The Lost Life

by Steven Carroll

  ‘Do I what?’

  ‘Have to say it like that.’

  ‘Would you rather I didn’t quite say it, the way they don’t quite say it in plays? Besides, if she’s so happy, why does she tell you all this? And why does she give you stockings?’

  ‘That’s just it — she’s not happy.’

  Ten minutes earlier, their mouths had been glued together; now the church is upon them. Pausing at the front of it, they acknowledge their shared impatience of the town with a brief flash of the eyes — the town and all the silly people who come along and say silly things just when you wish they’d shut up. But, all the same, they must have lingered longer in that laneway than they thought, for they’ve only just made the lunchtime recital and enter as the doors are closing.

  It is a modest affair, a quartet of musicians from the surrounding towns, probably students, but a surprisingly large attendance. Larger, Catherine suspects, than they might usually get for the Sunday-morning service. She puts it down to a town in which nothing much happens and the powers of the church to draw on its parishioners. But although it’s a modest affair, the size of the church (almost a cathedral, really — with its high ceiling and high windows) adds a touch of grandeur to the occasion. She’s rarely been here and is distracted by the place. There is an early-autumn chill in the air inside the church that the sun has not yet dispelled, but the light coming in from the stained-glass windows makes everything glow. Like another world, which (it occurs to Catherine for the first time) might well be the point of those windows — not so much the stories they tell or the saints they depict but the glow they create. A touch of heaven, a hint of things to come.

  Daniel stands awkwardly in the church. He is only there because she is. And for the music. He is well aware of Lenin’s famous remark about music and listening to Beethoven, and how it turns you into a sentimentalist and distracts you from the job at hand — which, for Lenin, was nothing less than transforming the world. While he may think in grand historical terms (Daniel, like so many of his fellow students, talks of the dialectics of History as a scientist might talk of gravity), he has no such personal ambitions. Besides, he loves music. All music. Popular songs, classical. He may, he smiles to himself, be standing under the high beams of an Anglican church, but he is catholic in his tastes. He doesn’t know much about Beethoven string quartets, but he is keen to hear this group of what look like students (already seated at the top of the aisle) perform, the poster on the door says, a Quartet in A Minor. Major is happy, minor is sad. Daniel, whose musical knowledge is limited, knows this, and prepares himself for a sad experience.

  There is no charge but Catherine drops coins into the collection bowl as they pass it round — for the musicians, she assures Daniel, not the church. As they are about to take their seats (most of the spaces bearing plaques informing everyone that Mr and or Mrs So-and-So made the pew possible with their good works and money), Catherine catches sight of the back of Miss Hale’s head. And almost as soon as she has done that, she sees, in profile, the beak-like nose of Miss Hale’s special friend as he turns to speak to her. They are only a few rows in front and there is no mistaking it. As soon as she sees them, she nudges Daniel and nods in their direction.

  Then a hush falls across the church, and, after a brief introduction, the quartet begins. And, straight away the sad sounds for which he’d prepared himself flow from the four players (three young men and a young woman) and rise to the ceiling. And Daniel, who has not attended many concerts, is struck by the power of live performance, the almost physical power of the music these performers make together, and the sight of the aged wood of the instruments and the trilling wire and gut of the strings, all adding something … something immediate and urgent to the performance that he did not expect. Immediately, he knows that Lenin was right, but the thought is no sooner in his head than it is out, as the music (both edgy and sad, it seems to him, like two opposite halves of a personality trying to resolve themselves) sweeps him up and transports him, the way, he will note afterwards, these things do. Catherine, likewise, forgets all about Daniel, the kisses like none she’s ever known, the sex thing and the people who interrupt you with their clichés when you wish they’d just mind their own business and gives herself up to the music, which lifts her too and takes her somewhere else that has a hint of heaven about it. Together, they are here, in this church, and they are not here, and, while it may be midday outside, inside they are existing, Catherine fancies, in no particular time at all.

