The Go-Between (37 page)

  Four candles (for combustion)

  One mettle container (silver)

  1 perferated utensil

  Four books (small) for supporting the last named

  Four boxes of matches

  Water for boiling

  Watch for timing

  Wet sponge in case of fire

  The metal container was a cup my mother had given
me; it was one of a series, graduated in size, which fitted into
one another and so took up only a small space. They were of silver,
gilt-washed inside, and had been given to Mother as a wedding
present. They were meant for picnics and she hoped I should use
mine for this purpose on my visit, though actually I never did, for
there were always plenty of glasses. She also believed, I suspect,
that the cup would be a mark of gentility, showing that I came from
a good home. As an alembic it was almost perfect, being egg-shell
thin.

  The perforated utensil on which, more than on
anything else, the success of my spell depended was the drainer
from the soap-dish on my washstand, a white enamelled makeshift
that did not match the set. It had a large hole in the middle and
other holes all round through which, I thought, the candle flames
would find their way; supported by the books, it would make a kind
of tripod.

  Then having arrived and having reduced the
ingredients in the cup to a mash or pulp, to add water, but not too
much, as this will require longer to boil. Boiling takes place when
bubbling begins (212° Fahr.). This should be at midnight, and at
the same time chant the spell (words of spell to be supplied later)
thirteen times backwards, thirteen times forwards, saying: “And I
am thirteen too,” not so loud as to be heard in the passage but
loud enough for someone listening in the room to hear; and if the
magician sweats, to add some drops of his own sweat, for this is
most effective.

  Afterwards on no account to touch the liquid with
the lips, but pour it down the W.C., leaving all utensils clean and
workmanlike, remembering that others have to use them after
you.

  How much of these instructions I was able to repeat
I cannot tell; I had written them down on a blank page of my diary,
which I meant to tear out, for safety’s sake, as soon as I had
ceased to be proud of them. But I forgot to do that, as I forgot
many other things, the following day.

  Although my eyes got gradually accustomed to the
darkness, I was almost on top of the outhouses before I saw the
thick blur of the deadly nightshade. It was like a lady standing in
her doorway looking out for someone. I was prepared to dread it,
but not prepared for the tumult of emotions it aroused in me. In
some way it wanted me, I felt, just as I wanted it; and the fancy
took me that it wanted me as an ingredient, and would have me. The
spell was not waiting to be born in my bedroom, as I meant it
should be, but here in this roofless shed, and I was not preparing
it for the deadly nightshade, but the deadly nightshade was
preparing it for me. “Come in,” it seemed to say; and at last after
an unfathomable time I stretched my hand out into the thick
darkness where it grew and felt the shoots and leaves close softly
on it. I withdrew my hand and peered. There was no room for me
inside, but if I went inside, into the unhallowed darkness where it
lurked, that springing mass of vegetable force, I should learn its
secret and it would learn mine. And in I went. It was stifling, yet
delicious, the leaves, the shoots, even the twigs, so yielding; and
this must be a flower that brushed my eyelids, and this must be a
berry that pressed against my lips ...

  At that I panicked and tried to force my way out,
but could not find the way out: there seemed to be a wall on every
side, and I barked my knuckles. At first I was afraid of hurting
the plant; then in my terror I began to tear at it and heard its
branches ripping and crackling. Soon I cleared a space round my
head, but that was not enough, it must all be clear. The plant was
much less strong than I supposed. I fought with it; I got hold of
its main stem and snapped it off. There was a swish; a soft,
sighing fall of leaf on leaf; a swirl, a debris of upturned leaves,
knee-deep all round me; and standing up among them, the torn stem.
I seized it and pulled it with all my might, and as I pulled, the
words of the missing spell floated into my mind out of some history
lesson—”
delenda est belladonna! delenda est belladonna
!” I
heard the roots creaking and cracking, felt their last strength
arrayed against me, the vital principle of the plant defending
itself in its death agony. “
Delenda est belladonna
!” I
chanted, not loudly, but loud enough for anyone listening to hear,
and braced myself for a last pull. And then it gave, came away in
my hands, throwing up with a soft sigh a little shower of earth,
which rustled on the leaves like rain; and I was lying on my back
in the open, still clutching the stump, staring up at its mop-like
coronal of roots, from which grains of earth kept dropping on my
face.

