The Book of Ebenezer le Page (45 page)

I wanted to get him safe home somehow, but I didn't know where he lived. I had asked Horace once, but he had shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘How should I know?' I said, ‘Where d'you live now?' He came alive at once. ‘I am NOT going back to my room!' he said. ‘Well, you can't stay here all night,' I said, reasonably enough. ‘I am NOT going back to that room! I am NOT! I am NOT! I am NOT!' he said, and clung on tighter to the wall. ‘Why d'you hang on to the wall like that?' I said. ‘It's company,' he said. I didn't know what to do. I have already said I had been drinking, and was in a strange state of mind myself, and perhaps that can explain what happened. I got a feeling Hetty was there. At the time I would have sworn it wasn't my imagination. She was more real than when she was sitting by me at the Pictures. It was as if she was in me and all around me, and was full of sorrow because this was happening to her boy. I heard myself saying something I would never have thought of saying otherwise. ‘Come along now, Raymond,' I said, ‘you are coming home with me to Les Moulins; and you won't have to go back to your room, and you will have company.' ‘All right, Ebby,' he said. He knew who I was then; but I think he would have gone with anybody. He let go of the wall, and I held him by the arm. ‘Can you walk?' I said. ‘I think so,' he said. He was wobbly at first, but soon he could get along without me holding him. I said, ‘If you can go a little faster, we'll be in time to catch the Picture bus,' and he stepped out. There was nothing wrong with his body. It was his mind.

The people was just coming out of St Julien's when we got there, and the buses was lined up outside. Harold Falla from the Vale was standing by his. ‘Going our way?' I said. ‘Hop in!' he said, ‘but sit at the back: you'll be the last out.' He was a great bus-driver, Harold Falla. He didn't follow any route with his Picture bus, but took everybody as near as he could to their back door. He dropped us at the end of our rough track, where no motorcar can go further; but he had been all round Birdo and nearly to Fort Doyle, and up and down over the grass across L'Ancresse Common to deliver old Mr and Mrs Bell to their bungalow, and back along Les Mielles for the Hamelins, and down L'Ancresse Road and round by the Vale Church. I enjoyed that ride. The bus was full. There was some standing and some sitting on each other; and everybody knew everybody and was talking and laughing and, once we got started, they sang song after song, and the rickety old bus went singing through the night:

Raymond and me sat quiet in our back corner. He was leaning against me, and I had an arm around him. He looked up into my face and smiled. ‘What's it, Raymond?' I said. ‘It's good to be alive,' he said.

Raymond didn't go to the Greffe again until the Monday. He meant to go the next morning, but didn't wake up in time; and I didn't wake him. When we got in the night before, I made up the fire and fried him a good meal of bacon and eggs, and brewed a pot of tea. He ate as if he was half starved. He had been having to get ready his own meals, and I don't think he had taken the trouble to feed himself properly. It wasn't because he couldn't. I was never better looked after than the months he looked after me and no trouble was too much for him. He didn't say much that first night. He wanted to thank me, but I said there was nothing to thank me for. I let him have the bed in my mother's room and a suit of my pyjamas. After he had gone to bed, I sat by the fire wondering if I ought to get a doctor for him next day; but when I went in with the candle to see if he was all right, he was curled up sound asleep.

He was asleep yet in the morning when I looked in to give him a cup of tea; and I let him sleep on. I went down to the Post Office at L'Islet and telephoned the Greffe. It was a Mr Ogier spoke to me, and I said Raymond wasn't very well and was at my place. He sounded a nice man, that Mr Ogier, and said he had been thinking for some time Raymond was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. There had been some trouble at home, he said: as if I didn't know! In the office he was much liked and they were all very sorry about it. That is where Raymond was wrong. He thought everybody was against him, but a lot of it was his imagination. Mr Ogier said there was no hurry for him to go back until he was well. It wasn't until five o'clock in the afternoon he woke up; and then I told him what I had done. After tea, he told me about his drunken landlady, and the other lodgers who had women in; and not only women, some of them. I said the only thing for him to do was to pay her off, and bring his things to Les Moulins. On the Monday morning he said he would go to work and settle with Mrs Maloney; and in the evening he came back with a suitcase, which was all he had in the world, except his pay. He wanted to arrange to pay me rent, but I wasn't charging for his company in my empty house.

