As she is staring at Miss Hale, who has not yet looked up, an entirely new thought occurs to Catherine. And she is almost as stunned by the thought as she was by the sudden appearance of Miss Hale. That whole sense of entering a story, if only vague or occasionally nagging, but which has, nonetheless, persisted all summer, rises in her. And while standing there, with Daniel’s expectant face just visible from the corner of her eye, Catherine silently addresses Miss Hale, with the clear insight and the concentrated wisdom of her eighteen-and-a-half-year-old mind. Is this it, she is silently asking? Is this the life you never had, the one you might have had all those years ago? Oh, you might not even have been aware of it but is this what you wanted, and is this what we had to give each other all along: a ‘felt experience’?
And now it’s not Catherine who feels as though she has intruded upon Miss Hale. For, in this moment in which wild thoughts and feelings tumble over one another, and which she knows will stay with her forever in relentlessly detailed clarity, she is asking herself just how long Miss Hale has been there? And how much of that private world of Catherine and Daniel’s has been heard, listened in on, and, thereby, made public? For, just one pair of ears, one listener, one eavesdropper (however intentional or unintentional) is enough to turn a private moment into a public one. Or, even a performance. So, far from being the one who has intruded, Catherine is now feeling intruded upon. And, however consciously or unconsciously determined, there is the nagging thought in Catherine’s mind that she has delivered, on cue, the right scene at just the right moment.
All of this, from laughing at Daniel’s feigned aristocratic indolence, to locking eyes with Miss Hale and witnessing the lowering of her gaze, has taken a matter of seconds — ten, possibly fifteen. She is not sure, for it is one of those moments in which you are not aware of minutes and seconds, not the usual moments that fill your days. They’re special ones that say to you you’re going to remember this — in every minute detail. But as she snaps out of the spell, and while Miss Hale’s head is still bowed, Catherine becomes conscious of the bundle she bears, with the small red smudge visible at the top, and wonders what to do with it. And it is only then that she remembers where she was going before she came face to face with Miss Hale when she opened the door. And, as any cleaning maid would, she does what Daniel in all his feigned indolence ordered her to do. She returns to work, assuming the manner of the domestic staff she is, and walks straight down the stairs, leaving behind the bowed figure of Miss Hale without speaking, taking the soiled sheet to the laundry to be cleaned. And, as she strides away, out into the open sunshine of the common garden at the back where the laundry is, she knows, beyond doubt, that Miss Hale will be gone by the time she returns. And that then she and Daniel can leave their room, leave the house (unoccupied as promised) and merge back into the street life of the postcard town, which will be Daniel’s for only a few days more and which Catherine cannot, now, wait to be shot of.
Control. Power. And yes, a certain satisfaction accompanies the whole action. But, as she enters the back garden, there is something else. A quickening of the heart. A fluttering of the nerves. A sense of having, intuitively, stepped into a role and triumphed. And, in the process, of having lived with an intensity that makes her hunger for more and leaves her tingling all over.
A week later, Catherine watches the bus containing Daniel lumbering up the high street of the town. She is, she knows, watching him leave. And he is waving to her through the rear window of the bus, his face sad in a way that she can’t quite define. She is not reflective at this moment; she is barely even thinking. She is only conscious of something being wrenched from her. A painful wrenching. Of course, she’s had all this time to prepare herself. But not only is Daniel being wrenched from her, so is the ‘us’, the ‘we’, the ‘them’ that had spent the summer together. When did she start talking like that? When did she start making plans in the plural? She has no idea, for it happened without her noticing. But one day this summer she started thinking in terms of ‘us’ and ‘we’, and it is only now that she realises how much it had meant — to be two. And the sadness hasn’t even hit her yet. It’s too soon for sadness. For the moment there is only this wrenching feeling. As well as that odd, puzzling sensation that it can’t be real, it can’t be true. She’s not really standing in the street waving goodbye to a bus taking Daniel from her. Possibly forever. Other people say goodbye, other people leave each other, not Catherine and Daniel. Then she reminds herself that he will come back and that they will be writing to each other all the time he is away. It is not goodbye, but au revoir. And with that little French thought, a flicker of a smile lights her eyes. All the same, she’s glad she’s back at school. Glad the tasks of her final year will swamp her mind, numb her feelings and fill her days with work. Perhaps, if she’s lucky, the year will be over before she knows it.
