The Go-Between (10 page)

  “And did you do any shopping for yourself?”

  Marian shrugged her shoulders.

  “Oh no, Mama; that can wait.”

  “You mustn’t wait too long,” said Mrs. Maudsley
evenly. “You didn’t see anyone in Norwich, I suppose?”

  “Not a cat,” said Marian. “We were hard at it all
the time, weren’t we, Leo?”

  “Yes, we were,” I answered, so eager to agree with
her that I forgot the hour I had spent in the Cathedral.

  From being my enemy the summer had become my friend:
this was another consequence of our Norwich shopping. I felt I had
been given the freedom of the heat, and I roamed about in it as if
I was exploring a new element. I liked to watch it rise shimmering
from the ground and hang heavy on the tops of the darkening July
trees. I liked the sense of suspended movement that it gave or
seemed to give, reducing everything in nature to the stillness of
contemplation. I liked to touch it with my hand and feel it on my
throat and round my knees, which now were bare to its embrace. I
yearned to travel far, ever farther into it, and achieve a close
approximation with it; for I felt that my experience of it would
somehow be cumulative, and that if it would only get hotter and
hotter there was a heart of heat I should attain to.

  The green suit, with its smoked-pearl buttons and
open collar, which sat so lightly on me, the thin underclothes,
whose touch caressed me, the stockings, hardly thick enough to
protect my legs from scratches, the low shoes, which were my
special pride—these, I felt, were only first steps towards my
complete, corporeal union with the summer. One by one they would be
discarded—in what order I couldn’t decide, though it was a question
that exercised me. Which garment would be the last I should retain,
before the final release into nakedness? My notions of decency were
vague and ill-defined, as were all my ideas relating to sex; yet
they were definite enough for me to long for the release of casting
them off with my clothes and being like a tree or a flower, with
nothing between me and nature.

  These yearnings for nudist fulfilment hovered on the
confines of my mind; perhaps I never thought them capable of
realization. In the meantime my pride in my new rig-out had, at
another level of consciousness, altered my outlook on the world,
and my relation to it. New clothes are always a tonic, and the
circumstances in which I had come by mine made them a super-tonic.
I strutted, I preened myself. But I was not incapable of gratitude
or awe, and both these feelings had been awakened in me. Gratitude
for the gifts—how was it possible that my benefactors did not value
me, how was it possible that I should not value them, when such
pledges of amity had been bestowed? And awe for the way they had
been given: the casual accumulation of colossal bills, mounting
from shop to shop, as if money were nothing! The expenditure had
been godlike; it belonged to another, ampler phase of being than
the one I was accustomed to. My mind could not grasp it, but my
imagination could make play with it, for unlike my mind, which
could dismiss what it did not understand, my imagination loved to
contemplate the incomprehensible and try to express my sense of it
by an analogy. And I had one ready-made. From those resplendent
beings, golden with sovereigns (and, I suspected, guineas),
arriving, staying, leaving, apparently unaffected by any
restrictions of work or family ties, citizens of the world who had
made the world their playground, who had it in their power (for I
did not forget that) to make me miserable with a laugh and happy
with a smile—from them it was but a short step to the hardly more
august and legendary figures of the zodiac.

  One of the items in my trousseau was a bathing-suit,
and partly from the promptings of nudism, partly because I fancied
the idea of myself in it (the day with Marian had made me conscious
of myself in many ways), I badly wanted to put it on. I confessed
that I couldn’t swim unless somebody held me, but Marian said she
would arrange for that. Here, however, my hostess put her foot
down. My mother had written to her that I was delicate and liable
to colds; she would not take the responsibility of letting me bathe
without first having my mother’s permission. But of course I could
watch the others bathe if I liked.

  There was a bathing party afoot and I had just time
to write the letter and go down and join them. It was Saturday the
14th—meteorologically a disappointing day, for the thermometer
(which I now wished to soar to unprecedented heights) had not
reached seventy-six. But this was a secret that I shared with
Marcus and his father; the others, ignorant of the true state of
affairs, complained loudly of the beat. I took my bathing-suit with
me, to be in keeping with the spirit of the party. Marcus also had
his, for use, though like me he could not swim. Neither of them, I
ruefully realized, made many concessions to nakedness: I had tried
mine on; it was disappointingly ample, and so was Marcus’s.

