The Go-Between (12 page)

  Last term it had been the fashion to call a book a
“buggins.”

  “Yes, but hold your breath.”

  I filled my lungs, dashed to the chest of drawers,
snatched the prayer-book, and, scarlet in the face, regained the
door.

  “Good egg, I didn’t think you could,” said Marcus,
while I gasped. “And have you got any old button or such-like for
the collection?”

  Again the under-water dash to the chest of drawers,
but this time I had to come up for air. As I gulped it down I had a
distinct feeling of several germs, the size of gnats, going down my
windpipe. To distract myself I opened my purse and sniffed it. The
new leather had a pungent, aromatic smell almost as reviving as a
smelling-bottle; and the central partition, which opened with a
thief-proof catch, sheltered a half-sovereign. Other partitions had
other coins, arranged in order of value; the outermost held
pennies.

  “Mama would give you something if you asked her,”
Marcus said. “She probably will anyhow. She’s decent about
that.”

  An access of masculine secrecy about money suddenly
stopped my tongue. “I’ll think it over,” I said, pinching the
purse, which crackled deliciously.

  “Well, don’t break the bank. So long, old chap.
Don’t pray too hard.”

  “Ta-ta, you old shammer,” I replied.

  At home we had one way of talking and at school
another; they were as distinct as two different languages. But when
we were alone together, and especially when any excitement— like
Marcus’s suspected measles—was afoot, we often lapsed into
schoolboy talk even away from school. Only when Marcus was
instructing me in
les convenances
, as he called them, for
he liked to air his French, did he stick closely to an unadorned
vocabulary. They were a serious matter.

  Somewhere on the sunny side of the house, the
private side, at the foot of the staircase, I expect, the party for
church was assembling. A new atmosphere prevailed: voices and
movements were restrained, everyone was wearing a decorous air. I
admired the richness of the women’s prayer-books; the men seemed to
have concealed theirs, if they had them. I was wearing my Eton
suit, Marcus said that would be right; and I could change into my
green suit after luncheon. Composing my features into pious lines I
strayed about among the gathering guests, but no one paid me much
attention until Mrs. Maudsley drew me aside and said: “Would you
like to give that to the collection?” and she slipped a shilling
into my hand. I suddenly felt enormously enriched and the thought
flashed through me: “Should I substitute a smaller coin? That would
be something to tell Marcus; but no,” I thought, “I won’t.” We were
still hanging about; a feeling of tension communicated itself to
me: churches don’t wait. Mr. Maudsley took out his watch. “Do we
wait for Triming-ham?” he said.

  “Well, perhaps another minute or two,” his wife
replied.

  My mother was wrong: we didn’t drive; the church was
only half a mile away. You could see it most of the time, you
couldn’t miss it; besides, it overlooked the cricket field. We
straggled along, in twos and threes, not in a crocodile, as we did
at school. At school we arranged beforehand whom we should walk
with. Feeling strange without Marcus, I attached myself
experimentally to one or two couples, and when they seemed to be
occupied with each other I walked alone. Presently Marian, who was
also alone, came up to me and I told her about Marcus. “I expect
he’ll be all right,” she said. “It’s probably just a touch of the
sun.” The sun was blazing down, and the dust blowing up at us.

  “Is your hair dry now?” I asked solicitously.

  She laughed and said: “Thanks to your
bathing-suit!”

  I felt proud of having been of use to her, but I
couldn’t think of anything to say to her except “Does it only come
down by accident?”

  She laughed again and said: “Haven’t you any
sisters?” which surprised and even wounded me; I had told her all
about my family circumstances, for me an oyster-like disclosure,
the day we went to Norwich. I reminded her of this.

  “Of course you did,” she said. “And I remember it
all perfectly. But I have so many things to think about, it slipped
out of my mind. I am so sorry.”