The bus recedes, the same bus that they have so often taken to the cinema at the towns nearby, or just for the sake of an afternoon trip. But this, she tells herself, as his face becomes smaller and smaller, is no afternoon trip. And, in the years to come, she will realise that beneath the pain of losing Daniel, the Catherine who is standing back and watching at this moment knew perfectly well all along that something final was taking place. And that, just then, what she saw in Daniel’s eyes as he stared back at her through the rear window of the bus was the admission that this was goodbye, not au revoir. And the sadness of the moment is this: that for all his talk he is, in fact, seeing his Catherine for the last time through the eyes of someone in love. But they don’t know this yet. And though they will meet again, they will never look upon each other with love in their eyes as they have this summer.
And no matter how much he swears he’s coming back for her, he won’t. And as much as he swears that he will miss her, there will come a day when he won’t. And she won’t. And they will both know that what they have just shared is what books, and the world for that matter, call first love. And just as books and plays very sensibly leave the story of first love at the climactic moment, so will Catherine and Daniel.
Then the bus is gone, around the corner at the top of the high street, and with it the last of Daniel. And as she turns to go, the sensation comes back again, that wrenching feeling.
And Miss Hale? Catherine has glimpsed her in the street once since the week before, for being back at school she no longer has time for cleaning. The distance was sufficient for them both to ignore each other. She went on her way (to the baker, the butcher, she can’t remember) as though she had never made the acquaintance of the refined Boston lady, or her special friend, and had never received the privilege of being counted as one of Miss Hale’s girls. And Miss Hale went her way as if Catherine could have been just anybody — one of the local girls who got up to all sorts of things in summer fields at nights.
A high, singing note soars above Catherine’s head, hovers there, then joins with others and becomes a tumbling, descending rush of music, falling on her, for the music that she and Daniel first heard in the lunchtime concert at the local church has become the music of the summer, their summer song, and she feels it fall on her now as she leaves the bus stop behind, leaves behind the house in the high street that introduced her to Miss Hale, her special friend, the woman who clings long after she has lost the right to do so and that whole storybook world that came with them all. And that something else, that secret thrill of having delivered into the world a ‘felt experience’, precisely on cue, the right gesture at exactly the right time.
As she leaves behind the street, the shops, the houses of the town and wanders down the lane that only a few weeks before she and Daniel had found so conveniently deserted, she takes with her the sadness of Daniel’s departure and the curious sense of triumph and power that comes with doing other people’s living for them.
PART FIVE
The Rose Garden
1990s
A string quartet is setting up on the lawns. It is mid-afternoon and the autumn sun
is still warm. The guests, all in their formal party clothes, are chatting quietly while a cellist tunes her instrument. Gusts of laughter and the shouts of children disturb the uniform murmur of the crowd from time to time. It is an inviting scene, but Catherine has slipped away for a few minutes. She looks back over her shoulder as she crosses the lawn. Everyone is still locked in chat. Her cousin’s husband is intent on mastering the complexities of his new camera while his granddaughter, in her white gown, is contemplating his confusion with a slow shake of the head. No one looks up. Good. No one has noticed that Aunt Catherine has given them the slip for a few moments.
When she reaches the rose garden, Catherine stops. The effect of being here again is stronger than she expects. Or is it that, knowing it to be an occasion of some moment, she has stopped dead in her tracks because she feels she ought to stop — in deference to the occasion? Going back is always like that, she thinks; are we really moved, or do we merely think we ought to be moved, and therefore are? After a lifetime of manufacturing other people’s feelings on cue, she is a little sceptical of her own. Nonetheless, when she stops at the border of the rose garden she is moved, even if there is a faint element of performance in the moment.
