The Go-Between (40 page)

  “Leave one for Marian!” someone cried.

  Again the detonations, the tearing paper, the smoke,
the acrid fumes. When sounds and smells had died away and laughter
was beginning, I saw the butler standing at Mrs. Maudsley’s
elbow.

  “Excuse me, madam,” he said, “the carriage has come
back, but not Miss Marian. She wasn’t at Miss Robson’s, and Miss
Robson said she hadn’t been all day.”

  This piece of news dismayed me just as much as if I
had not been expecting it. Perhaps I was not expecting it: perhaps
I had persuaded myself that Marian would be there. My in-sides
began to revolt anew against my birthday tea. Across the table,
under the caps, which always made grown-ups seem still older than
they were, the shining eyes, the faces, dark red in the lamplight,
had a wild, hobgoblin look. They reminded me of the pictures in the
smoking-room—they had forgotten themselves.

  “Where
can
she be?” asked someone, but not
as if it mattered.

  “Yes, where can she be?”

  “She’s got to change. She may be changing now. She
may be upstairs changing, “ Denys said.

  “Well, all we can do is to wait for her,” said Mr.
Maudsley equably.

  Cap nodded at cap sagely, whistles began to blow,
and a man was starting to read a riddle, shouting to make himself
heard, when all at once Mrs. Maudsley pushed her chair back and
stood up. Her elbows were sticking out, her body was bent and
trembling, and her face unrecognizable.

  “No,” she said. “We won’t wait. I’m going to look
for her. Leo, you know where she is; you shall show me the
way.”

  Before I knew what was happening, she had swept me
from the room, as much by the authority of her voice and manner as
by her hand, which, I think, touched my shoulder. “Madeleine!” her
husband’s voice called after her; it was the only time I ever heard
him call her by name.

  As we passed through the hall my eyes caught sight
of the green bicycle, and in an instant it was photographed on my
mind. It was propped against the newel-post of the staircase and
somehow reminded me of a little mountain sheep with curly horns,
its head lowered in apology or defence. The handlebars, turned
towards me, were dwarfed by the great height of the saddle, which,
pulled out to its fullest extent for Marian to ride, disclosed a
shining tube of steel six inches long.

  The vision remained with me, imparting a distressing
sense of something misshapen and misused, as I ran through the rain
at Mrs. Maudsley’s side. I did not know that she could run at all,
but I could hardly keep up with her, she ran so fast. Her lilac
paper bonnet was soon soaked through; it flapped dismally as she
ran, then clung to her head, dark and transparent, while the water
dripped off the strings. I felt the rain oozing through my dunce’s
cap, cooling my head and coursing down my back.

  Actually the rain was less heavy than it had been,
the thunder was more distant and the lightning, instead of darting
ice-blue from black clouds, wriggled slowly, an orange trickle,
down a primrose-coloured sky. I was too frightened to mind the
storm, though it increased my wretchedness; what I was most aware
of—outside my misery—was the indescribable smell of rain filling
the air.

  Mrs. Maudsley said nothing, but ran with wide,
awkward steps, her skirt with its three rows of braid dragging at
the gravel and swishing through the puddles, and soon I realized
that it was she who was guiding me; she knew where we were going.
When we came to the cinder path between the rhododendrons I tried
to turn her back. I cried: “Not this way, Mrs. Maudsley.” But she
paid no heed to me and plunged blindly on, until we came to the
outhouse where the deadly night-shade had been. The tousle-headed
stump was still lying on the path, limp and bedraggled. She stopped
and peered inside at the leaves, wet but already withering. “Not
here,” she said, “but here, perhaps, or here. You said there were
poachers.” Not a sound came from the forlorn row of huts, only the
rain pattering on their battered roofs. I could not bear to aid her
in her search and shrank back, crying. “No, you
shall
come,” she said, and seized my hand, and it was then that we saw
them, together on the ground, the Virgin and the Water-carrier, two
bodies moving like one. I think I was more mystified than
horrified; it was Mrs. Maudsley’s repeated screams that frightened
me, and a shadow on the wall that opened and closed like an
umbrella.