  When it is over and the final notes have fallen to the ground and they are all back on Earth again, she looks around, still in a drowsy half-sleep. Gradually, in twos and threes and fours, the audience rises and slowly files out through the open door as if everyone were in the same daze. It is only then, as the church begins to empty, that Catherine remembers Miss Hale and her friend, and notes that they are still seated, staring straight ahead where the musicians are now packing up their instruments. Their music has warmed everyone for a short time, but that early-autumn chill is still in the air. Catherine’s immediate impulse is to join the exiting audience and to be outside when Miss Hale and her friend emerge so that she might catch Miss Hale’s eye, greet her, and, as society demands, Miss Hale will introduce her friend. With this in mind, she nudges Daniel once again, nods towards the door, and they both rise.

  Daniel leaves her when they are outside, having promised to help his father with the lunchtime shoppers as he had often done as a boy. Not having told Catherine his plans, she is not happy to be standing about alone. In fact, she wavers on the path (the mossy teeth of occasional gravestones sticking up at all angles on the lawn beside her) in the shadow of the giant church tower that looks more like a castle keep, not sure now whether to go or stay. But matters are soon taken out of her hands when Miss Hale and her friend emerge from the church and stand framed in the doorway. Other members of the audience are still gathered on the lawn outside, discussing the performance before going their separate ways, but a single young woman stands out in the mostly middle-aged attendance, and Miss Hale notices her and smiles in recognition straight away. Then Miss Hale takes her friend by the arm and leads him directly to her, and as Catherine watches them approach, her heartbeat quickens, and she is wondering if she might not have been better off leaving with Daniel. Miss Hale, almost as if having remembered that they are in public view and ought to be careful, relinquishes her hold on her friend’s arm, but, nonetheless, smiles in that same way that she does when offering up some detail about her friend, a detail that may or may not, in some people’s minds, amount to gossip. But Catherine is only vaguely aware of this, for it is the imposing figure of Miss Hale’s friend that so occupies her eyes and mind. Afterwards she will put the experience more satisfactorily in order but at the moment she is aware of his height and his stoop. He is taller and more stooped (it seems) for being directly in front of her, inclining towards her in the way that tall people do when meeting someone, or when engaged in conversation. And Daniel’s joke (if it is Daniel’s joke) about his being a sort of Westminster Abbey on legs has never rung so true, for there is something of the edifice about Miss Hale’s friend that makes Catherine feel as though she is standing in the shadow of a public building instead of the church tower.

  ‘Tom, this is the young woman I told you about. Catherine, this is Tom.’

  Catherine is only vaguely aware of Miss Hale’s voice and is only vaguely aware of nodding in her direction, for she is still standing in the shadow of a public building, not a human being. Until she meets his eyes, that is, and Catherine is shocked to realise that Miss Hale’s friend is handsome. Far more so, it seems to her, than in his photographs. Some people do photograph badly (like Daniel) and you never realise just how handsome or attractive they are until you meet them. Yes, he’s handsome — and she had not expected this — in the way that a matinee actor might be handsome. The sort of face that girls of a certain type, a certain type such as Catherine, might even get a crush on. And
as much as she smothers the thought, it is there still, and a slight blush colours her cheeks. And it is then she notes that Miss Hale is smiling, not so much at her, as upon her, as if, in the blush and the wide eyes of Catherine, she is reading every single thought that is passing through her mind, because, at that moment, Catherine is sure her mind is an open book. And, as for ‘Tom’… That’s just not on. And it wouldn’t matter how many times she met him, she could never call him ‘Tom’. Always Mr Eliot. Only Mr Eliot.

  ‘Catherine,’ Miss Hale continues, turning her smile to her friend, ‘is an avid reader of yours, Tom. She has a book for you to sign.’

  ‘Gladly.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  It is then that he stretches out his hand and she realises she will be called upon to clutch it in greeting. And it is like shaking hands with History, even down to the coldness of his hand. As if the thinnest of thin blood were running through it. It is firm enough; it is brief. It is the handshake of a public man used to shaking the hands of strangers. And then it is over. He and Miss Hale excuse themselves. They are gone. And it is not the matinee looks of Miss Hale’s friend that linger on, nor the stoop of the public building, but the coolness of his skin as he shook her hand. And she can’t believe, as she watches him take Miss Hale’s hand as they walk away, that this is also what Miss Hale feels, or surely she would fling his hand away from her, like a bouquet of flowers to the ground.

