The Go-Between (13 page)

  “How do you do, Trimingham?” I replied repressively,
as who should say: “Trimingham you are, and don’t forget it.”

  “You can call me Hugh, if you like,” he volunteered,
“I don’t charge extra.”

  “But your name is Trimingham, isn’t it?” I couldn’t
help asking. “You told me it was yourself.” To be on the safe side,
and also with a certain guile, I added hastily: “Mr. Trimingham, I
mean.”

  “You were right the first time,” said he.

  Overcome by curiosity, I stared at his odd face, at
the scar, the down-weeping, blank eye, the upturned mouth, as if
they could tell me something. Then I suspected him of teasing me
and said:

  “But aren’t all grown-up men called Mister?”

  “Not all,” he said. “Doctors aren’t, for instance,
or professors.”

  I saw the flaw in this.

  “But they’re called Doctor or Professor,” I said.
“It’s a—a title they have.”

  “Well,” he said, “I have a title, too.”

  Then it dawned on me, and it was like the dawn of
the unimaginable. Slowly, painfully I said:

  “Are you Viscount Trimingham?”

  He nodded.

  I had to get it absolutely right.

  “Are you the
ninth
Viscount
Trimingham?”

  “I am,” he said.

  When I had got over the shock of this disclosure,
which quite took away my powers of speech, my first impulse was to
feel aggrieved. Why hadn’t they told me? I might have made an even
worse fool of myself. Then, with still greater force, it struck me
that I ought to have known. It had been obvious from the start, too
obvious. But I was like that. Two and two never made four for me,
if I could make them five.

  “Oughtn’t I to call you ‘my lord’?” I asked at
length.

  “Oh no,” he said, “not in ordinary conversation.
Perhaps if you were writing me a begging letter.... But Trimingham
is quite in order, if you prefer it to Hugh.”

  I was amazed at his condescension. The equivocal
unmis-tered Trimingham I had pictured to myself vanished utterly,
to be replaced by the ninth Viscount, whom I somehow felt to be
nine times as glorious as the first. I had never met a lord before,
nor had I ever expected to meet one. It didn’t matter what he
looked like: he was a lord first, and a human being, with a face
and limbs and body, long, long after.

  “But you haven’t told me your name,” he said.

  “It’s Colston,” I brought out with difficulty.

  “Mr. Colston?”

  I blushed at the hit, though it was a very gentle
one.

  “Well, Leo is my Christian name.”

  “Then I shall call you Leo if I may.”

  I mumbled something. I’m afraid he must have noticed
the alteration in my manner: the sidesman and the verger had shown
much more pride of bearing than I did.

  “Does Marian call you Leo?” he asked suddenly. “I
noticed you were talking to her this morning.”

  “Oh yes, she does,” I said enthusiastically. “And I
call her Marian, she asked me to. Don’t you think she is a ripping
girl?”

  “Why yes, I do, “he said.

  “I call her spifflicating... A 1 ... I don’t know
what to call her.” I wound up lamely: “I’d do anything for
her.”

  “What would you do?”

  I scented a trap in this; I felt I had been caught
boasting. There was so little I could do for her that would sound
important. Thinking of what it was within the compass of small boys
to do, I said:

  “If a big dog attacked her, I could go for it, or of
course I could run errands for her—you know, carry things and take
messages.”

  “That would be most useful,” said Lord Trimingham,
“and kind as well. Would you like to take her a message now?”

  “Crikey, yes. What shall I say?”

  “Tell her I’ve got her prayer-book. She left it
behind in church.”

  Always glad to run, I trotted off. Marian was
walking with a man, one of last night’s new-comers. I circled round
them.

  “Please, Marian,” I said, trying not to seem to
interrupt, “Hugh asked me to tell you—”

  She looked down at me, puzzled.

  “Who asked you to tell me?”

  “Yes, Hugh asked me to tell you—”

  “But,” she said quite kindly but with a touch of
impatience, “how can I tell who asked you to tell me?”

  The words “Hugh,” “you,” and “who” danced before my
mind and I was terribly embarrassed. “Not who,” I stammered,
“Hugh.”