  I remember very little more, but somehow it got
through to me, while I was still at Brandham Hall, that Ted Burgess
had gone home and shot himself.

  EPILOGUE

  WHEN I PUT down my pen, I meant to put away my
memories with it. They had had days, weeks, months to settle, but
in the end they didn’t, and that is how I came to write this
epilogue.

  During my breakdown I was like a train going through
a series of tunnels; sometimes in the daylight; sometimes in the
dark, sometimes knowing who and where I was, sometimes not knowing.
Little by little the periods of daylight grew more continuous and
at last I was running in the open; by the middle of September I was
considered fit to go back to school.

  I didn’t recover my memory of what happened at
Brand-ham, however, after the revelation in the outhouse. That,
like my coming home, remained a blank. I didn’t remember it and I
didn’t want to. The doctor said it would be good for me to unburden
myself, and my mother tried to make me, but I wouldn’t have told
her if I could. When she volunteered to tell me what she knew, I
shouted at her to stop; and I have never known how much she did
know. “But you have nothing to be ashamed of,” she would say;
“nothing at all, my darling. Besides, it’s all over now.”

  But I didn’t believe her, and the capacity for
disbelief, so difficult to acquire, is equally difficult to
eradicate. I didn’t believe it was all over and I didn’t believe
that I had nothing to be ashamed of. On the contrary, it seemed to
me that I had everything to be ashamed of. I had betrayed them
all—Lord Trimingham, Ted, Marian, the whole Maudsley family, who
had welcomed me into their midst. Just what the consequences had
been I neither knew nor wished to know; I judged their seriousness
by Mrs. Maudsley’s screams, which were the last sounds heard by my
conscious ear—for the tidings of Ted’s suicide came to me
voicelessly, like a communication in a dream.

  His fate I did know, and it was for him I grieved.
He haunted me. Not only in the most dreadful way, by his blood and
brains stuck to the kitchen walls, but by a persistent picture of
him cleaning his gun. The idea that he had cleaned it to shoot
himself with was a special torment to me; of all the thoughts he
might have had while cleaning it, the thought that he was going to
use it against himself must have been the one farthest from his
mind. The irony of this was like an arrow in my spirit.

  It did not occur to me that they had treated me
badly. I did not know how to draw up an indictment against a
grown-up person. A certain set of circumstances had arisen and it
was for me to deal with them, just as at school I had had to deal
with the persecution of Jenkins and Strode. Then I had succeeded; I
had turned their taunt of “vanquished” against them. This time I
had failed: it was I who was vanquished, and forever.

  At school a spell had saved me; and at Brandham,
too, I had resorted to a spell. The spell had worked: I couldn’t
deny that. It had broken off the relationship between Ted and
Marian, from whose continuance I had foreseen such direful
consequences. It had uprooted the belladonna, and blasted it in
Ted’s very arms. But it had recoiled on me. In destroying the
belladonna I had also destroyed Ted, and perhaps destroyed myself.
Was it really a moment of triumph when I lay prostrate on the
ground, and the uplifted root rained down earth on me?

  I saw myself entering Ted’s life, an unknown small
boy, a visitant from afar, sliding down his straw-stack; and it
seemed to me that from that moment he was doomed. And so was I—our
fates were linked together. I could not injure him without injuring
myself.

  Yes, the supernatural powers I had invoked had
punished my presumption. And why had they, when at school they had
so clearly been on my side? The reason was, I told myself, that at
Brandham Hall I had invoked these powers against each other, had
tried to set the Zodiac against itself. In my eyes the actors in my
drama had been immortals, inheritors of the summer and of the
coming glory of the twentieth century.

  So whichever way I looked, towards the world of
experience or the world of the imagination, my gaze returned to me
empty. I could make no contact with either, and lacking the
nourishment that these umbilical cords convey, I shrank into
myself.

