The Go-Between (18 page)

  My exchanges with Marcus, which had been as urgent
as those of Dr. Livingstone and Stanley, and much more expansive,
grew more desultory; half in hope, half in dread, I awaited the end
of the meal. At last it came, and I was again visited by a feeling
between hope and fear that I should be excused my afternoon
commission. Before, Marian had given me the notes soon after
breakfast—soon after, in fact, her mother had given us our orders
for the day.

  According to our wont I was scampering off with
Marcus when I heard her calling me. Supposing he followed.

  “Just half a tick, old dunderhead,” I said, “the
Lady Marian hath somewhat to communicate to me. I’ll be with you
anon.”

  While he stood hesitating, I hurried off and found
her at a writing-table, in which room I can’t remember, for the
house was peppered with writing-tables, but I remember shutting the
door after me.

  “Marian,” I began, and I was just going to tell her
what a difference to our routine Marcus’s arrival on the scene
would make, when I heard the latch click. Like lightning she thrust
an envelope into my hand; like lightning I transferred it to my
pocket. The door opened and Lord Trimingham stood on the
threshold.

  “Ah, a love-scene,” he remarked. “I heard you call,”
he said to Marian, “and thought you were calling me, but it was
this lucky fellow. But can I snatch you from him now?”

  She rose with a quick smile and went to him, just
giving me a backward look.

  When they had gone I felt in my pockets to make sure
the letter was safely there. My pockets were not very deep and the
letters had a way of working up. Sometimes I took this precaution a
dozen times during my journey. But today something felt different
and in a moment I realized what it was. The letter was
unsealed.

  I found Marcus and told him where I was going.

  “What! the old straw-stack again?” he said
languidly.

  “And on a day like this! There’ll be nothing left of
you, me-thinks, but one spot of train-oil, shiny on the top and
thick and smelly underneath.”

  We bickered a little about this and then I asked him
what he was going to do.

  “Oh, I suppose I shall find some way of killing
time,” he said. “I may sit at yonder window and watch them
spooning.”

  We both laughed a good deal about this, for it was
the aspect of grown-up behaviour that we found the silliest. Then a
thought shocked me into seriousness.

  “I’m sure your sister Marian doesn’t spoon,” I said,
“she’s got too much sense.”

  “Don’t you be too sure,” said Marcus darkly. “And
come to that, old turnip-top, Dame Rumour hath it that she spoons
with you.”

  At this I hit him and we wrestled together until
Marcus cried: “Pax! you’ve forgotten I’m an invalid.”

  Elated by my victory, I left him, and made tracks
for the game larder. It was three o’clock. The thermometer stood at
ninety. It might still go up. Passionately I willed it to, and
seemed to feel around me the unspoken response of Nature to my
plea. From the distance came the sounds of croquet —the sharp smack
of the mallet on the ball, the tap of the balls hitting one
another, and exclamations of triumph and protest. No other sounds
disturbed the stillness.

  I was half-way through the belt of trees above the
water-meadow when automatically my hand went to my pocket,
encountering the sharp edge of the flap of the unsealed envelope.
With no further intention in my mind I pulled it out and looked at
it. There was no address (or direction, as Mrs. Maudsley called it,
why I could not imagine) on the envelope; there never was. But the
open flap disclosed some writing, which at the moment was the wrong
side up.

  Among the complexities of our school code was a very
wholesome respect for the eleventh commandment. But we also had a
strong sense of justice, and if we were found out we did not expect
to be let off. For most offences the appropriate penalties were
known, and though we might grumble at them we did not think them
unjust; certainly I did not. They were as inevitable as the law of
cause and effect. If you put your hand into the fire, it got
burned; if you were caught cribbing, you were punished: there was
nothing more to be said.

  We had little sense of right and wrong in the
abstract, but to be liable to punishment one must have broken some
rule; and when a border-line case occurred, and a boy was punished
for doing something “wrong” that was not a contravention of any
recognized rule, then we were indignant and considered him the
victim of injustice.

