The Lost Life
Authors: Steven Carroll
The Rose Garden
Early September, 1934
On a bright
autumn day, in the early afternoon, two young people set out to cross the mile or so of open sheep country that lies between their town and an estate nearby that is rumoured to have pools. The day is at its hottest, and Catherine, who carries a bag containing togs and towels, is ready to throw herself into the water without changing if the rumours prove to be true. The sounds of sheep are all around them, even when there are no sheep to be seen. The occasional bull gives them a menacing once-over, but her companion, Daniel, walks across the fields, as if the sheer confidence of his stride is sufficient to render all property communal — he, Catherine, the sheep, the cattle, the birds that are perched in the shade of the trees, farmers, tradesmen, students and lords alike all share the land together, and the cattle,
detecting no sign that the young man feels out of his territory, leave the couple alone.
Out here they are free. No small-town eyes. They pause and kiss. Often. Long, aching kisses. They walk on, their faces, their skin, hot from the day, the walking and the kissing. They have come this way as much to be alone as in search of cooling pools. But the pools would be nice, convenient even. Instead of just undressing in front of each other, which they have never done, they would be bathing together. Bathing is good like that, gives you a
reason
, she thinks, as she tramps along just a bit behind. Lets you get undressed, or almost. People get about when they’re bathing as they never would on the street. Yes, pools would be nice.
They enter the estate gardens through a fence not far from the long, winding driveway. Strictly speaking, this is trespassing. But Daniel isn’t hearing any of this either, for it is known that the house is unoccupied and has been all year. Catherine follows. He is, after all, four years older, and knows his way around.
The old wooden gate slowly closes behind them and they pause where they stand, Catherine noting that this would be the perfect place, later in the day,
to watch the sun set over this part of the Cotswold Hills. They stroll on, and those few paces transform the afternoon. The vegetation is suddenly dense. The leaves are thick on the trees, the earth is soft, almost moist, and the air is cool and soothing. But, more than this, there is the feeling of entering the storybook world of children’s tales as removed from the ordinary world as Catherine and Daniel are now from the drowsy heat of the autumn sun. It is by pure accident that they haven’t entered the property through the driveway. They have no map, but know generally where the place is, and have happily stumbled into it their own way. Had they come along the driveway there would have been no sign telling them the name of the place. All the same, they know this is Burnt Norton.
An odd name for a house. But its history, of which the locals are vaguely acquainted, is also odd: a history of dissolute barons, drunkenness, loose women, madness and whatnot. Whether by drunkenness, design, or drunken design, the original house had burnt to the ground centuries before and the new one was named after it. And, to an extent, it isn’t just the promise of the estate’s pools (however murky they may be) that has drawn Catherine and
Daniel here, or the chance to be alone; it is also the place itself and the lure of a bit of local colour.
Now, the leaves dappled, the sun bright, hidden, then bright again, it is the storybook strangeness of the place that Catherine is registering, as much as the cool, soothing air around them. And while she is staring up at the dappled leaves and the canopy of branches above her, she feels Daniel’s lips on the back of her neck, and she smiles, but gives him the slip. Ardent, that’s what they are. Two characters in a novel she read the day before were ardent, and she thought, yes, that’s us too. ‘Ardent’ was their word — although she hasn’t told him yet. It’s a good word, and a strong one too. And so when his lips touched her neck, she thought ‘ardent’, then slipped out of range of his lips and his arms and grinned.
When they finally wander out from this thickly wooded part of the estate and onto one of the house’s many lawns, glumness falls across their faces. There, before them, is the rumoured pool. Drained. Without the prospect of watery relief, Catherine lets out a slow groan as she touches the pack containing their togs and towels and communicates her disappointment to Daniel with a roll of her deep brown eyes, the same deep brown eyes that he has
gazed into all summer long without once tiring of them. He shrugs his shoulders. She, hers in return. What can they do? There is the pool for which they came, directly in front of them. Drained. And, what’s more, it has clearly been drained for some time. Its edges are brown where the summer sun has dried the moss. As they stroll slowly around it, the sun, which had gone behind a small cloud, bursts upon the open, blue sky and hits the bottom of the circular concrete pool, creating a blinding glare. And, for a moment, it seems as if a miracle has happened: that the heavens have filled the pool for their pleasure and their use alone. As Catherine stares into the dazzling spectacle (but not for long because the light is blinding), she feels as though she might just be able to dive right in and drench herself in the element of air instead of water. Then the sun goes behind another small cloud and the pool is no longer filled with sunlight, but is simply drained and empty, as drained of sunlight as it is of water.
