The Lost Life

by Steven Carroll

  ‘No!’

  Catherine jumps.

  ‘I will not give up my husband. This,’ and Mrs Eliot looks up, taking in the room as if drawing life from it, ‘this is his home. This is where he belongs, and I will not give him up.’

  Catherine says nothing.

  ‘Who is this?’ she shrieks, holding the letter up and reading what it says at the bottom. ‘“A friend of Tom Eliot”? What does that mean? Who sent you? Who are you?’ With this, Mrs Eliot screws the letter up in both hands and throws it into a wastepaper basket beside her.

  Catherine stares at the letter. That is that. Final.

  ‘I assume she — and it is a she?’

  Again Catherine freezes under her stare and says nothing.

  ‘What does it matter? I assume whoever this “friend” is, whoever this “friend of Tom Eliot” is, he or she will require a reply.’ Before Catherine can say anything, Mrs Eliot reaches for writing paper. ‘Well, give them this!’

  Mrs Eliot scribbles a brief note, reaches for an envelope on the desk, seals it and hands it to Catherine. The writing of the reply, the signing, the sealing, the delivering of the thing to Catherine, is over in a flash. Catherine has Mrs Eliot’s letter in her hand.

  Mrs Eliot stands. ‘Well, I need keep you no longer. Take that back with you.’

  Catherine, whose treacherously sympathetic response of just a few minutes before to Mrs Eliot has evaporated, rises, almost jumps to her feet, now only aware of her overwhelming desire to be gone, for there is anger now in Mrs Eliot’s eyes and she is looking upon Catherine as one would an intruder. Is this, Catherine is thinking, is this when she springs?

  At the door, Mrs Eliot looks her up and down. ‘You’re the go-between?’

  Catherine has never thought of it like this, but she has to admit that, yes, Mrs Eliot is right, she is. But she says nothing.

  ‘They get damaged in the end, don’t they?’

  A response is clearly not required. Even if Catherine had wanted to reply, there is no time, for Mrs Eliot, not satisfied that she has said all she wishes to say, offers one last comment. ‘And you can tell them this. The only true friend Tom Eliot ever had, has or will ever have is his wife. His wife, who sits here every evening, with their dog, the door open, and waits…’ And Mrs Eliot nods, as if to suggest that if this is a battle of wills, she will win. She then closes the door, and Catherine is left standing alone on the landing with Mrs Eliot’s written reply in her hand, and which she now pushes into her coat pocket.

  Back on the street she feels as though she has just stepped out of a cinema. And from a strange, upsetting movie at that. The day is bright, and although the street itself is quiet enough, she is aware of life going on all around her, which she wasn’t aware of inside Mrs Eliot’s flat. And she is only now conscious of how dull the light was in that room. Not dark, but gloomy. Were the curtains drawn? She can’t remember, but the day is bright and the room was dull. Which, along with all the photographs, now makes her feel that the room was not quite part of the world. Not quite part of this world, at any rate. And so back on the street she squints and allows time for her eyes to adjust to the light, as she would if she was leaving the cinema. And there are also now the lingering impressions of Mrs Eliot: small (with that odd, puzzling smell of ether, which has left Catherine feeling slightly nauseous), frail looking, even brittle — yes. But she had power, that woman. And Catherine isn’t quite sure where that power came from; she only knows that she felt weak in her company. And it wouldn’t matter where they met or under what circumstances — if they were to ever meet again, Catherine is sure she would still feel the same. For Mrs Eliot, she sees, is one of those people who have long since given up on social niceties, and who can pin you down with relentless questions and don’t give up until you are too tired to resist. And perhaps that explains why Catherine is feeling so drained and exhausted. But it’s not just all the questions; it’s the way, Catherine suspects, that her heart and her sympathies have been bounced about. She suspects she has a heart that may too easily go out to others. One moment almost physically recoiling from a woman whose very intensity carries a hint of violent impulse, and the next being completely immersed in the shrine of her room, and understanding fully the loneliness that causes her to cling when she has lost all right to. And the fear. That too. For, although Mrs Eliot is, it’s true, a frightening woman (for in her presence there was a constant sense of not quite knowing what she would do next, and of Mrs Eliot not knowing herself what she would do next either), she is also, Catherine realises, a frightened woman. Like someone whose life, more or less, has ended. And, who has become a kind of ghost.

  Her eyes adjusted now to the brightness of the day, Catherine sets off, up the street, back to the station, to home and to Daniel, whom she suddenly misses with an urgency that surprises her. And the guilt that made her accept Miss Hale’s request without pausing to think hangs not so heavily upon her now. Her legs are lighter than they were when she came, and there is a part of her that is tired of this summer game of being one of Miss Hale’s girls, a part of her that will be quite happy to see the last of Miss Hale and her special friend.

  Early the next morning, as arranged, Catherine meets Miss Hale in her cottage and hands her the reply. Catherine has said nothing of the meeting, has said nothing about her impressions of the woman, and has not let on that she already knows the letter is bad news — that the whole mission, which is what it now seems to have been, was doomed from the outset. And Miss Hale, for her part, has not asked. She is simply eager to open the letter, but, eager as she is, she uses a letter-opener, and is careful not to rip the envelope.

