The Lost Life Read online

  To Daniel, a little while later, she simply told the truth — and insisted, upon pain of death (which she would personally administer), that he never tell a soul. Had she read the letter? This was Daniel’s immediate question. Of course not! Did she know what was in it? No, she explained, she didn’t. Miss Hale had not chosen to tell her — it was, she assumed, personal — and Catherine had not sought to know. It was, Catherine explained, a matter of trust. No, Daniel corrected her, it was a matter of common sense. The letter could say anything and she could, quite conceivably, be drawn into a messy, if not nasty, situation. But that, Catherine replied resolutely, was all part of the trust. She might have mentioned the tobacco tin, the guilt, her subsequent unquestioning acceptance of Miss Hale’s request (and that it was all his fault, anyway), but didn’t.

  Now, in the all but deserted high street, Catherine kisses Daniel on the cheek, almost a peck, almost, she notes, in the way that Miss Hale might kiss her friend, or her friend Miss Hale. She has, she says with an apologetic grin, things on her mind, to which Daniel replies that he prefers her when she has only one thing on her mind. With a bigger grin on her face, she leaves, arranging the time and place that they will meet when she returns. And, as she goes, she is pleased to see concern in his eyes — concern that she might have got herself into something just a little over her head. But he also knows that she prides herself on her independent ways, and so he leaves his concern in his eyes where she can read it without need of speech or reply.

  Nonetheless, when Catherine falls onto her bed she can’t rest, let alone sleep. She can’t rest because she knows Daniel is right and she is pronouncing herself a fool for ever agreeing to Miss Hale’s request. She doesn’t want to go. She’d do just about anything rather than go. And as soon as she fully registers her response to being dragged into something she’d rather have nothing to do with, anger rises up in her. Anger at herself. Anger at Daniel. And yes, anger at Miss Hale for ever asking her in the first place. She, Catherine, would never ask this of anybody, she feels sure. For that would be to take advantage of someone’s affections. And one doesn’t take advantage of someone’s affections because that’s how one loses them. But Miss Hale has, and perhaps underlying the whole episode is the assumption on Miss Hale’s part that Catherine’s affections aren’t worth much. And the moment she thinks this, she decides she will not go. Miss Hale can do her own dirty work. Not Catherine. And if Miss Hale doesn’t like this, she can go and jump in the nearest river with rocks in her pockets! It is a rotten feeling. Rotten! And the best way to get rid of the rotten feeling is to just not go. It’s too much and Miss Hale had no right to ask. But the moment she thinks of not going, she remembers Miss Hale’s eyes that morning. She remembers her whole manner — that of a desperate woman who wasn’t thinking rationally any more but didn’t realise it. Desperate enough to ask a virtual stranger to do this, and, in so doing, open up her most private self to scrutiny. She can’t go. She must go. She’ll go.

  Paddington Station, she notes as she gets off the train the next morning, is not nearly as ugly as everyone has said it is, and does not, as someone famous once said, resemble hell at all. She likes the smoke and the noise and the people. She’s put in mind of French impressionist paintings, of stations with exotic names and steam engines and mist. It doesn’t exactly look like that, but she’s got no doubt that a good painter could make it look like that. But she also knows there’s no time for this type of dreamy thinking. There’s a job to be done, and the sooner the better.

  The signs to the Underground are easy and a holiday mood comes over her. But as she descends, the place takes on a vague resemblance not so much of hell as another world, and a faintly alarming one of shadows and dark figures. You must take the Inner Circle, Catherine. The Inner Circle. Miss Hale’s words go round and round in her head as she scans a large map showing her all the lines and all the stations in the city, and, as her fingers follow the line from Paddington to Baker Street, such a short distance, two stops, she smiles faintly at the simplicity of it all. Why do they make such a fuss? Feeling as though she’s lived here all her life rather than having just arrived, Catherine heads for her platform.

