The Lost Life Page 15

  That was the end of Miss Hale, or it would have been had Catherine not, in the mid-seventies, picked up a critical study of Mr Eliot at a second-hand bookshop one Sunday afternoon. She’d flicked through the book in her car and come to a stop at a section entitled ‘Burnt Norton’. She, of course, knew the poem, had never ceased reading Mr Eliot, and he had never ceased to be her poet. She didn’t feel the need of other people’s opinions (since they were bound to get it wrong), and so rarely read the critics or biographers. But this was one of those never-ending Sundays and she’d picked up the book with eager relief. And when she came to the section entitled ‘Burnt Norton’, she noted there was also a photograph of the house, of the drained pools and the rose garden, and she mentally occupied her place in the foliage, sighed all over again for Miss Hale, and urged her on to happiness as if it were still a possibility. At the same time she noted that the critic, apparently a learned Eliot scholar, had written that there was nothing personal in the choice of location for the poem. Catherine gave a brief smile. She had never, over the years, let on to anybody about Miss Hale and the events of that summer and autumn. They were personal, and entailed confidences and trusts that could never be broken. In this respect, Catherine had remained one of Miss Hale’s girls all of her life. She had received Miss Hale’s trust, and she would never betray it. Let them write what they will. Catherine was there; she knew otherwise, knew the power and significance of unrecorded events that may as well never have existed, and letters that end up in wastepaper baskets and that may as well never have been written. There was also a superstitious part of Catherine that entertained the idea that a betrayal of trust somehow bestowed a curse upon the betrayer. She, who in her youth had scoffed at the idea of Mr Eliot and his Furies, was now wary of them.

  There was a brief footnote on the page that suggested Mr Eliot may have visited the house with a friend. Miss Hale’s name was not mentioned. She had become the footnote that she must have always feared she would become. The crying girl who may as well never have existed, whose essence ends up stoppered in a small bottle, whose name may or may not be remembered depending on the whims and interests of those who uncork the bottle. In the seventies and eighties, however, the nameless footnote was finally named, and a number of biographers ‘discovered’ Miss Hale. And there was speculation as to the importance of Miss Hale: was she the muse in the rose garden? Or was she simply an old friend who was merely coincident with the moment? Who really knew? Throughout it all, Catherine kept her confidences.

  Somehow, and she couldn’t remember how, Catherine discovered that Miss Hale died alone in 1969, three years after Mr Eliot’s death, in Massachusetts. Miss Hale would have read in the papers, as indeed Catherine had, about Mr Eliot’s marriage to his secretary in 1957, would have subsequently learned about the happiness of the marriage, and Catherine could only wonder what she thought whenever she spoke of it or was asked. For Catherine is convinced that she would never have uttered her real thoughts for fear that they may have been considered ‘beneath’ the lady.

  It was about the same time that Catherine heard of Mrs Eliot, dead in an asylum in London years before, protesting her sanity till the end, although she apparently had few visitors to protest it to; probably still in love, still waiting for Mr T.S. Eliot to return to 68 Clarence Gate Gardens. But all Catherine could remember were the walls of her flat, photograph after photograph, documenting her life with Mr T.S. Eliot, with Tom, photographs with her, preserved forever, as his ‘true companion’. And the faint whiff of ether, and the voice, the voice that Catherine knew already before she even heard it all those years ago because the poem in which Mrs Eliot would live on forever got it just right.

  And Mr Eliot? Catherine did meet him again, briefly. In 1939, a small production of The Family Reunion. Catherine played the young Mary, in whom she felt the presence of Miss Hale, the woman who waits, and waits. Mr Eliot had come all the way to Manchester to visit the cast. They were introduced one at a time, and, being the youngest, Catherine was the last to shake his hand. He showed no hint of recognition, and she never let on that they had, in fact, met before: she made no enquiries as to the welfare or otherwise of Miss Hale, made no mention of the book he signed for her one ‘awkward’ morning five years earlier in the town. When the handshake was complete (and his hand was as cold as she remembered), she stepped back and watched the rest of the cast ask eager questions and soak up his every word. Westminster Abbey on legs. She smiled inwardly. Did he enjoy the role of public monument? Or was it merely useful? A way of getting through the day? The talk, the eager questions from eager readers, the polite answers, all something for the public man to do while the private mind was elsewhere? He gave nothing away, and only once, at the end of his visit, did he give Catherine a sideways glance, almost conspiratorial, as if to say, ‘Yes, I do remember you now,’ and as if to further add, ‘That’s just between us.’

