The Lost Life (3 page)

When they are done, they stroll, side by side, back up the central path of the rose garden and soon kneel at the trimmed hedged border of one of the flower beds. Here he drops his cap onto the lawn, then, opening the small rectangular tin, places it on top of the low hedge. Together they unpin the roses and place them gently in the tin. Then he takes a small piece of paper from his coat pocket, and, already folded, places it in the tin with the two white roses. And finally, reluctantly, he slips the ring from his finger and puts it, too, into the tin. He snaps it shut, strolls a few feet back to the arch, picks up a
stick he noticed as they entered the garden and returns to the flower bed, where he begins to dig a hole with it. The bed has been recently tended, the soil is loose, and the digging is easy. When the hole is deep enough, he buries the tin in the hole and covers it, all in an effort to make it look as though the soil has never been disturbed. But it clearly has. The only article left over from the ceremony is the ring on Emily’s finger. And when she eventually returns to America, she will wear this ring in public. Friends, acquaintances, even strangers, will remark upon the ring, but not to her. And, even if they were to ask, she wouldn’t tell them, for that would be to betray her special friend.

The tin is consigned to the secret earth, and they both wear the calm, peaceful expression that comes with a job well done. Then there is the sound of a motor car, loud and intrusive, coming from the driveway of the estate. Doors slam. They both look up and exchange anxious glances, then rise from where they have been kneeling and leave through the same archway by which they entered the garden, almost in the same way Catherine and Daniel fled the scene upon their arrival. They pause for a moment beneath the arch looking over the rose
garden, it would seem, one last time. Satisfied, yet warily eyeing the driveway, they retrace their steps. Neither of them notices his cloth cap, lying on the lawn beside the hedge where he dropped it and which has been forgotten in their haste.

Catherine and Daniel kneel in the thick foliage beside the rose garden, hidden behind the leaves. They are perfectly still, listening to the low, muffled voices coming nearer from the path just to their left. Then a man and a woman, dressed sensibly for a walk, but also, they notice, almost formally, emerge from under the archway and Catherine knows who they are straight away. They are not the owners. They are not to be feared, but having concealed themselves in the bushes it is now impossible to reveal themselves. Besides, the couple, absorbed in their own company, give every impression that they would not welcome an intrusion.

She is the woman from America, who teaches drama at a girls school in California. She is staying with her aunt and uncle in the town, occupying one of
the cottages adjoining the large house they have rented for the summer. Catherine knows this because she cleans the house and cottages every other day. Miss Hale, as Catherine calls her (although she knows perfectly well her name is Emily), has been living in the town all summer. She has even got to know her a little, for Miss Hale is a friendly woman who is very interested in everyone and everything around her. She has an enthusiasm for the town and the countryside that Catherine has warmed to, for it is not a condescending enthusiasm. It does not make Catherine feel ‘quaint’ as some of the holidayers in the town, from different parts of the world, do. There is also something theatrical about her, at least to Catherine, for she often talks like the drama teacher she is. Especially when referring to her ‘girls’ back home, almost as though she fashioned them herself, so that, wherever they went in life after their school years, whatever they did, they would always have the stamp of Miss Hale upon them. And Catherine, right from the beginning of the summer when this woman started to open up to her, could feel the pull of being one of Miss Hale’s girls, of wanting to be one of Miss Hale’s girls. The fun of it all, but, more importantly, that sense of being outside the march of
usual female society. Of being different. Being special. Being one of Miss Hale’s girls. And perhaps Miss Hale senses this, for, on the occasions that they chat (Catherine often asking about the distant wonderland of California, with its vast blue skies and sun, the likes of which she can barely imagine), Miss Hale asks what she does, and takes more interest than most people from the town in the fact that Catherine (and she is quite proud of this) will soon begin her final year at school, literature being her first love and her whole reason for studying at all; the rest, geography and maths, the things you have to get through because they make you. Miss Hale is most interested. Who does she read? Who are her favourites? Has she ever heard of so-and-so, who might be good for a young woman such as Catherine to read at this particular time of life? Yes, Miss Hale takes an interest in Catherine’s studies, more than most around her. In fact, she takes an interest in Catherine’s studies in such a way that Catherine is beginning to feel that she has, to some extent, been taken under Miss Hale’s wing. The same wing under which she takes her girls, for Catherine has lately begun to feel, to understand, just what it might be like to be one of Miss Hale’s girls. That, in just being one of her band, one automatically
grows and leaves behind that fine line that separates adolescence and adulthood, being a girl and being a young woman. One is spoken to like a grown-up. One gives one’s views on a variety of subjects in the company of equals. More importantly, one trusts and receives trust on the unspoken assumption that it will never (on pain of death) be betrayed. And, ultimately, one is judged fit to receive confidences. That sense of being taken under Miss Hale’s wing early in the summer, the interest Miss Hale took in all she did, it struck Catherine later, might not just have come from her friendly nature but the result of curiosity, a desire to find out if this young woman was fit to receive confidences. If it was a test for which Catherine didn’t even realise she was sitting, she apparently passed it. Yes, she had, it seemed, been found up to receiving what confidences Miss Hale might see fit or find necessary to bestow upon her. She had, in fact, already received one.

