The Go-Between (16 page)

  All the same, driving back on the one unoccupied box
seat (the footman had the other), I was aware (though I did not
admit it to myself) that I found the coachman’s factual
conversation more satisfying than the trifling, purposeless,
unanchored talk that I had been listening to before I fell asleep.
I liked giving and receiving information and he supplied it just as
did the signposts and the milestones— to the appearance of which,
as every few minutes they hove in sight, I eagerly looked forward.
Sometimes he couldn’t answer my questions. “Why are there so many
by-roads in Norfolk?” I asked. “There aren’t any where I live.” He
didn’t know, but generally he did, and with him I felt I was
getting somewhere. With them there was nothing to catch hold of:
gossamer threads that broke against my mind and tired it. The
conversation of the gods!—I didn’t resent or feel aggrieved because
I couldn’t understand it. I was the smallest of the planets, and if
I carried messages between them and I couldn’t always understand,
that was in order, too: they were something in a foreign
language—star-talk.

  Under the multicoloured roof of parasols below me—a
Roman tortoise against the sun—more than one man’s straw hat was
taking shelter. The buzz of talk reached me—how they kept it
up!—but I was under no obligation of politeness to listen. At first
I had been a little wounded by Marian’s suggestion that I should be
left out of future expeditions; but now I realized that she had
made it for my benefit, and her “he’s a darling” kept coming back
to me, like a sweet taste in my mouth. Of course I valued the
prestige of being with them; I enjoyed our triumphal progress
through the countryside, the passers-by staring at the carriages,
the children running to open gates and scrabbling on the ground for
the pennies that the coachman nonchalantly threw them. But I could
imagine them in my mind, and bask in their radiance, just as well,
and perhaps better, when I was away from them; for then I had the
essence of the experience without its accidental drawbacks of
arranging my face and trying to look interested when I wasn’t. I
thought of the outhouses, I thought of the bathing-place, I thought
of the straw-stack down which I could now slide whenever I liked—I
even thought of the rubbish-heap. They were places which appealed
to me in an intimate way and which I longed to revisit.

  “Do you know Ted Burgess?” I asked the coachman.

  “Oh yes,” he said, “we all know him round here.”

  Something in his tone made me say: “Do you like
him?”

  “We’re all neighbours,” the coachman answered. “Mr.
Burgess is a bit of a lad.”

  I noticed the Mister, but the rest of the remark was
disappointingly meaningless. Ted Burgess did not seem in the least
like a lad to me.

  At last we came to what I had been specially looking
forward to—the hill, the one real hill of the drive, its one
sensational feature. A warning notice loomed up and gradually came
nearer:

       TO CYCLISTS

     RIDE WITH CAUTION.

  I had made a joke to myself about this. “Two
cyclists ride with caution” meant that any other number could take
what risks they liked. I tried to explain this to the coachman, but
he was busy with the brakes. Down we went, the horses’
hindquarters, writhing and flecked with sweat, pressed up against
the dashboard. Looking back I saw the carriage behind us similarly
labouring. As the brakes grew hotter, a pungent smell of burning
rose, which for some perverse reason was incense to my nostrils.
The sense of strain and crisis grew: all sensation was sharpened to
a point.

  At last we were at the bottom, and both carriages
came to a stand. Now the reverse process faced us—less exciting,
less fraught with dread, but scarcely less spectacular, for now the
check-reins were slackened and the men of the party dismounted to
make the ascent easier for the horses. A warm humanitarian feeling
possessed me: I begged to be allowed to get down too.

  “Why, you won’t make any difference!” said the
coachman, rather to my chagrin, but all the same he helped me down
those springy, skimpy footholds on which one might so easily slip.
I aligned myself with the men and tried to fit my short stride to
their long ones.

  “My word, how cool you look!” Lord Trimingham said,
touching his face with a silk handkerchief. He wore a white linen
suit and, unlike the others, had a panama hat, which was attached
to his coat by a button and a black cord: it looked extremely
elegant, as did all his clothes; perhaps one noticed them the more
because of the contrast with his face. “This is the hottest day
we’ve had so far.”

