The Go-Between (30 page)

  I didn’t answer.

  “C’est une bicyclette.”

  To a child of today this might have seemed an
anticlimax, to me it opened the gates of heaven. A bicycle was the
thing I wanted most in the world and had least hope of getting, for
it was, I knew by inquiry, beyond my mother’s purse. I plied Marcus
with questions about it—its make, its size, its tires, its lamp,
its brakes. “C’est une bicyclette Oombaire,” said Marcus, so
Frenchly that at first I didn’t recognize the famous name; but to
my other questions he would only answer “Je ne sais pas” in a
maddening up-and-down singsong.

  “Je ne l’ai pas vue,” he said at last. “C’est un
type qui se trouve seulement à Londres, that is only found in
London, espèce de blockhead. But I can tell you one thing that you
haven’t asked me.”

  “What?”

  “Sa couleur, or as you would say, its colour.”

  “What colour is it?”

  “Vert—un vert vif.”

  It was very slow of me but I took the word to be
“verre,” and I stared at him, no doubt moon-faced and owlish,
wondering how a bicycle could be the colour of a lively glass.

  At last he enlightened me. “Green, green, mon pauvre
imbécile, bright green,” and just as this vision was beginning to
dawn on me in all its splendour, he added: “Et savez-vous
pourquoi?”

  I could not guess.

  “Parce que vous êtes vert vous-même—you are green
yourself, as the poor old English say,” he translated, to leave me
in no doubt. “It is your true colour, Marian said so.” And he began
to dance round me, chanting: “Green, green, green.”

  I cannot describe how painful this disclosure was to
me. Momentarily it took away all my pleasure in the thought of the
bicycle. Most of Marcus’s gibes had run off me like water, but to
be called green, that went home. And like other revelations of the
day it cast a black shadow on the past, which I thought so secure.
The green suit, that happy-making present, Lincoln green, the green
of the greenwood, Robin Hood’s green—it too had been a subtle
insult, meant to make me look a fool.

  “Did she really say that?” I asked.

  “Mais oui! Vraiment!” and he went back to his
chanting and his dance.

  Perhaps schoolboys no longer dance round each other,
but they did once, and it was a most unnerving and exasperating
experience for the victim. For a moment I hated Marcus, and I hated
Marian: I saw how green I must look to her and realized how she had
taken advantage of it. I would strike back, and in French.

  “Savez-vous ou est Marian en ce moment-ci?” I asked
carefully.

  Marcus stopped dead and stared at me. “No,” he said,
and his voice sounded strangely English. “Do
you
know
where she is?”

  “Oui,” I replied, thrilled to have turned his French
against him. “Je sais bien.”

  This was quite untrue; I had no idea where she was,
though I guessed she was with Ted.

  “Where, where?” he said.

  “Pas cent lieues d’ici,” I answered, not knowing the
French for “miles” and giving the impression, I suppose, that
Marian was near at hand.

  “But where, where?” he repeated.

  “Je ne dis pas ça aux petits garçons,” I retorted,
and began to dance round him in my turn, chanting: “Petit garçon,
petit garçon, ne voudriez-vous pas savoir?”

  “Pax,” cried Marcus at last, and I stopped
gyrating.

  “But do you really know where she is, honest Injun?”
Marcus asked.

  “Mais oui, mais oui, mais oui,” was all I would
vouchsafe.

  If I had remembered what a telltale Marcus was, I
should never have proclaimed my supposed knowledge of Marian’s
whereabouts; though the fact that I really did not know
paradoxically made it seem less of a betrayal. Nor should I have
done so had we been talking in English: I should have kept a guard
on my tongue. But my French
persona
ran away with me.
Trying to compete in French with Marcus, I felt a different
being—as no doubt he did. In a foreign language one has to say
something or look silly, even if the something were better left
unsaid. But what weighed most with me was the feeling I was doing
Marian a bad turn. By saying I knew where she was I got rid of some
of my spleen against her; by not knowing, I salved my
conscience.

  We were walking in silence, every now and then
taking a few skips to release the tension and let the bad blood
out, when suddenly I saw something that turned me cold.

  We were in sight of the outhouse where the deadly
nightshade grew; and the deadly nightshade was coming out of the
door.

  For a second I actually thought it had been endowed
with movement and was coming towards us. Then the phenomenon
explained itself: the bush had grown so much since my last visit
that the hut no longer held it.

