The Go-Between: Chapter 3 Summary & Analysis

The weather starts to get hotter, and Leo and Marcus go to check the reading on a thermometer near a disused building in the grounds. Marcus shows Leo how the instrument works, but tells him not to touch it because Mr. Maudsley likes to do the readings. The reading is eighty-three degrees Fahrenheit. Leo notices that Marcus is wearing much lighter and cooler clothes than he is.

Old Leo can recall the details of his and Marcus’s clothes because he is looking at a picture of the two of them together at the time. In the picture, Leo is wearing restrictive clothes, with everything pulled up high and tight; he has on a “Norfolk jacket.” Old Leo looks at his young face and detects self-consciousness and “the strain of adaptability.”

Young Leo is not too bothered by the hot weather, though is conscious he doesn’t have any cool clothes. He prepares a spell to lower temperature, but it doesn’t work. The next day the thermometer has climbed to eighty-five. Leo wonders if he should wear his school cricket clothes because they are cooler than anything else he has. Marcus admonishes him for the thought, saying only “cads” would wear school clothes in the holidays. He also criticizes Leo for not leaving his dirty clothes on the floor in their bedroom: “You must leave them lying wherever they happen to fall—the servants will pick them up.”

Later at tea-time, someone asks Leo if he isn’t hot in his clothes. Leo mops his face with a handkerchief and says that he isn’t, and that he and Marcus have been running. Leo feels embarrassed at the attention to his appearance, and people asking him whether he is hot or would like to take his jacket off becomes a running joke at Brandham Hall. That night Leo tries another spell to cool the weather down.

The next day, the temperature has indeed dropped slightly. By that tea-time, though, it has gotten hot again, and Leo is teased further about his flustered appearance. He is also teased for wearing a Norfolk jacket, which seems doubly unfair to him considering that Brandham Hall is, after all, in Norfolk. He feels “utterly out of place” among the rich, and socially inferior. He tells the group that he might look hot, but underneath is “a chilly mortal,” which the others find hilarious.

Mrs. Maudsley asks if Leo has forgotten his summer clothes. Not willing to admit he doesn’t really have any, he says that his mother must have accidentally left them out of his trunk. Mrs. Maudsley suggests he write to his mother and get her to send some clothes, but Marian interjects that that would take too long. She asks if she can take Leo to the nearby city of Norwich and get him a new outfit. Leo says that he hasn’t got any money, but Marian tells him “that doesn’t matter,” as the Maudsleys do.

Marian suggests that the new clothes can be a birthday present for Leo, whose birthday happens to be on the twenty-seventh of that month. Leo tells Marian he was born under the sign of Leo, and that his name is actually Lionel. She jokingly suggests that she could buy him a “mane … or a lion-skin?” Trying to be part of the joke, he argues that those “might be rather hot.” Marian says they will go to Norwich tomorrow.

Mrs. Maudsley asks whether Marian would rather wait till Monday, when Lord Trimingham will have arrived, so they can all go to Norwich together. Mr. Maudsley and Denys did not realize Hugh (Lord Trimingham) was coming, thinking that he would be at the horse races. Leo doesn’t know who Hugh is, but he doesn’t want him to come—he’d rather be alone with Marian. Marian says Norwich would be boring to Hugh anyway, and that it’s important that Leo gets new clothes as soon as possible. Mrs. Maudsley reluctantly agrees to the trip.

Marian goes to Leo and Marcus’s room to look through Leo’s clothes. She admires how well mended they are (by Leo’s mother) and asks whether Leo’s summer clothes are “a myth”: “you didn’t really have them?” Leo doesn’t mind admitting to Marian that she’s right, “delighting in the shared secret.”