The Go-Between (6 page)

  1

  THE 8TH of July was a Sunday, and on the following
Monday I left West Hatch, the village where we lived near
Salisbury, for Brandham Hall. My mother arranged that my Aunt
Charlotte, a Londoner, should take me across London. Between bouts
of stomach-turning trepidation I looked forward wildly to the
visit.

  The invitation came about in this way. Maudsley had
never been a special friend of mine, as witness the fact that I
have forgotten his Christian name. Perhaps it will come to me
later; it may be one of the things that my memory fights shy of.
But in those days schoolboys seldom called one another by their
first names. These were regarded simply as a liability, though not
such a heavy liability as one’s middle name, which it was just
foolhardy to reveal. Maudsley was a dark-haired, sallow,
round-faced boy, with a protruding upper lip that showed his teeth;
he was a year younger than I was, and distinguished neither in work
nor in games, but he managed to get by, as we should say. I knew
him pretty well because he was a member of my dormitory, and just
before the affair of the diary we discovered a mild liking for each
other, chose each other as companions for walks (we walked out in a
crocodile), compared some of our personal treasures, and imparted
to each other scraps of information more intimate, and therefore
more fraught with peril, than schoolboys usually exchange. One of
these confidences was our respective addresses; he told me his home
was called Brandham Hall and I told him mine was called Court
Place, and of the two he was the more impressed, for he was, as I
afterwards discovered, a snob, which I had not begun to be, except
in the world of the heavenly bodies—there, I was a super-snob.

  The name Court Place predisposed him in my favour,
as I suspect it also did his mother. But they were mistaken, for
Court Place was quite an ordinary house, set a little back in the
village street, behind looped chains, of which I was rather proud.
Well, not quite ordinary, for part of the house was reputed to be
very old; the bishops of Salisbury, it was said, once held their
court there; hence the name. Behind the house we had an acre of
garden, intersected by a stream, which a jobbing gardener attended
to three days a week. It was not a court in the grandiloquent sense
of the word, such as Maud-sley, I fancy, believed it to be.

  All the same, my mother did not find it easy to keep
up. My father was, I suppose, a crank. He had a fine, precise mind,
which ignored what it was not interested in. Without being a
misanthrope he was unsociable and nonconforming. He had his own
unorthodox theories of education, one of which was that I should
not be sent to school. As far as he could he educated me himself
with the help of a tutor who came out from Salisbury. I should
never have gone to school if he had had his way, but my mother
always wanted me to and so did I, and as soon as was possible after
his death I went. I admired him and revered his opinions, but my
temperament had more in common with my mother’s.

  His talents went into his hobbies, which were
book-collecting and gardening; for his career he had accepted a
routine occupation and was quite content to be a bank manager in
Salisbury. My mother fretted at his lack of enterprise and was a
little jealous and impatient of his hobbies, which enclosed him in
himself, as hobbies do, and, so she thought, got him nowhere. In
this she turned out to be wrong, for he was a collector of taste
and foresight, and his books made a sum that astonished us when
they were sold; indeed, I owe to them my immunity from the more
pressing cares of life. But this was long after; at the time, my
mother fortunately never thought of selling his books: she
cherished the things he had been fond of, partly from a feeling
that she had been unfair to him; and we lived on her money, and the
pension from the bank, and the little he had been able to put
by.

  My mother, though unworldly, was always attracted by
the things of the world; she felt that if circumstances had been
different, she could have taken her place in it; but thanks to my
father’s preferring objects to people, she had very little chance.
She liked gossip, she liked social occasions and to be dressed
right for them; she was sensitive to public opinion in the village,
and an invitation to some function in Salisbury would always set
her aflutter. To mix with well-dressed people on some smooth lawn,
with the spire of the Cathedral soaring above, to greet and be
greeted by them, to exchange items of family news and make timid
contributions to political discussions—all this gave her a
tremulous pleasure; she felt supported by the presence of
acquaintances, she needed a social frame. When the landau arrived
(there was a livery stable in the village) she stepped into it with
a little air of pride and self-fulfilment very different from her
usual diffident and anxious manner. And if she had persuaded my
father to go with her, she looked almost triumphant.

