The Lost Life Read online

  It is while Catherine is contemplating all of this that Miss Hale scrutinises her as she would one of her girls. ‘How old are you, Catherine?’

  ‘Eighteen.’

  ‘Ah,’ and she nods knowingly at the garden. ‘Eighteen.’

  It is said with sadness, with tenderness, and with the faint suggestion, Catherine imagines, that just as her heart had gone out to Miss Hale in the rose garden the day before, Miss Hale’s heart is now going out to her and whatever fate may have in store for her.

  ‘I remember eighteen. I see it so clearly, even now. I know to the young it must seem impossible that someone of my years could ever have been eighteen, but I see it clearly.’

  Catherine is on the verge of saying no, she doesn’t think that at all, but Miss Hale offers only the slightest pause before going on — either out of the desire not to have her thoughts broken or the fear of Catherine’s silence. ‘I’m standing in a garden. There are flowers in my arms.’ Miss Hale’s eyes are fixed on the garden in front of her and her voice becomes dreamy, even distant, not so much, it seems to Catherine, in the way that people go when they’re slipping back into the past, but in the manner of an actor playing somebody slipping irresistibly back into the past. Someone playing a role. What is more, someone used to playing the role, as though that’s all they’ve got to hang on to now, like people who make up the past in a way it never was but who play the role so often they eventually come to believe it is true.

  Miss Hale goes on to paint a vivid scene for Catherine. A garden, a long-ago garden. Miss Hale, eighteen, with flowers in her arms. And a young man, a handsome young man of whom great things are expected, is standing beside her. They have the garden to themselves. A party is in progress in the drawing room of the house behind them. Figures pass by the windows, laughter erupts. But the garden is still. Without turning from the view, Miss Hale tells Catherine that she remembers only happiness at this particular moment, which is why she remembers the moment so clearly. It is the thrill of pure happiness she remembers, the kind of happiness that you can only have when you are eighteen, with everything in front of you and no conceivable impediments to your happy progress. She can, she says, remember no other moment of such pure happiness and concludes that she was never so happy in the whole of her life, before or after, as she was at that particular moment in that long-ago garden when she stood at the foot of the garden steps, with flowers in her arms, and the young man of whom great things were expected standing beside her. Then the young man, who until that moment had remained silent, who had been content to gaze upon her, spoke, and a shadow fell across the autumn garden (as it now conveniently did on the garden outside), across her happiness, and across her eighteen-year-old heart. He was going away, he told her. For a year, possibly more. He was going away to Europe to study. Either she did not know of this or she had pushed the knowledge of his departure aside. She reacted with surprise, no, with shock. And it was then, she tells Catherine, as the shadow of his going away fell across her happiness, that, in the manner of a reflex, she threw the flowers to the ground and watched as they came to rest, motionless, on the lawn. And even now, Catherine watches as her arms fly out, flinging the phantom flowers to the ground all over again. At the same time, Miss Hale turns from the view and stares directly at Catherine, her eyes filled with … what? Catherine meets the look, a momentary one, but in that moment concludes that it is resentment that has filled Miss Hale’s eyes. A resentment that does not seem to be directed against any particular person, but a general resentment that such pure happiness could disappear so quickly, so easily, and that the world could let her down so casually.

  And, as if the flowers really were at her feet, as if she were turning away, not just from Catherine but from the young man of whom great things were expected in that long-ago garden of her nineteenth year, Miss Hale returns to the view, lost to the world, immersed in the combination of pleasure and pain that make the memory, even now, so immediate and clear. ‘Can we ever have them back, Catherine? Those years, those gardens and the door we would have opened. Can we ever have it back or are we just plain childish and silly to try?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘No, how can you? You’ve got it all in front of you, haven’t you? Eighteen, a handsome young man. Why should you even think about losing it?’

  ‘But I do.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘He’s leaving at the end of the month.’

  ‘Who is?’ Miss Hale’s eyes are alert, back in the present, in the here and now, as if her dreamy indulgences have caused her to miss something of vital significance.

  ‘Daniel,’ says Catherine, as if to say who else could we be talking about.

  ‘Is that his name? The name of your young man.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where is he going?’

  ‘To Paris. To study.’

  ‘Oh.’

  And at this point, as the two women stare at each other in silence, Catherine experiences, once again, the feeling she had just a little while before, that the heart of Miss Hale is now going out to her because Catherine is one of her girls, after all. And just as Catherine had willed Miss Hale on to happiness in the rose garden of Burnt Norton, demanding of the world and the forces that determine our fates that nothing must go wrong, she now feels certain Miss Hale is demanding of the fates exactly the same for her.

  And it was also then that Catherine’s fingers stroked the tobacco tin in her dress pocket, and then that she knew, beyond doubt, that she could never reveal the tin to Miss Hale. For, and she was sure of this, she was one of Miss Hale’s girls now, and she would have to live with her treachery as best she could. Miss Hale had lifted her wing and taken her under it, and Catherine had the distinct feeling of handing over some part of herself, of delivering some part of herself, or whatever it was that may remain of the autumn, into the care and the judgment of Miss Hale.