  But, just as she thinks this, she hears it. A boom, yes, a boom. His head is thrown back and the boom of his laughter shatters the afternoon autumn stillness and quiet, and all heads turn to the hearty soul who possesses such laughter. For it is the kind of laughter, Catherine can’t help but think, that comes from someone with a warm heart, albeit cool hands. And she remembers the early-autumn chill in the church, and concludes that, no, Miss Hale does not feel the same cold hand that she did.

  That evening, and it is a luminous Wednesday evening, Catherine sits on a bench in the high street near the bus stop at the old marketplace, waiting for Daniel. She has a good view of the street from here. Down to where Daniel’s father has his shop (and at which Daniel has been all afternoon) and up to the top of the high street to the house that Miss Hale and her aunt and uncle have rented for the summer.

  The music, and its effect on her, has lingered all afternoon; as she walked home, as she read, as she dressed to go out tonight. So much so that before coming here to meet Daniel she wandered back to the church. She had time on her hands, the chill that had been in the air earlier in the day had gone, and it was a good time for a walk — a warm evening, a glowing sky. Besides, inside the church the memory of the music would be stronger, she thought, and so it was. Unexpected pleasures, she mused, standing at the back of the church (for although there was no service in progress, there were two other people in the church, possibly praying, possibly visiting like herself), are all the more memorable for being unexpected. The memory of the music was no stronger but she could visualise the scene again and lingered a while.

  Then, just as she was about to leave, she noticed the man seated a few rows in front of her. He was familiar, but why? And then she noticed the beak-like profile, the hair combed back, smooth and flat, with a parting down one side, not unlike his Mr Prufrock, and she stopped in her tracks. He was silent, perfectly still. It was a large church but she could see, when she looked more closely, that his lips were moving. And she realised, with something of a shock, that he was praying. Catherine didn’t go to church and never really thought much about God, and it occurred to her that she’d quite possibly never really observed, close at hand, someone praying. And just as the music had had unexpected power, watching Miss Hale’s friend pray was a strangely powerful experience, even moving. And she couldn’t say why — not to herself, not then, and not now as she sits on a bench at the bus stop — except to say that it was the almost imperceptible movement of the lips, in the midst of all that stillness. And was there the faintest of whispering or not? He was, she concluded, almost happy. And, at that moment, she had willed them both on to happiness, Miss Hale and her friend, as she had in the rose garden. But she was, nonetheless, vaguely troubled by the image of Mr Eliot. There was something, well, almost wrong about Mr Eliot kneeling before anyone or anything, even a god. No, especially a god. She had to stifle the impulse to tell him to get up, that her Mr Eliot did not kneel. But more troubling, and here she was thinking of Miss Hale, was the distinct impression that, inside that church, he was a man who might, like anybody, enjoy human company, but who could, if pressed, get by without it.

  Now, on the bench, she mulls over the words of Miss Hale (no doubt, at this moment, back in the house with her aunt and uncle, doing whatever they do at this time of day); the words of Miss Hale, these different kinds of love, and her friend (who seemed so complete, so contained, and yes, even happy, as he knelt in the private world of prayer), as well as the whole idea of love, of being eighteen, the sex thing, and Daniel, who is leaving in a week. And, just as she has had the sensation of stepping into and being part of a story for some time now, she now has the feeling that it is not entirely accidental that they have all crossed paths. All four. Strains of the music come back to her from the concert, four players, four melodies, weaving in and out of one another until they come to an abrupt halt and we know that a movement has been completed. There is a pause in the air and a lingering silence hovers over the square, the lingering silence that comes between the end of one part and the beginning of another.

  She looks up the high street and notices the old bus groaning towards her, passing Miss Hale’s house (who may well be observing the same bus), and imagines her friend, no longer kneeling, but strolling back to meet her. Then she turns her head as she rises, wondering where on earth Daniel could possibly be (they are going to the cinema at a town nearby), and sees him approaching, smiling, eyes alight as if contemplating some little prank, and she is aware of her whole mood lifting as she rises, instantly forgetting that world of high churches where lips that would kiss form prayers instead, and goes to meet him, their bodies, their mouths, coming together magnetically.

