The Lost Life (9 page)

The fact is, for all his high-jinks, Daniel takes study seriously, as, indeed, he takes thinking seriously. Study, to Daniel, is not simply a ticket to a job (as his father would have it), something you do for a short while because it is required of you. No, study is a lifelong activity. Something he has only just begun. And, although he has told Catherine that he expects to be away for only a year, he is already beginning to suspect that it may indeed be much longer. But he can’t tell her that. Much in the same way (and Daniel can’t possibly know this) that Miss Hale’s friend couldn’t tell her, in that long-ago garden of their youth, that he might not be coming back at all. Nor can Daniel tell his father, who will simply have to
understand that his son was not born for the classroom or the shop or any other of those solid work opportunities that most people in these hard days (the term ‘the Great Depression’ will not fall so easily from people’s lips until later) would kill to have. No, that something else that he can’t explain is calling him on. At the age of twenty-two he is in the thrall of exciting new ideas and has no choice but to follow them and find out where they lead him.

As his father closes the book in which he has calculated the day’s takings, he rises, proposing a pot of tea before bed, and Daniel nods, vaguely noting once again the leanness of his father’s frame, the sinewy hands, which, at that moment, speak of a life of simple tastes and pleasures, of someone who grew up in a world far removed from the one Daniel and his kind will inherit. His father is quietly muttering at the sink with the pot in his hands as he sometimes does (as if having forgotten that he has company, as people do when they live much of their life alone), and Daniel leaves him to his muttering.

His mind now is half on what the future may bring and wondering if he really knows why he is going, after all, and remembering, almost reliving, the touch of Catherine’s lips. And suddenly he has
forgotten all about those exciting new ideas, the mind of Europe and a lifetime of serious thinking because he can’t conceive of anything more exciting than Catherine’s kiss, and he gives himself up to the memory of her lips, and he’s inwardly pronouncing himself a bloody fool for going anywhere. The Catherines of this world, he’s musing, come along once in a lifetime, and she
would
have to come along just now. He never knew her, or possibly only faintly knew of her, until he came back to the town for the summer holidays, just to say a kind of goodbye to all that. But now he did know her. And a simple situation — hello, goodbye, up and off — has been complicated by the unforeseen surprise of falling in love.

The picture of Catherine and her young man stays in Emily Hale’s memory. It stays with her overnight and is still there the next morning when Catherine comes to clean the house. It was a picture of young love that she observed from the distance of a market stall the previous evening, and the mixture of envy
and protectiveness that it inspired has been with her since waking. And so when she greets Catherine at the door, her mind has been on this young woman for some time, although to what end she is not sure.

‘Did you buy anything?’ Miss Hale enquires and Catherine simply stares back at her, not sure what she means. ‘At the market. I saw,’ Miss Hale adds with practised casualness, ‘you and your young man at the market last evening.’

‘Oh,’ Catherine is smiling, ‘no, we didn’t.’

Miss Hale retains the same casual, almost dreamy, tone of voice. ‘No. You seemed very absorbed in each other.’

‘Did we?’

‘Yes, most decidedly.’

‘You should have said hello.’

‘Oh, I didn’t want to disturb you.’ And here Miss Hale smiles while arranging flowers in a bowl, a faint suggestion in her eyes that it would not have been an appropriate time for greetings. With the smile, Catherine blushes, for she now knows that Miss Hale observed them kissing. But it is not as though the blush is a result of being censured by Miss Hale, far from it. There is actually a hint, quite distinct (the smile, her fingers on the flowers, the
lingering emphasis of her speech), that Miss Hale has drawn pleasure from watching them kiss. And as if to confirm this, Miss Hale looks up and observes, with quiet delight, the colour on Catherine’s cheeks. At the same time, Catherine catches the hint of colour on Miss Hale’s cheeks, and for a moment they are two girls, exchanging confidences, vague, allusive confidences, hinting at forbidden things.

They part. Catherine begins her duties (the house and Miss Hale’s cottage, which has an inside adjoining door leading into the main building, being empty apart from Miss Hale and Catherine). But later, as Catherine is finishing, Miss Hale joins her in the hall before she leaves. ‘If you like, you can bring your book of poems to me. My friend is coming up today.’

Catherine smiles, surprised and relieved that the incident in the rose garden has now, it seems, been put behind them. ‘Oh, yes. I will. I will indeed.’

‘Good, he will be happy to sign it.’

‘That’s very kind of him.’

‘Oh, but he
is
kind.’ Here Miss Hale pauses for a moment, looking out over the garden. ‘A lot more kind than people know. Everybody thinks him cold and distant.’

‘Do they?’ Catherine asks, aware, possibly for the first time, that she has never contemplated the possibility of his being cold or distant or warm or near. He has always been, quite simply, his poems. And a certain kind of photograph, the sort of photographs taken of writers that always make them look, well, above being cold or warm or distant or near.

‘Yes, they do. They think him difficult to know. Like a sort of priest who’s impossible to get a smile out of. Severe, I suppose. And that’s when they even think of him as human at all, as apart from a sort of Westminster Abbey on legs.’

At this point, Catherine’s eyes pop. This is exactly, word for word, Daniel’s description of him. Has Miss Hale overheard their conversations somehow, as she, indeed, observed their kisses? And is she slyly letting on that she knows more than she says? Or did Daniel simply get the phrase from somewhere, and was the impression he gave of just having this happy knack of coming up with phrases like that an act? Luckily for Catherine, Miss Hale has briefly turned her attention to a flower in the bowl, twisting its stalk round to create a more harmonious arrangement.