  It was the most minute of glances and whether anything was really in it she will never know. Not that she would ever have betrayed the confidence of Miss Hale or intruded upon the private life of the public monument that had been so kind to come all this way for their little show. Nor would she have ever told him that she didn’t really much like the play, that people didn’t talk poetry, that he should stick to the printed page and leave the stage alone. (Years later she performed in the play again, this time as the older Agatha — detecting the sad formality of Miss Hale’s conversation — and loved all that poetry she dismissed when she was young.)

  Mr Eliot had stayed for an hour, patiently answering questions about the meaning of this and the meaning of that. Then, after tea and cakes, he had been escorted to the door by the director. And it was as they paused in the doorway that Catherine heard it, the booming laugh of the public monument, the laugh that told you that no matter how cold the shake of the hand may be, the heart was otherwise. How else could he possess such a laugh, the kind of laugh that turned heads and lifted the spirits of everybody in earshot? Then the laugh faded, he left, and Catherine never saw him or met him again. Nor did she ever know if Miss Hale came to visit again from faraway California, or if she still wore his ring.

  And with that thought, Catherine now plunges her hand into her dress pocket and clasps the small tobacco tin with its contents that can surely be of no interest to anybody else. ‘That’s just between us,’ his glance may very well have said. Did she return the glance with the most minute of nods? And did he see it and was he reassured? Perhaps. For years the tin lay buried in the bottom drawer of her chest in her old bedroom in the town. And amid the comings and goings, the films and stage shows and the travel to fabulous places, the living here and there, her marriages, her own ‘special friends’, she even managed to forget about it. Until her mother died in the early eighties and her things became Catherine’s. And she simply thought to leave the tin there at the bottom of the chest, that is, until the wedding invitation arrived and she knew that Fate had stepped in and deemed the moment right for the thing to be returned to its proper place. Miss Hale and Mr Eliot were gone now, and the pact they made in the rose garden (sealed inside the tin) was no one’s business but Miss Hale’s and Mr Eliot’s. And it is because it was no one’s business but theirs that Catherine has never unfolded the piece of paper the tin contains and never read whatever is written on it. They are private words, a private testimony briefly exchanged years ago, and intended to be stored out of harm’s reach, in a secret burial place away from the glare of the sun, the change of seasons and the passing of the years. Now the time was right for the thing to be returned to its proper spot in the garden. Where it had lain briefly before Daniel, in a long-ago, youthful prank, had claimed it for her.

  With the children now fled from the foliage and the sounds of the wedding behind her, Catherine kneels by the edge of the rose garden and, with a stick picked up along the way, proceeds to dig a hole in the ground, deep enough to take the tin. And when the hole is prepared, she takes the tin from her pocket and cons
igns it to the earth, quickly filling in and smoothing over the surface with leaves and dry earth so as to create the impression that the ground has not been disturbed. And, as she does, she could swear that the roses, in the full glow of their second blooming, incline towards her, like old friends, welcoming back into the garden the things that are rightly theirs.

  The task completed, she rises, brushes the dirt from her dress and hands, and turns to the marquee. The bride is calling to her, the children who had just before burst from the foliage are now running wild over the front lawns of the estate, and a photographer is organising everybody for a group shot. The young couple whose impetuosity has brought them all together are standing at the centre of the group, and as Catherine leaves behind the rose garden, she focuses on the young couple and her heart goes out to them, urging them on to happiness as she did all those years before when Miss Hale and her special friend made their visit to the house and exchanged confidences in that deeply private world of the rose garden.

  The string quartet, hired for the occasion, strikes up, and the music is instantly, though faintly, familiar to Catherine. Throughout the photographs, the toasts, the talk and the laughter, it remains tantalisingly so. Now melancholic, now urgent, as though impatient with itself, until a flurry of sounds end with the jabbed, emphatic final note that signals the end of the movement, the end of the whole piece, the music slowly fading in the open air of the old estate, but never quite gone: at once still, yet still in motion; resolved, yet restless for more. Never quite done. And as she stares out over the lawns to the rose garden, Catherine pictures the old tobacco tin containing the remnants of the lost life and wonders if such things can ever be buried deep enough.

  Acknowledgments

  Many thanks to the following for their help during the writing of this novel:

  To the Earl of Harrowby for showing me around Burnt Norton and for sharing his insights; to Max and Ailsa Scott for their generosity and kindness and for allowing me into Stamford House, Chipping Campden; and to Barry Kettle for showing me through the adjoining Stanley Cottage. Thanks also to Elizabeth Devas.

  To Shona Martyn, Linda Funnell and Jo Butler at HarperCollins, and my agent Sonia Land (and all the gang at Sheil Land) for their support and enthusiasm.

  Finally, my special thanks to my partner, Fiona Capp, for her constant support, suggestions and advice, not just in the writing of this novel, but all of them. And to Leo — the lion-hearted boy.