  It takes markedly less time to read the letter than to open it, which doesn’t surprise Catherine because it took Mrs Eliot virtually no time to write. There is an exasperated sigh; Miss Hale drops the hand holding the letter to her knee, then rises from her chair, placing the letter on a small table, and goes to the window. Catherine has no trouble reading the letter, and she doesn’t feel she is snooping, for it seems to have been left face-up on the table for her to view freely. She has, it is implied, earned the right. No wonder it took so little time to write. The message contains five words: ‘Never, never, never and never’ and is signed, pointedly, ‘Mrs Eliot’.

  There is a long, long silence, and Catherine is not sure if she can endure the silence without breaking it. But she bites her lip. Then, in a voice almost broken, Miss Hale addresses her. ‘What,’ and Miss Hale seems to be dragging the question from herself with the utmost reluctance, knowing that it is degrading but not being able to help herself all the same, ‘what is she like?’

  Catherine’s eyes lift from the letter, clear, lit with sudden understanding. This is why she was sent. Not because the letter had to be hand-delivered for the sake of secrecy or discretion or anything remotely like that. She was sent to be the eyes and nose and ears of Miss Hale and come back not only with the reply but with a report of the woman, of what it is like to be in the same room as her; to return with a picture of what it is like to share this woman’s company, so that, possibly, Miss Hale could gauge just what it is she is up against. All her explanations had been excuses. This is what Miss Hale wants, and what she wanted all along.

  With this realisation uppermost in her mind (and she is sure she is right), Catherine allows herself time, while eyeing the back of Miss Hale (the anger of the night before leaving for London rising in her again), to compose her answer so that it says exactly what she wants it to say. For Catherine is one of those who is always thinking after the event of the right thing to say. But not this time.

  ‘She is,’ Catherine says, slowly, almost with an actor’s air of rehearsed calculation, ‘exactly as I imagined — only more so.’

  Miss Hale does not turn, but Catherine sees the slightest of nods, weary and resigned, as if to say, ‘Yes, that is what I thought, too.’ Miss Hale continues to stand at the window for some time, without speaking. She seems, in fact, to have completely f
orgotten about Catherine. And, as is so often the case in this house, Catherine is not sure if she should stay or go, if her services are no longer required or if something further will be asked of her. But Miss Hale continues to stare out on to the green distance of the garden outside and the countryside beyond. And it is not one of those melodramatic gestures she is prone to. No, Miss Hale is no longer the crying girl; she is simply Miss Hale. She is no longer living, however theatrically, in the world of her youth, but is a middle-aged woman who can no longer pretend that re-entering the world of her youth is a possibility, or that picking up the things of youth from where they were carelessly dropped is a possibility. No, one doesn’t simply stride back on stage and pick up the scene (the garden, the two people, the flowers) and bring it all to a satisfactory conclusion with the advantage of hindsight and over twenty years of living to guide it.

  For a while during this summer, it must have seemed to Miss Hale that she could have it all back again: her youth, the love she left there but never gave up on, and the young man who eventually became the famous Mr Eliot, but who never ceased to be her Tom. Her whole lost life, seemingly retrieved during one miraculous summer. All through the summer and autumn she had been the crying girl who throws flowers to the ground, who stands at the top of the garden steps and troubles the conscience of her departing lover, and who stays standing there, through the change of seasons, year after year, with reproach in her eyes until the longed-for moment arrives when the lover returns and takes his crying girl in his arms, and everybody is young again and all that was lost is found. And so the scene would conclude. The little play would be over and happiness would be theirs.

  But she is no longer the crying girl. She can no longer play the part. She is now simply a middle-aged woman standing at the window, quite possibly about to lose her special friend for the second time, just when she thought that her friend, that long-ago garden and the moment they missed could be theirs again. And it is as she is standing there that the word ‘virgin’ comes to Catherine’s mind. What, Catherine wonders, what must it be to have waited so long, to have kept all of that life bottled up inside her, waiting for that moment in the garden to return so that all that bottled-up life could be released, but to wait in vain all those years? To arrive at one’s forty-fourth year and remain the virgin girl who might have loved … What must that be like?

  And it is then, as if responding to the unspoken question Catherine has just asked herself, Miss Hale finally turns from the window. ‘You can’t know, Catherine — you are far too young — you cannot know what it is to lose someone, not once, but twice. But I feel I may.’

  For a moment, Catherine wonders if she really did speak when she posed that question to herself. But before she has time to think about it any further, Miss Hale continues. ‘We must grasp our moments as they arise, Catherine. And never, never assume that they will come back. People may come back into our lives, but not the time or the moment. And, in the end, not even the people either, for they will be changed. They will not be the same. No,’ and here the dreaminess leaves her voice and a sudden urgency enters it, ‘no, grasp your moments, Catherine, because they never come back again, and we just spend the rest of our days wishing we’d grasped them when they were there for the taking.’

