The Lost Life (7 page)

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.

‘He’s left — her special friend. She’s been crying all night, and they’re blaming it all on this wicked woman he married, who apparently won’t let him be. It’s ridiculous! All I had to do was just stand there and set the record straight. But I couldn’t.’ At this point she looks across at Daniel as if she could strangle him all over again for getting her into this mess.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says, catching the look in her eyes.

Catherine doesn’t seem to hear or notice. She continues as if he has not spoken. ‘She tells me things in this funny way. Rather quaint. She turns it all into a little play. Honestly, I feel as if I’ve walked into a Henry James novel, and she’s desperately trying to tell me something, but she can’t just come out and say it. Today she played a scene for me.’ She eyes
Daniel, to emphasise the point. ‘I mean it, she
played
a scene. Does she know she’s doing it?’

Daniel shrugs his shoulders. He doesn’t know, the shrug says. ‘A scene? Of what?’

‘Something that happened when she was young, and I kept on thinking, this is familiar. But how?’ Catherine then stops and looks around, indicating they’ve probably walked long enough. ‘Later, I was flicking through my book of his poems, and there it was. The whole scene. Everything perfect. The look, the flinging of the flowers, the farewell. It was all there.’

‘Is she touched?’

‘No, she’s just sad, I think. And I could have made her happy. But I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t. In the end I just stood there and listened to it all with this bloody tin in my pocket. And don’t say sorry again or I’ll brain you.’ But she kisses him instead. Out here in the fields, with only the sheep looking on, they are free to do as they wish — provided no yokel comes strolling by. As much as she may have had the impulse to brain Daniel, she succumbed to the impulse to make love instead. To ‘make love’, she well knows, is to kiss, to embrace — to be ardent. And when Catherine thinks of making love, she thinks of
these things. But she also thinks about what comes after all the kissing and embracing. The undressing, the nakedness. Not so much a mystery as unknown. Hard to picture. Oh, she can picture certain things, whole scenes. But they are just pictures. Imaginings. She is sure that whatever really happens will be something quite different. Something for which she is unprepared and will always be unprepared unless she plunges. And so she is frightened of whatever it might prove to be, but wants it as well. With Daniel. For Daniel has come along. And with Daniel coming along has come a picture of what follows after the kissing. What some books call ‘intimacy’. What others call ‘going to bed’. If you have a convenient bed to go to. Some of the young girls from the town have made their way out to these fields on summer and autumn nights, and already done it with other young men of the town. A few have even got themselves in the family way. But only a few, for as much as she’s been warned off ‘going too far’ (and that is another way of putting it) by the school mistresses because it would make you a ‘fallen’ woman and get you pregnant, her observations of couples and marriages in the towns she’s lived in have taught her that it is actually rather difficult to get pregnant.

During the summer with Daniel, Catherine has reached a point where she has tired of simply thinking about all this, she wants to
know
it, this mystery dance that everybody knows the steps to and that she doesn’t. Not yet. Most of all, she’s met the boy she wants to dance with. Or, rather, she’s met the boy, and, well, now feels that the inevitable should inevitably follow. She smiles briefly to herself because she imagines that Daniel would like that line (he’s the sort that likes lines), even though she stole it from a favourite book by Mr Somerset Maugham. But she doesn’t tell him because she’s dwelling on the summer and the happy coincidence of Catherine and Daniel that has transformed it. And she has more than a sneaking feeling that all the talk from her school mistresses about pain and hardship and duty is just the talk of middle-aged spinsters who’ve never actually done it, never would, and who now console themselves with the belief that they are better off without it.

So, when Catherine makes love to Daniel, when she kisses him and holds him, as she does now (instead of braining him), she feels pleasure. She likes to receive pleasure and she likes to give it. Her nature is ardent. And as she kisses Daniel, she remembers again that ‘ardent’ is their word.

