Free The Go-Between by L. P. Hartley Page B

worked, and showed
me the small, stumpy magnet that drew the markers up and down.
“Only we mustn’t touch it,” he said, reading my thoughts, “or my
father would be angry. He likes to do the thermometer himself.”
      “Is he often angry?” I asked. I could not imagine
Mr. Maudsley being angry, or indeed anything else, but this was
almost the first thing one wanted to know about grown-up
people.
      “No, but my mother would be,” Marcus replied
obliquely.
      The thermometer stood at nearly eighty-three.
      We had run all the way from the luncheon table,
partly to make good our escape, partly because we often ran when
walking would have done as well. I was perspiring a little, and
remembered my mother’s oft-repeated injunction: “Try not to get
hot.” How could I not get hot? I looked at Marcus. He was wearing a
light flannel suit. His shirt was not open, but it was loose at the
neck; his knickers could not be called shorts, for they came well
below his knees, but they also were loose, they flapped, they let
the air in. Below them, not quite meeting them, he wore a pair of
thin grey stockings neatly turned over their supporting garters;
and on his feet— wonder of wonders—not boots but what then were
called low shoes. To a lightly clad child of today this would seem
thick winter wear; to me it might have been a bathing-suit, it
looked so inadequate to the proper, serious function of
clothes.
      The record of these sartorial details is before me,
for Marcus and I were photographed together; and though the light
has got in at one corner, and the background and ourselves are
tilted alarmingly, the faded reddish-brown print does display the
uncanny perception possessed by the camera in those days when it
could not so easily lie. I am wearing an Eton collar and a bow tie;
a Norfolk jacket cut very high across the chest, incised leather
buttons, round as bullets, conscientiously done up, and a belt,
which I have drawn more tightly than I need have. My breeches were
secured below the knee with a cloth strap and buckle, but these
were hidden by thick black stockings, the garters of which, coming
just below the straps, put a double strain on the circulation of my
legs. To complete the picture, a pair of obviously new boots,
looking larger for being new, and with the tabs, which I must have
forgotten to tuck in, standing up boldly.
      I have my hand on Marcus’s shoulder (I was an inch
or two taller as well as a year older than he) in the attitude of
affection which, in those days, was permitted to the male sex when
they were photographed together (undergraduates and even soldiers
draped themselves about one another), and though the unfortunate
slant of the photograph makes me look as if I was trying to push
him over, I also look fond of him—which I was, though the coolness
and deep-seated conventionality of his nature made it difficult to
be intimate with him. We were not much alike, and had been brought
together by factors extraneous to our real personalities. His round
face looks out on the world without much interest and with a
complacent acceptance of the situation; my rather long one is
self-conscious and seems aware of the strain of adaptability. Both
of us were wearing straw boaters, his with a plain band, mine with
the school colours; and their tilted crowns and brims make two hard
diagonal lines, inclined planes along which we seem to be rushing
violently down a steep place.
     
      I was not unduly dismayed by the heat, my dread of
which was at least as much moral and hypochondriacal as physical,
for I still half believed in my ability to influence the weather,
and that night I prepared a good strong spell to bring the
temperature down. But like an invalid whose fever defies the
doctor, the weather did not respond, and next day, when our
post-luncheon scamper had taken us to the game larder, the
thermometer had climbed to nearly eighty-five and was still pushing
up the marker.
      My heart