  Twilight begins to settle over the town as the bus carrying them lumbers out. The sky, the trees, the sheep fields glow. And so, it seems to Catherine, do they. She knows, beyond doubt, that whatever Miss Hale and her friend may have settled upon, whatever has brought them back together, and whatever has brought her all this way over land and oceans and time, far from her school and away from her girls, to a small English town for the summer, whatever has done all that and whatever it is that sustains them, she would give it all away, just to be Catherine at this very moment, holding Daniel’s hand with her heart beating like mad.

  PART THREE

  A Time for Taking Sides

  September, 1934

  Has the letter been left out on the hall-stand for Catherine to read? So that there will be no need for anybody to ask or answer questions, so that the mood in the house can be observed and understood and her visit be as brief as possible because nobody is really in the mood for talking. After stepping into the hallway, with the book in hand, to be signed on this bright Thursday morning, the first thing she saw was the letter lying on the hall-stand (with what appears to be a publisher’s card pinned to the top of it, as though the letter itself has been passed on via another party). Was it left out so she could read it, or would she be prying?

  Miss Hale, after a brief greeting, takes the book from her and leaves Catherine alone in the hall beside the stand upon which the letter sits, and Catherine, after asking herself if she dares, can’t help but read the thing.

  Will T.S. Eliot please return to his home

  68 Clarence Gate Gardens

  which he abandoned Sept. 17th, 1932.

  Keys with WLJ

  It is short enough to be taken in at a glance, yet long enough to be a story in itself. And Catherine instantly recognises that it is a very sad story for the person who wrote it (presumably the wicked woman who cling
s to things long after she has any right to). But, as much as it tells a sad story, it is also, she assumes, a disturbing letter to receive, as the mood of the house instantly tells her: although the house itself would probably choose to call it ‘awkward’. As she looks up from the letter and down the hall into the drawing room, she can make out Miss Hale whispering to her friend who is staring out a window, nodding as she speaks.

  As is often the case when she is in this house, Catherine doesn’t know whether to stay or go. The timing is all wrong and she is sure she is imposing on them at a particularly delicate moment. But just as she is about to raise her arm, just as she is about to signal to Miss Hale that the timing is all wrong and that she will leave and return another, more opportune, time, or not return at all (she doesn’t really need the signature and should never have asked for it), just as she is about to signal all of this, Miss Hale’s friend turns to her, and the transformation in his appearance shocks her into inertia. Gone is the face that emitted such booming, hearty laughter the day before, and upon which everybody turned and smiled, for it had been the happy sound of a hearty soul, the sort of sound that lights up other people’s faces and lives, and lets them forget, or simply put in perspective their concerns for a moment. That face has gone now, along with the matinee looks and the twinkle in his eye (the same sort of twinkle that Catherine has seen in Daniel’s eyes, just before he launches into some practical joke or other). And Catherine suspects that that lost happy face is the one that Miss Hale’s friend would rather go through life wearing from now on: that after years of being Westminster Abbey on legs he wants to live and laugh, and possibly be allowed to fall in love again, just like anybody else. Maybe even waste his time in idle pursuits, for he has the look of someone whose life, whose days, even whose hours, have, for year upon year, been organised like a school timetable. And you can only live like that for so long. So perhaps he’d like to throw some of his timetabled days away reading Sherlock Holmes, even memorising whole pages for a party trick; he looks the sort. But it is all proving to be extremely difficult. No, the face that yesterday had emitted such booming laughter is gone, and the one that now turns to her is transformed utterly. Above all, it is the eyes. No trace of a twinkle, no hint of a prank. And it is not just this sadness that she sees there, but something else. For the face that he shows her is not only the face of someone upon whom sadness has fallen, but someone who is also frightened. His eyes are opened wide, and a dark mood, almost physical in its intensity, seems to be emanating from him. Even more than frightened, and Catherine now remembers Miss Hale’s words (that seemed so melodramatic at the time) about goddesses, and hauntings and Furies, and concludes that the fear she sees in the eyes of Miss Hale’s friend is the fear of someone who sincerely believes himself damned to be haunted and pursued for life. And whereas she was once tempted to laugh at such an idea, she’s not now. Nor, she is sure, is he acting. Or, if he is, he is an exceptional performer.