The Lost Life (10 page)

Did this muse, did Miss Hale, not only want to step out of the shadows that her role demanded of her but also into the ordinariness of ordinary love, which she hovered over like a bird after a long journey, eyeing land? A destination longed for, and tantalisingly close, but never to be nested in.

The conversation seemingly over, Catherine turns to the door to leave. But it is then that Miss
Hale slumps onto a chair and invites Catherine to do likewise.

‘Ah, so good to have the house to ourselves. All of it.’

‘Yes.’ Catherine sits, nodding.

‘Not that I’m not grateful to my aunt and uncle for all they’ve done. They’ve been wonderful guardians. But it is good to have it to ourselves, isn’t it? Last night we dined with friends of my aunt and uncle. And the night before. And, of course, they are dear. And their friends. And all the small talk that friends share, which can be interesting or a little annoying depending on the talk and the evening and you.’

Catherine nods again, agreeing that all this is so, though more perplexed than anything by this sudden inclusiveness.

‘Company is good, but sometimes we can have rather too much of it. Don’t you agree?’

‘Sometimes. Yes.’

‘Like the town. It
is
pretty. And I do feel like I’m living in a travel brochure come to life — but it’s small, don’t you find? Confining after a while.’

Catherine, who is sitting more on the edge of her seat rather than on it, nods again, though she is not sure where all this is leading.

‘If you are born into small-town country life, no doubt it comes naturally. But you’re not, are you?’

‘No.’

‘Nor I. We’re city people who like the escape of these places. But not to live in.’

‘No.’

‘Do you have any plans for when you finish school?’ It is said as if to imply whatever the plan may be, it is to be hoped it will get her out of the town as much as anything else.

‘Yes. I’d like…’ and here Catherine hesitates, sure that what she is about to say will just sound silly. ‘I’d like to go to a university. It’s a sort of dream, I suppose.’ She sighs, her weight now sinking into the seat.

‘But these things happen. Like your young man. Daniel, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. But he’s very bright. Once you get past all the skylarking, he’s very bright indeed.’

‘But so are you, Catherine. Trust me, after years of teaching, I know how to tell the bright girls from the rest. They announce themselves. And you, Catherine, announce yourself.’

‘Thank you,’ Catherine says, a trace of a blush returning. She almost adds ‘Miss Hale’, but decides against it in the context of this newfound intimacy.

‘I always tell my girls — the bright ones — to believe in themselves. To have dreams. And to be bold in their dreaming. It’s odd how so many bright girls don’t, you know. Odd, how so many choose the conventional when so many have been born for far more than that.’

Miss Hale then rises and goes to the window and stares out over the garden as she had the previous morning. ‘These towns are nice — but to live in? Sometimes it’s so hard just to get away, don’t you find?’

‘Yes.’ Catherine laughs, as if to say she knows this only too well.

‘You and your young man, for instance. You must find it difficult to get away, to be some place without the whole town watching.’

Catherine stares back, knowing full well that she is not at all in control of the conversation, a conversation that still puzzles her. And now she is simply not sure what Miss Hale means. The town watching? Watching what, she thinks? But she nods
in response all the same, because the observation, overall, is true. It is hard to go anywhere without the sense of somebody watching.

And then, as if reading Catherine’s mind, Miss Hale says, ‘Of course, there are the fields. But they’re for sheep, aren’t they?’

Here Catherine laughs out loud, awkward but genuinely amused at the observation. And Miss Hale breaks into a smile, pleased, it seems, with the sound of a young woman’s laughter in the house.

‘For the sheep,’ Miss Hale goes on, ‘or the girls who don’t announce themselves. Or rather, shall we say, announce themselves in the wrong way altogether.’

It doesn’t occur to Catherine to think the statement snobbish or prim because she agrees with Miss Hale — this is exactly what she thinks. And to pronounce Miss Hale a snob (as Daniel would), she would have to include herself as well.

‘No,’ Miss Hale continues, ‘these towns can be so confining. When I saw you and your young man at the market yesterday evening, I thought — and I hope you don’t mind my saying so —’

And Catherine shakes her head — too readily, she realises, for she doesn’t even know what the
woman is going to say or where on earth this conversation is leading.

‘I thought … It must be difficult for them.’

This is a different Miss Hale again. Catherine knows the refined Miss Hale, even the prim Miss Hale. And she has also glimpsed the blunt Miss Hale who once liked you but doesn’t any more and drops the social niceties, as well as having witnessed the theatrical Miss Hale who lets herself go and subtly alludes to things that she can’t possibly tell you. Now, there is this other Miss Hale. Not the Miss Hale who hints at different kinds of love at the different stages of one’s life, but the Miss Hale who seems quite comfortable talking about sheep paddocks and the kinds of girls who use them.

And as Catherine nods she remembers once again that Miss Hale had been watching Daniel and her from a distance, that she had witnessed their kissing in the open, a market-stall kiss that Miss Hale had taken a certain pleasure in watching. More pleasure, quite possibly, than one might expect. But this time Catherine does not blush, for she now suspects that she has experienced something that Miss Hale hasn’t, or might once have.

Miss Hale then turns from the view out the window. ‘You don’t mind my saying this, do you?’

‘No, I don’t mind at all.’ And Catherine adds, a little coyly, ‘It’s true.’

‘I simply want you to understand that I appreciate these things. I was eighteen once, too.’

There it is again, Catherine observes, that note of regret. That sense of a long-ago garden, a young woman in another age, a young man, flowers flung to the ground, and that sense of something done badly, or not done at all. A memory, come down through the years, its power to haunt undiminished, for Miss Hale seems, quite genuinely, and it is not an act, to have slipped, irresistibly, into another time and place.