Fifty years ago? Even more than that. Was it really? To Catherine, peering down upon the scene for only the second time in her life, nothing, neither the garden nor the house, has changed, just the world outside.
Behind her, a giant marquee has been set up on the front lawns of the house and a wedding reception is in progress. A marriage has taken place, just a few hours before in the town’s parish church; her cousin’s grand-daughter, at the age of eighteen, has impetuously married a young man in his early twenties. Everybody told them, everybody warned them: don’t do it, they said. But of course they did it. Catherine turns, and her eyes rest for a moment on this young woman, now demonstrating the workings of the camera to her grandfather. Catherine, who, without any lasting regret, has no children of her own, looks upon this young woman as a kind of grand-daughter and there is a touch of the maternal in her gaze. Just then the bride looks up and sees the solitary figure of her ‘aunt’ on the edge of the estate lawns. They smile at each other. Even from this distance, Catherine sees the light of life in her eyes, and as she does the word ‘ardent’ occurs to her. ‘Ardent,’ she hums, is their word — this ardent young woman and ardent young man; together they have acted upon their ardent impulses and done this impetuous thing. The moment is theirs, she thinks, and whatever may follow — boredom, divorce or everlasting happiness — no one can take this moment from them now.
The smile is still in her eyes as she steps into the garden, roses pink and white glowing in the still light of the afternoon. The flowers, the drained pools, the house and sky that hangs above them all, untouched by the years. Dictators have tumbled (Herr Hitler won and lost his Rhineland), war has destroyed whole cities and murdered millions, the moon has been deflowered and the computer has been born. But none of these things, or so much more that the years have brought, are in evidence here. And as she strolls up the central path, the rose stems inclining towards her like old friends welcoming her back into their timeless midst, the phrase ‘pathetic fallacy’ interrupts her thoughts. For as much as she tells herself that flowers are just flowers, she has been, nonetheless, mentally bowing to the roses and the roses have bowed back. A short conversation, enquiries about her welfare after all this time, where she has been and what she has seen are surely not far away.
And it is then, while she is lost in a world of memory and speculation, that she hears it. Laughter. The bushes behind her are laughing. She swings around. Did she really bow to the flowers? Did she talk to the roses, and is the shrubbery behind her now shaking with laughter? As she peers into the shady green leaves, two young children burst from the bushes, their laughter trailing behind them as they speed across the open lawn to the marquee. And she has no sooner registered their laughter than she has turned back to the shrubbery, now still. For she knows this spot, and the two young people it once concealed in another age, a time people now call ‘between the wars’, although nobody ever thought of it like that then. The eighteen-year-old Catherine and the twenty-two-year-old Daniel. They’re not here to be seen now, only the shrubbery and the low-hanging branches that once hid them, and from which Daniel’s laughter, too, once irreverently rose. And because they are not here to be seen, and only the shrubbery is, she feels the moment more. For this is the way it will be. This is the way it will always be. Disregarding the possibilities of fires and bombs and whatnot, earth, buildings and trees will all go on, while she, and everyone with whom she’s crossed paths, will not. Like Daniel.
They did see each other again. Briefly, for a week, when he came to see her on a short trip from Paris. But it wasn’t the same Daniel, not the same Catherine, not the same ‘them’. As much as he told her he was in love, his love did not travel with him. Nor did hers stand still and wait. And as much as they tried to pick up where they’d left off, they couldn’t. They’d grown, and grown apart. Foolish to think they could ever pick things up. That last glimpse she’d had of him, as he looked back to her from the rear window of the bus when he left the town to live in Paris, was the last time they looked at each other through the eyes of two young people in love. And, perhaps, she’d known it all the time. Amid the sadness of things ending, of the summer being finally over, she had known that this was the way it was always going to be. That they’d given each other all they were ever going to give. His letters would come in, and her letters would go out to him. But one day, in their heart of hearts, they had known that the letters would stop. Perhaps she had known that the pain of having Daniel wrenched from her would fade, become a memory, and they would very sensibly just get on with things.