  When Marcus and I met again at school we met almost
as strangers. We were polite and distant with each other; we never
went for walks together and never alluded to the past. No one
commented on this; at school friendships were always being made and
broken. I found new friends to go about with, but into these
friendships I put little of myself—indeed, there was little left to
put. But my daily glimpses of Marcus, reminding me of the need for
secrecy, were like hammer-taps nailing me up. Gradually my active
dread of hearing anything about Brandham passed into indifference,
a progressive atrophy of curiosity about people that extended in
many directions—in fact, in nearly all. But another world came to
my aid: the world of facts. I accumulated facts: facts that existed
independently of me, facts that my private wishes could not add to
or subtract from. Soon I came to regard these facts as truths, and
the only truths I cared to recognize. Pascal would have condemned
them as being truth without charity; they contributed little to
experience or imagination, but gradually took the place of both.
Indeed, the life of facts proved no bad substitute for the facts of
life. It did not let me down; on the contrary it upheld me and
probably saved my life; for when the First World War came, my skill
in marshalling facts was held to be more important than any service
I was likely to perform on the field. So I missed that experience,
along with many others, spooning among them. Ted hadn’t told me
what it was, but he had shown me, he had paid with his life for
showing me, and after that I never felt like it.

  Many records came to light besides those hidden in
the collar-box. My mother and I were both inveterate hoarders; I
had kept all her letters, she all mine; it was only a matter of
time before I found our Brandham correspondence. Among the letters
was an envelope, sealed down but unaddressed. What was it? Then in
a flash I guessed: it was the letter Marian had given me for Ted on
the afternoon of my birthday. In equal measure I wanted to open it
and not to open it. Eventually I compromised by keeping it beside
me, a prize to be opened only when I had finished.

  My acquired respect for facts bore fruit, enabling
me to lay some unction to my soul which at the time I had denied
myself. Thus it became clear to me—chronology proved it— that
Marian had been quite fond of me before there was any question of
my acting as go-between. Afterwards she had redoubled her favours,
making up to me and stuffing me with lies; but the episode of the
green suit came first. I saw now, what I did not take in then, that
her chief object in going to Norwich was to meet Ted Burgess: his
must have been the raised hat on the other side of the square. But
it would be unduly cynical to say I was only a pretext for her
journey. It would have been such an expensive pretext, for one
thing— not that she minded about money. I felt pretty sure that she
was genuinely concerned about my permanently overheated state and
wanted to do me a good turn. Inexplicable as it seemed to me now,
the conviction that she had never really cared for me had been the
bitterest of the pills I had to swallow. Similarly Lord
Trimingham’s affability and condescension, on which I had set so
much store, did not altogether proceed from the wish that I should
be a convenient link between him and Marian. Ted’s behaviour had
been more suspect. What a change there had been in his demeanour
when I told him I was a visitor at the Hall! And how he had
alternately cajoled and threatened me when I began to jib at taking
the messages! And yet he had been really sorry about it; he had
even said he was sorry, as a good child should. Perhaps among all
of us—and that went for me, too—he was the only one who had had a
true impulse of contrition.

  I was able to winnow out other facts that had been
hidden from me at the time. Marcus it must have been who told his
mother that I knew something of Marian’s whereabouts when she gave
out that she was with her old nannie; he had goaded me, by his
superior knowledge of French, into making that silly and disastrous
boast. I had assumed that all schoolboys obeyed the “no sneaking”
rule as implicitly as I did—as Marcus himself did as long as he was
at school. It hadn’t occurred to me that just as we changed our
language and vocabulary when we went into polite society, so we
changed our natures—or at least our expression of them.

  And I, I was not so guilty as I believed myself to
be in the long months that followed my visit, or so blameless as,
in the years that followed them, I had come to think I was. I had
come to blame the visit for everything, even for my vice of taking
myself too seriously. I ought not to have read Marian’s note; I
ought not to have falsified the hour of Marian’s rendezvous with
Ted. The first had been regrettable though venial; and the second,
if well meant, had been fatal in its consequences. But if I should
not have done it now, in my middle sixties, it was because I had
long ceased to have the wish to meddle, for good or ill, in other
people’s business. “Once a go-between, never a go-between” had
become my maxim.