The Lost Life (18 page)

A high, singing note soars above Catherine’s head, hovers there, then joins with others and becomes a tumbling, descending rush of music, falling on her, for the music that she and Daniel first heard in the lunchtime concert at the local church has become the music of the summer, their summer song, and she feels it fall on her now as she leaves the bus stop behind, leaves behind the house in the high street that introduced her to Miss Hale, her special friend, the woman who clings long after she has lost the right to do so and that whole storybook world that came with them all. And that something else, that secret thrill of having delivered into the world a ‘felt experience’, precisely on cue, the right gesture at exactly the right time.

As she leaves behind the street, the shops, the houses of the town and wanders down the lane that only a few weeks before she and Daniel had found so conveniently deserted, she takes with her the sadness of Daniel’s departure and the curious sense of triumph and power that comes with doing other people’s living for them.

A string quartet
is setting up on the lawns. It is mid-afternoon and the autumn sun is still warm. The guests, all in their formal party clothes, are chatting quietly while a cellist tunes her instrument. Gusts of laughter and the shouts of children disturb the uniform murmur of the crowd from time to time. It is an inviting scene, but Catherine has slipped away for a few minutes. She looks back over her shoulder as she crosses the lawn. Everyone is still locked in chat. Her cousin’s husband is intent on mastering the complexities of his new camera while his granddaughter, in her white gown, is contemplating his confusion with a slow shake of the head. No one looks up. Good. No one has noticed that Aunt Catherine has given them the slip for a few moments.

When she reaches the rose garden, Catherine stops. The effect of being here again is stronger than
she expects. Or is it that, knowing it to be an occasion of some moment, she has stopped dead in her tracks because she feels she ought to stop — in deference to the occasion? Going back is always like that, she thinks; are we really moved, or do we merely think we
ought
to be moved, and therefore are? After a lifetime of manufacturing other people’s feelings on cue, she is a little sceptical of her own. Nonetheless, when she stops at the border of the rose garden she is moved, even if there is a faint element of performance in the moment.

Fifty years ago? Even more than that. Was it really? To Catherine, peering down upon the scene for only the second time in her life, nothing, neither the garden nor the house, has changed, just the world outside.

Behind her, a giant marquee has been set up on the front lawns of the house and a wedding reception is in progress. A marriage has taken place, just a few hours before in the town’s parish church; her cousin’s grand-daughter, at the age of eighteen, has impetuously married a young man in his early twenties. Everybody told them, everybody warned them: don’t do it, they said. But of course they did it. Catherine turns, and her eyes rest for a moment on
this young woman, now demonstrating the workings of the camera to her grandfather. Catherine, who, without any lasting regret, has no children of her own, looks upon this young woman as a kind of grand-daughter and there is a touch of the maternal in her gaze. Just then the bride looks up and sees the solitary figure of her ‘aunt’ on the edge of the estate lawns. They smile at each other. Even from this distance, Catherine sees the light of life in her eyes, and as she does the word ‘ardent’ occurs to her. ‘Ardent,’ she hums, is their word — this ardent young woman and ardent young man; together they have acted upon their ardent impulses and done this impetuous thing. The moment is theirs, she thinks, and whatever may follow — boredom, divorce or everlasting happiness — no one can take this moment from them now.

The smile is still in her eyes as she steps into the garden, roses pink and white glowing in the still light of the afternoon. The flowers, the drained pools, the house and sky that hangs above them all, untouched by the years. Dictators have tumbled (Herr Hitler won and lost his Rhineland), war has destroyed whole cities and murdered millions, the moon has been deflowered and the computer has been born.
But none of these things, or so much more that the years have brought, are in evidence here. And as she strolls up the central path, the rose stems inclining towards her like old friends welcoming her back into their timeless midst, the phrase ‘pathetic fallacy’ interrupts her thoughts. For as much as she tells herself that flowers are just flowers, she has been, nonetheless, mentally bowing to the roses and the roses have bowed back. A short conversation, enquiries about her welfare after all this time, where she has been and what she has seen are surely not far away.

And it is then, while she is lost in a world of memory and speculation, that she hears it. Laughter. The bushes behind her are laughing. She swings around. Did she really bow to the flowers? Did she talk to the roses, and is the shrubbery behind her now shaking with laughter? As she peers into the shady green leaves, two young children burst from the bushes, their laughter trailing behind them as they speed across the open lawn to the marquee. And she has no sooner registered their laughter than she has turned back to the shrubbery, now still. For she knows this spot, and the two young people it once concealed in another age, a time people now call
‘between the wars’, although nobody ever thought of it like that then. The eighteen-year-old Catherine and the twenty-two-year-old Daniel. They’re not here to be seen now, only the shrubbery and the low-hanging branches that once hid them, and from which Daniel’s laughter, too, once irreverently rose. And because they are not here to be seen, and only the shrubbery is, she feels the moment more. For this is the way it will be. This is the way it will always be. Disregarding the possibilities of fires and bombs and whatnot, earth, buildings and trees will all go on, while she, and everyone with whom she’s crossed paths, will not. Like Daniel.