  Miss Hale then falls into silence and Catherine knows that she has given up. Whatever is lost, stays lost. When two people part, they part forever. Even if they come back together, they are not the same people and the life they might have lived is lost forever. And whatever may keep Miss Hale and her friend together or just in touch over the years to come will never be what she came here for this summer and autumn. What she came for was impossible. But this never occurred to her at the beginning of the summer because she was still the crying girl then, frozen in mid-sentence, in mid-gesture, still the crying girl, and still young enough to believe anything was possible.

  As Catherine rises, Miss Hale emphasises her point again. ‘You must remember that. You won’t forget?’

  ‘No.’

  She then scrutinises Catherine, almost judging whether this is, in fact, one of those moments. And, concluding that it is (the letter with its four emphatic nevers still spread out on the table), she speaks. ‘Your friend — Daniel, yes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He is leaving soon, is he not?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Tomorrow you come to clean, do you not?’

  ‘Yes.’ Catherine nods, mystified, no sense of where this line of questioning might be leading.

  ‘You know that tomorrow the house will be empty. My aunt and uncle will be visiting friends — and I shall be away all day. You know this, don’t you?’

  ‘No.’ Catherine’s eyes widen as the import of what Miss Hale is saying slowly dawns on her.

  ‘Well,’ Miss Hale says with a firm nod, ‘you do now.’

  Catherine looks to the floor, then looks up, not sure what the moment requires.

  ‘Thank you,’ she mutters, ‘thank you for telling me.’

  Miss Hale smiles. ‘It’s only right you should know. Your duties will be made so much easier, no doubt, for having the house to yourself. And you have the whole day, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And the whole place to yourself.’

  There is a trace of a smile in Miss Hale’s eyes, and Catherine returns the look, likewise, with the faintest smile. And in this way an understanding passes between them, and is shared.

  It is then that Miss Hale picks up the letter, scrunches it up, and throws the paper ball into the wastepaper basket. Catherine watches it land. A barely discernible thud. As though it had never existed. Miss Hale now wipes her hands, consigning the whole business to the oblivion of the next day’s rubbish collection. Catherine finds herself dwelling on the whole business of wastepaper baskets and what ends up in them. Mrs Eliot’s letter. Miss Hale’s. Both into bins. Both letters, as far as anybody outside the triangle of Miss Hale, Mrs Eliot and Catherine is concerned, never existed. Were never written. The whole episode they have just enacted, the whole nerve-racking mission, never happened.

  At the door, Miss Hale thanks Catherine for having undertaken the trip to London. Without saying as much, she implies it is not Catherine’s fault that it was all to no avail and that the shadow of that woman will always be hanging over her and her special friend and never let them be. And, once again, she tells Catherine that she has her sincere thanks. But, more than that, Catherine also has her gratitude.

  With that, Catherine leaves and steps out into the high street. When she looks back, the door is closed. Miss Hale has retreated, back into the house. Possibly to dwell on those four emphatic nevers, or to remove the wastepaper bin from the room to a place where the letter can be collected and taken from the house altogether, as though, indeed, it never existed.

  Outside, the mid-morning street is busy with a mixture of vehicles — old world and new. As she walks back home, Catherine is pondering the curiosity of Miss Hale. For she is a curiosity. Restrained, proper, even prim, but with a whole other life inside her just waiting to burst out, like the gift of French stockings. And so when Miss Hale tells her, with that knowing look, that the house will be vacant the next day, it is both curious and not so curious. For all that life has to burst from her somehow, doesn’t it? All those lost moments that were there for the grasping at the time, but which never were because of an assumption that time goes on and on, cry out to be lived somehow. Don’t they?

  When Daniel leaves, he may do so for good, or he may return as he swears he will. He may, indeed. But Catherine knows, and she bravely tells herself, that they are young, with whole lives to be lived that may or may not include each other. They may never have a life together at all, but they will (and Catherine’s mind is dwelling on the image of Miss Hale at the window, forever at the window, her voice almost broken) have their moment. They will have this much. And in the bustle of the street Catherine is aware of moments, greetings and cheerios, the opening
and closing of a shop door, a farming cart and the clip-clop of a horse mingling with the engine sounds of a passing motor car. Moments gathered together, strands of the day’s music tapering into the long, drawn-out hum of the car as it leaves the town. They may not have a life together but they will have the days. And that, she tells herself, is how a life is lived, through moments and through days.

  The sun glints on the rooftops along the street. The windows sparkle. Her feet move swiftly. Daniel will, at this minute, be in his father’s shop, and she moves towards it with urgency in her step, for she has not spoken to him since returning from London and there is much to tell.

  PART FOUR

  Intercession

  Late September, 1934

  Was it an accident that she came home early, or did she do so on purpose? Or did she do it, as the phrase would have it, ‘accidentally on purpose’? Whatever, she is back. And she is early.

  The house has been cleaned. Everything spotless. Everything exactly where it ought to be. Everything is in order, in its place. A model of how the universe ought to be. And quiet. The kind of quiet that a house has when nobody is home. And Emily Hale assumes that nobody is.