The Go-Between (7 page)

  It never occurred to me, for instance, that I might
get measles, and it astonished me that my mother regarded this as
not only possible but probable. “You will tell me, won’t you,” she
said anxiously, “the first moment that you don’t feel well?” I
smiled. “Of course I shall be all right,” I assured her. “I hope so
too,” she said. “But don’t forget last year, and how ill you
were.”

  Last year, the year 1899, had been a disastrous
year. In January my father died after a brief illness, and in the
summer I had diphtheria, with complications; almost all July and
August I had spent in bed. They were phenomenally hot months, but
what I recollected of the heat was my own fever, of which the heat
in my room seemed only another aggravating aspect; heat was my
enemy, the sun something to be kept out. I dreaded it; and whenever
I heard people saying what a wonderful summer it had been, almost
the hottest within living memory, I could not understand what they
meant—I only thought of my aching throat and the desperate search
of my fretful limbs for a cool place in the bedclothes. I had good
reason to wish the century over.

  The summer of 1900 would be a cool one, I decided; I
should arrange for that. And the Clerk of the Weather hearkened to
me. On July 1 the temperature was in the sixties and we had only
had three hot days—the 10th, the llth, and the 12th of June. I had
marked them in my diary with a cross.

  The 1st of July also brought Mrs. Maudsley’s
invitation, for in those days we still had a post on Sundays. My
mother showed me the letter: it was written in a large, bold,
sloping hand. I had just reached the age when I could read
handwriting that was unfamiliar to me, and this accomplishment gave
me some pride. Mrs. Maudsley did not ignore the possibility of
measles though she took it more light-heartedly than my mother did.
“If neither of our boys has come out in spots by July 10th,” she
wrote, “I should be so very pleased if you would allow Leo to spend
the rest of the month with us. Marcus”—ah,
that
was his
name—”has told me quite a lot about him, and I am most anxious to
make his acquaintance, if you can spare him. It will be very nice
for Marcus to have a boy of his own age to play with as he is the
baby of the family, and a little apt to feel left out. I understand
that Leo is an only child and I promise you we will take great care
of him. The Norfolk air...” etc. She ended up: “You may be
surprised that we should be spending the Season in the country but
neither my husband nor I have been very well, and Town is no place
for a small boy in the summer.”

  I pored over the letter and soon committed it to
memory. I imagined that its conventional phrases implied a deep and
sympathetic interest in my personality; it was almost the first
time I had felt myself real to somebody who didn’t know me.

  At first I was all agog to go and couldn’t
understand my mother’s hesitation in accepting for me. “Norfolk is
such a long way off,” she would say, “and you’ve never been away
from home before, to stay with strangers, I mean.” “But I’ve been
to school,” I argued. She had to admit that. “But I wish you
weren’t going for so long,” she said. “You may not like it, and
then what will you do?” “I’m sure I shall enjoy myself,” I told
her. “And you will be there for your birthday,” she said. “We’ve
always been together for your birthday.” I said nothing to that, I
had forgotten about my birthday and was visited by a pang of
premature nostalgia. “Promise me you’ll let me know if you’re not
happy,” she said. I didn’t like to say again I knew I should be
happy, so I promised. But still she wasn’t satisfied. “Perhaps
you’ll get measles after all,” she told me hopefully, “or Marcus
will.”

  A dozen times a day I asked her if she had written
saying I might go, until in the end she quite lost patience with
me. “Don’t worry me—I have written,” she said at last.

  Preparations followed—what should I take with me?
One thing I shouldn’t need, I said, was summer clothes. “I know it
won’t be hot.” And the weather bore me out—cool day followed cool
day. My mother saw eye to eye with me in this: she believed that
thick clothes were somehow safer than thin ones. And she had
another motive: economy. The hot months of last year I had spent in
bed, so I had no hot-weather outfit suitable to my size. I was
growing fast: the outlay would be considerable and perhaps money
thrown away. My mother yielded to me. “But try not to get hot,” she
said. “Getting hot is always a risk. You needn’t do anything
violent
, need you?” We looked at each other in perplexity,
and dismissed the idea that I should have to do anything
violent.

  In imagination, often in apprehension, she tried to
foresee the kind of life I should lead. One day she said, apropos
of nothing: “Try to go to church if you can. I don’t know what sort
of people they are—perhaps they don’t go to church. If they do, I
expect they drive.” Her face grew wistful, and I knew she wished
she was going with me.

