family.' I said, ‘Fine!' I didn't know then what had happened; but I couldn't help feeling all was not well. Christine was sitting knitting; but being very icy and distant to both Raymond and Horace. She was quite friendly to me, and said she thought I had forgotten she was alive: it was such a long time since I had been to see her. Raymond and Horace was on the floor, helping Abel to build a ‘Big house'. When Abel was sent to bed, Horace sat in the armchair as if he was the master of the house. Raymond didn't seem to mind, and sat on a hassock with his arms round his knees. I tackled him about it once. He remembered that night very well, and said the only thing he minded was not being able to tell me the baby coming was Horace's. ‘I would have liked to be honest with you,' he said, ‘but it wouldn't have been fair to Christine.' God Almighty, as if it ever entered Christine's head to be fair to Raymond! I don't think ‘forces of nature' are ‘fair'.

It was Raymond got the meal, and Horace helped to clear away after and wash up. They both waited on Christine, and asked her if she had all she needed; and she said ‘Thank you', as if they was servants. The washing-up place was small; and I noticed how Raymond and Horace worked in together well, and didn't get in each other's way. I talked to Christine nothing that mattered of people we both knew: gossip really. Raymond admitted he wasn't unhappy those days. Horace was there. He was only wondering how it was going to end. Christine really was living quite on her own. She had the big bedroom with Abel in his cot. Raymond slept in the little room and Horace at the back of the shop. Otherwise, Horace lived at Rosamunda: ate his meals there and was there every evening. Christine gave up singing and choir-practice, and they stayed in together as I found them the evening I went down. I didn't know what to make of it. I knew something was gone wrong; but I didn't really want to know what. I was soon told. I ran into Len Carré from Pleinheaume in the Mariners. ‘I hear there's a cuckoo in the nest round your way,' he said. ‘I don't know nothing about that,' I said. ‘Ah well,' he said, ‘it's not the first time that's happened, and it won't be the last.' He went on to tell me about two brothers we both knew who swopped wives; and, after a spell, swopped back again. There was children from all the pairs; and the families now lived next door to each other. The children all played together, and the parents seemed to get on quite well. I didn't say nothing. I didn't want to talk about it. The whole business was upsetting me more than I liked to admit. I thanked my lucky stars I didn't take things as serious as Raymond.

I wish I could leave out the next part of my story; but I don't see how I honestly can. I can't be expected to write the truth about other people, because I don't know it; but at least I can write the truth about some of the stupid things I have done myself. This was the stupidest. It was because I wanted to forget about Raymond and his serious nonsense I decided I would go on a gallivant like old Victor. I was more or less on the spree for a week. It didn't amount to much. I got drunk a few nights and had a couple of fights, I don't remember who with or what about; and then on the Saturday afternoon I went to Town with the intention of having a last blindo, but happened to see Gerald Mahy on the other side of the road in Fountain Street. I thought how young and sprightly he looked, though he can't have been many years younger than me. He hadn't got into trouble at the Old Bank yet, and been nearly put in jail. He was talking and laughing with a couple of girls I didn't know; and I crossed over the road to ask him how his mother was. He was living with his mother then at St Martin's and I knew she wasn't very well. He said she was no better; and introduced me to the two girls. The one he was getting off with I could see at a glance was a trollop; but I wasn't so sure about the other. The great mistake I made, and God knows I paid for it, was that in her eyes I was getting on in years. I thought she was quite taken with me. She smiled and shook hands and said she was pleased to meet me; and told me her name was Dolly Trouteaud, and she lived in Doyle Road. I thought it was rather a grand part for a girl of her sort to live. Anyhow, when Gerald and his piece went off for a stroll down Havelet, I asked if I might see Miss Trouteaud to her gate. Miss Trouteaud was delighted. I don't remember what we talked about on the way; but when we got there, she said, ‘Come in and meet my mother. She will love to meet you.'

