The Lost Life (2 page)

And so, with the discovery of these kinds of shared attitudes and shared passions, they soon discovered they liked the way their respective minds, behind the looks (to which they were initially attracted), turned over.

Now, he is lounging back on the lawn, idly eyeing the two-storey manor house in front of him while chatting about the local butcher and what a slippery customer he is. Didn’t she know? And he is about to continue when they hear voices coming from the direction from which they too had entered the estate. Without a word, both tacitly acknowledge that these voices may very well be those of the property owners, inconveniently come back just in time to spring them trespassing. They gather their things and scramble behind a line of thick bushes and low trees that look down upon the rose garden, but in which they will be safely hidden. As they
kneel on the cool earth in the dark shade of the bushes, Catherine looks up to him with her deep brown eyes smiling, noting — she will tell him later — that the Marxist in Daniel retreats fairly smartly when the landlord is on the scene.

On that same bright autumn day, a middle-aged couple set out for an early-afternoon walk. They are, at once, dressed for walking (sensible shoes) and dressed for an outing. The man, tall with a slight stoop, is especially sensible, wearing a tweed cap and light tweed trousers tucked into long socks, something like a golfer about to step out onto a fairway rather than country fields. But the top half of him, shirt, tie, light sports coat (white handkerchief tucked into the breast pocket), is attired for a more formal occasion. The woman wears one of those practical summer dresses that suit just about any situation. They give every appearance of being a couple, two people who have been together for most of their lives, who, perhaps, holiday regularly in the town and who have, for many years now, been
taking regular walks through this famed countryside. It is a postcard town, surrounded by postcard fields full of postcard sheep, and, to all appearances, they are a postcard English couple. In fact, they are American. And while couples that have been together many years may indeed hold hands, they are apt not to. Even then, it is not only the fact that these two people are holding hands that is noteworthy, it is also the way they are doing it. Their grip is firm, and at times their arms swing back and forth, not like a middle-aged couple but like two young lovers. They smile at each other frequently. She carries herself with the dignified bearing of an actor about to make an entrance, and her eyes shine, not with contentment but with the sheer delight of a young woman in love — the happiness of a woman who has kept her love inside her, stoppered in a bottle, and who is only now uncorking her happiness, releasing the young woman she once was because the time is right. She is almost two women: the one young, unselfconsciously releasing her happiness; the other mature, watching it all unfold. Together they experience everything twice over.

If they are any kind of couple, they are a mature couple giving themselves licence to be young. For
they first met in what must now seem to them like another world altogether, and is: Boston before the war, when she was eighteen (she is now forty-three) and he was twenty. She is Emily Hale, Miss Hale to the drama students she has left behind at a Californian girls school. She is a frustrated actor and always yearned for the theatre but having been born into Boston aristocracy she was forbidden by her guardians (her aunt and uncle, with whom she is staying in the town) to step on to the stage as a professional.

Miss Hale has left the job that she loves and her friends to be with this man whom she calls Tom. Had the world outside of that tight Boston society not called to him, had he not travelled to Europe and never come back, they might well have married in their youth as everyone expected and eventually become the middle-aged couple that they now give the impression of being as they leave behind the high street in the town and head into the countryside where the ubiquitous sheep bleat and the cows wait. But, instead of living that life, this Tom of hers settled in England, married an Englishwoman, and became both unhappy and famous. When he is not being called Tom by his family and friends, he is referred
to as Mr Eliot, in journals and newspapers. For this is an age in which critics of literature (and Mr Eliot is both a poet and critic) refer to their subjects as Mr So-and-So, or, occasionally, Mrs or Miss So-and-So. Mr Eliot, Mr Yeats, Mr Pound. The name that Tom — who is adjusting his cap and eyeing the fields for cattle because cattle unnerve him almost as much as humanity does — the name with which Tom presents himself to the world, the name by which he is known and read (indeed by Catherine and Daniel, who are, at this moment, discovering the disappointment of the drained pools of the estate), the name that he sends into the world with his books of verse and criticism, is T.S. Eliot. In tweeds and old cap, he is Tom. But it is in his best suit of T.S. Eliot that he is known to the world.

Emily has been living in the town throughout the summer. As soon as she arrived, Tom rushed from what society calls a ‘difficult’ marriage, and an even more difficult separation, to be with Emily Hale, whom he first met (and never forgot) at a Boston soiree in another life, when he had played Mr Knightley to Emily’s Emma Woodhouse.

On this bright autumn day, at the suggestion of her aunt and uncle, they have embarked on the short
mile or so walk to the eighteenth-century manor house of Burnt Norton. The house, they are told, is nothing special. But the rose garden, they are assured, is worth the walk. And, as the house is unoccupied, they are also assured (in the manner of a friendly wink) that they will not be disturbed. The house is not famous, and no one ever goes there.

As they enter the estate’s grounds through the same gate as Catherine and Daniel had not long before, Emily Hale, who precedes Tom, pauses and notes that it would be an ideal spot from which to observe the sunset. He nods and they stroll on through the green shade, holding hands as they have for most of the walk. But as they leave this thickly wooded section of the estate and approach the open lawns, Emily rushes ahead. She turns, raises her voice as she looks up to the treetops and the sky, and loudly, theatrically, pronounces everything perfect: the day, the time, the place. She also calls back to him, demanding to know if they have everything they should. He checks his pockets and assures her that, yes, everything is here. They have all they need. Nothing has been overlooked and nothing can go wrong.