  It would, Miss Hale suggests, be best for Catherine to simply keep the book, so that it is ready to hand when her friend returns. His visits, she cautions, may well prove to be more erratic now and she would not want to deprive Catherine of the poems that she understands so well, and that nobody else does.

  Miss Hale holds the book on the flat palm of one hand, almost weighing it — not only the volume itself, but weighing up the burdens of the author, those who share, add to or ease those burdens, and the life that had to be lived in order to produce the words.

  He will, she says, come back when he feels he can. When the time is right. And it is as she hands back the book and as Catherine pockets it that Miss Hale reminds Catherine of the consequences of making a bad marriage. Her friend, she explains again, made just such a marriage. And this woman, this weak, selfish woman, is proving impossible to leave. Like all weak and selfish people, she clings to the things she has no right to cling to any more and turns everything into a nightmare. She hounds him at his work (the poor man has to escape through the back door), she follows him and appears when he least expects (she bobbed up at a book signing one day). And, most recently, she shattered the most private and beautiful of ceremonies (and although Miss Hale makes no specific mention of a place and time, Catherine knows exactly what she is talking about, and wishes once again that she could summon the courage to just reach into her dress pocket and produce the tin, and say, ‘Here, here it is. It is not what you think,’ but she doesn’t). And this, Miss Hale says, this desecration of a deeply private moment, is the reason he has gone. Because, she goes on, until now they had this place to come to, and it was all theirs, away from all the cares of the past and the all-too-immediate present. A place both secret and private. But like one of Mr Blake’s worms, she, this woman, found it out. Oh, she may not know exactly where they are, but she knows the general vicinity. Thank heavens, Miss Hale adds, it’s a popular region. And there is a glint in her eyes, a hint that this is precisely why it was chosen for their rendezvous in the first plac
e. Then her gaze rises to the ceiling, as if to suggest that Catherine can’t possibly imagine the effect of all this.

  ‘Have you ever heard of the Furies?’ she asks, and Catherine shakes her head. ‘No, no, why should you?’

  The Furies, she goes on, also expressing the hope that Catherine never meets them, are avenging goddesses who won’t let you be. They are, she says, the nightmare that follows you about in broad daylight. Of course, Catherine has heard of the Furies but had simply never considered the possibility that Miss Hale might be referring to them; she finds it inconceivable that anybody could seriously imagine themselves being followed by gods out of a Greek tragedy. That is just plain silly. But Miss Hale goes on, treating the whole idea as completely plausible, and Catherine is considering the possibility that such people might exist — as might the ghostly gods that follow them in broad daylight, making oohing sounds in the ears of those they pursue. No, no. Impossible. The people who believe in the gods enough to make them real might exist, but the gods don’t.

  ‘The poor man,’ Miss Hale continues. ‘He feels as though all he’s got to do, anywhere, anytime, is turn, and they’ll be there. And so he spends his days ignoring them, in the hope that if he ignores them long enough they’ll go away. But they don’t. And, of course, it’s not them, is it?’ she adds with sudden vehemence. ‘It’s her!’

  She sinks onto a chair beside the window, exhausted by the whole scene, and the final utterance that seems to have wrung the last of her energy from her. That, and the bad night to which her eyes bear testimony.

  After a long pause, in which she seems to have completely forgotten all about Catherine, she turns and smiles, nodding, acknowledging that, in this young woman, she has found a patch of fresh air in a tired, stale world. ‘He, my friend, assures me that he will return when he feels he can. He is very busy. But when he returns, he will, of course, sign your book. I will see to that.’ She smiles at Catherine as if to say that is that. Their conversation is now concluded.

  Catherine nods back, then turns to the door as Miss Hale rises from the chair to let her out. But as much as she is finished with the conversation, Miss Hale lingers in the doorway, looking this breath of fresh air up and down, and smiles. ‘Eighteen. I remember eighteen.’

  Out in the high street, following the curve of the road down to the marketplace, Catherine reaches into her dress pocket. The tin is there; of course it is. She had gone to give it back, to tell Miss Hale that it was all a silly prank that went wrong, but failed in her errand. Now they’re imagining Furies, and wicked women who won’t let things go are at the bottom of all this, when all the time it was a silly prank gone wrong. All she had to do was just give it back and unburden herself — and all of them — but she didn’t. And although she could feel the weight of the thing in her pocket, they were all weighed down by it now. And the moment that undid them won’t go. She’s convinced herself that the sensation of carrying around some sort of weight from these days won’t ever go now, and she will always be carrying it around with her. There was no giving it back, she’d missed her chance. Now she was a fake, and she knew it. One of Miss Hale’s girls, but also the cause of Miss Hale’s sleeplessness and tears.

  She stops, gripped with the impulse to throw the thing away, to walk down to the stream that flows near the town and throw it in. But what good would that do? The tin would be gone, but its weight would remain. And as she grips the tin and gives it a shake, she hears, faintly, a small metal object rattling around inside.