  She still looked blank, and I said:

  “Hugh, you know, Hugh the Viscount.”

  They both laughed.

  I was terribly ashamed. I thought she would think I
was making free with his Christian name. “Did I say it wrong?” I
asked. “He asked me to call him Hugh,” I added. I had only seen the
word written and had forgotten how he pronounced it.

  “Yes, but not who,” she said. “Hugh, like—well,
stew, or phew, or whew. What words! Still, I ought to have known, I
wasn’t thinking.... What did Hugh say?”

  “He said he’d got your prayer-book. You left it
behind in church.”

  “How careless of me! I seem to forget everything.
Please thank him.”

  I trotted back to Lord Trimingham and gave him
Marian’s message.

  “Is that all she said?” he asked. He seemed
disappointed. Perhaps he expected, as I had, that she would come
and claim the prayer-book at once.

  Outside the front door a high dogcart was drawn up.
Its wheels were painted black and yellow; they had very thin spokes
and were shod with indiarubber. A groom was standing by the horse’s
head.

  “Do you know whose turn-out that is?” asked Lord
Trimingham. He seemed to have recovered from his disappointment
over the prayer-book.

  I said I didn’t.

  “It’s Franklin, Dr. Franklin. You mustn’t call him
Mister. He’s not a surgeon.”

  I didn’t quite see the point of this, but I laughed
dutifully. I had taken a great liking to Lord Trimingham though I
couldn’t have told whether I liked the Viscount or the man.

  “Doctors always come at lunch-time, it’s one of
their rules,” he said.

  I was emboldened to ask: “But how did you know it
was Dr. Franklin?”

  Lord Trimingham gave a little shrug. “Oh, I know
everyone round here, “ he said.

  “Of course it all belongs to you really, doesn’t
it?” I asked. Then I brought out a phrase I had been pondering
over. “You are a guest in your own house!”

  He smiled. “And very pleased to be,” he said, a
little crisply.

  After luncheon, just as I was about to scamper off,
Mrs. Maudsley called me to her. It was always difficult for me to
approach her, along the beam of that black ray that started from
her eye, and I must have given the impression that I went
unwillingly.

  “Marcus isn’t very well,” she told me, “and the
doctor says we must keep him in bed a day or two. He doesn’t think
it’s anything infectious, but to be on the safe side we’re going to
change your room. They’re moving your things now, I think. It’s
across the passage from your old one—a room with a green baize
door. Would you like me to show it to you?”

  “Oh no, thank you,” I said, alarmed at the idea. “I
know the green baize door.”

  “And don’t go in to Marcus,” she called after me as
I scurried off.

  But presently my steps came slower. Should I have
the room to myself, or should I be sharing it? When I opened the
door, should I find someone in the room, occupying it and resenting
an intruder? Perhaps one of the grown-up guests, who would take up
more than his share of the bed, who would have strange ways of
dressing and undressing, and might not want me to look at him?

  I paused at the door and knocked on the soft baize,
a muffled knock. There was no answer, so I went in. I saw at a
glance my fears were groundless.

  It was a very small room, almost a cell; and the bed
so narrow it could only be meant for one person. My things were all
there, my hairbrushes, my red collar-box; but all in different
places and looking different—and I felt different, too. I tiptoed
about, as though exploring a new personality. Whether I was more or
less than I had been, I couldn’t decide, but I felt I was cast for
a new role.

  Then I remembered what Marcus had told me, about
changing, and joyfully and furtively—all my movements in the new
room were furtive—I began to take off my Eton suit. Then, a Robin
Hood in Lincoln green, with a tingling sense of imminent adventure,
I started off. I took all the precautions a bandit should take not
to be observed, and I am certain no one saw me leave the house.

  7

  THE THERMOMETER stood at eighty-four: that was
satisfactory, but I was confident it could do better.

  Not a drop of rain had fallen since I came to
Brandham Hall. I was in love with the heat, I felt for it what the
convert feels for his new religion. I was in league with it, and
half believed that for my sake it might perform a miracle.

  Only a year ago I had devoutly echoed my mother’s
plaintive cry: “I don’t think this heat can last
much
longer, do you?” Now the sick self that had set so much store by
the temperate was inconceivable to me.