It is this exchange that Catherine and Daniel, currently lounging on the lawns in front of the house,
drinking beer and chomping on cheddar sandwiches, hear. And it is this exchange (the two young people assuming it to be an exchange of the owners, not two interlopers like themselves) that prompts them to pick up their bags and bottles and take cover in a patch of thick shrubbery and low trees that look down upon the estate’s rose garden.

At the same time, Emily and Tom come upon the drained circular pool. Bright sunlight (the pool is set in a small lawn, open to the sky) fills the concrete pool and they stand for a moment, speechless, transfixed by the glare. It is dazzling, but they are drawn into the intense, white reflection, struck motionless by its blinding light. Then a small cloud passes over and the pool is as drained of light as it is of water. Released from the spell, they move on, almost floating over the lawns as if in some hypnotic state until they come to two more pools a little further on. In the same trance they walk slowly, without speaking, up the path lined with roses, pass under an arch and out into the rose garden, humming pink and white in the autumn sun, which still retains the heat of summer.

In fact, neither Emily nor Tom needed to be told that the house was vacant, nor did they require
the reassuring wink that they would be undisturbed. They’d already been here. They’d already discovered the rose garden the previous week, along with the pools that dazzled them then and dazzled them just now.

Today, they have come prepared. As Emily leaves the archway and walks towards a hedge-boxed bed of flowers, she takes a small pair of scissors from her dress pocket. She pauses, admiring the sun on the flowers, then selects two white roses (it is a private joke, for he affects support for the White Rose of York, which amuses both of them, for it
is
an affectation, and as much as he tries to be English, he never quite gets his ‘Englishness’ right) and she cuts them off the bush, looking about the property briefly before doing so.

Her ‘special friend’, as she calls him when talking about his letters with her ‘girls’ at the college or those people with whom she is not intimate enough to mention names, is standing under the arch, bewitched, it would seem, by the combined spectacle of Emily, the roses and the garden. She closes the gap between them, her eyes upon his. There is a hint of a smile on his face; his eyes are both focused on her and far away. She knows the
look; he is both here and not here. He is, she knows, someone who is either continually looking back or looking forward, one of those who feel the pastness of a moment even as they are living it; who feel, at odd times, ordinary moments as if already having lived them, as if living them, and as if about to live them, all at once. He is either dogged by nostalgia or drawn into yearning for something more. She, although knowing all this, is much better at simply living the moment, in the here and now, without too much looking forward or back, or towards other worlds, other realities behind the ‘appearance’ of this one. Emily Hale is better at simply doing things without the eyes of Emily Hale looking on. And as she reaches for his coat lapel, he lowers his eyes and notes her nimble fingers pinning the bloom to his chest as perfectly and securely as he would dearly love to pin this moment, in all its detail, to that part of the mind where memory is contained, and which he draws upon when he picks up the pen to write. To pin these moments to a page, with such perfect ease, poetry without the poetry, that would be something. His eyes flicker, she pins the second rose to her dress, and, rising slightly on her toes, kisses him on the cheek. His face breaks into a smile and she nods.
Yes, that’s it, she seems to say: just let the moment take you without too much thought, for once.

She then takes his hand, leading him through the rose garden, along the central aisle that runs in between the boxed beds of roses, pausing occasionally, pointing to this bloom and that. And when they finally come to a stop, it is at the front of the garden, underneath the windows of the unoccupied house.

He removes his cap and runs his fingers through his hair, shiny, parted down one side, with a hint of brilliantine. And as they pause, arm in arm, they look out over the garden, almost as if surveying an assembly or a congregation. The roses, in their second blooming, glow pink and white in the heavy autumn sun, witness to the couple’s presence and what it is that they are about to do, for they have the appearance of two people paused on the brink of a ceremony.

With the rose pinned to his lapel, Tom inclines towards her, his figure tall and stooped, his face solemn, almost grave. She stands beside him, both facing the garden, but with their heads turned, eyes upon each other. They hold hands and it is then that he speaks, softly, slowly, almost a whisper, words that are meant for only two people to hear. It is brief,
and when he is finished he raises his eyebrows slightly, in the manner of a question. Without hesitation, the moment he has finished, she nods. If, indeed, it is a question that has been asked, it has been answered with a yes.

He then lets go of her hand, puts his cap back on, reaches into his coat pocket and takes out a small rectangular container, a tin of some sort. She watches, rapt, perfectly still, as he opens it and takes out a gold ring. But it is at this moment that his head jerks up and swings about, his nose, his brow, his eyes those of an eagle as he scans the garden, not so much in search of prey as intrusion. The lightness leaves his features, his eyes are concentrated, his whole bearing one of somebody on guard. It is as though he has heard something. Was it a bird, or was it, surely not, laughter? In front of a manor house that they have been assured is unoccupied, in a garden that should be free of people, he feels disturbed. As if the occasion has been intruded upon, even mocked, the way laughter cheapens a solemn moment, and he now scans the garden with eagle eyes as if seeking out the source of hidden laughter, somewhere out there in the bushes. But the garden is silent apart from the occasional calling of birds, and
the flapping of wings as they dart from one bush, one tree, to another. The eagle then relaxes, becomes Tom again, and turns back to the puzzled face of Emily, who is wondering what on earth could have caught his attention, for she heard nothing.

He lifts her left hand, as if preparing to bestow a kiss upon it, but instead slips the ring onto her third finger. She then, quite smartly (it is over in a second or two), accepts another ring that he takes from his coat pocket and puts it on his finger. He then kisses her cheek, and she his. The ceremony is done, but they linger, breathing in the moment and the warm autumn air.