The Lost Life by Steven Carroll

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 aboutthe 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 arush 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 although 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 becomesan 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