For it was, in just such a way, that Catherine first heard of Miss Hale’s special friend. You may, she told Catherine early in her employment, you may, from time to time, see or meet a special friend of mine who comes up from London to visit. You will do me a service more valuable than work, she
suggested, if you say nothing of it. And Catherine had nodded, saying nothing, both flushed with the tone of the request (one adult to another) and intrigued as to whom it could possibly be. It was all part of that world of confidences and trusts, the kind of confidence bestowed on Miss Hale’s girls and the kind of trust expected of them. If, her manner clearly implied, if you were one of my girls (and if you attended my college you most certainly would be, for, you have, her manner once again clearly inferred, that something extra that all my girls have), you would know without being told the need for discretion. She doesn’t use the word ‘secrecy’, Miss Hale. Whenever she speaks to Catherine on the subject of her special friend, she instead speaks of discretion. And care. And, on one such occasion, as if to dispel any unnecessary sense of mystery, as if to explain that this required discretion was no affectation, she spoke, in distant terms, of someone she knew, a dear friend who had made a most unfortunate match in his youth and married a very weak woman. And don’t imagine that the weak don’t have power, she’d said, gazing from her cottage window on to the garden below, they have enormous power. The selfishly weak will always rule the strong.
For they cling and they hold on long after they have any right to. This is the selfishness of the weak. They hold on to things long after they have any right to, just so nobody else can have them. Do you know such people, she had asked, turning her head back from the garden the way actors do on the stage. Just the way actors do when they have revealed something of their inner character and are momentarily vulnerable. Catherine shook her head and Miss Hale had smiled. Good, the smile implied. You are lucky. Let’s hope it stays that way.

Without as much being said, Catherine was given to understand, very early in her employment, that such discretion was crucial, in case this woman, this weak woman, who held on to things longer than she had any right to, intruded upon their special time together. For, although she was weak, Catherine was given to understand through the urgency that Miss Hale radiated when speaking of these visits from her special friend, she was, this woman, cunning, as the weak and selfish inevitably are, and not to be under-estimated. She follows him, this woman, plagues and turns up just when he thinks he is alone. It is not an exaggeration, Miss Hale had suggested, to say there are even times when, with
some justification, he can lay claim to being haunted, her friend.

‘You may even know of him,’ she once murmured, with the faintest of smiles, not even a smile but a hint that one was not far away, a suggestion that when Catherine was out of the room and she was alone, Miss Hale might allow herself a smile, and a vaguely satisfied one at that.

It was said in such a way that implied her friend was known to the public and that she may very well have seen his photograph in the newspaper, or perhaps not. And then, Miss Hale had dropped the matter, as if having gone too far, become too loose in her talk. For what was noteworthy to Catherine about this particular remark was that Miss Hale was not simply passing on information important in assuring that these visits were treated with discretion, but almost (and that shadow of a smile had suggested as much) in the manner of someone passing on a piece of gossip. Passing on a piece of gossip because they just can’t help themselves, and, almost simultaneously, reprimanding themselves. For with that hint of a smile came the shadow of a boast. And this was what was so noteworthy about the moment: that Miss Hale was not a boastful woman and yet
she had almost let one slip from her. A slip that would, in Catherine’s estimation (as, indeed, it would in Miss Hale’s) have been beneath the lady.

