The Lost Life (8 page)

At first Catherine isn’t sure what it is that has caught her mother’s attention, for her mother has, from time to time, looked up from the armchair where she is preparing her lessons and glanced at her daughter with puzzled curiosity. But it is almost furtive, and each time Catherine catches her glance, her mother quickly looks down again. The next time she looks up Catherine is quick enough to follow her mother’s eye and sees she is looking at her dress — at her knee, to be precise. And at first this is a mystery to Catherine, until she sees it, the thing that has caught her mother’s attention — a grass stain.

Catherine’s impulse is to cover the spot with her hand or the newspaper she is reading, but concludes that there is no point concealing it now. It has been spotted and conclusions are being drawn. Presumably disturbing ones. Now, it is Catherine’s turn to study
her mother, with her eyes on the notes in front of her, her face hidden under her dark, springy curls, almost wiry, the complete opposite of Catherine’s hair. Catherine’s deep brown eyes come from her mother, but her hair, fine and straight, comes from her father. Her mother taps lightly on the notes with the pencil she is holding, as she always does when thinking or pretending that she is. She hasn’t looked up since Catherine noticed the grass stain (for the first time) because, Catherine concludes, she knows her daughter is on to her. She now knows what her mother has been furtively staring at, and her mother is now scrupulously avoiding staring. Which, of course, only draws attention to the fact that she was staring. When two people have lived closely together over many years, Catherine thinks, they learn to read each other’s movements and gestures. And just as Catherine is sure her mother knows she’s on to her, she is also sure that she is drawing disturbing conclusions about the stain on her dress. Her mother is thirty-eight, and to Catherine’s knowledge has only ever had anything to do with one man — Catherine’s father. And although he bolted on her, she never passed on to Catherine any of the anger that she must have felt. She has never been warned off men, never
been told that they are all shiftless and untrustworthy and only ever want one thing, although, in the circumstances, her mother would have been perfectly entitled to. No, Catherine’s mother, a school teacher in the town, has always seemed remarkably composed about the whole affair. Who knows, she might have been glad to be shot of him. She has said as much on a couple of occasions, how she’s watched bad marriages stumble from bad to worse through the years, putting on a brave face to the world and doing nobody any good, and how she was possibly lucky to get it all out of the way and over and done with years before. And everybody, especially Catherine, better off for her father having bolted because he would have been a dead weight and bloody pest anyway. And the only thing you could rely on, of course, was his
un
reliability. Still, nobody likes to be left, and the two of them must, at some time, have had something that’s worth getting a bit teary about, her mother and this father of hers whom she’s visited back in Manchester from time to time, as you would an uncle. So Catherine has never felt that the hurt or whatever damage may have been done has been passed on to her. And this is something for which she is now grateful. She has, at school and in the towns they’ve
lived in, seen the damage done in damaged homes passed on from parents to children, as if it were only right and proper that they share the damage as they would the household jobs, one big happy damaged family. But not her mother. In fact, the older she gets (the grey is emerging where her hair parts in the middle, but she is free of lines around the eyes and mouth, Catherine is pleased to note), the more she admires her mother for containing the effects of the whole business, and for always having given Catherine, much more than other girls she has known, a certain independence. But it has always been understood as an independence that comes with responsibility for one’s actions. This, the fact that she is an only child and that there has been no father in the house, has always made Catherine seem (to others as much as her mother) like those children who grow up young, more mature than their years, capable of observations and a sort of wisdom that they shouldn’t really ought to have, except they do — and she does. But it’s the assumption of responsibility that Catherine is dwelling on at the moment, and the possibility that her mother may well be drawing disturbing conclusions about the grass stain on her dress.

It is also why she doesn’t tell her mother about
the tobacco tin, the estate house and the incident in the rose garden. It is precisely because she has been brought up to be independent, to decide things for herself, that she chooses to decide things for herself now. Besides, she has no desire to unload her problems onto her mother, for it has always been implicit that her mother has enough problems of her own, what with a runaway husband, a child to bring up, and a job to be done. In fact, it has long occurred to Catherine that this independent spirit that she has always been encouraged to cultivate has been not only good for the child but for the mother as well.

And so Catherine does not unload her troubles onto her mother, because she has rarely done so. What’s more, her mother would simply tell her to give the thing back, and Catherine knows she can’t. She would then not only have her conscience telling her to give the thing back, but her mother as well.

It is for all of these reasons that she says nothing about the incident in the rose garden, or the grass stain on her dress. This summer she has also entered the world of grown-up love, and while some girls might take their mothers with them into that world, Catherine doesn’t. Daniel’s reputation in the town for pranks and a general tendency to succumb to a
rush of blood in a harmless sort of way has never bothered her mother. It’s all part of this ‘go’ that the town (and Catherine’s mother) thinks he possesses. He has, after all, gone to Cambridge — something no one else in the town has ever done (and which Catherine, too, hopes to do in a year, although she doesn’t know what to do afterwards, for she has watched her mother over the years and has no intention of ever teaching). And although the town, like Catherine’s mother, has sometimes wondered where Daniel’s ‘go’ will take him, the general consensus has been that the wayward is more than balanced by the sensible. So, it is not as though her mother would be dwelling on the image of her daughter tumbling in the hay with some yokel, getting herself in the family way and ruining her life.