  I had never heard her apologize to anyone before,
and it gave me a strange feeling of sweetness and power; but I
didn’t know what to say next and fell to looking at her, at her
straw hat with a bow on it like the sails of a windmill, at the
patterns her flowery light-blue skirt made as it trailed the dust.
Suddenly out of the corner of my eye I saw that Trimingham was
following us; he wasn’t dawdling as we were and would soon catch up
with us. I didn’t want this to happen and calculated how long it
would take him to overtake us, but in the end I felt compelled to
say: “Trimingham’s coming after us,” as if he were a disease, or a
misfortune, or the police.

  “Oh, is he?” she said, and turned her head, but she
didn’t call to him or make a sign, and his pace slackened off, and
when he did come abreast of us, he passed us, to my great relief,
with a smile, and joined the people who were walking in front.

  6

  I FORGET how we got into the church or who told me
where to sit. That was a thing that had been bothering me, for I
knew it was important to sit in the right place. But I remember we
sat in a transept, at right angles to the rest of the congregation,
and raised a step or two above them. A verger offered me a
prayer-book and a hymn-book, and I was pleased to be able to show
him that I was already provided.

  I was relieved at being in church at last; it was
like having caught a train. The first thing I did was to examine
the Psalms for the Day and add up the number of verses, for I knew
that if there were over fifty I might feel faint and have to sit
down, a thing I dreaded, for it made people turn and look at me;
and once or twice I had been taken out and made to rest in the
church porch till I felt better. I enjoyed the importance that this
gave me, but I dreaded the preliminaries—the cold sweat, the
wobbling knees, and the wondering how long I could hold out.
Perhaps they were a sign that religion didn’t agree with me. In
those days congregations were hardier than they are now, and the
Psalms went their appointed length.

  But there were only forty-four verses all told, so
my mind was set at rest, and I looked about for something to occupy
it with. The transept wall was covered with mural tablets, and on
every one the same name occurred. “To the memory of Hugh Winlove,
Sixth Viscount Trimingham,” I read. “Born 1783, Died 1856.” I
studied them carefully. All the viscounts seemed to be called Hugh.
Seven viscounts were accounted for, but there should have been
eight—no, nine. The fifth was missing; there was no record of him.
And the ninth was missing, too. “To the memory of Hugh, Eighth
Viscount Trimingham, born 1843, died 1894.” It offended my sense of
completeness. What was still more annoying, two of the viscounts
had perversely been called Edward. What had happened to the fifth
Viscount, that there was no memorial to him? He lived so long ago
that he might have got into one of those fortunate periods when
history seemed to get along without dates. But the eighth Viscount
had died in 1894, so there must be a ninth. Why was he not
there?

  Suddenly it dawned on me that he might be still
alive.

  This discovery, or hypothesis, for I could not quite
convince myself of its truth, caused a revolution in my attitude
towards the assembled viscounts. At first I had thought of them as
so much church furniture, utterly dead and gone, more dead, more
gone, than if they had been given proper graves instead of mere
wall space. They were something out of a history book; the deeds
recorded of them were just like those recorded in a history book:
the battles they had fought in, the honours they had won, the
positions in the Government they had held—what could be deader than
all that? Their exploits were things to be learned, to be
forgotten, to be examined about, perhaps to be punished for
forgetting. “Write out the sixth Viscount Trimingham ten
times.”

  But if there really was a ninth Viscount, not buried
in a wall but walking about, then the whole family came to life; it
did not belong to history but to today; and the church was the
citadel of its glory; the church and Brandham Hall.

  I brooded over this, and it seemed to me that the
Maudsleys were the inheritors of the Trimingham renown. It was, I
felt, local, and they enjoyed it by right of rent. And if they, so
did their guests, including myself.

  A glory brighter than the sunshine filled the
transept. It filled my mind too, and, reaching upwards and
outwards, began to identify itself with the Zodiac, my favourite
religion.