  After he died, what little social consequence we had
diminished; but at no time was it such as anyone with a delicate
sense of social nuances would have associated with the name Court
Place.

  I did not tell Maudsley this, of course—not from any
wish for concealment, but because our code discouraged personal
disclosures. Bragging about the wealth and grandeur of one’s
parents was not unknown, but Maudsley was not one of those who did
it. In some ways he was precociously sophisticated; his corners
must have been rubbed off before he came to school. I never
understood him very deeply; perhaps there was little to understand,
except an instinctive responsiveness to public opinion, a
savoir-faire
that enabled him to be, without appearing to
seek it, on the winning side.

  During the diary episode he had remained neutral,
which was all that one could hope for from one’s friends. (This is
not cynicism; belonging to a lower age group, they could have done
nothing for me effectively. ) But when I was the winning side he
made no secret of his pleasure at my success and, I afterwards
learned, he told his family about it. He took lessons from me in
magic and I remember drawing up for him, free, certain curses that
he could use if he was in a tight place—though I never thought he
would be in one. He looked up to me and I felt that his esteem was
decidedly worth having. Once in an expansive moment he confided to
me that he was going to Eton, and he was like a premature Etonian,
easy, well-mannered, sure of himself.

  The last weeks of the Easter term were the happiest
of my schooldays so far, and the holidays were irradiated by them.
For the first time I felt that I was someone. But when I tried to
explain my improved status to my mother she was puzzled. Success in
work she would have understood (and happily I was able to report
this also) or success in games (of this I could not boast, but I
had hopes of the cricket season). But to be revered as a magician!
She gave me a soft, indulgent smile and almost shook her head. In a
way she was religious: she had brought me up to think about being
good, and to say my prayers, which I always did, for our code
permitted it as long as it was done in a perfunctory manner;
soliciting divine aid did not count as sneaking. Perhaps she would
have understood what it meant to me to be singled out among my
fellows if I could have told her the whole story; but I had to edit
and bowdlerize it to such a degree that very little of the original
was left, and least of all the intoxicating transition from a
trough of persecution to a pedestal of power. A few of the boys had
been a little unkind; now they were all very kind. Because of
something I had written in my diary which was rather like a prayer,
the unkind boys had hurt themselves and of course I couldn’t help
being glad about it. “But ought you to have been glad?” she asked
anxiously. “I think you ought to have been sorry, even if they were
a little unkind. Did they hurt themselves badly?” “Rather badly,” I
said, “but you see they were my enemies.” But she refused to share
my triumph and said uneasily: “But you oughtn’t to have enemies at
your age.” In those days a widow was still a figure of desolation;
my mother felt the responsibility of bringing me up and thought
that firmness should come into it, but she never quite knew when or
how to apply it. “Well, you must be nice to them when they come
back,” she sighed; “I expect they didn’t mean to be unkind.”

  Jenkins and Strode, who had had some bones broken,
did not in fact return until the autumn. They were very much
subdued, and so was I, and we had no difficulty in being nice to
each other.

  My mother was mistaken if she thought that I gloated
over their downfall; it was the rise in my own stock that enlarged
my spirit. But I was sensitive to atmosphere, and under my mother’s
half-hearted sympathy my dreams of greatness did not thrive. I
began to wonder if they were something to be ashamed of, and when I
went back to school it was in a private capacity, not as a
magician. But my friends and clients had not forgotten; to my
surprise they were as eager as ever to profit by my proficiency in
the Black Arts. I was still the vogue, and any scruples of
conscience I retained soon fled. I was urged to put out more
spells, one of which was that we should be given a whole holiday.
Into this last I put all the psychic force I had, and I was
rewarded. Soon after the beginning of June we had an outbreak of
measles. By half-term more than half the school was down with it,
and soon after came the dramatic announcement that we were to break
up.