No, that is not Catherine’s way. No tumble in a sheep paddock for her. Poets might get all dreamy eyed about fields and wenches and a jolly bit of summer sport, but Catherine’s going to have a room — a room that will forever after (should they stay together or not) become their room, the place to which their ardent ways finally led them. For, if Catherine has any poet in mind at all, it is Mr Donne and that room he shares with his ‘thou’ that becomes
an everywhere. She, too, wants such a room, but where?

Catherine’s mother is back to her lesson preparations, the quick, dark eyes that she passed on to her daughter concentrating on the handwritten notes of her lesson plans for the coming school term. Catherine is back to her newspaper, with its talk of Europe and the sniff of war. Herr Hitler, she muses, wants the whole of the Rhineland — all Catherine wants is a room. Surely that isn’t too much to ask of the world.

For what seems to Daniel to be at least the hundredth time, he is explaining to his father just why he is going to Europe when he really ought to be going to work. Scooting off to France, his father calls it. And why? There are schools here he could be teaching at, earning his keep. Life isn’t one big stunt, or doesn’t he know that? His father’s hair falls across his forehead as he glances up, his lean frame hunched over the table and a look in his eyes of both irritation and pride as he gazes upon his son. Yes,
Daniel does know that. But as much as he has explained that his field of study is the French Revolution and that the logical place to go to further his studies is France (not to mention the fact that he has no desire to teach in schools anyway), he knows this isn’t the full picture.

The fact is that Daniel, as much as having fallen in love with Catherine, has also fallen in love with new ideas. And Europe. The two have become intertwined. Unlike so many of those around him at university who look with suspicion and distrust on any thinking that comes out of Europe (with all its fancy notions and equally fancy talk), Daniel likes many of these thinkers. He feels, and has felt for some time, like someone who is groping towards a way of looking at History and Literature and the world around him that doesn’t yet exist; a way of looking at the world that doesn’t ignore the everyday life of ordinary people and all the things that they do that occupy their time, but that don’t count as something serious or worthy enough of study. Not, at least, to the likes of Miss Hale and her friend. It might come as a surprise to his father or Catherine’s mother or the butcher down the road that the films they watch in the towns nearby or in the town hall
on weekends, and which give them a few hours of escape, pleasure or fun, might one day be worthy of serious attention. But it would not surprise Daniel. And he has got it into his head that this thing he feels he is groping towards is over
there
somewhere. Europe. Not
here
. That whatever lies scrambled in his brain will become unscrambled there. But he keeps it quiet. And so, if he doesn’t mention this to his father, it is not that he is being deliberately deceitful (although Daniel has done some crazy things, he has never lied to his father), it is simply that he doesn’t yet understand this impulse to go there. He just knows he has to. He has not given his father the full picture because he can’t.

So where does this impulse to leave come from? The desire for fun? Adventure? Yes, but of a particular kind. If you like, the
serious
fun of grand ideas. And it is not because ideas of moment and immediacy might shake things up and change the world to greater or lesser degrees. It is the sheer excitement of ideas themselves. The thrill of understanding them. Especially new ideas. New ideas take you somewhere, and you don’t need mountaineering boots to get there. Just a room and books and a place that shares your excitement.

It was the informal talks of a German scholar visiting the university (whose talks seemed to have come along at just the right time, as these things so often do) that caught his interest. When the German talked (and again Daniel hadn’t let on to his fellow students that he liked what he heard — because they didn’t), he caught glimpses of new ways of thinking, exciting ones — and so, for this reason, Daniel has been seized by the idea of Europe and what they’re thinking over there. He may call himself a Marxist, but the Marxism of fellow students, who see literature only in terms of serving a cause, is not for Daniel. Indeed, one of those fellow students who listened to the German scholar (a Mr Adorno, who has fled the Nazis) called his ideas ‘subtle’. And ‘subtle’ was used as a criticism, almost an insult, as if to say that this was not an age that could afford the luxury of subtle thinking. But Daniel begs to differ — and this is another reason why he would be one of the first to be lined up against a wall and shot if he were ever caught up in a revolution.

He is aware that this special friend of Miss Hale’s — and it annoys him that Catherine has fallen under her spell — believes in what he calls the ‘mind of Europe’, for he has read the essay this idea comes from. He knows full well that Miss Hale’s friend —
and he smiles to himself, acknowledging the prim, silliness of the phrase — is talking about a club of the like-minded and like-gifted (and the self-appointed, for that matter) all united by precisely the kind of exclusive idea of tradition that Daniel would dearly love to smash. And although he doesn’t really know what he wants himself or what it is that is drawing him in and on, he knows that what he heard from the German scholar is different and exciting and that he is going to follow its thread and see where it leads him. It has become his passion. His other passion. Without it, he would not be the Daniel that he is. And he wants to say this to Catherine, if only he can find the right moment.

He spoke with the visiting German scholar and was given a letter of introduction to friends of his in France (many of his friends and colleagues having already fled Germany for France, England or America). Daniel has that letter, along with his tickets and his passport, in the drawer in his room at his father’s house. And, with his mind half on the drawer and the exciting prospect of travel, he attempts once more to smooth his father’s anxieties about his mad-cap plans, which must seem, Daniel guesses, like another of his pranks.

As his father adds up the day’s takings, Daniel draws comfort from this image of his father at his work (for — and again he is at variance with many of his student friends — he is not disdainful of what they all call the
petit bourgeoisie
) and decides to let it rest for the time being. To let it rest, this whole business of trying to explain, yet again, to his father why he is passing up perfectly good opportunities for good work, when (as his father continually reminds him) so many are looking for it, for something that he can’t even explain.