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Chapter 23
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Go-Between, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Social Class and Hierarchy
Coming of Age and Trauma
Masculinity
Fate, Myth, and Magic
Love, Sex, and Marriage
Summary
Analysis
Back with old Leo, he tells the reader that he had meant to put away his memories at the end of the story, but that they failed to settle. That’s how he has come to write this epilogue.
The narrative’s sudden return to the “sixty-odd” Leo shows the trauma’s severity—it literally severed his life in two. In the retelling of the story, though, he has brought his memories back to life and now seeks their resolution.
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Old Leo likens his breakdown to being “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.” By September in 1900 he was deemed fit to return to school. He has never remembered what exactly happened after the discovery of Marian and Ted, or his return home.
The discovery of Ted and Marian affects Leo so deeply that he loses entire weeks to a mental blackout. His mind presents his recovery as a literal journey back to sanity as he seeks to recover some semblance of identity. The train journey is also a metaphor for the relationship between Leo’s self-awareness and his subconscious: he has to travel through both to get back to any kind of normality.
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Young Leo felt that he had betrayed everyone at Brandham Hall. Furthermore, he was haunted by visions of Ted, “his blood and brains stuck to the kitchen wall,” and by an image of him cleaning his gun. Ultimately, feels old Leo, his spell worked: it broke off Ted and Marian’s relationship, but with unintended terrible consequences. He sees his fate as linked with Ted’s—“I could not injure him without injuring myself.”
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Young Leo believed that supernatural powers punished him for believing he could harness their control. At Brandham Hall, he 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.” Whether he looked towards “the world of experience or the world of the imagination,” he could make no contact with either and “shrank” into himself.
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When Leo returned to school, he and Marcus barely acknowledged one another. Leo’s fear of hearing anything about Brandham eventually turned into a lack of curiosity about people more generally. Instead, he spent the rest of his life accumulating “facts.” His skill with facts meant that when the First World War came around, he was more useful in an administrative role. Just as he never learnt about war, he never learnt about “spooning” either.
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Old Leo realizes now that Marian took him to Norwich so she could meet Ted there. He also sees that Marcus must have told Mrs. Maudsley that Leo knew something about Marian’s whereabouts at the time.
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Old Leo cannot take his younger self’s interest in spells or magic seriously anymore. In writing about the facts of Brandham, it has “lost its terrors.” Amongst his possessions, Leo finds the final letter that Marian gave him to take to Ted on that fateful day. If he wants true closure, he feels, he will have to reach beyond what he remembers and find out what happened to the people involved. For that reason, he decides to open Marian’s last letter.
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The letter reveals Marian’s disquiet at meeting at six o’clock—she intended to tell Ted that she thought Leo had made a mistake, and instead they should meet at six thirty. She also tells Ted that Leo’s new bicycle will mean he doesn’t have to do so much walking on their behalf. She says if the letter doesn’t make it to Ted she will wait from six till “seven or eight or nine or Doomsday — darling, darling.”
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Old Leo heads back to Norfolk to try and find out what happened to everyone. He goes to the church and learns from the mural tablets that Trimingham had died in 1910. It also tells of a tenth Viscount, born in 1901, who was killed in action during the Second World War. Leo wonders how Trimingham could have married and had a child in the less than seven months since he left Brandham. It occurs to Leo that there might now be an eleventh Viscount who is still alive.
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Though he is not religious, old Leo says a prayer for everyone involved in the events at Brandham. He leaves the church and passes by the cricket ground. As he heads towards the village, he sees a young man whose face seems “less unfamiliar” to him than anyone else that’s around.
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Leo stops the young man and asks if there is still a Lord Trimingham—an eleventh Viscount—living at Brandham Hall. In fact, the young man replies that he is Lord Trimingham. He lives in just a corner of the house; the rest is a girls’ school.
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Leo informs the eleventh Viscount that he had stayed at Brandham in his youth and knew his grandfather, the ninth Lord Trimingham. The eleventh Lord Trimingham disconcertedly asks if Leo had known his grandmother, Marian, too. He informs Leo that she is still alive and living in the village, where Nannie Robson used to live.
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The eleventh viscount says that his grandmother is quite lonely, and asks whether Leo would mind going to see her. Leo asks Trimingham if he will first go and tell Marian that Leo Colston is here to see her, to which he agrees. While Leo waits for Trimingham to return, he walks by the village hall in which he sung, but can’t connect with the memory of his former “public triumph.”
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The eleventh viscount returns and informs Leo that Marian would be very happy to see him; she has also asked Trimingham to provide lunch for Leo at the Hall after he has been to see her. Trimingham says that Marian wasn’t sure if Leo would want to see her, “because of something that had happened long ago.” Trimingham apologizes to Leo if they didn’t treat him well at the time, but Leo tells him not to give it another thought.
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Leo and the eleventh viscount part ways, planning to meet for lunch at the Hall around one. Trimingham begins walking away, but then turns around. He asks: “Were you the little boy who—?” Leo interrupts and says “yes.”
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Leo arrives at Marian’s house. She looks very elderly, but her eyes retain some of “their frosty fire.” Leo asks her questions about the different people from Brandham Hall. She thinks that Marcus and Denys were both killed in the first world war. Mrs. Maudsley, she informs Leo, had a nervous breakdown.
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Marian tells Leo that they weren’t sure how he found out about Ted’s suicide. They knew he knew because one of the “few things” Leo said in the aftermath was “why did Ted kill himself—wasn’t he a good shot?” She says Ted had a weak streak in him, like her grandson Edward (the eleventh Viscount).
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Marian tells Leo that Trimingham (the ninth) married her regardless of her affair and behaved very honorably towards her. Mr. Maudsley, she says, lived to be very old, and often came to see them.
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Marian complains that her grandson, Edward, doesn’t visit her often. She asks if Edward reminds Leo of anyone. She says that Edward wants to get married, but feels that he is “under some sort of spell or curse, and that he’d hand it on.”
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Marian asks Leo to tell Edward “what really happened.” She says that only he knows that she and Ted weren’t “ordinary lovers,” but that their love was a “beautiful thing.” She and Ted were made for each other, she says. She asks Leo if he realized how beautiful their love was at the time, and wouldn’t he be proud to be descended from their union, “the child of so much happiness and beauty?” Leo feels that the only answer he can give is yes.
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Marian says that she is glad Leo agrees, as he was their “instrument”—he made them happy. They entrusted him with their “greatest treasure.” She implores Leo to go and tell Edward that her and Ted’s love was nothing to be ashamed of. She says that they never meant to hurt anyone, and though there were great sorrows in the lives of the Maudsleys, they were the fault of “this hideous century we live in, which has denatured humanity and planted death and hate where love and living were.” Deliver this message, she says, and it will the “best day’s work” Leo will ever do.
Marian wants her grandson to get married, and also thinks it’s not too late for Leo to do so either. She says she can tell Leo is “all dried up inside.” She asks him if he doesn’t feel “any need of love,” and says if only Ted “had more brains he wouldn’t have blown them out.” Leo owes it to Ted, and to her, to tell Edward that there’s no curse or spell except “an unloving heart.”
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Leo agrees to deliver the message, and Marian kisses him, calling him “a friend in a thousand.” Her face is wet with tears. Leo leaves her house, “a foreigner in the world of emotions, ignorant of their language but compelled to listen to it.” He marvels at Marian’s self-deception. But why, then, he wonders, was he so moved by what she had said? And why ought he to go on this “preposterous errand”? He feels he should just head home, but instead turns towards Brandham Hall and walks towards it.
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