Nonetheless, when Catherine arrived one morning early in the summer to begin her tasks, she observed the tall, stooped figure of Miss Hale’s friend standing by the drawing-room window of the main house, and she couldn’t help but stare. She did indeed know him, and when Miss Hale saw this, Catherine noticed, once more, the caged bird of a smile fluttering beneath her control.

But she kept all this to herself (until later when she told Daniel, for she never imagined that discretion excluded him). And on each occasion, the two or three times that the matter came up in conversation with Miss Hale, Catherine nodded, making it perfectly clear that she understood everything. That discretion was guaranteed. That her loyalties could not be doubted, Miss Hale’s confidences were in safe hands and her trust would be returned because Catherine was, if not in fact then at least in spirit, one of Miss Hale’s girls.

And so, here they are, Miss Hale and her friend, no more than twenty feet or so away from them. Catherine and Daniel are perfectly still, two children
hidden in the leaves, desperate not to be found out. It is only the second time she has seen Miss Hale’s friend. He is tall, not stooped this time, his shoulders back as he stares ahead up the pathway, his stance as formal as the neatly folded white handkerchief in the breast pocket of his coat. Then, slowly, as if to unheard music, Miss Hale and her friend emerge from under the arch and stroll slowly up the central pathway of the rose garden.

They are solemn. Happy, but solemn. And it is this very solemnity that draws Catherine in. As they pass by directly in front of them, she has no fear of being discovered, for they seem to belong to another time and place altogether — a time completely outside that which Catherine and Daniel are experiencing. They are at once real and ghosts from another age. They glide by in front of her as if inhabiting another garden in another time. And, without knowing exactly why, from the bits and pieces of their history that Miss Hale has offered up in conversation from time to time, Catherine is sure that they are enacting something they never did, once upon a time, when this act was there to be performed, but which, for one reason or another, never was. And it is possibly for this reason that they
seem to inhabit, as they now approach the end of the pathway at the foot of the house, another time. There is a then-and-now manner to the way they move through the garden, a grace, a solemnity that belongs to another age, and implied in it all an order of feeling that may well have gone out with the horse and buggy — an old-world couple in an age of uncertainty, with its constant newspaper talk of war and revolution and choosing sides.

They turn at the top of the path and face the garden. He removes his cap and turns to her. They hold hands. He speaks softly, words meant for two people and two people only. And the moment he is finished, his eyes raised in the manner of a question, she nods. He replaces his cap, reaches into his coat pocket and fishes out a tin of some sort, like a tobacco tin, from which he produces a small golden object. And it is then, while Catherine is absorbed in the spectacle of Miss Hale and her special friend, who now face the garden as if facing an assembly or a congregation, that she hears laughter. Low laughter, muffled laughter. But laughter nonetheless. And she is not sure at first where it is coming from, for she feels as though she has been hypnotised by the spectacle, by the day and its sleepy heat, and is
only now shaking the sleep off her and returning to the here and now. Drawn back to reality by this laughter that, at first, she can’t place. Then, as she snaps free of the spell the garden has cast upon her, she turns to see the curved, sneering, laughing lips of Daniel beside her. She could kill him. This is no time for laughter. Not even happy laughter, let alone the sniggering laughter of the Daniels of this world. Her heart has gone out to Miss Hale. Her heart has gone out to the Miss Hale she knows about from the scraps of personal history that have been offered up to her (how they met in a garden in Boston and parted in a garden, and are now, for all she knows, reclaiming their garden), and her heart has gone out to Miss Hale in the same way that it goes out to a paper character in a novel, a character who is travelling the winding path to what may or may not be a happy ending, depending on the whims of the novelist and the nature of the characters he has created. Please, please, her whole attitude, her whole pose suggests, let them be happy. Let nothing go wrong. They must be happy. But just as her heart went out to Miss Hale, this laughter broke out beside her, the spell was broken, and the very thing she dreaded became a possibility. For what has only just
preceded his laughter is the longed-for moment when the man declares his love, the woman accepts, and happiness is theirs. While Catherine’s heart was going out to Miss Hale, her special friend had taken that small golden object from the tin, which Catherine knew with absolute certainty was a ring, and was poised to place it on the finger of Miss Hale.