The Go-Between (41 page)

  As to the spell, I shook my head; I could not take
it seriously. It did not fit into the world of facts. The search
for facts, which meant the search for truth, had such a
tranquillizing and reconciling effect on me that by the end the
episode at Brandham Hall, that Bluebeard’s chamber in my mind, had
lost its terrors. It was no more horrific than a long and intricate
bibliographical quest. It might have been something that had
happened to another person. With the opening of the door, and the
installation of electric light into the cupboard, the skeletons had
crumbled into dust.

  The facts that I had brought to light had been
sufficient for my purpose. They were incomplete, of course. If I
wanted to know more precisely how I stood vis-à-vis life—success
and failure, happiness and unhappiness, integration and
disintegration, and so on—I should have to examine other facts,
facts beyond the reach of memory and gleaned from outside, from
living sources. I should have to know what happened to the other
persons in the story, and how the experience had affected them. The
others! I did not take kindly to the fact of others. I did not mind
their names in print, providing evidence, but I did not want them
in the flesh: that way they were most troublesome.

  As to these “others” of Brandham Hall, somehow I
could not think of them as going on after I had stopped. They were
like figures in a picture, the frame enclosed them, the twofold
frame of time and place, and they could not step outside it, they
were imprisoned in Brandham Hall and the summer of 1900. There let
them stay, fixed in their two dimensions: I did not want to free
them.

  So with a quiet mind I was able to approach the last
piece of evidence, the unopened letter.

  Darling, [it read—only one “darling” this time],

  Our trusty messenger must have made a bloomer. You
can’t
have said six o’clock. Why, you’ll be all covered
with hay-seed, you’ll have straw in your hair, you won’t be fit to
be seen! So I’m writing to say, Come at six thirty if you can,
because it’s our dear postman’s birthday and I have to be there to
give him a little present, just the thing for a postman—he won’t
have to walk any more, poor pet, when he takes our messages! I’m
giving him this. Mama is making other plans for him and he may not
be able to outwit her, cunning as he is, and if he doesn’t get
through with it I shall be there at six, and wait till seven or
eight or nine or Doomsday—darling, darling.

  The tears came into my eyes—tears, which I had never
shed, I think, since I left Brandham Hall. So that was why she had
given me the green bicycle—to facilitate my journeys between the
Hall and the farm. Eh bien je jamais! She was a cool one. I didn’t
mind; my only wish was that I had kept it, instead of letting
Mother give it away because I wouldn’t use it.

  The figures in the picture started moving; curiosity
stirred in me again. I would go back to Brandham and find out what
had happened after I left.

  Defying augury, I took a room at the Maid’s Head,
and the next day I recklessly hired a car and drove to my
objective.

  My memories of the village were very hazy, but even
so I shouldn’t have recognized it. The angle of vision makes a
difference: I was a foot taller than when I had seen it last, and
it seemed many feet lower. A passing motor-car cut off half the
height of the houses; I saw a woman standing at an upper window,
and her head and shoulders were invisible, the window was so low.
The place had changed with all the changes of fifty years—the most
changeful half a century in history. I did not even feel a
revenant; I felt a stranger. “What will have changed least?” I
wondered. The church. To the church I bent my steps, and having
reached it I went straight to the transept. There were two new
mural tablets.

  “Hugh Francis Winlove, Ninth Viscount Trimingham,” I
read. “Born Nov. 15th. 1874, died July 6th. 1910.”

  So soon! Poor Hugh! His could never have been a good
life, I reflected, not in the doctor’s sense. Suddenly I thought of
him as a man much younger than I, he who had seemed so much older:
a young man of thirty-six, but looking any age; his face too
damaged by the hand of man to respond to the kinder surgery of the
hand of God. It had never struck me that besides the damage one
could see, there might be other damage that one couldn’t.

  Requiescat.

  Had he ever married? I wondered. The tablet did not
record a viscountess. There seemed to be no way of telling. But
yes, there was, for here was another tablet, stuck away in the
corner.

