Free The Book of Ebenezer le Page by G.B. Edwards

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