  I shouldn’t have wanted that. I was haunted by the
schoolboy’s fear that my mother wouldn’t look right, do right, be
right in the eyes of the other boys and their parents. She would be
socially unacceptable; she would make a bloomer. I could bear
humiliation for myself, I thought, more easily than I could for
her.

  But as the day of departure drew nearer, my feelings
underwent a change. Now it was I who wanted to get out of going,
and my mother who held me to it. “You could so easily say I had got
measles,” I pleaded. She was horrified. “I couldn’t say such a
thing,” she cried indignantly. “And besides they would know. You
were out of quarantine yesterday.” My heart sank; I tried a spell
for making spots come out on my chest, but it didn’t work. On the
last evening my mother and I sat together in the drawing-room on
the two-humped settee, which reminded me of a dromedary in profile.
The room faced the street and was a little stuffy, for we used it
seldom and when it was not in use the windows were fastened to keep
out the dust, which in the dry weather rose in clouds whenever a
vehicle went by. It was our one formal room and I think my mother
may have chosen it for its moral effect; its comparative
strangeness would be a step towards the strangeness I should feel
in another house. Also I suspect she had something special to say,
which the room would lend weight to, but she never said it, for I
was too near to tears to be open to practical or moral
counsels.

  2

  TO MY MIND’S eye, my buried memories of Brandham
Hall are like effects of chiaroscuro, patches of light and dark: it
is only with an effort that I can see them in terms of colour.
There are things I know, though I don’t know how I know them, and
things that I remember. Certain things are established in my mind
as facts, but no picture attaches to them; on the other hand there
are pictures unverified by any fact which recur obsessively, like
the landscape of a dream.

  The facts I owe to my diary, which I kept
religiously, beginning on the 9th, the day I arrived, and going on
until the 26th, the eve of the fateful Friday. The last few entries
are in code—how proud I was of having invented that! Not a pretence
code such as I had used to call down curses on Jenkins and Strode,
but a real one like Pepys’s—perhaps I had heard of his. I found it
difficult to “break,” partly because, from motives of prudence and
also, possibly, to display my virtuosity, I modified and
embellished it each day. There are still two or three sentences
that don’t give up their secret, though the whole affair is clearer
to me now than it was then.

  Facts there are in plenty, beginning with “M. met me
on Norwich platform with the pony carriage and the Under-Coachman.
We drove 13¾ miles to Brandham Hall, which came in site after about
12½ miles and then disapeared again.”

  No doubt this was so, but I have no recollection of
the drive, no visual image to make it real for me; the first part
of my visit remains in my memory as a series of unrelated
impressions, without time sequence, but each with a distinct
feeling
attaching to it. Some of the entries might just as
well refer to places I have never seen, and incidents I have never
experienced. Even the look of the house is vague to me. I
laboriously transcribed into my diary a description of it that I
found in a directory of Norfolk:

  Brandham Hall, the seat of the Winlove family, is an
imposing early Georgian mansion pleasantly situated on a plot of
rising ground and standing in a park of some five hundred acres. Of
an architectural style too bare and unadorned for present tastes,
it makes an impressive if over-plain effect when seen from the S.W.
The interior contains interesting family portraits by Gainsborough
and Reynolds, also landscapes by Cuyp, Ruysdael, Hobbema, etc., and
in the smoking-room a series of tavern scenes by Teniers the
Younger (these are not shown). The first-floor apartments are
approached by a double staircase which has been much admired. The
Winlove family has the gift of the livings of Brandham,
Brandham-under-Brandham, and Brandham All Saints. At present the
mansion, park, and pleasure grounds are let to Mr. W. H. Maudsley,
of Princes Gate and Thread-needle Street, who allows the public the
same facilities to see the house that it enjoyed formerly.
Permission to view should be obtained from the agent, Brandham
Estate Offices, Brandham.

  Now of this all that remains clear in my mind’s eye
is the double staircase, which certainly was admired by me. I
likened it to many things: a tilted horseshoe, a magnet, a
cataract; and both coming down and going up I made it a rule to use
alternate routes; I persuaded myself that something awful might
happen if I went the same way twice. But surprisingly enough
(considering how ready I was to be impressed), the imposing façade,
which I am sure I studied from the S.W., has faded from my mind. I
can see the front of the house now, but through the eyes of the
directory, not through my own.