  The rules about reading other people’s letters were
fairly well defined. If you left your letters lying about and
somebody read them, then it was your fault, and you were not
justified in retaliation. If somebody rifled your desk or locker
and read them, then it was their fault, and you were justified in
taking vengeance. Even if Jenkins and Strode had not bullied me I
should still have felt justified in calling down curses on
them.

  In class and out I had often passed round notes at
school. If they were sealed I should not have dreamed of reading
them; if they were open I often read them—indeed, it was usually
the intention of the sender that one should, for they were meant to
raise a laugh. If they were unsealed, one could read them; sealed,
one couldn’t: it was as simple as that. The same rule applied to
postcards: one read a postcard that was addressed to someone else,
but not a letter.

  Marian’s letter was unsealed and therefore I could
read it. So why hesitate?

  I hesitated because I wasn’t sure she had meant me
to read the letter. The others had been sealed. She had given me
this one in a hurry; she might have meant to seal it.

  But she hadn’t.

  In our code we attached great weight to facts and
very little to intentions. Either you had done something or you
hadn’t, and what your motives might have been didn’t matter. A slip
counted against you just as much as something done deliberately. If
Marian had made a slip, well, then, she must pay for it. That was
only logical. But to my surprise I couldn’t think of her in that
way, as just an example in an argument. I wished her well, I wanted
to be of use to her, my feelings were entangled with hers. I could
not disregard her intentions.

  For a time I struggled in the unfamiliar toils of
moral casuistry. Why couldn’t everything be plain sailing, as it
had always been? Why did Marian’s face and presence keep recurring
to me, dividing my thoughts against themselves?

  And how did I know that she hadn’t
wanted
me to read the letter—that she hadn’t left it open on purpose, so
that I could find out something that would be useful to both of us?
As a proof of her regard for me? There might even be something
about me in the letter—something kind, something sweet, that would
make me glow... gloat....

  It was this hope, I think, that finally decided me,
though I went over many other arguments to give me the excuse of
meaning well. One was that this might be the last letter in the
series: I had practically made up my mind to take no more. And
another, illogically, was that to know the contents would help me
to make up my mind: if they were sufficiently important, if they
were matters of life and death (as I rather hoped), if Marian’s
safety was at stake, if she would get into the most frightful
row—

  Well, then, I might go on with the messages, Marcus
or no Marcus.

  But I would not take the letter out of the envelope:
I would only read the words that were exposed, and three of them
were the same, as I could see from upside down.

  
Darling, darling, darling,

  
Same place, same time, this evening....

  
But take care not to—

  The rest was hidden by the envelope.

  10

  NOT ADAM and Eve, after eating the apple, could have
been more upset than I was.

  I felt utterly deflated and let down: so deep did my
disappointment and disillusion go that I lost all sense of where I
was, and when I came to, it was like waking from a dream.

  They were in love! Marian and Ted Burgess were in
love! Of all the possible explanations, it was the only one that
had never crossed my mind. What a sell, what a frightful sell! And
what a fool I had been!

  Trying to regain my self-respect, I allowed myself a
hollow chuckle. To think how I had been taken in! My world of high
intense emotions, collapsing around me, released not only the
mental strain but the very high physical pressure under which I had
been living; I felt I might explode. My only defence was that I
could not have expected it of Marian. Marian, who had done so much
for me, Marian, who knew how a boy felt, Marian the Virgin of the
Zodiac—how could she have sunk so low? To be what we all despised
more than anything—soft, soppy—hardly, when the joke grew staler, a
subject for furtive giggling. My mind flew this way and that:
servants, silly servants who were in love and came down red-eyed to
prayers —postcards, picture postcards, comic postcards, vulgar
postcards, found in shops on the “front”: I had sent some of them
myself before I knew better.