  She’d also wanted to tell Miss Hale that eighteen wasn’t so wonderful, anyway. That she’d been eighteen for most of the year and she’d never felt so alone. Until she met Daniel this summer, and, for the first time in her life, felt that there really was someone for her after all. And although she knew he was going away and may very well come back to her as he insisted he would because she was beautiful and he was head over heels in love, he might not either (her mother had married a man who was head over heels in love with her and he’d never come back). But, for the moment, there really was someone out there for her, and that had made all the difference to the summer. But it had nothing to do with being eighteen, and everything to do with meeting Daniel.

  A little while later she is sitting on a bench by the stream that runs through the town at the back of the high street, the sounds of sheep all around, the field in front of her glowing a deep autumn yellow. Still dwelling on the conversation with Miss Hale, she reaches into her pocket for the book (for no particular reason that she is aware of) and begins flicking through it. Her eyes are skipping over the pages, barely taking in the writing, when she stops. She stops because she has come to a poem about a crying girl, which she has read before but not closely. A girl, a young woman, is standing in a garden. There are flowers in her arms, which she flings to the ground, then looks back at somebody, somebody who is in the garden with her, with resentment in her eyes. It is, Catherine quickly realises, a farewell scene, but one that is almost acted, like a silent movie.

  Catherine looks up from the book and stares out across the field. Had she previously read the poem more closely than she thought? Had she taken its images in more than she thought? And when she had stood listening to Miss Hale this morning, had she arranged the scene in her mind and imposed the poem upon her? Or, had Miss Hale absorbed the poem so much that, in time, she felt that this was the way it happened, this was, in fact, the way her friend had left all those years before, and, as a consequence, did she become the crying girl? And so, this morning, did she play the scene like that, knowing that Catherine would be familiar with the poem, and see, straight away, that she, Miss Hale, was the girl who cried, flung flowers and looked up with resentment in her eyes? All so that Catherine would understand that it was she, Miss Hale, who was the inspiration for so many of the poems that Catherine loved, and which she felt that she understood and nobody else did? That it was Miss Hale who was always in the lines or written in between them? Always there, in some shadowy way or another. But always a shadow.

  The bleating of the sheep, the stream, the yellow glow of the field all disappeared and dissolved. All she could see was the artfully framed picture of Miss Hale that morning as she stood at the window, and she was asking herself if shadows ever tired of being shadows. Do shadows long for substance? Do muses, consigned to background silence, ever grow tired of their silence? And is this what Miss Hale was doing, stepping out from the shadows? You are familiar with the poem, she might have been saying, now you are privileged to learn where it came from. But, as much as Catherine finds this intriguing to contemplate, there is also something disappointing in this. For it reminds her of that flicker of a smile she detected on Miss Hale’s face when she told Catherine that she may know her special friend (in the way that ordinary people know the famous). There was a hint of … what? Yes, a hint of gossip about the whole episode that was beneath the lady, but which the lady couldn’t resist revealing, all the same.

  It is while she is turning all of this over that she remembers the uneasy feeling she had at the time — that Miss Hale was acting. That Miss Hale was a drama teacher. And that she was putting on a performance for both Catherine and for herself. And, in so doing, the shadow stepped out of the shadows and assumed solidity; the background muse grew tired of her silence and found her voice. Her special friend may have departed (and she may very well be losing him — for the second time) but she at least had this: the knowledge that she had made it all possible. And with that knowledge came the role that she was now playing, a role that one could so easily step into and live for the rest of one’s life because that’s all one is left with. And so when the world closes in, when things go wrong and her dream of retrieving something of the past looks set to come crashing down around her, she becomes not just Miss Hale but the crying girl herself. It not only gives her a place to go, and a time when anything is still possible, but … a what? A consolation? That even if her dream comes crashing down, she will always be the crying girl. She wil
l always have that to show for it all. But only if somebody knows. For, as surely as the poem doesn’t exist until somebody has read it, neither does the muse.

  Then, as Catherine closes the book, another thought occurs to her. Had Miss Hale, quite simply, always been an actor? Had she played the scene like a melodrama the first time in that long-ago Boston garden, and had her special friend seen the actor in her and simply written down what he saw? A beautiful young woman living in the dream world of the stage that her guardians forbade her from entering. And because of that, did she then pour all her theatrical longings (and her storybook love) into the theatre of life itself? Did he see this? And did he catch sight of her in a way that she never could because he was standing beside her watching the performance and she was in the thick of it?

  Now, as she rises from the bench, Catherine takes with her not only the weight that comes with that small metal tin in her pocket but also the puzzling feeling that she has entered an odd story, one of those little drawing-room plays that people in books put on from time to time to amuse themselves on a drizzly day, or to pass the time on a dull afternoon.

  ‘I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t.’

  Catherine and Daniel are walking across open country outside the town. It is late in the afternoon, the shadows of trees lengthening over the fields. They have set out with no particular destination in mind, and when she suggests they head for a small town nearby, she knows it is too late even as she suggests it and when Daniel shakes his head she agrees. Besides, they have not come out here to walk to some designated place, but simply to be alone.