  “Hugh Maudsley Winlove, Tenth Viscount Trimingham.
Born Feb. 12th. 1901, killed in action in France June 15th. 1944;
also of Alethea, his wife, killed in an air-raid Jan. 16th.
1941.”

  If these were facts, then they were very odd facts.
Little as I remembered of the circumstances of my departure, I was
quite sure that Lord Trimingham was not married when I left;
indeed, his engagement to Marian had not yet been made public. How
had he contrived to get married and have a son in less than seven
months?

  That the explanation didn’t dawn on me shows what a
deep impression the scene in the outhouse had left on my mind. I
could not conceive of Marian going on after it; it was not only
worse than death, it was death too: she was rubbed out.

  Shaking my head, still puzzled and a little
irritated—for I, who had got the better of so many facts, did not
like it when facts got the better of me—I sat down in what I
thought was the pew I had occupied fifty years before, and found
myself, like myself of an earlier date, looking for a memorial to
the eleventh Viscount.

  But there was none. Had the line died out? Then it
occurred to me that the eleventh Viscount might be still alive.

  Thinking back to my past, lost self, I remembered
how impatient I had always been with the Litany and with
Christianity’s general insistence on sin. I did not want to think
about it! Since then I had thought about it a great deal, though
not in a religious spirit, and not as sin. I was resigned to my lot
and sometimes congratulated myself on it; but when I rebelled
against its drabness, I knew where the blame lay, and my resentment
against Brandham Hall and all its works had hardened into a general
grudge against mankind. I did not call them sinners—sin was not
among my terms of reference—but I did not like or trust them.

  But what of the sense of praise and thankfulness
that I had then? What of the song I used to sing with so much gusto
(singing was one of the studies I had given up|: “My song shall be
alway Thy mercy praising”? I would not have sung it now, even if I
could have reached the notes. There seemed so little room for
praise or thanksgiving in the modern world, and the mercy of God,
on which people were all too prone to throw themselves, had been
left behind with the Psalms.

  In the porch as I came in I saw a notice which said
that the church was kept open to visitors partly for the purpose of
private prayer; and would the visitor pray for the parish priest,
for the congregation committed to his charge, and for the souls of
the faithful who had passed away in the hope of a joyful
resurrection?

  Though my church-going days were over, it seemed
ungracious not to comply; and when I came to the souls of the
faithful, I did not fail to say a prayer for Hugh, nor for his son
and daughter-in-law; and then I remembered Ted, and though I could
not be sure that he had been buried in consecrated ground and was
eligible for the benefits of prayer, I said a prayer for him too.
But still I was not satisfied. I remembered all the persons of our
drama and prayed for them, and in the end I even prayed for
myself.

  I went out of the church uncertain what my next step
should be. I had come to Brandham without a definite plan of
campaign, but with some vague idea of searching out the oldest
inhabitant and asking him or her for information. The pub was the
most likely place to find such a person, but it was early still and
the pubs would not be open for an hour. Anyhow I do not like pubs
and had rarely been inside one.

  I stood in the churchyard and looked down on the
cricket field. It was mid-May, and they had been mowing it and
rolling it and generally putting it in order for the season.
Evidently cricket still flourished in Brandham. The pavilion was
still there, facing me, and I tried to make out where I had been
standing when I made my historic catch, wondering what it felt like
to be a cricketer, for cricket was another thing I had been excused
when I went back to school.

  I turned and made my way down to the village, and as
I entered the street I saw a man whose face seemed less unfamiliar
to me than the others. He was a young man in the middle twenties,
not the sort of person I was looking for; probably he was also a
stranger to the place. Certainly he was a stranger to me, and I did
not care about talking to strangers. But there was one question he
might be able to answer.

  He was wearing a sports coat and an old pair of
corduroy trousers; his face was closed in thought.

  “Excuse me,” I said, “but is there still a Lord
Trimingham living at Brandham Hall?”

  He looked at me as though he shared my prejudice
against strangers, and as though he wanted to be left alone, and
yet didn’t want to be left alone.

  “There is,” he said rather shortly, “and as a matter
of fact I am Lord Trimingham.”