  I took a few prancing steps to show how little I
regarded it; but I remembered what he had said, and when we were
all back in our places, and the horses were moving at their slow
swinging trot, my obsession with the heat returned. Perhaps today
would break a record. If only it would, I thought, if only it
could! I was in love with the exceptional, and ready to sacrifice
all normal happenings to it.

  My first thought, on arriving, was to hurry to the
game larder; but in this I was thwarted. For one thing, tea was
ready, and for another I had a letter from my mother, which had
come by the afternoon post. “Master Leo Colston, c/o Mrs. Maudsley,
Brandham Hall, near Norwich.” I looked at the address with pride:
yes, that was where I was.

  I liked to be specially alone when reading my
mother’s letters: even the game larder was too exposed for that.
Sometimes I took refuge in the lavatory, but now that I had a room
of my own I was assured of privacy. Thither I retired, like a dog
with a bone, but for the first time I could not feel really
interested in my mother’s letter. The small concerns of home,
instead of coming close to me and enveloping me as I read about
them, remained small and far away; they were like magic-lantern
slides without a lantern to bring them to life. I did not belong
there, I felt; my place was here; here I was a planet, albeit a
small one, and carried messages for the other planets. And my
mother’s harping on the heat seemed irrelevant and almost
irritating; she ought to know, I felt, that I was enjoying it, that
I was invulnerable to it, invulnerable to everything....

  She had given me for the visit a black leather
writing-case which had an inkpot embedded in its top right-hand
corner. I tried to write to her, but I was out of touch. It was not
like at school, when I carefully edited my letters until hardly
anything remained except the fact that I was well and the hope that
she was; I wanted to tell her about my promotion and the ampler
ether, the diviner air that I now breathed. But even to me my
efforts sounded feeble. Viscount Trimingham said I was like
Mercury—I run errands—Marcus’s sister Marian is still very nice to
me, I think I like her the best of them all—it is a pitty she is
going to be married only then will she be a Lady Viscount—what
could it mean to her, what did it mean to me, that made me feel so
self-important? I did say something about all this and about Marcus
being unwell (though of course I didn’t mention measles); I told
her of all the festivities, past and to come—the picnics, the
cricket match, the birthday party, and the ball; I thanked her for
saying I might bathe, and I promised not to bathe unless someone
was with me; and I was her loving son. But even that sounded false,
and a touch condescending, as if an immortal was acknowledging
kinship with a mortal.

  Poor effort as it was, the letter took me a long
time to write, and it was past six when, hot-foot, I reached the
game larder. I expected something sensational and I was not
disappointed. The mercury had declined to eighty-five; but the
marker, nearly half an inch above it, recorded ninety-four.
Ninety-four! Perhaps it was a record, a record at any rate for
England, where I believed the shade temperature had never reached a
hundred. It was my ambition that it should. Only six degrees to go!
A mere trifle, the sun could easily accomplish that; perhaps it
would tomorrow. As I stood musing, I seemed to feel within me the
world’s tremendous meteorological effort to excel itself, to pass
into a region of being which it had never attained before. I was
myself the mercury (had I not been called Mercury, I thought
confusedly) soaring ever to new heights; and Brandham Hall with its
still unexplored altitudes of feeling was the mountain on which my
experience would be won. I felt intoxicated and light-headed, as
though some miraculous boon had been granted to me, something that
took me outside myself and the limitations of my normal
personality. Yet it was not a solitary experience, it was linked
inseparably with the expectation that I saw reflected in the faces
round me. They too were looking forward to a fulfilment, and I knew
its stages as distinctly as if they had been rungs in a ladder: the
cricket match, my birthday party, and the ball.

  And then? Then there was to be a coming together,
which my mind, hesitating and half unwillingly, was learning to
associate with Marian and Lord Trimingham. Yet there were the
stirrings of rapture in that thought too; the shedding, the
sacrifice of the part of me that found its happiness in her.

  “Enjoying yourself?” said a voice behind me.