  The delight of the survivors, of whom I was one and
Maudsley another, can be imagined. The spiritual and emotional
intoxication, which normally took thirteen weeks to brew, was
suddenly engendered after seven; and added to it was the thrilling
sense of having been favoured by fortune, for only once before in
the history of the school had such a crowning mercy been
vouchsafed.

  The appearance at my bedside of my shiny black trunk
with its imposing, rounded roof, flanked by my father’s brown
wooden tuck-box, which still showed, by a path of darker paint,
where my initials had been painted over his—this ocular proof that
we were really going back had an effect on my spirits more
overwhelming than the headmaster’s brief announcement after prayers
the previous evening. And not only the sight, the smell: the smell
of home exhaled by the trunk and tuck-box, drowning the smell of
school. For the whole of one day the vessels of salvation stood
empty, and as long as they were empty there was always the fear
that J. C., as we called him, might change his mind. The matron and
her assistant were engaged in other dormitories. But our turn came,
and at last, stealing upstairs to look, I saw the trunk with its
lid pushed back and its tray foaming with the tissue paper in which
were wrapped my lighter and more breakable possessions. This was a
supreme moment: nothing that came afterwards surpassed it in pure
bliss, though excitement steadily mounted.

  Two brakes, instead of three, were drawn up before
the school front door. The apathy on the drivers’ faces contrasted
strongly but rather agreeably with the joy on ours. They knew the
procedure, however; they did not start off as soon as the last
small boy (even to me he looked extremely small) had climbed into
his place. There was a last rite to perform— the only flourish we
allowed ourselves, for we were not an emotional school. The head
boy stood up and, looking round him, cried: “Three cheers for Mr.
Cross, Mrs. Cross, and the baby!” How the baby came to be included
I never knew; perhaps it was the spontaneous, facetious
afterthought of a former head boy. Late in life (or so it seemed to
us) Mr. and Mrs. Cross had been blessed with a third daughter. The
other two were already, to our eyes, grown up, and them we did not
cheer. For that matter the baby was no longer a baby; she was
nearly four, but for some reason it delighted us to cheer her, as
it plainly delighted her to be lifted up between her parents and to
wave her hand. We waited for this to happen, and when it did we
laughed and nudged one another, relieved, as Englishmen, at not
having to take our cheering too seriously.

  The volume of sound was thin compared with normal
times, but it lacked nothing in fervour nor did we stop to think
how it would sound to the suffering prisoners in the San. The
“baby’s” acknowledgment left nothing to be desired: it was
comically regal. The drivers raised their whips without raising
their faces, and we were off.

  How long did the ecstasy of escape continue? It was
at its height in the train. Both coming and going, the school was
allotted a special coach. It was a parlour car of a kind not found
now, upholstered in deep red plush, the seats facing each other the
whole length of the compartment. They were impregnated with a most
searching smell of train smoke and tobacco, which on the outward
journey at once turned my stomach. But going home it was the very
breath of freedom and acted like an apéritif. Joy shone on every
face; playful punches were exchanged; new variations were found of
the theme of the South-Eastern and Smashem Railway. Nonchalantly I
took out my diary and began to decorate the date—it was Friday the
15th of June—with a red pencil. Covertly my neighbours watched me.
Was a new spell being cast? Presently I tired of arabesques and
whirligigs and decided to paint the whole day red.

  Did I really believe that I had been responsible for
the epidemic? Modestly, I took some credit for it, and in certain
quarters credit was given me. My pretensions were not exploded—far
from it—but the awe with which I had been regarded was now tempered
with a certain good-natured banter that might easily have turned to
ridicule had the term gone on. I expect I had got a little above
myself, not, I prefer to think, in manner, but in my outlook on
life. Once I had been too self-distrustful; now I was
overconfident. I expected things to go my way, and without much
conscious effort on my part. I had only to wish them to serve me
and they would. I had forgotten the era of persecution; I had
relaxed and withdrawn the sentries. I felt myself to be
invulnerable. I did not believe that my happiness was contingent on
anything: I felt that the laws of reality had been suspended on my
behalf. My dreams for the year 1900 and for the twentieth century
and for myself were coming true.