  After a few minutes’ wait, she hears the dragon’s breath of an approaching train for the first time and feels a sudden and surprising wariness about stepping into and giving herself over to this thing that creates such sounds and travels round in circles all day and night. And the quiet inside, everybody concentrating on newspapers and books, no one catching one another’s eyes, adds to the unease and unreality of the journey.

  As she steps out of the Underground (both grimy and somehow exciting) and on to the street, the thrill of arriving is overtaken by the thought of the task at hand. And it’s the nearness of the place and the task now that confuse her and cause her to walk in the wrong direction. She is walking along a busy street and reaches Madame Tussauds before she realises that Madame Tussauds is not on the map and that she is walking in the wrong direction. So she walks back to the station, losing time, annoyed with herself for getting just a bit too casual and, at the same time, imagining the disappointment of Miss Hale. Once more at the entrance of the station, she realises she was holding the map the wrong way round, and now reorientates herself and sees clearly where she must go.

  A few minutes later when she pauses in front of the designated flats, a block both high and wide by Catherine’s standards, she tells herself that she is simply a messenger. She has a letter to deliver, and a reply to receive. Apart from a brief introduction, she need not even be called upon to talk. And as someone leaves through the front door, she slips into the block and takes the stairs, looking on each level for the number she is after.

  When she comes to the flat, her breathing heavy from the climb and a rush of nerves and the residue of the rotten feeling from the night before, she notes that there is a line of light at the bottom of the door, which could be the sun in the room or an inside light. She wavers for a moment, but rather than wait and feel her courage drain she quickly steps forward and knocks on the door. Just get the thing over and done with, she’s telling herself. In ten minutes you’ll be back on the street. But there is no reply and she knocks again. After a third attempt, she slips the letter under the door, and feels a guilty sense of relief, knowing that her job is now done and that she need not meet the woman, after all. She can, she tells herself, do no more.

  But before she reaches the stairs, the door opens and a woman’s voice echoes in the landing. And it is not just any voice. She has heard this voice before, if not in fact then in her imagination. And, it is exactly as her imagination told her it would be. This, she knows, straight away, is the voice of the woman who follows her husband about, who is driven to place advertisements in The Times calling him home and clings long after she’s lost the right to cling. But the recognition of the voice goes deeper than that. This, Catherine knows immediately, is the voice of the woman whose nerves are bad and who threatens at any moment to explode. This is the voice of poetry, poetry Catherine has read again and again, poetry that she has absorbed to the point that she can quote whole passages without even trying. This is that poetry come alive, like a book talking, like a character suddenly stepping out of the page and addressing the startled reader. Startled, and more than a little frightened. For on the page she is simply the product of writing that makes one feel as though she is real, a ‘felt experience’. But, standing in front of Catherine, she is, well, uncomfortably there. This is that voice, and Catherine is astounded that she knows it so well. As it calls from the door and reverberates around the darkly lit landing, her heart sinks.

  ‘Are you from Tom? Did Tom send you? Did he ask after me? Is he coming?’

  It seems to Catherine to be a torrent of questions, all delivered on top of one another at great speed, no pausing in between for full stops or commas. No punctuation. Nothing. Just sheer urgency. Catherine turns to look upon the possessor of the voice that she knows so well but whom she is meeting
for the first time, and sees a small, frail-looking woman with eyes that seem to look straight through her with a dangerous, playful innocence, and Catherine’s impulse is to run.

  But she doesn’t. There’s nowhere to run. Besides, Miss Hale requires a reply, and for that she must meet this woman who, although small, seems, to Catherine, to be compact and tight, like a spring ready to let fly.

  The woman repeats herself. ‘Are you from Tom?’

  ‘No-no,’ Catherine stammers, amazed that she can talk at all.

  ‘Then what are you doing here? What are you doing knocking on my door? Who are you?’

  Again this torrent of questions. Catherine has only been in this woman’s company for a minute, possibly less, and yet, already, she feels exhausted and drained.

  ‘I was asked,’ Catherine says, noting that she sounds infinitely more composed than she feels, ‘to bring that letter to you.’ And here she points to the envelope that Mrs Eliot is holding (for though Catherine didn’t see it, Mrs Eliot must have picked it up when she opened the door).