  22

  I SLEPT deeply that night and, for the first time
since I came to Brandham Hall, was still asleep when the footman
called me. I felt very strange and could not collect myself. The
feeling of strangeness did not wear off when he had drawn the
curtains. It was something inside me, I knew, but it was also
something outside. I just remembered to say: “Good morning, Henry!”
Otherwise he would have gone out without speaking: he never spoke
to me unless I spoke to him first— and not always then.

  “Good morning, Master Leo, many happy returns!”

  “Why, it’s my birthday! I had quite forgotten.”

  “You may have, Master Leo,” said the footman, “but
there’s others haven’t. Time’s running on! You’re thirteen now,
you’ll soon be fourteen: fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, and
every year bringing new troubles.”

  I didn’t quite like this speech, though I knew it
was kindly meant and only reflected the ingrained pessimism of
Henry’s outlook. But I still felt strange: what could it be? I
looked at the window and one explanation dawned on me.

  “Good gracious, it’s raining!”

  “It’s not raining
yet
,” said Henry
grudgingly. “But it will before the day’s out, mark my words. Not
that we don’t need it. All this hot weather isn’t natural.”

  “Oh, but it’s summer!” I exclaimed.

  “Summer or not, it isn’t natural,” Henry repeated.
“Why, everything’s burnt up and they do say”—here he looked down at
me ominously—”that quite a lot of people have gone mad.”

  “Oh,” I exclaimed, for mental derangement, like most
forms of calamity, had a special interest for me.

  “The dog days, you know,” he said confidentially,
shaking his head.

  Still interested in the effects of the weather, I
asked: “Do you know of any dog that’s gone mad—personally, I
mean?”

  Again he shook his head. “It isn’t only dogs go
mad,” he remarked with gloomy relish; “it’s human beings.”

  “Oh, not anybody here?” I asked, all ears.

  “I’m not saying it is,” said Henry oracularly, “and
I’m not saying it isn’t. But what I do say is, A miss is as good as
a mile, any day.”

  I could make nothing of this, and if his manner had
not been so chilling I should have asked him to explain it. He was
bending over the washstand, ritually removing the water-jug from
the basin and replacing it with a brass hot-water can, over which
he draped a face towel.

  Suddenly he said accusingly: “There’s a piece of the
soap-dish missing.”

  “It’s over there,” I answered guiltily, pointing to
the writing-table, which, for reasons of space, had been put at the
end of the bed. Henry came across and stared at my handiwork.

  It looked like a little heathen altar, or a study
for Stone-henge. The four books formed the temenos; within stood
the four candles, close together; above them, resting on the books,
lay the drainer from the soap-dish, and on the drainer, ready to
receive the ingredients, my silver cup. The water-bottle, the damp
sponge, the four boxes of matches, were set at ritual intervals.
Only my watch was absent from the roll-call. Flimsy and
childish-looking as the structure was, it did somehow bear witness
to occult intention, as if it was ready to do what harm it could,
and I felt exceedingly embarrassed at having to confess myself its
architect.

  Henry shook his head slowly,-1 knew what he meant:
Here is someone else whose brains have been turned by the heat. But
all he said was:

  “It looks as if you’ve been having a field day.”

  This was a compendious comment he often used to
indicate Olympian tolerance for actions which, though harmless,
were below the comprehension line.

  “But,” he added grimly, “it’s not my job to clear
them up.”

  As soon as Henry had gone I got out of bed and
gingerly dismantled my spell mechanism. Once the various objects
were separated and back in their proper place, they seemed to lose
their collective power for evil. They had only acquired it while I
slept, for last night, after my struggle with the deadly
nightshade, they had seemed the whitest magic, hardly magic at all.
I had been so strung up by the encounter that my journey back, with
its prospect of being locked out, had had no terrors for me. I
walked in at the open door as if it had been eleven in the morning,
not eleven at night.