It wasn’t until years later that she learned from a friend who’d taught briefly with him that he married and slipped back into the country without ever telling her. And why not? What was there to say? That ‘ardent’ was their word, but that he’d wearied of their ardent ways? And that thing he was groping towards, that way of thinking about the world he’d talked about often enough but could never quite describe, yet felt sure he would find over there? Perhaps he did find it. In the mid-sixties, her mother, who was retired but liked, as she put it, to keep ‘in touch’, showed her an article in a literary quarterly by an academic at Birmingham with Daniel’s name. It was, she’d said, an article about the new Citroën. You know, the car! A serious article. And Catherine remembered her mother shaking her head, not so much puzzled as disbelieving of this new world of ‘theories’. She couldn’t understand a word of it, she said, and what she did she didn’t like, but she thought Catherine might be interested. They were, apparently, a ‘school’, this Birmingham crowd, and that gave her mother a laugh. ‘Like fish.’ And she’d opened and closed her mouth as she’d laughed.
Catherine thought about Daniel more often, she imagined, than he ever thought about her, and was always happy that he seemed to have found that thing he was groping towards but could never see clearly enough to define. And although she’d sobbed and moaned when the letters stopped, and although she knew that they’d stopped because he’d met someone else, she’d also recognised that it was as it should be. They’d lived inside a golden circle but could never step outside. And, once they did, for the world in which the rest of their lives would be lived was always calling, they had to leave it all behind, their ardent ways and those golden circle days when ‘ardent’ was their word. And the difference in the lives they had lived since then only served to confirm this. He, the academic, the teacher he swore he would never become, settled, apparently happy, in the same city (not far from where he grew up) all his life. His life (job, wife, three children and seven grandchildren), one, it seemed, of contented routine, no doubt punctuated by the odd prank.
He, all of this, and she the shiftless one. For when Catherine finished her final year of school, she did earn a scholarship to university (Manchester, not Cambrid
ge), where she not only discovered acting but discovered that she was very good at it. Discovered that she not only had a natural gift for delivering a ‘felt experience’ on cue (a director’s dream) but delighted in the experience. Thrilled inwardly every time she felt the audience living, through her and her alone, one of those lives they would never live, but the experience of which she could give them for a few transcendent moments. And once she knew she had the gift, she nursed and nurtured it every year of her life. As she still does. For ‘Aunt’ Catherine is famous. Famous for the many gutsy women she has brought to life on stage and screen, for the many romantic and suggestive scenes she has had no qualms about doing and which, surprisingly, her mother took in her stride. And famous for her political views, which, one evening on television, saw her going head to head with Mrs Thatcher and coming out rather well. And, even then, she could feel half the country surging behind her as she gave them a ‘felt’ political experience they’d so longed to have. So when she knew she had the gift of delivering such experiences, she nurtured it. What better way to give people all those lives they’d never live, those lives we inevitably lose in living?
And throughout her life (two marriages, a trail of boyfriends and lovers), throughout her career (famous for her outspoken beliefs about living life’s moments as they arise, the actress Daniel must surely have seen sometime, who’d lived much of her life both home and abroad), she never lost the memory of that first performance and her first audience, never forgot the eyes of Miss Hale in the bedroom of her cottage as they stared back at her, that unmistakable mixture of gratitude and shame written all over her face, never forgot the exhausted way Miss Hale’s body had slumped and her head had lowered, as though having finally experienced the very thing she had both dreaded and longed for all her life. And it was Catherine who’d given it to her. But even though there was a mixture of gratitude and shame written across Miss Hale’s features that afternoon all those years ago, Catherine concluded that she’d chosen to disown the thing that Catherine had given her and for which she’d so longed — disowned it as being ‘beneath’ the lady. And after that day, the two women had never spoken again.
The Lost Life Page 14