They walk on, cross the lawn, and there are two more pools, but their hopes are dashed again as soon as they look at them. Drained, both of them, and, with no more clouds in the sky, the sun is in its early-afternoon ascendancy, and the day seems
hotter than ever. Catherine gazes upon the larger of these two pools, a long, rectangular affair, and imagines propelling herself, dolphin-like, end to end, until she is cooled to her bones and exhausted. But there will be no such swim. Nor, she realises, will they be permitted that moment of discreetly disrobing behind bushes somewhere, slipping into their togs and getting a good look at each other because they would be bathing, after all, and looking is allowed. That would be disrobing with a purpose. But without the purpose, without a
reason
, they have no excuse, and the world requires an excuse before it can give you permission. Presently, they pass between the two pools and out into the rose-lined aisle that leads up to the house.
Pruned rose bushes stand like servants either side of them as they walk up the crumbling path to the red-brick arch at the end of it; path, shrubs and wall, all daubed in sunshine and shadow; the feeling, like stepping into and strolling through, an impressionist painting. Catherine, having cast off the disappointment of the drained pools, is now gliding up the aisle, lulled by the abundance of greens, pinks and reds all around her, while Daniel follows a pace behind her, more intent on the figure than the landscape.
Then they are under the archway and out into the rose garden. There are hedged squares of roses, white and pink, all around them, and as they come to a stop she turns to him, eyes alight, as if to say, hang the pools, we’ve got this. All of this, she sighs, and no one to see it. A shame. But the thought has no sooner passed through her mind than she concludes it is as it should be. The property is unoccupied, there are no gardeners about, and this is a private viewing, all the more thrilling for being so. She imagines that the flowers are greeting them, as guests, welcoming these two young people into their home. But of course they are not. This is what her books of literary criticism and critical terms (at eighteen, she is preparing for her final year of school, a childhood illness having kept her from starting school until a year after everyone else) call the ‘pathetic fallacy’. No, the rose bushes are not gracious hosts, and Catherine and Daniel are not their guests, and the flowers are not inclining towards them as if to greet them. That is just the length of the stalks and weight of the blooms bowing to gravity, if anything. To invest these flowers with human characteristics, as having the manner of hosts (and gracious ones at that), is to indulge in the
pathetic fallacy. Flowers are neither happy nor sad nor gracious nor rude, and sunsets pass without melancholy on the part of the sun or on the hills behind which it nightly sets. Nor do the trees and flowers or, indeed, this country house itself require human eyes and emotions to see the days through. Nor do they need to be observed by human eyes in order to exist. They simply are, thank you very much. And she smiles at that. For, in spite of her literary texts, the insistence of Mr Ruskin (who coined the term), and her awareness of the pomposity of the pathetic fallacy, she is aware that she has been talking to the flowers, and the flowers have just answered back.
Soon they are lounging on the lawns at the front of the house (obviously trimmed and well-maintained by absentee staff). She opens up her pack and takes out two cheddar sandwiches. Daniel carries the weightier objects in his pack, two bottles of beer wrapped in wet newspaper to keep them cool. She’d never drunk beer until this summer. Cider, yes. But she’s getting a taste for beer. Daniel likes his beer and insists on getting two bottles when they go walking. It is accepted that she will only drink half of her bottle (as she always does) and so
he downs his smartly, knowing that another half is still waiting to be savoured. And, although the local brew isn’t particularly strong, the combination of sun and beer makes itself felt almost immediately.
Daniel, who was born and raised in the town, is back from Cambridge, Downing College, as he is every summer. Only this is the last time he will come back for the holidays in quite the same way. He has finished his degree and will soon, at the end of autumn, leave for Paris to study more, and, quite possibly, just lounge about. He has, his father (a shopkeeper in the town — greengrocer and small goods) maintains, picked up bad habits at the university. He’d left the town a sensible lad (albeit one known for being a bit of a prankster and a daredevil), and come back at the end of that first year proclaiming himself a Marxist. Marxist, in his father’s mind, was nothing more than fancy talk for troublemaker. And he hadn’t spent the last twenty-two years bringing up his boy (the last twelve by himself) to be a troublemaker — whatever toffy way you might find to say it. Daniel told his father that half the university was Marxist. Marxism was the future and it worked, he told his father. And his father replied that it might be the future but nobody
in it worked. This new way of looking at the world and the laws that governed it was apparent in everything Daniel said and did. And so it was no wonder that he strode through the countryside, as he had an hour before, in a way that suggested to all forms of animal life around him that the world belonged to everybody. He was, as it were, ideologically equipped for just such a stride and just such a manner of walking. A manner of walking that, in its very assertiveness, was a political act.
