The Go-Between, adapted from the novel by L.P.Hartley, directed by Joseph Losey, straddles the world of memory and the dominant/ subservient class relations traditional to turn-of-the-century and prewar Britain. Like Silence, the screenplay moves back and forth in time in what might seem to be flash forwards. The central love story, Marian’s passionate entanglement with the hired man Ted, is framed by Colston, who as a child, acted as her go-between with Ted. Colston, the child, half enamored of Marian, believes he cast a spell on her love, and when, after she becomes pregnant, she is eased into a marriage with Lore Trimmingham, Ted kills himself. The middle-aged Colston, who revisits the aged Marian at her invitation, bears witness to the son she had with Ted and raised as her husband’s, dramatizing a triumph of love over class relations. She represents yet another of Pinter’s women characters who wrest some justice and victory from circumstances that would oppress her as love again returns as a vital center of all else.
As with almost any victory in Pinter’s work, Marian’s is tainted with a darker side. The youthful beauty has become a slightly foolish, old woman, empty of all else save her title as Lady Trimmingham, and her past love for Ted—the great event of her life that gave her a grandson. In her cruel prattle she tells Colston (perhaps rightly), “You’re all dried up inside, I can tell that.” (359) Though his boyhood moment which we witnessed seemed unconsciously possessed by his crush on her, she seems insensitive to his onetime devotion when she asks, “Don’t you feel any need of love?” and adds “Everyone should get married.” (359) She then commands the aged go-between, who her fiance once dubbed “Mercury, the messenger of the gods,” to assure her grandson that there is no curse on him (which the young man believes prevents him from asking the woman he loves to marry him). She implores Colston to tell her grandson the truth about her love for Ted, “Speak to him, tell him there’s no spell, or curse, except an unloving heart.” (360) The go-between ends by walking to the young man as bearer of the message of love, the story which began the film (along with, perhaps, a confession of his “spell”). His story, to be told after the film ends, both continues and concludes the fracturing and dislocation of time with a spiral return to love and passion, a formal technique that would also mark the end of The Proust Screenplay and the beginning and end of Betrayal.