The Lost Life

by Steven Carroll

  ‘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 experienc
e’. 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.

  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 unreliability. 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 althoug
h 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.