  Think about being good, my mother had told me, and I
had no difficulty in doing this, for I had a sense of worship. At
school I took singing lessons, and among the pieces I learned was
one—”My song shall be alway thy mercy praising”—from which I got
great pleasure: I felt I could really contemplate the mercy of God,
and hymn its praises if I didn’t have to stand forever; but I
thought of it simply as an attribute of God; I didn’t connect it
with the sins of men. And in the same way I did not associate
goodness much with moral behaviour; it was not a standard to live
up to, it was an abstraction to think about; it was included in the
perfection of the heavenly bodies, though it was not their goodness
that specially attracted me, it was their immunity from the
disabilities I suffered from. I never thought of comparing my lot
with theirs, except as a contrast.

  Rapt in contemplation of the absolute, I missed some
of the service and my nervous apprehension about the Psalms
returned, but it was shortlived. At verse forty I examined my
symptoms and found them normal: I knew by experience that in the
space of four verses nothing untoward could develop.

  But now came an ominous sound; the clergyman’s voice
changed gear and took on a deeper note: “O God, the Father of
Heaven.” My spirits sank. We were in for the Litany. I at once took
out my watch, for having a bet with myself as to how long it would
last was the best way I knew of getting through the ordeal.

  Usually I closed my mind completely to what was
being intoned, only waiting for the drone to change its rhythm —the
sign that the end was getting nearer. But this time some of the
words came through, and “miserable sinners,” instead of being a
sound, reached me as a meaning with a challenge.

  I rebelled strongly against it. Why should we call
ourselves sinners? Life was life, and people acted in a certain
way, which sometimes caused one pain. I thought of Jenkins and
Strode. Were they sinners? Even at the height of the persecution, I
had never thought of them as such: they were boys like myself, and
they had got me into a situation which I had to use my wits to get
out of; and I had got out of it, I had turned the tables on them.
If I had thought of them as sinners, requiring mercy from God, not
resistance from me, the story of my deliverance would have lost its
zest. I should deserve no credit for my victory: the solution to
the problem would have been in God’s hands, not mine, and I might
even have to confess myself a sinner, for drawing down the
curses.

  “No,” I thought, growing more rebellious, “life has
its own laws, and it is for me to defend myself against whatever
comes along, without going snivelling to God about sin, my own or
other people’s.” How would it profit a man, if he got into a tight
place, to call the people who put him there miserable sinners? Or
himself a miserable sinner? I disliked the levelling aspect of this
sinnerdom; it was like a cricket match played in a drizzle, where
everyone had an excuse—and what a dull excuse!—for playing badly.
Life was meant to test a man, bring out his courage, initiative,
resource; and I longed, I thought, to be tested: I did not want to
fall on my knees and call myself a miserable sinner.

  But the idea of goodness did attract me, for I did
not regard it as the opposite of sin. I saw it as something bright
and positive and sustaining, like the sunshine, something to be
adored, but from afar.

  The idea of the assembled viscounts contained it for
me, and the Maudsleys, as their viceroys, enjoyed it too, not so
in-contestably, but enough to separate them from other human
beings. They were a race apart, super-adults, not bound by the same
laws of life as little boys.

  I had just reached this conclusion when the last
hymn was announced. What a long service, almost a record! It was
twelve fifty-two. The sidesmen were doing their rounds; and the
expression of the one who mounted the transept steps and came
towards us justified me in thinking that we were something special,
so respectful was it.

  Walking back from church, I again found myself the
odd man out, and this time Marian didn’t join me; she went at once
to the head of the little procession, as if she had made up her
mind beforehand. I lagged behind, trying to conceal the fact of my
isolation by staring around me like a tourist. But again I was not
the last: Trimingham had stayed at the church door chatting to the
verger, who looked nothing if not obsequious. I was puzzled by all
this deference shown to Trimingham and was still resenting it when
he caught up with me and said, very pleasantly, I had to admit:

  “I don’t think we’ve been introduced. My name is
Trimingham.”

  Being without experience of social usage, I didn’t
know that I ought to tell him my name in return; I didn’t give him
credit for modesty and thought it rather silly of him to imagine I
didn’t know his name, when it had been on everybody’s lips.