There can't have been a more pleasant chap to live with. He didn't push himself, and seemed to know without being told how I liked things done. Living on my own, I had got set in my ways, and any other chap would have rubbed me up the wrong way pretty quick. When Tabitha came for the Saturday and Sunday, I made him sleep on the green-bed; and he didn't mind. He got on well with Tabitha, and she was glad for him to be there. I noticed, however, when he came in from work, he had a haunted look; but once he was indoors and sitting by the fire talking, you wouldn't have thought there was anything wrong with him.

The war with Hitler came, as I expected it would. There had been a lot of silly talk the year before saying there wasn't going to be no war, when Chamberlain went to see the creature; but I didn't see how anybody in their right mind could think anything would come of that. I blamed the English as much as the Germans. After the last war, they had forced the Germans into such a plight, Hitler was the only sort of chap they could turn to. Once he was in power, the English was only too willing to lend him money, provided the interest was paid; but Hitler wasn't going to let the Germans forget what they had gone through the years after 1918 and behave like an English gentleman now. I was too angry to talk about it, or argue. The last time I had been willing to leave it to the big ones to decide; but now the big ones had landed us into it again, who on earth was I to leave it to? I couldn't do nothing myself. It didn't upset Raymond, as much as it did me. ‘It is the way of the world,' he said. ‘It always has been and always will be, and will get worse and worse as time goes on.' He wasn't exactly cheerful. Anyhow, the War didn't make much difference to Guernsey at first; and we had no idea of what was coming.

I thought Raymond would be staying with me until it was all over; though I was by no means sure this time which side would win. He seemed happy enough at Les Moulins. The weekends he made himself useful in the house, and helped me in the greenhouse to pull up the plants, or came with me out fishing; but when the winter months came he wasn't so well. The long dark evenings he would talk to me by the hour of his misery as a child, and of the half-and-half happiness of his marriage. It was those winter evenings I learnt most of what I have written about him in this book; and a lot I haven't said and won't say. I think his heart was broken because he doubted if God was love. ‘Cupboard love isn't love,' he said. ‘Is there any other?' I didn't want to have to answer that question. ‘Is there, Ebenezer?' he said. ‘Have you ever known it?' ‘Yes,' I said.

He sat for a long time looking into the fire, saying nothing. At last he said, ‘You are thinking of your friend, Jim Mahy.' I said, ‘I wasn't thinking of Jim, as a matter of fact. I was thinking of Jean Batiste and my sister Tabitha.' He said, ‘Yes, but Jim and Jean are dead. It is easy to believe in it because it wasn't broken. They didn't break it of themselves.' I said, ‘Perhaps it never really is broken, if the truth was known.' I don't know why I said that, because I am not at all sure I believe it. He said, ‘I hope to God you are right!' I didn't know then he was coming home every night along the Route Militaire, because he was afraid he might run into Horace if he came round Baubigny, and Horace not speak to him. Then one night he came in from work white as a sheet and trembling and didn't answer when I spoke to him.

I made him sit down and got out some brandy, but he wouldn't touch it. I said, ‘For Christ's sake, tell me what is the matter, Raymond! I don't care what it is; but tell me!' He clung to me and cried. It was as if he was being torn in two. Only once in my life, have I cried like that, and I know it is for something you can't ever tell anybody. ‘I understand, Raymond,' I said, ‘you don't have to tell me.' He managed to get out a few words. He had run bang into Horace in the narrowest part of the Pollet. They had passed so close their shoulders touched; but Horace had gone on without a word or a look. I said, ‘What odds, for God's sake? He is not worth you bothering about!' I was fed up with the big Horace, and the trouble he had brought on Raymond. ‘Why the hell couldn't he stop in America where he belong?' I said. As it happened, I couldn't have said anything better, if I had tried. Raymond turned on me as he had never done before, and told me off good and proper; and by the time he had done telling me what he thought of me, he was quite himself again.