They did see each other again. Briefly, for a week, when he came to see her on a short trip from Paris. But it wasn’t the same Daniel, not the same Catherine, not the same ‘them’. As much as he told her he was in love, his love did not travel with him. Nor did hers stand still and wait. And as much as they tried to pick up where they’d left off, they couldn’t. They’d grown, and grown apart. Foolish to think they could ever pick things up. That last glimpse she’d had of him, as he looked back to her from the rear window of the bus when he left the town to live in Paris, was the last time they looked at
each other through the eyes of two young people in love. And, perhaps, she’d known it all the time. Amid the sadness of things ending, of the summer being finally over, she had known that this was the way it was always going to be. That they’d given each other all they were ever going to give. His letters would come in, and her letters would go out to him. But one day, in their heart of hearts, they had known that the letters would stop. Perhaps she had known that the pain of having Daniel wrenched from her would fade, become a memory, and they would very sensibly just get on with things.

It wasn’t until years later that she learned from a friend who’d taught briefly with him that he married and slipped back into the country without ever telling her. And why not? What was there to say? That ‘ardent’ was their word, but that he’d wearied of their ardent ways? And that thing he was groping towards, that way of thinking about the world he’d talked about often enough but could never quite describe, yet felt sure he would find over there? Perhaps he did find it. In the mid-sixties, her mother, who was retired but liked, as she put it, to keep ‘in touch’, showed her an article in a literary quarterly by an academic at Birmingham with Daniel’s name.
It was, she’d said, an article about the new Citroën. You know, the car! A
serious
article. And Catherine remembered her mother shaking her head, not so much puzzled as disbelieving of this new world of ‘theories’. She couldn’t understand a word of it, she said, and what she did she didn’t like, but she thought Catherine might be interested. They were, apparently, a ‘school’, this Birmingham crowd, and that gave her mother a laugh. ‘Like fish.’ And she’d opened and closed her mouth as she’d laughed.

Catherine thought about Daniel more often, she imagined, than he ever thought about her, and was always happy that he seemed to have found that thing he was groping towards but could never see clearly enough to define. And although she’d sobbed and moaned when the letters stopped, and although she knew that they’d stopped because he’d met someone else, she’d also recognised that it was as it should be. They’d lived inside a golden circle but could never step outside. And, once they did, for the world in which the rest of their lives would be lived was always calling, they had to leave it all behind, their ardent ways and those golden circle days when ‘ardent’ was their word. And the difference in the lives they had lived since then only served to
confirm this. He, the academic, the teacher he swore he would never become, settled, apparently happy, in the same city (not far from where he grew up) all his life. His life (job, wife, three children and seven grandchildren), one, it seemed, of contented routine, no doubt punctuated by the odd prank.

He, all of this, and she the shiftless one. For when Catherine finished her final year of school, she did earn a scholarship to university (Manchester, not Cambridge), where she not only discovered acting but discovered that she was very good at it. Discovered that she not only had a natural gift for delivering a ‘felt experience’ on cue (a director’s dream) but delighted in the experience. Thrilled inwardly every time she felt the audience living, through her and her alone, one of those lives they would never live, but the experience of which she could give them for a few transcendent moments. And once she knew she had the gift, she nursed and nurtured it every year of her life. As she still does. For ‘Aunt’ Catherine is famous. Famous for the many gutsy women she has brought to life on stage and screen, for the many romantic and suggestive scenes she has had no qualms about doing and which, surprisingly, her mother took in her stride. And
famous for her political views, which, one evening on television, saw her going head to head with Mrs Thatcher and coming out rather well. And, even then, she could feel half the country surging behind her as she gave them a ‘felt’ political experience they’d so longed to have. So when she knew she had the gift of delivering such experiences, she nurtured it. What better way to give people all those lives they’d never live, those lives we inevitably lose in living?

And throughout her life (two marriages, a trail of boyfriends and lovers), throughout her career (famous for her outspoken beliefs about
living
life’s moments as they arise, the actress Daniel must surely have seen sometime, who’d lived much of her life both home and abroad), she never lost the memory of that first performance and her first audience, never forgot the eyes of Miss Hale in the bedroom of her cottage as they stared back at her, that unmistakable mixture of gratitude and shame written all over her face, never forgot the exhausted way Miss Hale’s body had slumped and her head had lowered, as though having finally experienced the very thing she had both dreaded and longed for all her life. And it was Catherine who’d given it to her.
But even though there was a mixture of gratitude and shame written across Miss Hale’s features that afternoon all those years ago, Catherine concluded that she’d chosen to disown the thing that Catherine had given her and for which she’d so longed — disowned it as being ‘beneath’ the lady. And after that day, the two women had never spoken again.

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.