The Go-Between (22 page)

  But luck was with him, he had found a way of
harnessing his strength, and all at once he opened his shoulders
and hit the ball right over the pavilion roof.

  A cluster of small boys tore off to look for it, and
while they were looking our side lay down on the grass; only Ted
and his partner and the two umpires remained standing, looking like
victors on a stricken field. All the impulse seemed to go out of
the game; it was a moment of utter relaxation. And even when the
ball had been found and play began again, it still had a
light-hearted, knock-about character. “Good old Ted!” someone
called out.

  With the score card in front of me I still can’t
remember at what point I was reminded that it was a match and not a
game, and that Ted’s fireworks, which were so exhilarating to
watch, might spell disaster for us, might mean in fact that we
should
lose
—unless he was got rid of. Perhaps a stiffening
in the attitude of the spectators told me; at any rate I felt my
heart pounding in my chest.

  Lose! I didn’t like the word, or what it stood for.
I didn’t want to be on the losing side. I knew how to lose with a
good grace, it was one of the first things we learned at school.
Grin and bear it! And sharing made it easier, of course. Many heads
bowed, not one. And telling one another, with raised eyebrows,
head-shakes, shrugs, and carefully disinterested voices, that if it
hadn’t been for this or that piece of unfairness, and this or that
stroke of bad luck, if X hadn’t been off form, or Y had been able
to play, the result would have been different. Yes, defeat could be
taken with dignity, like any other medicine. But oh, the
contraction of spirit it entailed!— that was what, in prospect, I
really minded. Instead of expanding in the sunshine of success, to
have to shrink into oneself, make oneself into a hard tight core of
disappointment, raise all one’s hackles, and defences, to keep out
the cold breath of failure!

  People were cheering; Ted had made his “fifty.” It
was a very different “fifty” from Mr. Maudsley’s, a triumph of
luck, not of cunning, for the will and even the wish to win seemed
absent from it. He might have been giving an exhibition, on which
nothing hung. Dimly I felt that the contrast represented something
more than the conflict between Hall and village. It was that, but
it was also a struggle between order and lawlessness, between
obedience to tradition and defiance of it, between social stability
and revolution, between one attitude to life and another. I knew
which side I was on, yet the traitor within my gates was not so
sure; he felt the issue differently, he backed the individual
against the side, even my own side, and wouldn’t mind seeing Ted
Burgess pull it off. But I couldn’t voice such thoughts to the
hosts of Midian prowling round me under the shade of the pavilion
veranda. Their looks had cleared marvellously and they were now
taking bets about the outcome, not without sly glances at me; so
spying a vacant seat beside Marian, I edged my way down to her and
whispered:

  “Isn’t it exciting?” I felt that this was not too
much of a betrayal of our side.

  When she did not answer, I repeated the question.
She turned to me and nodded, and I saw that she didn’t answer
because she couldn’t trust herself to speak. Her eyes were bright,
her cheeks were flushed, and her lips trembled. I was a child and
lived in the society of children and I knew the signs. At the time
I didn’t ask myself what they meant, but the sight of a grown-up
person so openly affected greatly increased my emotional response
to the game, so that I could hardly sit still, for I always
wriggled when excited. The conflict in my feelings grew more acute.
I knew what Marian wanted, and deep down I couldn’t help wanting
what she wanted. It had always been so. Yet my training and my
loyalty to the Hall made it impossible for me to
will
the
other side to win. With burning cheeks I stole back to my
place.

  Ted Burgess might win the match, but he couldn’t do
it alone; some other batsman must stay with him until our score was
passed. It was a partnership, and if no partner stayed the course,
the game was up. Only two of the village batsmen remained to keep
him company. Last on the list, they were sure to be “rabbits.”

  With Ted hitting so hard, Lord Trimingham had put
several of his fielders on the “boundary” as far away from Ted as
possible. One of them was standing just in front of us. Ted hit the
ball straight at him. I thought it would go over his head, but soon
its trajectory flattened, and as it came to earth it seemed to
gather speed. The fieldsman put out his hand, but the ball cannoned
off it and hurtled threateningly towards us. Mrs. Maudsley jumped
up with a little cry; Marian’s hands flew to protect her face; I
held my breath. There was a moment of tension and confused inquiry
before it was discovered that neither of them had been touched.
Both the ladies laughed at their narrow escape and tried to pass it
off. The ball lay at Mrs. Maudsley’s feet looking strangely small
and harmless. I threw it to the man who had tried to stop it (I saw
now that he was one of our gardeners), but he didn’t pick it up.
His face twisted with pain, he was nursing his left hand in his
right and gingerly rubbing it.

  Lord Trimingham and some other members of our side
came towards him and he went out to meet them. I saw him showing
them his injured hand. They conferred; they seemed to come to a
decision; then the group broke up and Lord Trimingham and the
gardener returned to the pavilion.

  Confusion reigned in my mind. I thought all sorts of
things at the same time—that the match was over, that the gardener
would be maimed for life, that Ted would be sent to prison. Then I
heard Lord Trimingham say: “We’ve had a casualty. Pollin has
sprained his thumb, and I’m afraid we shall have to call on our
twelfth man.” Even then I didn’t know that he meant me.

  My knees quaking, I walked back with him to the
arena. A basking onlooker who had been suddenly called upon to join
the Christians among the lions could not have been more overcome
than I was. I heard Lord Trimingham say: “Let’s hope this
interruption will have unsettled him,” meaning Ted. I heard him
telling me what to do, and then mechanically I followed the
movements of his hand, signalling me to my place in the field. At
last I came to rest in a fairy ring, and this absurdly gave me
confidence, for I thought it might be a magic circle and would
protect me. As my nervousness wore off, a sense of elation took
possession of me. I felt at one with my surroundings and sustained
by the long tradition of cricket. Awareness such as I had never
known sharpened my senses. Responsibility instead of being a dread,
became a stimulus. But was I so responsible after all? The game had
begun again and Ted had begun hitting again; I saw two shots flash
to the boundary. But they did not come my way and then I realized,
almost with a pang, that it was most unlikely that they would, for
my position was the least important, the least responsible, that
could have been found for me. It was known, I now remember, as
“square leg,” and was a place reserved for the least expert
fieldsman. Nothing would come my way.

  A mortifying thought! And mortifying, too, was the
relief it brought me. Released from my self-preoccupation, I looked
round at the figures on the score-board and knew that we were in
the direst danger. Our captain knew it too, he was reorganizing the
attack. Our men were being made to change their positions. Should I
be ousted from my fairy ring, to which —when I was not occupying
the corresponding position on the other side of the field—I so
thankfully returned? No, I was not. Lord Trimingham did not look
towards me; he was holding the ball, he was to be our bowler, the
spearhead of our attack.

  Ted was not facing him, his partner was. So many
things in cricket happen when one is not looking; almost before I
realized it, the man had been bowled out. He turned and looked
ruefully at the three stumps behind him, one of which had been
uprooted from the ground; then with dull eyes and heavy steps he
walked back to the pavilion. It was proof of our captain’s
popularity that even at this critical moment he was generously
applauded. And it was proof, too, of the general nervous excitement
that when the boy whose job it was to put the figures on the
score-board, in his own nervousness, put them upside-down, a laugh
went round the field. It came to me magnified through ears that,
like the rest of me, had begun to tingle. Even mathematics, it
seemed, were liable to nervous upset. The boy came back, peered at
his handiwork, and, to the accompaniment of more laughter, slowly
changed the figures round. One hundred and thirty-six: the village
needed seven runs to win, and this was their last batsman coming
out.

  As he met the retiring batsman in midfield and
exchanged a few words with him, at which each man nodded, I tried
once more to make out where my true feelings lay. But they gathered
round me like a mist, whose shape can be seen as it approaches, but
not when it is on you, and in the thick whirling vapours my mind
soon lost its way. Yet I kept my sense of the general drama of the
match and it was sharpened by an awareness, which I couldn’t have
explained, of a peculiar drama between the bowler and the batsman,
between Lord Trimingham and Ted, who were now facing each other.
Landlord and tenant, peer and commoner, Hall and village—these were
elements in it. But there was another, the spot of bright colour on
the pavilion steps which I knew was Marian.

  It was a prideful and sustaining thought that
whereas the spectators would throw themselves about and shout
themselves hoarse, we, the players, were forbidden to show the
least sign of emotion. Certainly Lord Trimingham, digging his heel
into the ground, a trick he had before he started bowling, did not,
nor did Ted, though his face was scarlet under his matted hair, and
his shirt was sticking to his back. But they eyed each other
warily, the Briton and the Boer, as warily as two men could, I
thought, who were not actually seeking each other’s blood.

  Lord Trimingham sent down his deceptively dipping
ball, but Ted did not wait for it to drop; he ran out and hit it to
the boundary. It was a glorious stroke, and the elation of it ran
through me like an electric current. The crowd yelled and cheered,
and suddenly the balance of my feelings went right over. It was
their victory I wanted now, Ted’s victory, not ours, not Lord
Trimingham’s. I did not think of it in terms of the three runs that
were needed; I seemed to hear it blowing towards me like a
wind.

  I could not tell if the next ball was straight or
not, but it was pitched much farther up, and suddenly I saw Ted’s
face and body swinging round and the ball travelling towards me on
a rising straight line like a cable stretched between us. Ted
started to run and then stopped and stood watching me, wonder in
his eyes and a wild disbelief.

  I threw my hand above my head and the ball stuck
there, but the impact knocked me over. When I scrambled up, still
clutching the ball to me, as though it was a pain that had started
in my heart, I heard the sweet sound of applause and saw the field
breaking up and Lord Trimingham coming towards me. I can’t remember
what he said—my emotions were too overpowering—but I remember his
congratulations were the more precious because they were reserved
and understated; they might, in fact, have been addressed to a
man
; and it was as a man, and not by any means the least
of men, that I joined the group who were making their way back to
the pavilion. We went together in a ragged cluster, the defeated
and the surviving batsmen with us, all enmity laid aside, amid a
more than generous measure of applause from the spectators.

  I could not tell how I felt; in my high mood of
elation the usual landmarks by which I judged such things were lost
to view. I was still in the air though the scaffolding of events
which had lifted me had crumbled. But I was uneasily aware of one
separate element that had not quite fused in the general concourse
of passions: the pang of regret, sharp as a sword-thrust, that had
accompanied the catch. Far from diminishing my exultation, it had
somehow raised it to a higher power, like the drop of bitter in the
fount of happiness; but I felt that I should be still happier—that
it would add another cubit to my stature—if I told Ted of it.
Something warned me that such an avowal would be unorthodox; the
personal feelings of cricketers were concealed behind their stiff
upper lips. But I was almost literally above myself; I knew that
the fate of the match had turned on me, and I felt I could afford
to defy convention. Yet how would he take it? What were his
feelings? Was he still elated by his innings or was he bitterly
disappointed by its untimely close? Did he still regard me as a
friend, or as an enemy who had brought about his downfall? I did
not greatly care; and seeing that he was walking alone (most of the
players had exhausted their stock of conversation), I sidled up to
him and said, with a trembling voice: “I’m sorry, Ted. I didn’t
really mean to catch you out.”

  He didn’t answer at once, his thoughts seemed far
away; then he smiled and said: “That’s quite all right.” A moment
later his face changed, he looked concerned, and he said anxiously:
“But you mustn’t mind about me. You’ll spoil it if you do. You
ought to be all cock-a-hoop. I should be, in your place. That catch
of yours was a beauty; I never thought you’d hold it. To tell you
the truth, I’d forgotten your existence, and then I looked round
and there you were, by God. And then I thought: ‘It’ll go right
over his head,’ but you stretched up like a concertina. I’d thought
of a dozen ways I might get out, but never thought I’d be caught
out by our postman.”