  On the threshold that it guarded we paused and
peered in. Marcus was for pushing past it into the shed. “Oh,
don’t,” I whispered, and he smiled and drew back: it was our moment
of reconciliation. The shrub had spread amazingly; it topped the
roofless walls, it pressed into their crannies, groping for an
outlet, urged by a secret explosive force that I felt would burst
them. It had battened on the heat, which had parched everything
else. Its beauty, of which I was well aware, was too bold for me,
too uncompromising in every particular. The sullen, heavy purple
bells wanted something of me that I could not give, the bold black
burnished berries offered me something that I did not want. “All
other plants,” I thought, “bloom for the eye; they are perfected
for our view: the mysterious principle of growth is manifest in
them, mysterious yet simple.” But this plant seemed to be up to
something, to be carrying on a questionable traffic with itself.
There was no harmony, no proportion in its parts. It exhibited all
the stages of its development at once. It was young, middle-aged,
and old at the same time. Not only did it bear its fruit and
flowers together, but there was a strange discrepancy between the
size of its leaves: some were no longer than my little finger,
others much longer than my hand. It invited and yet repelled
inspection, as if it was harbouring some shady secret that it yet
wanted you to know. Outside the shed, twilight was darkening the
air, but inside it was already night, night that the plant had
gathered to itself.

  Torn between fascination and recoil, I turned away,
and it was then we heard the voices.

  Actually there was only one voice, or only one voice
audible. I recognized it at once, though Marcus didn’t; it was the
voice of “When other lips, “ speaking, no doubt, the language whose
excess imparts the power it feels so well. But what I heard was a
low insistent murmur, with pauses for reply in which no reply was
made. It had a hypnotic quality that I had never heard in any
voice: a blend of urgency, cajolery, and extreme tenderness, and
with below it the deep vibrato of a held-in laugh that might break
out at any moment. It was the voice of someone wanting something
very much and confident of getting it, but at the same time
willing, no, constrained, to plead for it with all the force of his
being.

  “A loony talking to himself,” whispered Marcus;
“shall we go and see?”

  At that moment a second voice became audible,
toneless, unrecognizable, but distinct. Marcus’s eyes lit up.

  “Eh bien, je jamais! c’est un couple,” he whispered,
“un couple qui fait le cuiller. “

  “Fait le cuiller?” I echoed, stupidly.

  “Spooning, you idiot. Let’s go and rout them
out.”

  Terrified equally at the thought of discovering or
being discovered, I suddenly had an inspiration.

  “Mais non!” I whispered. “Ça serait trop ennuyeux.
Laissons-les faire!”

  I started resolutely on the homeward path, and
Marcus, after more than one backward glance, with a bad grace
followed me. Through the mad pounding of my heart, and my general
gratitude for deliverance, I found time to congratulate myself. It
was the word “ennuyeux” that had done the trick; Marcus had used it
to discredit the rubbish-heap; in all his large vocabulary it
carried the greatest weight of disparagement. Precociously
sophisticated, he knew that to be boring was the unforgivable
sin.

  “Confounded cheek, I call it!” Marcus fumed when we
were out of earshot. “Why should they come here to spoon? I wonder
what Mama would say.”

  “Oh, I shouldn’t tell her, Marcus,” I said quickly.
“Don’t tell her. Promise you won’t. Jurez, jurez, je vous en
prie.”

  But he wouldn’t oblige me, even in French.

  Our amity restored, we walked along, sometimes
sedately, with open, guileless faces, sometimes barging into each
other with sudden charges. I thought of many things.

  “How long do engagements last?” I asked. Marcus
would be sure to know.

  “Cela dépend,” he announced oracularly. “Perhaps you
would rather I answered in English?” he said suddenly. “It is a
language more suited to your feeble intelligence.”

  I let this pass.

  “In the case of grooms, gardeners, skivvies, and
suchlike scum,” said Marcus, “it may go on forever. With people
like ourselves it generally doesn’t go on very long.”

  “How long?”

  “Oh, a month or so. Deux mois, trois mois.”

  I thought about this.

  “Engagements are sometimes broken off, aren’t
they?”