  Mrs Eliot looks down at the letter, almost as if noticing it for the first time, then back to Catherine. ‘Who is it from? It’s not Tom’s hand. I know Tom’s hand, and that’s not it.’

  ‘It’s from a lady.’

  ‘What lady? Why couldn’t she bring it herself?’

  Catherine simply doesn’t know what to say, so she repeats what Miss Hale told her. ‘She felt that some things are best said in print.’

  ‘Did she? Then why didn’t she just post it? Are we still living in the eighteenth century?’

  The questions are relentless, but, Catherine notes, every single one is precise, to the point, and has a logic that is almost impossible to refute. And already, more than simply drained by her company, Catherine feels worn down, worn out. Yes, yes, Catherine might as well say, for she is not sure she has the strength to resist any more. You are quite right, Catherine may as well say, I have no answers. She may be small, this woman, she may have the appearance of being fragile even, but she is all nervous energy and cutting questions, and, all the time, Catherine is reminded of a spring, coiled and ready to let fly.

  ‘Very well, come in,’ Mrs Eliot says, more in the manner of a command than an invitation or request.

  ‘Come in?’ Catherine hadn’t expected this and would rather stay put, anything but step into that flat.

  ‘Yes.’ And Mrs Eliot looks her up and down, as if concluding that the girl might be simple. ‘Come on. You’re not going to stay out here, are you?’

  Again, the logic is irrefutable. Of course, it makes absolutely no sense to stand out in the landing while Mrs Eliot goes inside and reads the letter. And so she enters, and Mrs Eliot closes the door behind her, Catherine registering the distant sensation of her heart sinking even further, as well as the distinct smell of … what? Ether?

  As they sit, Mrs Eliot fixes her with a direct stare — one of intense scrutiny. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Catherine.’

  ‘Where are you from?’

  Catherine knows that this is precisely what she must not tell this woman, that the whole point of delivering the note was to keep this secret: where she comes from, where the letter comes from and so on. It is crucial, she knows this. And so she is vague. ‘The country. Up north.’

  ‘Where up north?’

  ‘A small town. You wouldn’t know it.’

  ‘Try me. I’m very good on small towns up north.’

  Is she making fun of her, or does she always talk like this? Catherine can’t decide. ‘Broadheath. Near Stretford,’ she says.

  Catherine did, in fact, once live there, so she can tell her this with some sense of composure. But Mrs Eliot is one of those people who sniff out lies and deception, and Catherine is sure she smells a lie. Mrs Eliot lets it rest however, for she is looking down upon the envelope in her hands. She may be thinking about where Catherine comes from and why she’s lying, and she may very well come back to that point later on. But Catherine is not really sure about any of this, for she is distracted. She is both staring at Mrs Eliot and, at the same time, opening her eyes to the overwhelming spectacle of the room in which she is sitting. So much so that she is only vaguely aware of Mrs Eliot ripping at the envelope and unfolding the letter. In front of her, behind her, all around her, it seems on all four walls, are photographs of her husband. From all the phases of his life — young, with the light in his eyes of someone just starting out, the dandy leaning on a brolly and on the brink of fame, to the brooding, mature face of the husband who left on a lecture tour to America in 1932 and never came back. And Mrs Eliot too, from the barely recognisable young woman she was to the one in front of Catherine now. It is impossible not to stare at them all. They demand to be stared at. They are inescapably present. In one that Catherine focuses on directly in front of her, Mr and Mrs Eliot both seem impossibly young. Mrs Eliot, happy, serene even, with none of the shifting edginess in her eyes that she now has, is almost unrecognisable. She is not the same woman. She is clearly vivacious, entrancing, and Catherine knows in an instant why Mr Eliot fell under her spell. They are seated beside each other (either newlyweds, or about to be married, deeply immersed in each other’s eyes). Hers are shining — the shining eyes, Catherine notes, of someone gazing upon the object of their adoration and the cause of this look of serene calm she wears. And Mr Eliot, so young he seems to be only just emerging from adolescence, stares back at her with the same longing. But also with what? A sort of trust, Catherine imagines. Yes, trust. As though the world will unfold for him with this young woman, as though with her it will give up its secrets, and with her, he will enter the secret society of grown-up living. Perhaps. Perhaps not. But the more Catherine stares at the photograph, the more she is certain that the young man that was Mr Eliot is handing something over, something he has long wanted to hand over, some part of him — what he might become, his potential, yes, that’s it — that he entrusts to her. And it is also an admission — that the grandness of his dreams (and his dreams are, indeed, grand) cannot be achieved alone; that he can’t do it on his own. And at the bottom of this almost childlike trust in the eyes of the young Mr Eliot is the assumption that she knows more about the ways of the world than he does, and that with her he will be initiated into them. And there is almost a touch of Daniel in that look, and a touch of Catherine in the eyes of the young Mrs Eliot. And she realises with a start that this is a portrait of two young people in love, realises that the man Daniel calls Westminster Abbey on legs was once just a boy with starry eyes. And the woman now reading the letter in front of her, who clings when she has long ago lost the right to cling, once had the dreamy-eyed look of a young woman in love, not a frail woman with that abandoned look all over her face. No, not that. But a young wife, prepared to move heaven and earth for her young man, and confident that she can so that they will both move forward together and live those grand dreams that drive him. And, once again, in the shared dreams and the excitement of setting out in life, she sees in this young couple that Mr and Mrs Eliot once had a hint of Daniel and herself.