  And without my being aware of it, the climate of my
emotions had undergone a change. I was no longer satisfied with the
small change of experience, which had hitherto contented me. I
wanted to deal in larger sums. I wanted to enjoy continuously the
afflatus of spirit that I had when I was talking to Lord Trimingham
and he admitted to being a Viscount. To be in tune with all that
Brandham Hall meant, I must increase my stature, I must act on a
grander scale.

  Perhaps all these desires had been dormant in me for
years, and the Zodiac had been their latest manifestation. But the
difference was this: in those days I had known where I stood; I had
never confused the reality of my private-school life with the
dreams with which I beguiled my imagination. That they were
unattainable was almost their point. I was a schoolboy, assiduously
but unambitiously subscribing to the realities of a schoolboy’s
life. The schoolboy’s standards were my standards: in my daily life
I did not look beyond them. Then came the diary and the
persecution; and the success of my appeal for supernatural aid
slightly shook my very earthbound sense of reality. Like other
dabblers in the black arts, I was willing to believe I had been
taken in. But I was not
sure
; and now, superimposed on the
grandeur of the Maudsleys, was the glory of the Triminghams
militant here on earth; and the two together had upset the balance
of my realistic-idealistic system. Without knowing it, I was
crossing the rainbow bridge from reality to dream.

  I now felt that I belonged to the Zodiac, not to
Southdown Hill School; and that my emotions and my behaviour must
illustrate this change. My dream had become my reality; my old life
was a discarded husk.

  And the heat was a medium that made this change of
outlook possible. As a liberating power with its own laws it was
outside my experience. In the heat the commonest objects changed
their nature. Walls, trees, the very ground one trod on, instead of
being cool, were warm to the touch; and the sense of touch is the
most transfiguring of all the senses. Many things to eat and drink,
which one had enjoyed because they were hot, one now shunned for
the same reason. Unless restrained by ice, the butter melted.
Besides altering or intensifying all smells, the heat had a smell
of its own—a garden smell, I called it to myself, compounded of the
scents of many flowers, and odours loosed from the earth, but with
something peculiar to itself which defied analysis. Sounds were
fewer and seemed to come from far away, as if Nature grudged the
effort. In the heat the senses, the mind, the heart, the body, all
told a different tale. One felt another person, one was another
person.

  Instinctively I looked round for Marcus, but Marcus
wasn’t there. I should have to spend the afternoon by myself; the
others, the companions of the Zodiac, were all engaged on their own
high concerns. I would not seek them out. I had lost my fear of
them; they would be kind to me if I approached them; but I should
be in their way. Also I wanted, I urgently wanted, to be by
myself.

  How best to explore the heat, that was the question;
how best to feel its power and be at one with it. Marcus and I, in
our afternoon playtime, had generally hung about the house, whose
less exposed ramifications had a fascination for us. I would go
farther afield. The only road I knew that was not a carriage road
was the path to the bathing-place, and that I took.

  Even since yesterday the water-meadow seemed to have
dried up. The rusty pools beside the causeway had receded; the
willows shimmered in a greyish haze. I wondered if I should find
the farmer bathing, but I didn’t; the place was deserted, and
without the shouts and the laughter and the splashing, it
frightened me as it had the first time—with some suggestion of
drowning, I suppose. I mounted the black scaffold, which was almost
too hot to touch, and looked down into the mirror that had been
shattered by the farmer’s dive. How flawless it was now!—a darker
picture of the sky.

  I crossed the sluice and followed a path between
rushes as tall as I was. Soon came a second, smaller sluice, but
with two drop-doors instead of one. I crossed that too, and found
myself in a wheat-field. It had been lately reaped; some of the
swaths were lying on the ground, others had been gathered into
stooks. These had a slightly different outline from our Wiltshire
ones and confirmed me in my sense of being abroad.

  Here for the first time I regretted my low shoes,
for the stubble came over them and pricked my ankles. Still, it was
not unpleasant to feel the hard, sharp thrust against my skin. I
saw a gate at the far corner and, treading carefully, made my way
towards it.