  I had never been to a grown-up bathing party before.
There was nothing surprising in that, for in those days bathing was
a pastime of the few, and the word denoted an intenser experience
than it does now. I was curious about it and almost frightened—this
idea of surrendering oneself to an alien and potentially hostile
element. Though my knowledge of it was to be only vicarious, I felt
a tingling on my skin and a faint loosening of my bowels.

  We trooped down the path, six of us—Marian and
Denys, a young man and a young woman whose names are in my diary
but whose faces I cannot remember—and Marcus and I bringing up the
rear. It was about six o’clock, but the heat still lingered—not
burning, but diffused and benign. We went through a wicket gate
into a belt of trees. I was often to go that way on hotter days;
but never again did I get quite the same impression of cold
succeeding heat. The trees were very thick, they wrapped us round;
the stillness was infectious, no one spoke. We came to a road
between the trees and followed it, and then scrambled down a steep
tree-lined bank and over a stile into a meadow. Another stage
nearer the experience! Under the renewed assault of the heat we
started talking
again
, and Marcus said:

  “Trimingham is coming this evening.”

  “Oh, is he?” I answered, not much interested, but
noting the name for my diary.

  “Yes, but late, we shall be in bed.”

  “Is he nice?” I asked.

  “Yes, but dreadfully ugly. You mustn’t start or
anything when you see him, or it will put him off. He doesn’t like
you to feel sorry for him. You see, he was wounded in the war and
his face hasn’t got right. They say it never will.”

  “Hard cheese, “I said.

  “Yes, but you mustn’t say so to him, or to Marian
either.”

  “Why not?”

  “Mama wouldn’t like it.”

  “Why not?” I said again.

  “Promise you won’t tell anybody—not even under
torture.”

  I promisedr

  “Mama wants Marian to marry him.”

  I digested this news in silence. It was extremely
disagreeable to me. I already felt violently jealous of Trimingham,
and the fact that he was a war hero did not recommend him to me. My
father had disapproved of the war, to the point of being a
pro-Boer. I was quite capable of lending my voice to “The Soldiers
of the Queen” and “Good-bye, Dolly, I Must Leave You,” and had gone
almost mad with excitement at the relief of Ladysmith; but I
believed that my father was right. Perhaps Trimingham deserved to
be disfigured. And why should Mrs. Maudsley want Marian to marry a
man who was horribly ugly and not even a Mr. ?

  We were crossing the meadow on a raised causeway
towards a curved line of rushes; the curve was concave, and we were
aiming for the farthest part. It was one of those sedgy, marshy
places in Norfolk where bog-cotton grows; despite the heat, which
was drying up everything, one had to pick one’s way, to avoid the
pools of reddish water that were half concealed by grass. Squelch,
squelch, and a brown trickle came over my low shoes.

  There was a black thing ahead of us, all bars and
spars and uprights, like a gallows. It gave out a sense of
fear—also of intense solitude. It was like something that must not
be approached, that might catch you and hurt you; I wondered why we
were walking towards it so unconcernedly. We had nearly reached it,
and I saw how the pitch was peeling off its surfaces, and realized
that no one could have attended to it for years, when suddenly the
head and shoulders of a man rose from among the rushes. He had his
back to us and did not hear us. He walked slowly up the steps to
the platform between the wheels and pulleys. He walked very slowly,
in the exultation of being alone; he moved his arms about and
hunched his shoulders, as if to give himself more freedom, though
he was wearing nothing that could have cramped him: for a moment I
thought that he was naked.

  He stood almost motionless for a second or two, just
raising his heels experimentally; and then he threw his hands up,
stretched himself into an arc, and disappeared. Until I heard the
splash I hadn’t realized how near the river was.

  The grown-ups stared at one another in dismay, and
we at them. Dismay turned to indignation. “What cheek!” said Denys.
“I thought we had the whole place to ourselves. He must know he’s
trespassing. What shall we do? Shall we order him off?”

  “He can’t go quite as he is,” the other man
said.

  “Well, shall we give him five minutes to clear
out?”

  “Whatever you do, I’m going to change,” said Marian.
“It takes me a long time. Come along, Eulalie” (this was her
friend’s strange name), “there’s our bathing-machine—it’s better
than it looks,” and she pointed to a hut among the rushes, which,
like so many huts, had the appearance of a disused hen-coop. They
went off, leaving us to face the situation.