  Very much taken aback, I stared at him. I remembered
his colouring: it was like a wheat-field, a ripe wheat-field in the
month of May.

  “You seem surprised,” he said, and his tone
suggested that my surprise was uncalled for. “But I live only in a
corner of the house—the rest is let to a girls’ school.”

  I recovered myself a little. “Oh,” I said, “I didn’t
mean that, though I’m glad to know you live there. You see I stayed
there many years ago.”

  At that his manner changed completely and he said,
almost eagerly:

  “You stayed there? Then you know the house?”

  “I remember parts of it,” I said.

  “You stayed there?” he repeated. “When would that
be?”

  “In your grandfather’s time,” I said.

  “My grandfather?” he said, and I saw that he was on
his guard again. “You knew my grandfather?”

  “Yes,” I said, “your grandfather, the ninth
Viscount.” Out of some unsealed chamber of memory the pompous
phrase slipped past my tongue. “He was your grandfather, wasn’t
he?”

  “Of course,” Lord Trimingham said, “of course. I
never knew him, I’m afraid: he died before I was born. But I
believe he was a charming man, if I may say so of my own
relation.”

  “You may,” I smiled. “He was a charming man.”

  Lord Trimingham had lost a little of his aplomb: it
was as though the breath of the May morning had gone out of him. He
hesitated and then said:

  “And did you also know my grandmother?”

  This time it was for me to echo him. “Your
grandmother?”

  “Yes, she was a Miss Maudsley.”

  I took a long breath. “Oh yes,” I said. “I knew her
very well. Is she still alive?”

  “She is,” he said, without too much enthusiasm.

  “And living where?”

  “Here in the village, in a little house that used to
belong to an old retainer of the family, called, I think, Nannie
Robson. Perhaps you knew her, too?”

  “No,” I said, “I never saw her, though I heard about
her.... Is your grandmother well? “

  “Quite well, except that she’s got rather forgetful
lately, like old people do.” He smiled, a tolerant, youthful smile
that seemed to relegate her without regret to the category of the
old. “Why don’t you call and see her?” he went on. “She’d like to
see you, I’m sure. She’s rather lonely. She doesn’t have many
visitors.”

  The inhibitions of fifty years rose up in me and
took control of my face and voice.

  “I think I’d better not,” I said, “I’m not sure she
would want to see me.”

  He looked at me a moment, good manners struggling
with curiosity in his face.

  “Well,” he said, “it’s for you to say.”

  Suddenly I remembered that, Trimingham or no
Trimingham, he was much younger than I was and I could claim an
older person’s freedom of speech. At the same time I was aware of
an Ancient Mariner in me who might be trying his patience.

  “Would you,” I asked, “do me a great kindness?”

  “Of course,” he said, with a fleeting glance at his
wrist-watch. “What is it?”

  “Would you tell Lady Trimingham that Leo Colston is
here and would like to see her?”

  “Leo Colston?”

  “Yes, that is my name.”

  He hesitated. “As a rule I don’t drop in on her,” he
said. “I sometimes telephone.... What a boon it is! Was there a
telephone here in your day?”

  “No,” I replied. “It might have made a great
difference if there had been.”

  “Yes indeed,” said he. “My grandmother is a great
talker, you know; old people sometimes are. But I’ll go if you
like. I—” he stopped.

  “It would be a great kindness,” I repeated, firmly.
“Like you I shouldn’t want to—to take her unawares.” I thought of
the last time I had done so.

  “Very well,” said he, overcoming an obvious
reluctance. “Mr. Leo Colston, was it? You think that she’ll
remember the name? She’s rather forgetful.”

  “I’m sure she will,” I said. “I’ll wait here for
you.”

  While he was gone I strolled about the street,
searching for some object that would put me visually in line with
the past. But nothing clicked. I saw the village hall, a sombre
structure of smooth, dark-red brick, which looked incongruous among
the glittering, grey flint houses. I ought to have remembered it,
for it was the scene of my last public triumph, but I didn’t.