  “That’s what is worrying Mama. But Marian would
never be so
folle
—fou for you, Colston, in the masculine
it describes you exactly—write it out a hundred times, please—so
folle as to leave Trimingham
planté là
. What did I say,
Colston?”

  “Planté là,” I repeated humbly.

  “Please construe it.”

  “Planted there.”

  “Planted there, indeed! Sit down. Next, next, next,
next, next. Can no boy give a proper rendering of ‘planté là’?”

  “Well, what does it mean?” I asked.

  “ ‘Planté là’ means—it means—well, almost anything
you like except ‘planted there.’ “

  I took this from him, too: my thoughts had veered
again and were now swarming like flies round a honey-pot. The green
bicycle! Even if it was an insult—and I had no doubt of that—I
could swallow the insult. Could I bring myself
not
to
swallow it, that was the question. The bicycle was already dearer
to me than anything I possessed. I was sure that if I went away
before my birthday I should not get it. They would be offended with
me and return it to the shop, or perhaps give it to Marcus, though
he had one already. I pictured myself riding it through our village
street, which had become much nearer and clearer to me during the
last few hours— jumping off and standing it against one of the
posts that held the hanging chains that guarded our road frontage.
How everyone would admire it! I couldn’t ride a bicycle, but I
should soon learn. Mother would put a steadying hand on the saddle;
so would the gardener... up and down the hills I should go,
soaring, floating....

  And yet I wasn’t comfortable about it. There was a
trap somewhere, I felt sure; and though I didn’t know the term
“hush-money,” its meaning flittered, bat-like, about my mind.

  I was too tired to hold any one thought for long,
even the image of the bicycle. I had been so pleased with my
handling of the situation at the outhouses; now I found myself
wondering whether instead of whispering to Marcus, it wouldn’t have
been better to have given a shout that would have warned them.

  “Vous êtes très silencieux,” said Marcus. “Je n’aime
pas votre voix, which is ugly, oily, and only fit to be heard at a
village singsong. Et quant à vos sales pensées, crapaud, je m’en
fiche d’elles, je crache upon them. Mais pourquoi avez-vous perdu
la langue? Your long, thin, slimy, spotted serpent’s tongue?”

  At his bedroom door we parted. There was plenty of
time before dinner, and I stole down into the hall to look at the
post-box. My letter was still there, leaning against the pane, with
other letters behind it. I fingered the door and to my intense
surprise it opened. I had the letter in my hand; tear it up and I
had the bicycle too. A moment of excruciating self-division
followed. Then I slipped the letter back and tip-toed upstairs with
a thudding heart.

  18

  WHEN I CAME down to breakfast the next morning, the
letter was gone. Oh, the peace of that moment! There were two
absentees from the breakfast table, Marian and her mother. Marian,
I learned, had caught the early train to London; Mrs. Maudsley was
still in bed. I speculated on the nature of her complaint. Un type
hystérique, Marcus had said. What were her symptoms? Did she have
fits? All I knew about hysteria was that sometimes servants had it;
I didn’t know what form it took, but I couldn’t connect it with
Mrs. Maudsley, who, besides being a lady, was always so calm. That
tense, still look of hers that caught you in its searchlight beam!
She had been invariably kind to me; kinder in some ways, perhaps
kinder in all ways, than Marian had been. Yet because of her very
stillness I found her presence repressive: I shouldn’t have dared
to love her if she had been my mother. Marcus did, but perhaps she
showed another side of herself to him. She brought out all the
clumsiness in Denys; when he saw her eye on him he always looked as
if he was going to drop something—or had dropped it. Yes, with Mrs.
Maudsley away one breathed more freely.

  Did Marian love her? That I could not tell: I had
seen them watching each other like two cats; and then, as cats do,
turn away again, indifferently, as if whatever was at stake between
them had somehow faded out. It wasn’t my idea of love; my idea of
love was more demonstrative.

  I had loved Marian, or so I should have said if
anyone in my confidence had asked me (but there was no one; I
certainly should not have told my mother). How did I feel to her? I
asked myself the question as we knelt at prayers, when my thoughts
should have been turned towards forgiveness; but I couldn’t answer
it. I was still half expecting to see her mocking face across the
table, and when I didn’t see it and realized I shouldn’t till
Wednesday, relief surged up in me. By Wednesday, by Tuesday indeed,
I should have got my marching orders: I should have finished with
Brandham; already I felt in it but not of it.