Read The Lost Life for Free Online Page B

whole garden still and quiet, the silence is shattered by the loud urgent skidding of motor-car tyres in the gravel driveway at the front of the house. For two, possibly three seconds, Miss Hale, her friend, Catherine and Daniel — all four — listen with various mixtures of dread and alarm over their faces, as this motor car (which they cannot see) speeds from the driveway, stirring, they imagine, dust and stones into the air as it departs and fades into the distance of the estate’s front gate. Then the garden is still again. Possessing that glowing, mid-afternoon Arcadian stillness it had a mere fifteen or twenty minutes before when Miss Hale and her friend had stood, so serenely, at the top of the garden path and exchanged rings. To all appearances still the same garden, but now utterly transformed, violated. For violation is the word that comes to Catherine while she stares at the couple she had, not so long ago, urged on to happiness, as they, in turn, stand gaping at where their intimate, shared possessions had, they assumed, been safely committedto earth, unable to fathom what manner of animal, or mad man or woman, could possibly have done this.
    It is then as Miss Hale watches, helpless, that her special friend, his body folding like a summer deckchair, falls to his knees in front of his cap, in front of the hole in the earth and the glowing pink and white petals of the timeless garden, and screams out as if having been physically hit. ‘I will never be free of this woman!’ And as he does this, he looks in the direction of the driveway where the car has just so hastily departed, then to the hole. Catherine can’t help but observe there’s not only despair in this outburst but violence as well. A capacity for violence, for white-tempered, mad violence, has taken over the face and body of Miss Hale’s special friend. And not just a capacity for loud violence but the kind of violent impulse that can cause people to explode and shout the most loathsome things (to ‘this woman’ for a start). For there is that kind of violence now in his countenance, one that, Catherine thinks, in some Jekyll-and-Hyde manner, disfigures him. She would never have thought to see such a look on the face of Miss Hale’s special friend, whose public image she knows from newspapers and books, and which has always looked back at her, and all readers,with the calm, serene stare of the impersonal poet, to whom outbursts of inferior emotions are completely foreign. Human, but not like the rest of us are human. Endlessly patient. A stare that understands it all, and is above it all. And this is the image she wants to believe. And she is as much shocked by this violent outburst as she is by his sobs and the heaving of his body as he looks up to Miss Hale, who now kneels and takes his hands and holds them in hers, occasionally patting them and subduing him, until the violence is gone from his eyes and he is her special friend once more. When he is calmed, when they are done, Miss Hale rises, and, still holding his hands, brings him to his feet. He picks up his cap, slaps his thigh with it, and together they leave, silently, the laughter, the lightness, all gone, down the path that leads to the drained pools of the estate and the wooded section beyond that will eventually take them back to the gate she had so recently pronounced the perfect place from which to watch the sun set.

    When the scene settles, for it is as though some cold, dark wind has blown in across the estate and over the rose garden, Catherine and Daniel emerge, warily, from the bushes for a second time. The screech of motor-car tyres has long disappeared, the sounds of the outburst have faded, and all is quiet again. But the sun goes behind a cloud, the shadows darken, and the storybook glow has left the garden. Or perhaps the story has changed. Catherine has the urge to shiver and feels that if she was to turn towards the house now she might catch a glimpse of a couple of