I had nothing else to do, so I thought I might as well. I ought to have known there was something in the wind. As soon as she had introduced me to her mother, she said she had to go out again, and I was left alone with Mrs Trouteaud, or Louisa, the name I came to know her by all too well. She was a woman of my own age, or older; and was stout with a square face, and had a wooden leg. I felt sorry for her because she had a wooden leg, and she sat with it stretched out for me to see. I never dared at any time to ask her how she got it, but from the way she got about on it, I think she was born with it. It was a big house she lived in; but it came out she and Dolly only had two rooms on the ground floor. She soon let me know Dolly was engaged. She was engaged to a young English chap who worked for Le Riche's, but was taking on a better job as a manager for Sainsbury's somewhere in England, and Dolly was getting married and going with him. I didn't see the danger. That wicked young puss of a Dolly had jumped at me as an old man sent by God to palm off on her mother. She and her bloke didn't want the old woman going to live with them in England, and I was to be bribed and corrupted into taking her off their hands.

As a matter of fact, I quite enjoyed myself that night. The old woman was the rough and ready sort, and I felt quite at home with her. She told me she was a widow and her husband had been a sea-captain; though from what she said, I gathered he was only skipper of a trawler. When he was alive, she used to go with him to sea, she said: because she didn't trust a man out of her sight. I took that for a joke, and laughed. She got out glasses and a bottle of wine, and buttered some of Guérin's biscuits. I ate and drank, and there was a good fire, and I felt warm and comfortable. She asked me a lot of questions about who I was, and where I came from, and what I did for a living, and so on; and I answered her straight out, without letting her know too much. When I left, she said she hoped I would go and see her again, because she was a lonely old woman. I promised. The next Saturday I went. Dolly opened the door and showed me in, but said she was on the way out. The glasses and the wine and the buttered biscuits was out ready; and Louisa was sitting by a small table, telling herself her fortune from the cards. The moment I came in, she sprang up on her wooden leg and pointed dramatically to the cards spread out on the table. ‘It is in the cards!' she said. I was mesmerised like a rabbit. I couldn't move. I couldn't speak. I would like to meet the chap who could have stood up on his hind legs and said to Louisa Trouteaud ‘It is NOT in the cards!' I would have to wait a few weeks, she said: the course of true love never did run smooth. She must make sure Dolly got properly hooked up; and then she would be mine! I sort of laughed. I ate and drank, but didn't know what I was eating and drinking; and she talked and I said yes to everything she said. I wasn't listening. I was only thinking of how to get out of the house as soon as possible. I promised faithfully I would go and see her the next Saturday. I had no more intention than the man in the moon of ever going to see her again; or even of ever going along Doyle Road again, as long as I lived. I counted without Louisa.

She came to see me. I was horrified the Monday afternoon, when she turned up and caught me unawares. She said I was a bad boy: I hadn't kept my word; but then she hadn't expected me to: she knew men. I had to ask her in. After all, I had been in her house, but I hadn't gone nosing round. She looked in every cupboard, and in every drawer, and I was in fear and trembling she was going to look up the chimney in the wash-house and find the pied-du-cauche. She went into my bedroom and had a look round; and into what had been my mother's room, and came out looking like a dragon with a night-dress in her hand. She said a woman had been sleeping there. I said yes: it was my sister, when she came sometimes. She didn't believe it was my sister. She said it was high time she was there herself to keep an eye on me. She then began finding fault with everything. Nothing was to her satisfaction. I must have the electricity put in, and the water-works; and she would rather have gas to cook by than my Guernsey range. The pigs would have to go. She said pigs in a pigsty against the house wasn't ‘hygienic'. I said I didn't think the place was really good enough for her. She said it was small; but it would do. I saw her to the bus and said, ‘Good-bye!' and she said, ‘Au revoir!' That is how the persecution of Ebenezer Le Page began.

