I had another cause for thinking sometimes about the personage named Josephine Tey when I would rather have been admiring the image of the two-storey house or the image of the green field rising to the wooded hill, or when I would rather have been feeling towards the images of persons who seemed to live in that scenery as though I lived among them. I seem to remember that Brat Farrar was called a mystery novel and that the plot turned on the return to the family home of a young man claiming to be the long-lost heir to the estate. The claimant, so to call him, was invited to live in the family home although none of the persons already living there was yet sure of the truth of his claim. I recall three of these persons. One was the claimant’s brother, who may have been named Simon and who may have been a twin; another was the claimant’s sister, or perhaps half-sister; the third person was an older woman known always as Aunt Bee. The three siblings, if such they were, had no parents that I can recall. Aunt Bee was the oldest of the chief characters and by far the most powerful of those who lived in the two-storey house. Whether or not she was their aunt, she seemed to have authority over the three purported siblings. The young woman especially confided in Aunt Bee, consulted her often, and almost always followed her advice.
For as long as I had the text of Brat Farrar in front of my eyes, and often at other times, I did as I was compelled to do whenever I was reading much of what I read during the 1950s or whenever I was remembering the experience of having read it. I felt as though I myself moved among the characters.
I was unable to alter the course of the narrative: anything reported in the fiction was a fact that I had to accept. However, I was free to take advantage of the seeming gaps in the narrative. The text of a work of fiction, as I seem to have understood from the first, reports in detail certain events from certain hours in the lives of the characters but leaves unreported whole days, months, years even. A narrative would often include, of course, a summary of a lengthy period of time, but a mere summary hardly restricted my freedom.
I was free, first of all, to observe and to admire. I could watch openly while my favourite female character rode on horseback to the far side of some landscape described in the text and even further, or while she fondled or fed her pet animals or birds, or even while she sat reading some work of fiction and while she felt, perhaps, as though she herself moved among the characters of that work. I was free also to influence the life of my favourite female character, but within strict limits. In 1953, for example, while I was reading Hereward the Wake, by Charles Kingsley, I was distressed by Hereward’s abandoning his wife, Torfrida, for another woman. From my standpoint as a shadowy presence among the characters, I knew I could never reverse Hereward’s decision. And yet, I was able in some mysterious way to add to whatever remorse he might have felt from time to time: I became, perhaps, one more of the lesser characters whose disapproval conveyed itself to Hereward. More to my satisfaction, I seemed able wordlessly to convey my sympathy to the cast-off Torfrida and even to suppose that this was of help to her.
In my life as a ghostly fictional character — as the creation of a reader rather than a writer — I could say and do no more than my creator was able to have me say or do, and my creator was a child. He was a precocious child in some ways: in his reading of adult books, for example, and in his curiosity about adult sexuality, so to call it. In other ways, he was an ignorant child. When he sent a version of himself into the scenery that included the hill with the trees on it and the two-storey house, he wanted no more than to have that version fall in love with one of the female characters and she with him. And although he could have said that he himself had already fallen in love with many female persons in what he would have called the real world, he knew about girls’ or young women’s falling in love only what he had read about it in fiction.
A reader of this work of fiction may be wondering why I had to insinuate a version of myself into the scenery of so many novels or short stories when I might have chosen from the male characters in each work a young man or a boy and might afterwards have felt as though I shared in his fictional life. My answer is that I had never met up with any young male character with whom I could feel the sympathy needed for such a sharing. And the most common reason for my failing to sympathise with young male characters was that I could not comprehend, let alone agree with, the policy of those characters towards young female characters.
Sometimes I tried to live in my mind the life of one or another male character of fiction. I believe I tried, while I read the first of the monthly instalments of Brat Farrar, to take part, as it were, in the fictional life of the young man who had arrived at the two-storey house claiming to be the long-lost son. I recall my having suspected from the first that the claimant was an impostor and, therefore, no kin of the young woman. This would have left me free to fall in love with the young woman, who had attracted me as soon as I had begun to read about her. At the same time, my representing myself as her brother or half-brother would have obliged me to disguise my true feelings for the time being — or, if my claim was accepted, perhaps indefinitely. Far from being a hindrance or a hardship, this would have been much to my liking; for me, the process of falling in love needed much secrecy and concealment and pretence. To fall in love with a young woman who had to allow for the possibility that I was her brother or half-brother — such an event would have prompted me to set going all that I considered necessary and appropriate during a courtship: the young man’s confiding in the young woman day after day for month after month, if necessary, until she had learned every detail of his life-story, of his daydreams, and of what he might have called his ideal female companion, and until she had come to understand that he was different indeed from the many coarse-minded suitors that she would have read about in fiction who could hardly wait before they tried to kiss and embrace their girlfriends; the young woman’s responding to the young man’s confidences by reporting in equal detail her own history, especially those periods of her life when she believed herself to be in love with one or another boy or young man; finally, the young woman’s falling into the habit of asking the young man, whenever he took his leave of her, where he was likely to be and what he was likely to be doing in his absence, thereby allowing the young man to suppose that the young woman daydreamed about him while he and she were apart, so that he did not deceive himself whenever he seemed to feel her presence about him while he was alone.
Before I began to write the first of the six previous paragraphs, I had intended to report more of what I recalled about my feelings towards the character of Aunt Bee, as she existed in my mind, and more about a further reason that I had for thinking sometimes about the personage known to me as Josephine Tey when I would have preferred simply to look at the unfolding scenery that appeared to me while I read. I had intended to report that I was jealous of the influence that Aunt Bee had over the young female character that I looked forward to courting in my mind. If the young female had a fault in my eyes, it was her unquestioning admiration of Aunt Bee.
I sensed that Aunt Bee disapproved of my interest in the young female character and that she contrived to keep me from being alone with her. Even though I conducted myself towards the young woman with unfailing seemliness, as though I truly was her brother or her half-brother, still Aunt Bee seemed to suspect me of wanting to make advances to the young woman if only I could arrange for the two of us to be alone together. Of course I wanted to be alone with the young woman, but for the time being I planned only to have long, serious conversations with her during our meetings.