  “We are having an interesting time in Southdown”—a
fat couple, amorously intertwined. “Come to Southdown for a good
spoon”—two spoons with human faces, one very thick, one very thin,
leering at each other.

  And always, or nearly always, the thin-fat motif;
the man or the woman grossly out of proportion, under- or
over-sized: the man or the woman, the man or the woman ...

  I laughed and laughed, half wishing Marcus had been
with me to share the joke, and at the same time miserable about it,
and obscurely aware that ridicule, however enjoyable, is no
substitute for worship. That Marian of all people should have done
this! No wonder she wanted it kept secret. Instinctively, to cover
her shame, I thrust the letter deep into the envelope and sealed
it.

  Yet it must be delivered.

  I climbed the stile into the water-meadow and at
once the sun caught me in its fierce embrace. What strength it had!
The boggy pools that fringed the causeway were almost dried up; the
stalks that had been below the water-line showed a band of dirty
yellow where the sun had scorched them. And standing on the sluice
platform I saw almost with dismay how far the level of the river
had sunk. On the blue side, the deep side, I could see stones at
the bottom that had never been visible before; and on the other
side, the gold and green side, the water was almost lost to view
beneath the trailing weeds which, piled one on another, gave a
distressing impression of disarray. And the water-lilies, instead
of lying on the water, stuck up awkwardly above it.

  All this the sun had done, and it had done something
to me too: it had changed the colour of my thoughts. I no longer
felt the bitter shame for Marian that I had felt in the shadow of
the trees. Whether I realized the helplessness of nature to contend
with nature I don’t know; but my heart, which could not bear to
feel unkindly towards her, softened the strictures that my mind was
heaping on her, so that the act of spooning, when associated with
her, no longer seemed the most damaging activity that a human being
could engage in. But it did not help me to find a new attitude; I
was too honest with myself to say: “Spooning is all right because
she does it,” or “Other people mustn’t spoon, but
she
can.” After all, she had to have someone to spoon with, and what
was right for her—

  Almost for the first time I thought of Ted Burgess
as her spooning-partner. It was not a pleasant thought. Where was
he? Not in the field the men were reaping; I could see that at a
glance.

  I went down to them. “Mr. Burgess is up to the
farm,” they told me; “he’s got a job on there.” “What is it?” I
asked. They smiled but did not enlighten me.

  It was the best part of a mile to the farm. My
thoughts troubled me and I tried to concentrate them on the
straw-stack and the pleasure of sliding down it—the one known
factor among all these doubtful ones. I still conceived the act of
spooning visually, comic-postcard fashion; an affront to the eye
and through the eye to the mind. Silliness, silliness, a kind of
clowning that made people absurd, soft, soppy.... Pitiful at the
best, but who wanted pity? It was a way of looking down on people,
and I wanted to look up.

  As I opened the farmyard gate he was coming out of
one of the stable doors. He saluted me, as he always did; a gesture
half mocking, half playful, but with something of respect for me,
or for the Hall, in it, which I enjoyed. I noticed that his arm had
turned a darker shade of brown, and for this I envied him. It was
difficult to connect him with silliness, or with spooning.

  “How’s the postman?” he asked. This was a name he
had given me. It was the kind of liberty that grown-ups took with
children. I liked it from Lord Trimingham, but I wasn’t so sure I
liked it from Ted Burgess.

  “Very well, thank you, “ I said rather
distantly.

  He gave his battered leather belt a hitch.

  “Brought anything for me?” he asked. I handed him
the letter. He turned away from me to read it, as he always did,
then put it in the pocket of his corduroy trousers.

  “Good boy,” he said. And when I looked surprised, he
added: “You don’t mind being called a good boy, do you?”

  “Not at all,” I answered primly. And then it seemed
the moment, and I heard myself saying: “I’m afraid I shan’t be able
to bring you any more letters.”

  His mouth fell open and his forehead wrinkled.

  “Why not? “he asked.