And it is while she is lost in that memory that Catherine decides to rise from her seat and excuse herself. As she rises, Miss Hale turns.

‘Oh, I kept you too long.’

‘Not at all.’ And Catherine means it. She would gladly stay on, but just when it appears that the conversation is finally at an end, Miss Hale suddenly remembers something. ‘Oh, but wait. I’ve something for you.’ She rushes upstairs to the connecting door, while Catherine waits downstairs in the drawing room, observing the view from the window, half
expecting to see a young woman and a young man, in the clothes of another age, standing in the garden.

‘Here.’ Miss Hale is back, a little breathless, holding a small wrapped package. ‘These are for you. I bought them for myself, but decided afterwards that they belonged to a younger woman than I am now. And, you and I, we are the same height. I think you’ll find they fit.’ And here Miss Hale smiles as she passes the package over to Catherine, who thanks her profusely for the gift, without knowing, or even possibly caring, what it is. It is a gift from Miss Hale to one of her girls. An affirmation that Catherine is one of those girls who announce themselves, and that Miss Hale is watching over.

It is only when she is back home in her room that she dares to open the package, that she dares to pull the purple wrapping from the gift. And when she holds the gift aloft, a faint, quizzical smile lights her face. Stockings. Expensive. French. By English standards, adventurous. Certainly not the stockings that a middle-aged drama teacher from Boston would normally be seen wearing. In fact, Catherine is not exactly sure that
she
can be seen wearing them. Of course, she will be. Given the right time, and the right place.

But what a thing? The thought of Miss Hale even
buying them, let alone contemplating wearing them, is intriguing, for it opens up the possibility that there may be another side,
many
other sides, to Miss Hale altogether. Catherine falls back on the bed, running the material through her fingers, that faint, quizzical smile still lighting her face. Who would have expected that? What a thing. What a thing, indeed.

A deserted laneway isn’t quite a sheep paddock, nor does it possess the privacy of a room of their own, but it is, nonetheless, where they stop. Catherine is backed up against a wall. Her arms are around Daniel’s neck and her fingers are digging into his hair, which he swears needs cutting but which she’d rather left long. Her mouth is glued to his, her tongue, like a life-form unto itself, has been let loose inside his mouth, its tip darting here and there. She seems to be taking in mouthfuls of him, and he of her. She never knew until this summer that kissing could be this delirious, have such power, to make you forget or just not care that there’s a world of people and houses and streets out there; everything
(their lips, tongues, fingers and limbs) has given itself over to these ardent ways of theirs.

And just as their lips are glued to each other, so are their bodies. His knee is in between her legs, pressing deep into her. In the language of the street and the schoolyard, this, she knows, is what’s called a knee-trembler. The girls at the various schools she’s attended (and she’s been to five) have talked of such things in a way that was both alarming and fascinating, but she had never experienced the thing until this summer. Her knowledge of boys and girls and what happens between them has been picked up in the schoolyard and through the books for and about young women and what happens in bedrooms, books that are circulated around the class, having been pilfered or ferreted out of a parent’s drawer or off a bedside bookshelf by some enterprising girl for both her benefit and everybody else’s as well — by one of those girls who do it, or say that they’ve done it. They’re odd things, these pages from manuals, with odd words and phrases that she and most of the girls at the school can’t help but laugh at because they’re funny, and also because they’re just a bit scary too — and laughing together makes them feel just a little bit less scared. But she’s not laughing
now, because along with his knee she can feel something else pressed against her as she leans back, eyes closed, against a wall, in a laneway, in a town, in a world, solar system … et cetera, et cetera. And if she thinks of the thing pressing against her, words such as ‘penis’ and ‘member’ and all the rest of those silly, bloody terms don’t occur to her. She simply thinks of the thing as ‘it’. If she thinks of it at all. For the one thing she has observed about moments such as these, when she looks back on them, is that she’s usually not thinking. She’s free of thinking. And it’s puzzling that she should feel such joy at being free of thought because she loves thought. But she’s also beginning to appreciate the sheer exhilaration of having all thought wiped away by touch. Certainly, at the moment, words don’t matter. Like Daniel, she’s all touch, no thought.

And Daniel, his mouth glued to hers, tongue to tongue, feels as though he is merging with her, almost as though they have collided and stuck, which is pretty much what has happened this summer, and what happened just a few moments ago when they found the laneway deserted, and, without even catching each other’s eyes, collided, and wound up pressed against the wall with their mouths glued to
each other. Did he start it; did she? Did she draw him in to her, or did he take himself there? He did, she did, they did.

But as much as the world seems to have been deliriously obliterated, they are suddenly jerked back into it.

‘Gotta come up for air sometime.’

Two men pass, and their voices, their footsteps on the stone path and the sounds of the high street just up to their right, bring the unwanted world back. But Catherine and Daniel don’t look up, and they don’t acknowledge the two men. They look down instead, waiting for them to pass, Catherine softly muttering something about why don’t people just leave other people alone. And it is true, Daniel is thinking, why can’t they? But because they are in a public place, these two men assume it to be a public matter, which they wouldn’t, of course, if Catherine and Daniel were arguing instead of kissing. No, if they were arguing or fighting these two men would look the other way and pretend it wasn’t happening. But, somehow, the act of kissing in public, the act of, as the phrase goes, ‘making love’ in public, is a public matter, and so the men say stupid things about coming up for air. And, as much as Catherine
is angered by their intrusion, she is also annoyed by their lack of imagination. These two men have interrupted a delirious moment, jolted Daniel and her back into the world, with a cliché. And not only, Catherine concludes, does the cliché reflect on the men who used it, it reflects on her and Daniel as well. They have not only been interrupted by a cliché, they have been cheapened by it.