‘But that’s not what I see,’ she says, returning to Catherine. ‘That’s not my friend. He’s really like those cats that sit all prim and proper on a garden bench and look as if they don’t want to know you. Until you stroke their chins and they roll over on their backs because all along they were just waiting to be touched.’ She smiles, almost as if in the act of stroking her friend’s chin, implying that it’s all in the way you stroke them, and, in having an instinct for knowing these things. ‘They call him cold. But he’s nothing of the sort.’

There is a pause and Catherine doesn’t know if she should stay or go. It is awkward. Even though Miss Hale (putting some finishing touches to the bowl of flowers) is choosing to tell her all these private things, there is a part of Catherine that feels as though she shouldn’t, all the same, be hearing any of this — as if they are private matters related by someone in a moment of weakness and that will be regretted later by both the confessor and the listener. Moreover, the silence is made more awkward by the sense of moment that comes with it. Miss Hale, Catherine senses, is not simply pausing for breath, she is, Catherine is convinced, on the brink of some confession and pausing for effect. And Catherine is
not sure that she really wants to hear. But, of course, she is one of Miss Hale’s girls now and she is about to receive a confidence.

‘They’ll also tell you that he has no instincts, no gift for affection, or even love. But don’t believe it. You are eighteen and no doubt think that love is all adoring eyes and touch and market-stall kisses. And so it is, at eighteen. But there are different kinds of love.’ She turns from the bowl to Catherine. ‘As you get older, you come to understand that people can have deep bonds that are quite … different from what this world today calls love.’ Then she smiles and clasps her hands together, as if to say that the matter is now concluded. Possibly even conceding that she may have spoken a little too freely. For until now, Catherine notes, Miss Hale has always spoken of her ‘special’ friend, or having known someone who did such and such, or had such and such inflicted upon him — like a bad marriage, or a wicked woman who continues to cling when she has no right to any more. But today she has spoken, quite specifically, about ‘her’ friend. As Catherine is asking herself why, she is remembering the scene in the rose garden. Did the ceremony — and Catherine has to remind herself that Miss Hale has absolutely
no knowledge of her and Daniel witnessing the event — seal the love that she has just spoken of? And, for all the formal language that came with that declaration of love (and this is what it seems to Catherine), Miss Hale has as good as told her that she and her friend share the kind of love that is above certain things, like adoring eyes and touch and kisses. And it’s not simply the right and proper acknowledgment of the fact that he is married (albeit separated); it has been said in such a way that implies they wouldn’t descend to everyday love anyway. That they are above all of that. There is, it seems, young love — all kisses and burning flushes — that is over almost before it has been registered by the senses, and there is the love that rises above kisses and burning flushes, which lasts in the way that deep friendships last. But it is not, it seems, the kind of love that ‘goes to bed’, which, for Catherine, is the logical end of all their ardent ways. No, ‘ardent’ isn’t their word as it is Catherine and Daniel’s. Miss Hale and her friend have another kind of love, and, presumably, another word. At least this is the way Catherine takes it, and she is immediately puzzled because, among other things, some part of her is, well, almost shocked. And, at the
same time, she also realises that she would be less shocked, in fact, not shocked at all but even happy, to learn that theirs was an affair like any other affair, a romance that followed the usual ways of romance. A romance that exuberantly sheds its clothes and goes to bed. Why else would Catherine have willed them on to happiness in the rose garden? So that they could rise above all the things that she was willing them towards? No, so that they should be lovers and do all the things that lovers do. But not Miss Hale and her special friend. They had, she had as much as informed Catherine with practised casualness, found a different kind of love. And the ring she wears, which Catherine has just noticed (and which she could almost be wearing in the way that a nun wears a ring), bears testimony to that love.

I saw you, Miss Hale’s smile is saying, her hands still clasped; I saw you and your ardent ways in the market, impulsive as young love always is, and Catherine can’t help but feel, once again, that Miss Hale drew a bitter-sweet pleasure from observing them. And at the same time there is a hint of something else. Don’t imagine, her smile might be saying, don’t imagine that is all there is to love. One loves as one can. I too love, she could be saying. I
too love, even if it is not your ardent love of market-stall kisses.

Is this what her smile is saying? Is it a simple declaration of a pure love, a chaste love, that has been sworn to secrecy but which can’t be kept secret because it is too vast for Miss Hale to keep in? Is it a declaration — albeit oblique, formal and implied — of the love that they had celebrated in the secrecy of the rose garden, away from the prying eyes of the world, the evidence of which was consigned to earth where it would have remained buried and secret forever? But, as much as they were pledged to secrecy, has Miss Hale felt, in the end, the overwhelming need to tell someone — and is that someone Catherine, a young woman she would never see again after this summer and autumn, who knows nothing of London literary society, and who could surely tell no one of any conceivable importance? Is this what this odd communication of silences and suggestive smiles is all about? Moreover, Catherine is, of course, one of her girls and bound to keep all knowledge passed on to her in strict confidence. The muse is restless, perhaps not content to remain a shadow, silent and forever in the background, where muses quietly go when their job is done.

And as much as she has declared her love, this muse’s love, which is different by being above things, timeless, like the poetry it sparks into life, Catherine retains the lingering sensation of the blush, the hint of colour on Miss Hale’s cheeks, and the unmistakable feeling that Miss Hale took slightly more pleasure from watching Daniel and her kiss than might be expected. For what happens, Catherine is silently asking the figure standing by the bowl of autumn flowers, what happens when he doesn’t need you any more because he’s got you stoppered in a bottle, and all he has to do to have you back is to lift the cork and inhale the essence of you? What happens when all you have left is the love letter but not the lover? What happens then? Do you watch young lovers kiss in the twilight at market stalls and remember what it was to be eighteen?