But they have a problem: nowhere to go. The local girls may be happy to give themselves up to a roll in the country fields with their young men but Catherine isn’t. For her, there is nothing romantic about rolling around in a country paddock with the grass and the dirt and the sheep bleating. You went there because you had nowhere else to go, and, if you weren’t careful, you came back with grass stains all over your dress telling everybody in the town or within eyeshot exactly what you’d been up to. No,
they
were ‘going to bed’. And she’s communicated this to Daniel, who understands perfectly, because, for all the crazy little pranks he gets up to, Daniel is head over heels in love with Catherine, and, for all his professed belief in the objective forces of History, he has precisely the kind of subjective outlook, the kind of sensitive nature, that would make him a complete disaster in a revolution. He (as does she) has no time for all that guff in the novels of the infamous Mr Lawrence, where that combination of earth, dirt and sex becomes the gateway to some long-lost organic society. No, it was so serious you couldn’t take it seriously — that world in which characters knew each other with the fullness of ‘dark knowledge’ as they rolled around in country fields exchanging all
their vital sensual reality and whatnot. Catherine and Daniel, in fact, have had many amusing conversations in the language the two of them call Lawrence-
sprechen
. The infamous Mr Lawrence may have been worshipped back at university, but Daniel just had to laugh. And so he agrees with Catherine.
They
are ‘going to bed’. But where? Friends’ places? His friends were all back in Cambridge. And he didn’t have a room at university any more. He was leaving; he’d finished his degree. He’d really only come back to the town to say goodbye to his father — the town itself did not mean a great deal to him. He’d only been vaguely aware of Catherine. That she was new, that her mother was a school teacher. He hadn’t counted on this — on their spending the whole summer together and now the beginning of autumn. On, well, falling in love. But he has, and soon enough he’ll be off. It was all planned. All organised. Tickets. Places to stay, people to meet. The whole venture has acquired an inevitability that can’t be avoided. But he’s fallen in love, and now it is complex. And time is dwindling.

And so as their mouths unglue and they look about, they are still confronted with the same problem. The problem that has plagued them all through the summer and into the autumn. The
problem still unresolved, like a question left hanging in the air as they talk and wander back to town.

Later, the sun sinking over the town, Emily Hale watches from a market stall as this Catherine (to whom she has become attached and whom she trusts, as she would one of her girls) kisses, briefly, her young man in the street. It is a brief kiss but filled with implication — that they would be more than happy to linger over each other in this way but not in the plain view of the street, with its market-day stalls. The restraint on the part of these two young lovers adds, she notes, poignancy to the brevity of the kiss, giving it a force and power that almost makes the kiss, to the observer, a felt experience. A ‘felt experience’? This phrase occurs to Emily Hale because Catherine has recently used it in her presence. And it seems to have stuck the way some phrases do, for it comes back to her now as she watches the young lovers, while also congratulating herself on being ‘up with’ the latest terms.

If she were to tell Catherine this (and Catherine is oblivious to her presence, has no awareness of being observed at all — not by anybody who
matters
that is), one part of her would smile. For it is a fashionable phrase that the critics Catherine reads use now when they are talking about poetry — that the right words, used in precisely the right way by someone gifted in the use of words, provide the reader with a ‘felt experience’. It is also the test of great writing — if it is ‘felt’ or not. Catherine is happy with the phrase for she is sure she knows what it means and that good writing has exactly that effect on her: she feels as if she is there, in a story, with all these characters she cares so much about. And so, when a character bites into a ripe peach, one feels the skin break and tastes the juices, and with this feeling comes a hearty regard for the power of words. Catherine is continually told by those who write about poetry that words aren’t what they used to be. Once upon a time, the things people did and felt and the words they used to describe it were all one. Words had natural power. And mattered. Not in the modern world. But a ‘felt experience’ brings back the glory days of literature when words did matter, and with that brings back the promise that words might just matter again someday — someday
soon, when people will tuck into a book as they tuck into a pie. Daniel calls it waffle because as much as he is one of these sensitive types who would be completely lost in a revolution, he not so much smells a rat as a dusty gentlemen’s club where everybody sits around sniffing all this ‘felt experience’ like they would a vintage port, while the ‘felt’ reality of the actual world goes completely unnoticed outside in the mines and factories where people are ground daily into early death.

Nonetheless, when Emily Hale, from the safe distance of a market stall, watches the lips of the two young lovers reluctantly part, it is a felt experience. With the experience, comes a familiar yearning. And, once more, her heart goes out to this eighteen-year-old Catherine, to whom she has become attached, whom she has taken under her wing, a protectiveness that now has added urgency because she knows that the young man, whose lips Catherine would dearly love to taste again if they were not in plain view of the street, is leaving soon. Leaving for foreign parts, just as a young man once left her.

They are a young couple who haven’t yet discovered, because they are too young, that when young lovers part, even ardent young lovers, they do
so forever. Her heart goes out to them, but she is also aware it is not only for the eighteen-year-old Catherine and her young man that her heart goes out.