  We looked at each other irresolutely and then by
common consent pushed through the rushes to the river bank. The
river had been hidden until now.

  At once the landscape changed. The river dominated
it— the two rivers, I might say, for they seemed like different
streams.

  Above the sluice, by which we stood, the river came
out of the shadow of the belt of trees. Green, bronze, and golden
it flowed through weeds and rushes; the gravel glinted, I could see
the fishes darting in the shallows. Below the sluice it broadened
out into a pool that was as blue as the sky. Not a weed marred the
surface; only one thing broke it: the intruder’s bobbing head.

  He saw us and began to swim towards us; white above,
brown below, his arms parted the water. Soon we could see his face
and his eyes fixed on us with the strained expression of the
swimmer. “Why, it’s Ted Burgess,” said Denys in a low voice, “the
tenant of Black Farm. We can’t be rude to him—it’s his land on the
other side for one thing, and Trimingham wouldn’t like it, for
another. You’ll see, I shall be particularly nice to him. He
doesn’t swim badly, does he, for a farmer?” Denys seemed relieved
at not having to make a scene; and I, who had been rather looking
forward to it and didn’t think the farmer would be an easy man to
order off, felt disappointed.

  “I’ll just say how-do-you-do to him,” said Denys.
“We don’t know him socially, of course, but he mustn’t think us
stuck-up.”

  Burgess by now was almost under us. Clamped to the
brickwork of the sluice, a thick old post stuck out of the water.
Exposure to the elements had grooved its sides and sharpened it
almost to a point. To this post he clung and began to haul himself
up. Crouching over the spike to change his foothold, he looked as
though he would be impaled; then his hand grasped a ring embedded
in the coping and he was on the bank, the water running off
him.

  “What a way to land!” said Denys, giving his dry
hand to the farmer’s wet one; “why didn’t you get out comfortably,
on the other side of the sluice? We’ve had some steps made
there.”

  “I know,” the farmer said, “but this is the way I’ve
always done it.” He spoke with a local accent: it lent a kind of
warmth and substance to his words. He looked down at the water
collecting in a puddle on the bluish brickwork at his feet, and
suddenly seemed embarrassed at being so nearly naked in the
presence of the clothed. “I didn’t know anyone was going to be
here,” he said, apologetically. “Harvest’s just started, and I got
that hot working I thought I’d run down and have a dip, being
Saturday and all. I shan’t be long, just one more header—”

  “Oh, please don’t hurry on our account,” Denys broke
in. “It’s quite all right for us. We were hot too, up at the Hall.
By the way,” he added, “Trimingham’s coming tonight: he’ll probably
want to see you.”

  “I shouldn’t be surprised,” the farmer said, and
giving Denys a half salute, he ran up the stairs to the platform,
leaving a dark footprint on each step. We watched him dive— it must
have been a ten-foot drop—and then Denys said: “I think I put him
at his ease, don’t you?” His friend agreed. They went off one way,
we another, to find a lair in the rushes. Their feathery tops
nodded invitingly. Within the rushes, we could see, but not, I
thought, be seen: it was tinglingly secret and withdrawn. Marcus
began to take his clothes off. I wanted to do the same, but Marcus
said: “I shouldn’t put on a bathing-dress if you’re not going to
bathe. It would look funny.” So I stayed as I was.

  The rushes rustled as the men walked out, and almost
at the same moment we heard the hut door creak and the sound of
women’s voices. They all went together to the steps above the
sluice and I followed, feeling I was no longer of their company.
Somehow it was disappointing to see them so fully clad, almost as
if they were bathing in their clothes; Marian’s suit, I remember,
seemed to cover her far more completely than her evening dresses.
They lingered on the steps, playfully daring one another to go in
first. Denys and his friend pulled each other in and were carried
by the current through the sluice, while Marian and Eulalie and
Marcus stayed in the shallow water above, where it was only
waist-deep; their feet showed softly white on the shining golden
gravel as they waded about with long, uneven steps, plunging into
unsuspected holes, splashing each other, shrieking and giggling and
laughing. Their thick, clumsy dresses began to cling to them and
take on the soft outlines of their bodies. Bolder now, they struck
out purposefully. Resolution narrowed their eyes; their chins were
tilted upwards; with long, slow sweeps their outstretched hands
pushed back the water, gathering it in again in armfuls. The motion
began to come more easily to them; smiling beatifically, they drew
deep blissful breaths.