  Perhaps we came and went through a side-door—I think
we did, and that there was a backstairs near it convenient for our
bedroom—for I shared a bedroom, and indeed a bed, a four-poster,
with Marcus. And not only with him, but with his Aberdeen terrier,
an elderly, cross creature, whose presence soon became almost
intolerable. My memories are of the hinder parts of the house,
invisible from the S.W., which were higgledy-piggledy and rambling,
and of passages with sudden bends and confusing identical doors,
where you could easily lose your way and be late for meals. They
were not well lighted, if I remember, which the Georgian addition
must have been. Perhaps our bedroom was an old night nursery. It
had a broad, squat window, set high in the wall, Elizabethan
possibly: sitting up in bed I could only see the sky. In those days
even rich people did not always give their children the kind of
sleeping-quarters we should think essential for them now.

  No doubt there was a shortage of bedrooms, for a
great many guests came and went, and once we were eighteen to
dinner. Marcus and I sat next to each other and when the ladies
retired we retired too, to bed. I can remember the pink glow of the
candles and the shine of the silver, the stately, ample figure of
Mrs. Maudsley at one end of the table and the thin figure of her
husband with his stiff upright carriage at the other. Sitting down,
he looked taller than when standing up. She always seemed to take
up more space than was necessary to her, and he less.

  I don’t know what he did with himself all day, but
my impression is of meeting him unexpectedly in some passage or
doorway and of his stopping to say: “Enjoying yourself?” and when I
had said: “Yes, sir,” he would say: “That’s good,” and hurry on. He
was a wispy little man with a long drooping moustache, eyelids that
drooped over his blue-grey eyes, and a long thin neck round which
he wore the highest of high collars. It would have been as
difficult to think of him being master of the house as it would
have been to think of his wife not being mistress of it.

  Her face is a blur to me now, so many impressions
have overlaid the original; but when I see her in dreams (for I
have not been able to keep her out of them), it is not with that
terrible aspect she wore the last time I saw her, when her face
could hardly be called a face at all, but with the look of a
portrait by Ingres or Goya, a full, pale face, with dark, lustrous
eyes, a fixed, unchanging regard, and two or three black curls, or
crescents of curls, stealing down over her forehead. In dreams,
oddly enough, her attitude towards me is as cordial as it was at
the beginning of my stay, when I only half sensed the danger behind
her fascination. Can it be that her spirit would like to make it
right with me?—for she must long ago be dead—she was then, I
suppose, in her middle or late forties, and seemed old to me.
Marcus had her colouring, but not her beauty.

  I suppose it was my first evening when, the honoured
guest, I sat next to her at dinner.

  “And so you are a magician?” she said, smiling.

  “Oh,” I replied modestly, “not really. Only, you
know, at school.”

  “You’re not going to bewitch us here?” she said.

  “Oh no,” I answered, wriggling, a habit I had when I
was nervous, and I made a mental note to reproach Marcus for this
breach of trust.

  She never looked at anyone, it seemed to me, except
with intention and as if she didn’t mean to waste the look. Her
glance most often rested on her daughter, who usually sat between
two young men. “What do they find to talk
about
?” I
remember thinking. “They seem so interested—more interested than
she is.”

  I didn’t possess the ordinary schoolboy’s royal gift
for fitting names to faces—perhaps because I had been at school
such a short time. I was introduced to everyone, of course, and
Marcus told me who was coming and who was leaving and something
about them; and I dutifully put their names down in my diary, Mr.
This and Miss That—they were generally single. But the few years
that separated us were wider than an ocean; I think I should have
had more in common with a Hottentot child than with these grown-ups
in their late teens and early twenties. What they thought, what
they did, how they occupied themselves, were a mystery to me. The
young men down from the university (as Marcus assured me they
were), the young women with even less to identify them, would greet
me on their way to or from the tennis court or the croquet lawn;
the men in white flannels, white shoes, and straw hats, the women,
also in white, with hourglass figures and hats like windmills; all
white, or nearly white, save for the men’s black socks, which
sometimes showed above their buckskin shoes. Some found more to say
to me than others; but they were only part of the scene and I never
had, or felt I ought to have, the smallest personal relationship
with them. They were they, and Marcus and I were we—different age
groups, as we should say now.