Catherine is originally from Broadheath, just outside Stretford, her mother a school teacher who had come to the town only the year before. Her father, who had defied family tradition and not gone to the mills but joined the merchant navy, had set off on a voyage to India when Catherine was two-and-a-half and never come back, even though he’d told her mother often enough that she was beautiful (too beautiful for him) and he was head over heels in love with her, and that he could never live without her. Intermittent cheques arrived in the post from various parts of the world, until they ran out with a letter telling his wife what proved to be a cock-and-bull story about being held in some jail in Calcutta. Two years later (the war over) he was seen by her
mother’s sister promenading through a park in Manchester with a new suit and a new girl. Together, mother and daughter have now lived in various parts of the country, but this town, her mother says, is the final stop.
Daniel is twenty-two, Catherine eighteen. But, he freely acknowledges, she knows just as much about life, and neither of them feels the age difference. He’d escaped the confines of the town to university, where, instead of discovering the intricate structures of Elizabethan songs, sonnets, rondels and running rhymes, and the kingdom of individual experience they communicated (as he thought he would), he discovered, through reading Mr Marx, the impersonal iron laws of History, laws that united all private lives on Earth as surely as the laws of gravity kept everybody’s feet on the ground — or ought to. The world, he was happy to tell Catherine and anybody in earshot, was falling apart and thugs were rising from the rubble. This was no time for poetry. She agreed the world was falling apart (you only had to look at the newspapers) and that thugs were rising from the rubble, but she didn’t see why you had to throw out the poetry. Byron didn’t, she said one day, and that shut him up for a moment.
Daniel had escaped the confines of a small town, she’d told herself all summer, and the very next year she intended to as well.
And, as much as the town might have suggested that they started hanging about together because she had no father and he had no mother (Daniel’s mother had died with the flu when he was ten) and that they were united by private grief, the fact was they just liked the look of each other. Neither of them was dismissive of this or held it to be a superficial attraction; in time they both agreed that the things people like the look of tell you a lot about the people themselves. For they both had a certain kind of look: something out of kilter with the age. No fashionable clothes (for all his talk about the ‘future’, Daniel was strictly old world to look at), and she practically no make-up and possessing none of the graceful, flowing dresses that actresses wore on the screen, off-the-rack imitations of which girls wore on Saturday nights to make themselves look like actresses. But it was more than that. They both projected a kind of conservatism, a social conservatism that masked the rebel in him and the hunger for life in her. It was no surprise to either of them that they agreed on many things: politics, books, the town and just about everybody in it. And even when they
disagreed, they were united by a shared passion to do so. The only books worth reading, he’d say, were the ones that shook the world up. By this he meant, of course, that books — poetry, novels and, yes, the bloody doddering theatre — had to be political in some way. No, no, no, she came back at him, again and again. Too simple — a charge that Daniel took calmly and happily because he knew they were both on the same side. Poems, novels, stories, Catherine would say (and Daniel from the start admired her confidence, a confidence beyond her years), give people the lives they will never live and fill them with a yearning for something else, something more. A way of living in the world that doesn’t yet exist. Doesn’t yet exist but dreaming about it just might make it so. And books that speak about these things just might make it so by inspiring people to go out there and
create
their lives, not have their lives imposed upon them. Isn’t that shaking things up? Why do you think mothers and fathers and nuns snatch novels from the eager hands of girls of a certain age? Because they might get ideas — and we don’t want that, do we? And why do you think fathers snort at the sight of their sons with their noses stuck in books? Because they might just get above themselves, and what was good enough for them and
their fathers and their fathers’ fathers — the mills or the mines — won’t be good enough for their sons. And even though Daniel always felt there was just a bit too much of the Rugged Individual about all of this, he still couldn’t help but be swept up in her sheer enthusiasm — that and the sparkle in her eyes, alight with argument and energy.