  It was Mr. Maudsley, also bent on meteorological
investigation.

  Wriggling (I could not help wriggling when he spoke
to me), I told him that I was.

  “Been pretty hot today,” he remarked.

  “Is it a record?” I asked eagerly.

  “I shouldn’t be surprised,” he said. “I shall have
to look it up. Hot weather suit you?”

  I said it did. He took up the magnet. I did not want
to see the testimony to the day’s heat obliterated, but muttered
something and hurried off.

  Confused by the encounter, I forgot what my next
move was to be, and found myself straying near the lawn, where
figures in white were strolling about as aimlessly as I. It was far
from my intention to join them; I wanted to be alone with my
sensations, and I made for the ha-ha that separated the lawn from
the park. I knew from experience that it was high enough to hide
me. But it was too late; I had been sighted.

  “Hi!” called Lord Trimingham’s voice. “Come here! We
want you!”

  He came to the edge of the ha-ha and looked down at
me.

  “Trying to sneak past in dead ground,” he said.

  I did not recognize the military allusion, but the
general purport of the accusation was quite clear to me.

  “Now you’re always running about,” he said, “can you
find Marian and ask her to make a four at croquet? It’s all we’re
any of us good for. We’ve looked for her and we can’t find her, but
I believe you have her in your pocket.”

  Involuntarily my hands went to my pockets, and he
laughed.

  “Well,” he said, “you must bring her in alive or
dead.”

  I trotted off. I had no idea where to look, and yet
it never occurred to me that I should not find her. My footsteps
took me round the house, away from its noble and imposing aspects,
which meant so little to me, past the huddle of buildings at the
back, which meant so much, and along the cinder track that led to
the abandoned outhouses. And it was there that I met her, walking
rather quickly and with her head held high.

  She did not see me at first, and when she did she
eyed me stonily. “What are you doing here?” she said.

  I felt guilty as children do when asked their
business by a grown-up person; but I had my answer ready, and I
felt sure that it would please her.

  “Hugh asked me to tell you—” I began.

  “I asked you to tell me?”

  “No, not you, Hugh.”

  “Not you, you,” she repeated. “I can’t understand a
word you say. Is it a game?”

  “No,” I said wretchedly, for it seemed I was fated
to mispronounce Hugh’s name. “Hugh, you know Hugh.”

  “Yes, of course I know myself,” she said, apparently
more mystified than ever. We were standing still, but I noticed
that she was breathing rather quickly. “Now let’s talk about
something else,” she said, as though she had humoured me long
enough. For a moment it occurred to me that she didn’t want to talk
about Lord Trimingham and was deliberately putting me off; but I
had to deliver my message.

  “It’s not you, it’s Viscount Hugh,” I said; there
could be no misunderstanding now, and I waited to see her face
light up. But it didn’t; her eyes moved quickly to and fro and she
looked almost vexed.

  “Oh, Hugh,” she said, almost like an owl hooting.
“How stupid of me. But you do pronounce his name in a funny
way.”

  It was the first unkind thing she had said to me and
I suppose I looked dashed, for she noticed my embarrassment and
said more kindly:

  “But people have different ways of saying it. Well,
what does he want?”

  “He wants you to play croquet.”

  “What time is it?” she asked.

  “Nearly seven o’clock.”

  “We don’t dine until eight thirty, do we? All right,
I’ll go.”

  Friendship restored, we walked along together.

  “He said I was to bring you dead or alive,” I
ventured to say.

  “Oh, did he? Well, which am I?”

  I thought this very funny. After we had joked a bit
she said:

  “We’re going to luncheon with some neighbours
tomorrow. They’re all grown up, as old as the hills, quite mossy,
and Mama thinks you might be bored. Should you mind staying
here?”

  “Of course not,” I replied. I remembered it was she,
and not her mother, who thought I might be bored, but I didn’t hold
it against her; she was like the girl in the fairy story whose
words turned to pearls as they fell from her lips.

  “What shall you do to amuse yourself?” she
asked.

  “Well,” I said, playing for time, “I might do
several things.” This sounded rather grand.