  And now the skies were grey; that was one reason why
I felt strange. We had had cloudy days before, but not dull days,
threatening rain. I was so used to being greeted by the sun that
its absence was as disconcerting as a frown on a face that has
always smiled. It told me summer was over and a sterner season lay
ahead.

  My experience of the night before had somehow
prepared me for this. Not in vain had I allied myself with the
weather; my summer was ended, too. I had emptied myself out over
the deadly nightshade, purged myself of the accretions of fantasy
that had been accumulating since I came to Brand-ham Hall. No one
had ever told me to beware of them, but now I told myself. Good-bye
to make-believe! I tried, with tolerable success, to think of my
struggle in the outhouse as a mere gardening operation, the
destruction of a poisonous weed of whose existence I ought long ago
to have warned my hostess.

  Now that I was thirteen, I was under an obligation
to look reality in the face. At school I should be one of the older
boys, to whom the others looked up. When I thought of last night’s
performance at the outhouse, of my efforts to impose my puny self
upon events, when I thought of my career as a magician, the
mumbo-jumbo which I had practised and which I had taught to others,
I grew hot. And my letter to my mother —that pitiful petition for
recall—how I despised myself for writing it! Looking back on my
actions since I came to Brand-ham, I condemned them all; they
seemed the actions of another person.

  I condemned them unheard. I did not stop to ask
myself how, if they were to do again, I should improve on them. I
saw them all as instances of a gross piece of quackery, which had
begun the moment I arrived at Brandham—had indeed begun before,
when Jenkins and Strode had fallen off the roof. Ever since then I
had been playing a part, which seemed to have taken in everybody,
and most of all myself. It would not have taken in my old nurse,
who had been very quick to spot in me, or any child, a tendency to
ape an alien personality. She had no objection to one’s being any
kind of animal, or any kind of human being, high or low, young or
old, dead or alive, provided it was a pretence, provided you could
say
who
you were, when challenged. But if the assumed
personality was a distortion of one’s own ego, the “I” decked out
in borrowed plumes meant to impress, somebody one would like to be
thought to be, then she was down on one. “Who are you being now?”
she would ask me. “Oh, nobody special. Just Leo.” “Well, you’re not
my Leo. You’re another little boy and I don’t like him.”

  All the time at Brandham I had been another little
boy, and the grown-ups had aided and abetted me in this; it was a
great deal their fault. They liked to think of a little boy as a
little boy, corresponding to their idea of what a little boy should
be—as a representative of little boyhood—not a Leo or a Marcus.
They even had a special language designed for little boys—at least
some of them had, some of the visitors; not the family: the family,
and Lord Trimingham too, who was soon to be one of them, respected
one’s dignity. But there are other ways, far more seductive to
oneself than the title “my little man,” to make one feel unreal. No
little boy likes to be called a little man, but any little boy
likes to be treated as a little man, and this is what Marian had
done for me: at times, and when she had wanted to, she had endowed
me with the importance of a grown-up; she had made me feel that she
depended on me. She, more than anyone else, had puffed me up.

  No doubt, as Henry said, the heat had something to
do with it. The heat had knocked out Mrs. Maudsley—the heat and
Marian. Perhaps Marian
was
the heat? It had also knocked
out Marcus, and he had taken it more sensibly than anyone else: he
had come out in spots and retired to bed. He had no wish to be
thought other than he was; he could have told me he had measles,
but he didn’t. He was never taken in by himself; even his pretences
were not for themselves, but had an ulterior object. Once or twice
his French personality had run away with him, but its main object
was to score off me. He was interested in what really went on
around him, not in what his imagination could make of it. That was
why he was fond of gossip: he wanted to know about people, not to
imagine about them. It would not have pleased him in the least to
imagine himself a romantic outlaw, defending a deadly secret to the
death; he would much rather tell the secret and see what happened.
I had never admired Marcus so much as I did on the morning of my
thirteenth birthday.