It went on for years. It was terrible. I never felt safe. It is true, more often than not when she came, I wasn't in. I lived with the front door locked and the back door locked, and I locked myself in the greenhouse or the packing shed; and when I was working out-of-doors, I kept my eyes skinned to see her before she saw me. I would spot her coming round the corner of the Chouey; and, by God, she got along quicker and looked forty times more determined on her wooden leg, than any other woman with two legs of flesh and blood! I looked through my old book of Army Instructions for the drill on how to take cover in the presence of the enemy. She would try the front door, and try the back door, and look in the windows; and once she even looked in the double-u. I would be making myself invisible. I daubed whitewash on the glass of the greenhouse, so as she couldn't look in; and I am ashamed now when I think of myself crawling on all fours on the floor of the packing shed, in case she peeped through the window. Young Lihou was a brick, and did his best to protect me. He would say I had gone to the White Rock, or St Sampson's, or somewhere, and wouldn't be back for hours; and once he told her I was dead in the Cottage Hospital, hadn't she heard? She didn't believe him; and came back in half-an-hour and caught me.

I got into such a state of mind I verily believed the day would come when I would have to stand side by side with Louisa Trouteaud in front of the altar of the Vale Church and say ‘till death do us part' as a punishment for my sins. When Raymond was living with me, he didn't have much laugh left in him; but he used to laugh over Louisa Trouteaud. He called her ‘Captain Hook'. He was always very sympathetic with her when she came; and he was the only one of us she believed. He would say how sorry I was going to be when I got back and heard I had missed her. I was being tempted to shout out from where I was hiding, ‘Oh, you bloody liar!' Raymond found it hard to tell a lie for his own good, but he told dozens for my sake. Well, if there is any justice in heaven, he will have his reward for that!

I saw the birth of Horace's kid in the
Press
. MARTEL. At Rosamunda, Les Effards, St Sampson's, to Christine (née Mahy) and Raymond, a son, Gideon. I heard about it too from old Mrs Renouf I met in Weymouth's shop. ‘Ah, I see your cousin, Raymond Martel, got another, then,' she said: ‘It is funny they call him Gideon, isn't it? I would have thought, if he was the brother of the other, they would have called him Cain. Cain and Abel, eh?' I didn't feel like giving him much of a present; but I thought I ought to give something. I couldn't think what to give; so I asked Ada Domaille to buy what she thought, and she bought a monkey on a stick. She said it would make him laugh. It didn't. He didn't take any interest in it. He wasn't a bright baby like Abel. He looked like a wizened, shrivelled little monkey himself. Christine thanked me for the present, but said it was too old for him.

She had a bad time having Gideon, and was in bed yet when I went. Raymond told me he and Horace sat together by the fire downstairs the whole day, listening to her screams upstairs in the bedroom. He said he felt very close to Horace that day. They both suffered with her; but there was nothing they could do. Gwen fetched the doctor. She wanted to get them a meal, but they couldn't eat. It wasn't until nine o'clock at night it was over. When Nurse Wright came down with the doctor and said Raymond could go and see his wife and child, Raymond pushed Horace in front of him to go first up the stairs. Christine was sitting up in bed giving Gideon his first feed. Raymond said she was very pale, but had never looked more beautiful. ‘Like a spirit,' he said. She didn't look at Horace, but held out the baby for Raymond to see. ‘Another for your tribe,' she said. Raymond didn't know what she meant.

I don't know neither. I have often wondered if, perhaps in her heart of hearts, Christine did love Raymond; or, at least, Raymond as he was the night he preached at Birdo Mission. It may be she was jealous of Horace, and wanted to get rid of him by hook or by crook. If so, I am all wrong; and Christine is greatly to be pitied. I can only say again I don't know; for women as they are to themselves are a mystery to me. I do know she couldn't bear to have Horace in the house once Gideon was born. The doctor said it might affect her mind, if she wasn't given way to; and Raymond had to ask Horace not to show himself. Raymond then devoted himself to looking after Christine and the baby. It was him gave Gideon his bath every day. He said he liked doing it. Gideon was Horace's flesh and blood. I said, ‘Why on earth didn't you and Christine join up again then, and bring him up as your own?' He just shook his head. ‘Why not? Why not?' I said. I couldn't understand it. Liza had been with other men and had children by other men; but it hadn't made any difference to my feeling for Liza. He said: