The Go-Between (26 page)

  I was struck by the unfairness of this, and said so.
“It ought to have been the other way round.”

  “Yes, he was unlucky,” Lord Trimingham said. “So
they buried him in France, away from his own people.”

  “Did the Viscountess marry the other man?”

  “No, but she lived abroad, and the children came to
live in England, all except the youngest, who stayed with her in
France.”

  “Was he her favourite?” With the egotism of my sex,
I assumed that the child was a boy.

  “Yes, I suppose so.”

  I was glad to have had the explanation, and
unsatisfactory as it was to my sensation-loving mind, I was
impressed by his unsensational way of telling it. Something of the
sadness of human life came through to me, its indifference to our
wishes, even to the wish that calamity should be more colourful
than it is. The ideas of acceptance and resignation were hard for
me to entertain: I thought that emotions should be more dramatic
than the facts that caused them.

  “If she hadn’t been the Viscountess would he have
minded so much?” I asked at length.

  He laughed in a puzzled way.

  “I don’t imagine that the fact of her having a title
made any difference. He gave it to her, he couldn’t feel snobbish
about it.”

  “Oh, I didn’t mean that,” I exclaimed, realizing
that my delicacy in not wanting to describe a viscountess as a mere
wife had led to confusion. “What I meant was, would he have minded
so much her having another—friend, if he hadn’t been married to
her, but just engaged?”

  Lord Trimingham thought this over. “Yes, quite as
much, I should think.”

  As I ruminated on his answer, it slid into my mind,
for the first time, that there was a parallel between the fifth
Viscount’s situation and his own. I dismissed the idea at once, so
sure was I that Marian had given up being too friendly with Ted.
But it affected my imagination and I said, for anger always
interested me:

  “Was he angry with her too?”

  “I don’t think so,” Lord Trimingham answered. “More
upset.”

  “She hadn’t done anything wicked?”

  “Well, she’d been a bit unwise.”

  “But wasn’t it her fault as well as the man’s?”

  “Nothing is ever a lady’s fault; you’ll learn that,”
Lord Trimingham told me.

  This remark, confirming something I already felt,
made an immense impression on me.

  “Was the man a very wicked man?” I asked. I didn’t
much believe in wickedness, but the word thrilled me.

  “He was a good-looking blackguard, I believe,” Lord
Trimingham said, “and it wasn’t the first time—” He broke off. “He
was a Frenchman,” he added.

  “Oh, a Frenchman,” I said, as if that explained
everything.

  “Yes, and a good shot, by all accounts. I don’t
suppose he was a specially wicked man, judged by the standards of
his time.”

  “But now would he be?” I was determined to find
wickedness somewhere.

  “Yes, now it would be murder, at least in
England.”

  “But it wouldn’t be murder if the fifth Viscount had
shot him instead, would it?” I asked.

  “It would be now,” Lord Trimingham said.

  “That doesn’t seem very fair,” I observed. I tried
to picture the scene as I had read about it in books: the coffee
and pistols for two in the early morning, the lonely place, the
seconds measuring out the distance, the dropped handkerchief, the
shots, the fall.

  “Did he—the fifth Viscount—bleed very much?” I
asked.

  “History doesn’t relate. I shouldn’t think
so
. A bullet wound doesn’t bleed very much, unless it hits
an artery or a vein.... Duelling’s been abolished in England, and a
good thing, too.”

  “But men still shoot each other, don’t they?” I
asked hopefully.

  “They shot me,” he answered, with what I took to be
a smile.

  “Yes, but that was in a war. Do they still shoot
each other over ladies?” I imagined a, carpet of prostrate women,
over whom shots rang out.

  “Sometimes.”

  “And it’s murder?”

  “In England, yes.”

  I felt that this was as it should be; and then,
anxious to have his opinion on a question that had long exercised
me, I said:

  “The Boers break the rules of war, don’t they?” My
father had bequeathed his pacifism to me, but Lord Trimingham, the
war hero, had shaken it.

  “The Boer’s not a bad feller,” said Lord Trimingham
tolerantly. “I don’t dislike him personally. It’s a pity we have to
shoot so many of them, but there you are. Hullo,” he added, as if
surprised at a sudden discovery, “we’ve caught up with Marian.
Shall we go and talk to her?”

  15

  ALL THROUGH luncheon fragments of my conversation
with Lord Trimingham kept coming back to me. Two things stood out:
one was that, whatever happened, it was never a lady’s fault, and
the other, that it might be necessary to kill someone though you
didn’t really dislike him. These were new ideas to me, and their
magnanimity appealed to me very much.

  At the longed-for moment when our elders ceased
eating their peaches and began to look about them instead of
showing off to each other (grown-up conversation always seemed to
me a form of showing off) I caught Marcus’s eye and we did our
usual bunk. Hardly were we out of earshot, however, when Marcus
said:

  “I’m afraid I can’t come with you this
afternoon.”

  “Why ever not, you sewer-rat?” I demanded, acutely
disappointed.

  “Well, it’s like this. Nannie Robson, our old
nannie, lives in the village and she isn’t very well and Marian
said would I go and spend the afternoon with her. What good I shall
do her I don’t know, and zounds, man, how her house smells! Enough
to raise the roof. But I suppose I must go. Marian said she was
going herself after tea. Cripes, partner, you can think yourself
lucky not to have a sister.”

  Still trying to control my disappointment, I said:
“Shall you tell Nannie Robson about the engagement?”

  “Good Lord, no. It would be all round the village if
I did. And don’t you tell anyone, either. I shall chop you up into
the teeniest-weeniest little pieces if you do.”

  I retorted suitably.

  “Now what will you do?” asked Marcus languidly. “How
will you occupy your silly self? Towards what destination will you
drag your evil-smelling carcass? Not to that bally old
straw-stack?”

  “Oh no,” I said. “I’ve said good-bye to that. I
might hang round the rubbish-heap awhile and then—”

  “Well, don’t get carted away by mistake,” Marcus
said. I was angry with myself for giving such an easy score, and we
had a slight tussle before parting.

  After more than a week of neglect the rubbish-heap
had suddenly regained its fascination for me. I liked pottering
about on its malodorous confines, scanning its surfaces and probing
its depths for the accidentally discarded treasures that, someone
had assured me, many if not most trash-collectors came across
during their rounds, enabling them to retire on fortunes. But first
I bent my steps to the game larder. Although I felt a little
lonely, my exaltation of the morning had not worn off; it gave an
upward impetus to all my thoughts, as the sun did to the gossamers;
and as usual I cast about in my mind for a subject of contemplation
which would raise them still higher. Some of these, I knew, would
lose their power because I could only think of them in a limited
number of ways; even my catch, even my song, had, I suspected,
yielded me all the ecstasy they could. My memory and imagination
would add nothing to them. But I was always finding new facets to
Marian, and here was one ready for my use: her kindness to her old
nurse. My mother used to read to me from a book called
Ministering Children
, in which two high-born young
ladies—Anne Clifford and Lady Gertrude were their names, I
think—did acts of charity and rescue work among the needy
villagers. To these my imagination added a third, Marian, and I
began to fit her into the story, making her, I need hardly say, the
most outstanding of the trio for beauty as well as for good
works.

  Eighty point nine, said the thermometer. This was an
advance of nearly three degrees on yesterday, but I felt that the
sun could do still better, give us a greater grilling; and it
turned out I was right.

  My thoughts swung back. To give Marian social
precedence over Lady Gertrude I had cheated: I anticipated her
marriage. “Last but not least on a grey palfrey came the
Viscountess Trimingham (ninth of her line), and she, too,
dismounted at the door of the humble cottage, carrying a bowl of
steaming soup”—I was going to say, but just as I was wondering how
she could carry it on horseback, for my imaginings, which would
swallow a camel, sometimes also strained at a gnat, I heard a voice
behind me that made me jump.

  “Hullo, Leo! Just the man I was looking for”—and
there she was, in every other way so like my vision of her that it
almost surprised me she was not carrying something—but she was: I
saw it now, a letter.

  “Will you do something for me?” she said.

  “Oh yes. What shall I do?”

  “Just take this letter.”

  It shows how little thought I had of Ted in
connection with her that I said: “Who to?”

  “Who to? Why, to the faim, you silly,” she answered,
half laughing, half impatient.

  The scaffolding of my life seemed to collapse: I was
dumbfounded.

  Many thoughts besieged my mind, but only one found
lodging, and it was overwhelming: Marian was engaged to Lord
Trimingham, but she hadn’t given up her relationship with Ted, she
was still being friendly with another man. What that meant I had no
idea, but I knew what it might lead to: murder. The dread word
shook me to my foundations, I had no defence against it; and almost
without thinking I cried out:

  “Oh, I can’t.”

  “You can’t?” she echoed, mystified. “Why not?”

  I have been asked difficult questions in my life,
but only one that has given me more trouble to answer. In a flash I
saw the betrayals it would involve if I were to give my reasons.
The iron curtain of secrecy, which it was my deepest instinct to
keep intact, would be riddled with holes. I should not have
answered at all, I should have left her without answering, had not
a stronger dread—the dread of something terrible happening—forced
me to speak.

  “It’s because of Hugh.”

  “Because of me?” she repeated. A smile softened her
lips and she opened her blue eyes very wide.

  I remember closing mine, screwing them up. If I had
had the quickness of mind to accept her interpretation of the name,
this story might have ended differently, but my one concern, the
one channel in which my will-power flowed, was to get his name out;
and the trivial but maddening circumstance of her misunderstanding
it confused me still further.

  “No, not you,” I said. “Hugh.” I tried to hoot it,
whistle it as she did.

  Marian’s brow darkened. “Hugh?” she said. “What has
Hugh to do with it?”

  I gave her a despairing look; I had a wild notion of
running round to the other side of the game larder, putting it
between us. But I had to stand my ground: people didn’t literally
run away from questions. Remembering a word Lord Trimingham had
used, I muttered:

  “He might be upset.”

  At that her eyes blazed. She came a step forward and
stood over me, her nose hawklike, her body curved to pounce.

  “What has he got to do with it?” she repeated. “I
told you, this is a business matter between me and—and Mr. Burgess.
It has nothing to do with anyone else, no one else in the world. Do
you understand, or are you too stupid?”

  I stared at her in terror.

  “You come into this house, our guest,” she stormed,
“we take you in, we know nothing about you, we make a great fuss of
you—I suppose you wouldn’t deny that?—I know I have—and then I ask
you to do a simple thing which a child in the street that I’d never
spoken to would do for the asking—and you have the infernal cheek
to say you won’t! We’ve spoilt you. I’ll never ask you to do
anything for me again, never! I won’t speak to you again!”

  I made some gesture with my hands to try to stop
her—to push her away from me or to bring her closer—but she almost
struck out at me in her fury; I thought—and it was a moment of
relief—that she was actually going to hit me.

  All at once her manner changed; she seemed to
freeze.

  “You want paying, that’s what you want,” she said
quietly, “I know.” She produced her purse from somewhere and opened
it. “How much do you want, you little Shylock?”

  But I had had enough: I snatched the letter, which
she still held crumpled in her hand, and ran away from her as fast
as I could.

  For a time no thoughts would come to me, I was so
blasted by her anger. Then I began to realize, beyond the immediate
ache and smart, how much, in losing Marian’s friendship, I had
lost: it seemed to me that I had lost everything that I valued, and
this cut even deeper than her cruel words.

  I was not a hypersensitive child. I was used to
people being angry with me and made it a point of honour not to
mind. I had been called far worse names than Marian had called me,
and by people who, I believed, liked me, without turning a hair. I
was myself no mean master of invective. Of all the insults she had
heaped on me, the one that hurt me most was “Shylock,” because I
didn’t know what it meant and therefore couldn’t deny it. I didn’t
know if it was personal, like the smell that schoolboys are, or
were, so apt to attribute to one another, or moral. The suspicion
that everybody was going about saying I was a Shylock and disliked
and despised me for it added to my wretchedness.