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

usually exchange. One of
these confidences was our respective addresses; he told me his home
was called Brandham Hall and I told him mine was called Court
Place, and of the two he was the more impressed, for he was, as I
afterwards discovered, a snob, which I had not begun to be, except
in the world of the heavenly bodies—there, I was a super-snob.
      The name Court Place predisposed him in my favour,
as I suspect it also did his mother. But they were mistaken, for
Court Place was quite an ordinary house, set a little back in the
village street, behind looped chains, of which I was rather proud.
Well, not quite ordinary, for part of the house was reputed to be
very old; the bishops of Salisbury, it was said, once held their
court there; hence the name. Behind the house we had an acre of
garden, intersected by a stream, which a jobbing gardener attended
to three days a week. It was not a court in the grandiloquent sense
of the word, such as Maud-sley, I fancy, believed it to be.
      All the same, my mother did not find it easy to keep
up. My father was, I suppose, a crank. He had a fine, precise mind,
which ignored what it was not interested in. Without being a
misanthrope he was unsociable and nonconforming. He had his own
unorthodox theories of education, one of which was that I should
not be sent to school. As far as he could he educated me himself
with the help of a tutor who came out from Salisbury. I should
never have gone to school if he had had his way, but my mother
always wanted me to and so did I, and as soon as was possible after
his death I went. I admired him and revered his opinions, but my
temperament had more in common with my mother’s.
      His talents went into his hobbies, which were
book-collecting and gardening; for his career he had accepted a
routine occupation and was quite content to be a bank manager in
Salisbury. My mother fretted at his lack of enterprise and was a
little jealous and impatient of his hobbies, which enclosed him in
himself, as hobbies do, and, so she thought, got him nowhere. In
this she turned out to be wrong, for he was a collector of taste
and foresight, and his books made a sum that astonished us when
they were sold; indeed, I owe to them my immunity from the more
pressing cares of life. But this was long after; at the time, my
mother fortunately never thought of selling his books: she
cherished the things he had been fond of, partly from a feeling
that she had been unfair to him; and we lived on her money, and the
pension from the bank, and the little he had been able to put
by.
      My mother, though unworldly, was always attracted by
the things of the world; she felt that if circumstances had been
different, she could have taken her place in it; but thanks to my
father’s preferring objects to people, she had very little chance.
She liked gossip, she liked social occasions and to be dressed
right for them; she was sensitive to public opinion in the village,
and an invitation to some function in Salisbury would always set
her aflutter. To mix with well-dressed people on some smooth lawn,
with the spire of the Cathedral soaring above, to greet and be
greeted by them, to exchange items of family news and make timid
contributions to political discussions—all this gave her a
tremulous pleasure; she felt supported by the presence of
acquaintances, she needed a social frame. When the landau arrived
(there was a livery stable in the village) she stepped into it with
a little air of pride and self-fulfilment very different from her
usual diffident and anxious manner. And if she had persuaded my
father to go with her, she looked almost triumphant.
      After he died, what little social consequence we had
diminished; but at no time was it such as anyone with a delicate
sense of social nuances would have associated with the name Court
Place.
      I did not tell Maudsley this, of course—not from any
wish for concealment, but because our code discouraged personal
disclosures.