  About the Author

  Steven Carroll was born in Melbourne. His first novel, Remember Me, Jimmy James, was published in 1992. This was followed by Momoko (1994), The Love Song of Lucy McBride (1998) and then The Art of the Engine Driver (2001), which was shortlisted for both the Miles Franklin Award in 2002 and France’s Prix Femina literary award for the Best Foreign Novel in 2005, The Gift of Speed (2004), which was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award in 2005, and The Time We Have Taken (2007), which won both the 2008 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for the South-East Asia and South Pacific Region and the Miles Franklin Award 2008.

  Steven Carroll lives in Melbourne with his partner and son.

  Praise for The Lost Life

  ‘Carroll’s prose is limpid and assured … [a] poised and beautifully burnished work. Carroll’s control is masterly’

  Andrew Riemer, The Sydney Morning Herald

  ‘Carroll’s ability to turn an ordinary moment into something sacred makes this novel a profound exploration of human desire, endurance, maturity and regret’

  Bookseller + Publisher’

  ‘This novel will consolidate Steven Carroll’s reputation among Australia’s literati … Carroll is as much the literary ringmaster as novelist in The Lost Life, but remains as “rewardingly eclectic, intelligent and involving as ever”’

  The Week

  ‘[a] brilliantly envisaged novel … few novels begin with such measured elegance’

  Sunday Tasmanian

  ‘its capacity to evoke a kind of sharp, sad nostalgia for an unlived past takes you by surprise. To enter the narrative is like entering into a slightly faded but exquisitely tinted photograph encased in gilded frame.’

  Canberra Times

  ‘this is not so much a departure as an arrival … Carroll’s fiction is distinctive for the way his clean prose decelerates experience, puts aside the urgings of linear temporality, to reveal a richness that habitually evades us … his beautiful and poetically attentive novel retrieves a warm, beating heart from Eliot’s haunted, stark, magnificent work of art.’

  Australian Literary Review

  Praise for The Time We Have Taken

  ‘Carroll’s novel is a poised, philosophically profound exploration … a stand-alone work that is moving and indelible in its evocation of the extraordinary in ordinary lives’ Miles Franklin Literary Award Judges, 2008

  ‘The result is a deeply satisfying encounter with the empty spaces that the suburb failed to fill both between people and inside them. The surface of Carroll’s writing is deceptively calm … Carroll takes time to tell an untidy story with a gentle sense of wonder. His prose whispers loud.’

  Michael McGirr, The Age

  ‘It is the creation of a larger concept of suburban life in all its transcendent possibilities that makes this novel so special. Carroll’s revelations of these beautiful insights into our utterly ordinary world make him a writer worth cherishing. His prose is unfailingly assured, lyrical, poised.’

  Debra Adelaide, The Australian

  Praise for The Gift of Speed

  ‘Carroll’s gift for evocative storytelling … had me captivated’

  Australian Bookseller & Publisher

  ‘Carroll’s a rare beast in that he writes with great affection and understanding about life in the suburbs … A lovely rites of passage novel that is oh so carefully crafted and captures the evanescence of time to perfection.’

  Jason Steger, The Age

  ‘Carroll’s writing is astonishingly assured.’ James Bradley, Australian Book Review

  Praise for The Art of the Engine Driver

  ‘Carroll has choreographed his story too well to be obvious. Resist the urge to flip to the end. It’s the journey that rewards in this book, not the destination’

  The Age

  ‘A veritable gem … a beautiful discovery’

  Elle France

  ‘An exquisitely crafted journey of Australian suburban life … fresh and irresistible’

  Miles Franklin Literary Award Judges, 2002

  Other Books by Steven Carroll

  Remember Me, Jimmy James

  Momoko

  The Love Song of Lucy McBride

  The Art of the Engine Driver

  The Gift of Speed

  The Time We Have Taken

  Copyright

  Fourth Estate

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

  First published in Australia in 2009

  This edition published in 2012

  by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia Pty Limited

  ABN 36 009 913 517

  harpercollins.com.au

  Copyright © Steven Carroll 2009

  The right of Steven Carroll to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him under the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.

  This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  HarperCollinsPublishers

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  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

  Carroll, Steven, 1949–

  The lost life / Steven Carroll.

  ISBN 978 0 7322 8481 7 (pbk.)

  ISBN 978 1 7430 9971 1 (epub)

  Eliot, T.S. (Thomas Stearns), 1888–1965 – Fiction.

  A823.3

  Cover design by Greendot Design

  Cover images: woman standing in meadow by Christine Cody/Getty Images; pink rose by Charles Gullung/Getty Images