  There is a sudden humph, then a sigh, and Mrs Eliot turns the page over with audible impatience, once more a coiled spring ready to let fly at any moment, and Catherine is wondering if that moment is now.

  The whole room is the same. Photograph upon photograph upon photograph, upon wall upon wall. In one, they are young, punting somewhere or other with friends. In another, Mr Eliot has lost that boyish look, as well as the trust, and Mrs Eliot is no longer a young woman with dreamy eyes but the brittle spring she is now. There are three people in the photograph, and Mrs Eliot is standing apart from the other two, as though she is not wanted and knows it. Mr Eliot is standing beside the long, thin figure of a woman Catherine knows to be the author Virginia Woolf, whom Catherine has never read, but knows one day she will have to. The whole room amounts to a chronicle of the years. A portrait of a marriage. But it’s more than that, for as Catherine looks about she
concludes that the room is, in fact, a shrine. A place of remembrance. An attempt to freeze time. A place for Mrs Eliot to dwell in and feel as though nothing has changed. Where Mr Eliot might walk in the door at any moment and they would both go on as though nothing had happened. And it is impossible, in this shrine of a room, at this moment, not to see Mrs Eliot as a kind of Miss Havisham, frozen in time. For the room is testimony that she once fell in love, that they fell in love, and that words of love and trust once passed between them. Facts, the photographs are pictures of facts, and above all the room is testimony to the fact that the years were hers, his and theirs — and that now, the years having flown, she simply doesn’t know how to let them go or what to do with herself. And as Catherine sits there, and as Mrs Eliot huffs and puffs her way through the letter, a treacherous compassion for this woman who clings to all of these things in the room rises in Catherine. For when she calls him her husband, and talks of ‘home’, as she did in the advertisement, it has the weight of the years documented in these photographs and all the memorabilia contained in the room behind it. And, at the same time, Catherine is also aware of a treacherous shift in her sympathies, and Mrs Eliot no longer frightens and unnerves her as she did just a few moments before. In fact, the very thought of Mrs Eliot had frightened her, such were the images that had inevitably taken root in her imagination after all Miss Hale’s talk of her. Such were the images that the poetry created. But now, against all her acquired sense of loyalty, Catherine’s heart is going out to this woman who clings, and whose right to do so, she concedes, just might be in the weight of all the years that went before when words of love and trust were surely exchanged between the two of them. And she is dwelling on this when Mrs Eliot slaps the letter down on her knee.