Leo Colston’s memories of Brandham Hall fifty years earlier are an infinite source of trouble. Now about sixty-two, he is still trying to understand why.
Sometimes Leo is called Mercury or the postman because he’s the go-between surreptitiously delivering letters for Marian Maudsley to Ted Burgess, a tenant farmer. As in an espionage thriller, Leo becomes enmeshed in sneaky actions, modest lies, and doubtful morality while facilitating Marian and Ted’s love affair. He’s unsure what they do and does not understand their intense sexuality.
Despite Marian’s protestations of love for Ted, Leo also very distinctly recalls another picnic when he observed her flirting with a prospective suitor of her class, Lord Trimingham. He says he did not then understand what was occurring. The memory of the picnic is so striking that it’s hard to believe he did not get what was going on.
I remember sitting by some stream and watching the hampers unpacked, the rugs spread out, and the footman bending down to change our plates. The grown-ups drank amber wine out of tall tapering bottles; I was given fizzy lemonade from a bottle with a glass marble for a stopper. I enjoyed the meal; it was the conversation afterwards, while the things were being packed away, that was the strain. I got as near to Marian as I dared, but she did not look at me; she seemed to have eyes only for Lord Trimingham who sat beside her. I could not hear what they were saying to each other, and I knew I shouldn’t have understood if I had.
Fifty years later, Leo is still unsure of what he experienced in the past. Marian has to be emphatic when she repeatedly tells him that she and Burgess were lovers. She’s still romantically enthralled with Burgess but heartless about his suicide. “Poor Ted,” she tells Leo, “if he’d had more brains, he wouldn’t have blown them out.” Leo never gets over feeling wrong about his role in the affair.
See L.P. Hartley. The Go-Between. New York: Penguin Books, 1953; Joseph Losey. The Go-Between (1971). The screenplay is by Harold Pinter.