Read Online The Go-Between by L. P. Hartley - Free Book Online Page B

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