I was wonderfully good to anybody I liked, he said, but to those I didn't like I was blind and stupid and unfair. I had liked his mother and his father; but I had always been unfair to his Uncle Percy and his Aunt Prissy. I was unfair to Christine, even when I was being most friendly; and, as for Horace, I had been down on him ever since he was a boy. I thought he was all swank, but I didn't see it was the only way he had of getting along. He was humble really. He wasn't a bully: I was a bully. I didn't realise how different people was made different. I imagined everybody was made the same as me, or ought to be; and if they didn't behave as I thought they ought to behave, it was all up with them as far as I was concerned. That is, except for the few people I took a fancy to, and those, it didn't matter what they did, they could do no wrong. ‘Well, you may be right, Raymond,' I said. ‘Come on now, son: let's have some grub!' He smiled like an angel.

I let him spend the rest of the evening talking about Horace to his heart's content. I can't say he won me over to Horace's side, or that I agree with him even now; but he did make me see Horace hadn't been too bad to him when he was a kid. Raymond had been a timid little boy when he went to the Secondary School and, until he did a bit of boxing at Gosport, had no idea how to defend himself. The years he was at the Secondary on his own, he had been bullied by the other boys; but once Horace came from the Capelles there wasn't a boy dared to bully his cousin Raymond. It was Horace he had to thank he had blossomed out and got stronger, and done so well his last year at school. Raymond admitted he was better at his school work than Horace, and did his homework for him; but it was a fair exchange. ‘It was always a fair exchange between Horace and me,' he said. ‘He has something I haven't got and I have something he hasn't got. If we had been born rolled into one, we would have made the perfect husband for Christine.' I had my doubts if Christine would have thought so; but for once I wasn't going to be unfair.

That night I lay on my back in bed thinking of what to do about Hetty's boy. I don't like to be beaten. I had taken him under my wing, meaning and hoping to get him better; but he seemed to be getting worse. I thought perhaps if he gave up going to the Greffe for a while, and pottered round Les Moulins, he wouldn't be reminded of things he would do better to forget. Young Lihou wasn't coming back to work for me in the spring, as he wanted to enlist, so I would have plenty I could give Raymond to do, and he wouldn't feel he was being kept for nothing. Myself, I didn't care if he was. Anyhow, I put it to him next morning when we was having breakfast. His face lit up. He said it would be wonderful; but then began to raise difficulties, as I thought he would, about me keeping him. I said I ought to pay him a wage by rights, but I wouldn't do that. The money in the china fowl was for our present use. He could take what he wanted without asking me, or telling me. He said he wouldn't need it: he had clothes and so on. I said, ‘Well, that's settled.'

I offered to go and see Mr Ogier for him; but he said he would go himself and ask for six months leave without pay. I was glad because it gave me a chance to go down to the Arsenal Stores and tell Horace not to bring my groceries to the house any more. Horace was out on his round; but I saw Gwen. I didn't say anything about the meeting in the Pollet; but I did say I thought it would be wiser if Horace didn't come to Les Moulins now Raymond was going to be there during the day. Gwen said she would tell him if I insisted, but she didn't agree. For Horace's sake. According to her, it was only pride on Horace's part. She said he would never have peace of mind again, until he and Raymond were as they used to be. I said that wasn't possible now. She seemed to think it was somehow; but promised to tell Horace not to come with the groceries. I know now it was Gwen, and not me, who was right; though it was not so much a question of pride. It was pride in so far as Horace didn't like being turned out of the house because Christine said so; but he really cut Raymond off because of the dirty things she spread around. It didn't suit Horace to be tarred with the same brush. I was thinking along those lines on the way back to Les Moulins; but it was something I couldn't have explained to Gwen. Raymond came back later in the morning and said Mr Ogier had given him leave and been most sympathetic.

Raymond earned his keep ten times over. I don't know where Harold got the idea from he was no good at doing things. He transplanted all my seedlings, and I got a better crop that year than I have ever had; though most of it had to be given or thrown away because the blessed Germans was here. Also I got some timber, and he built me a fowl-house far better than I could have done it myself. I didn't know the day was to come when I would have to chop down his precious fowl-house, he had put so much work into, for the wood to make a fire to keep Tabitha and me warm. By then, the fowls was all stolen, except for a couple I kept locked up in the wash-house; and Raymond was no more. I look back now on the time he lived with me as the most peaceful I have lived through. He said to me once, ‘The monks on Lihou used to live like us.' I said, ‘Yes, but I bet they had to pray morning, noon and night, those poor old monks.' He said, ‘It is better to do things than to pray.'