Authors: Steven Carroll
As the two men pass into the distance and out on to the high street, Catherine and Daniel move apart and hand in hand they stroll up the laneway towards the high street. It is then that Catherine tells him about her conversation with Miss Hale the previous morning — the conversation, and the gift that followed.
‘What?’ Daniel has stopped and is staring with incredulity at Catherine. ‘Don’t you think that’s a little, well, odd?’
Catherine nods. ‘A little,’ she says, taking a private delight in the incredulous look still on Daniel’s face. She could have said more than this. Yes, it is odd. Decidedly so. Funny old thing, and so on. But she didn’t say this; she said ‘a little’ odd. And she means it. There is, she tells herself, an understanding between her and Miss Hale. She is, after all, one of Miss Hale’s
girls. And, although she tells Daniel things, she knows she can never quite explain to him just what it means to be one of Miss Hale’s girls. For there is, she knows, an element of the secret, of the exclusive society, that can never be fully communicated to someone else outside that society. And so although Daniel looks at her with incredulity, there is that part of Catherine that accepts the gift as any of Miss Hale’s girls would — that part of her that looks upon it, not so much as an odd act, or even an eccentric one, but as a compliment, a gift given by one adult to another.
‘She says,’ Catherine continues as they follow the pathway, ‘that there are different kinds of love. And as we grow, love changes.’
‘She would.’
‘That’s cruel.’
‘It’s true. What are they, these different kinds of love?’
‘She never says anything directly. She never just comes out and says things. She always seems to be in some sort of play — the sort of play where no one comes out and says what they really want to say.’
‘So she means the old sex thing.’
There is a kind of smugness to the way Daniel says this, and Catherine’s immediate instinct is to take
Miss Hale’s side, for it is the kind of comment, and the kind of turn of phrase (a smart, studenty one, which is unlike Daniel), that demands sides be taken. And so she does. ‘What do you mean, the old sex thing?’
‘That’s the way these people talk. The sex thing. The woman thing. They’re still children. So what she means is they don’t do it because that’s beneath them these days, but they do have this wonderful spiritual thing instead of the sex thing.’
‘Do you have to say it like that?’
‘But it’s true. She’s just an old maid. Bit more style than most, but an old maid. And he’s just as likely to be an old queer who doesn’t know what to do with himself. They’re made for each other. A funny bunch, if you ask me.’
‘That’s awful. You don’t mean all that? And even if you do, do you have to say it like that?’
Catherine, knowing that Daniel, like her, is probably just angry at being interrupted and cheapened by a cliché, says this just as they hit the high street. With people suddenly around them and within earshot, they stop talking even though she would dearly love to go on and tell Daniel just how much he annoys her when he talks like that (and she’s surprised because he rarely does). But he’s also annoyed her
because what he’s said is hurtful. She is not so much hurt herself but hurt on Miss Hale’s behalf. It is all part of taking sides. For her heart is still going out to Miss Hale, still urging her on to happiness.
At the same time, Daniel (and Catherine is fully aware of this because Daniel has told her) knows something — not much, but something — about this ‘old sex thing’ because he has done it. He is, after all, twenty-two. He’s been at Cambridge for four years and they have girls there. And, of course, he’s told her with the self-satisfied air of the prankster who got away with one of his finest stunts that it’s difficult to get in and out of the women’s rooms without being caught, but that it can be done if you know how. And he has. Once. Up the window and out the window on a fireman’s rope. He’s told her this, and although he might boast about the trick, he didn’t about the girl like any of the other local boys would (and that’s another reason she never wants to be caught in the open because everybody talks around here). No, he’s told her because he thinks she ought to know. Just as he’s told her that he expected everything to be different afterwards, but it wasn’t. Everybody else, he’d thought, had this knowledge — and he didn’t. But, once he’d done it, he would. Only, when it was
all over (and Daniel has not told her that it was all over in a flash and that the first thing he’d done was apologise to the girl — who’d told him not to be silly), he didn’t feel any different. This knowledge that he’d fully expected to come with the whole thing failed to arrive. So, when he talks about the sex thing the way he just has, he’s not pretending to know anything much more than Catherine — and she knows this because Daniel doesn’t put on airs and doesn’t pretend to be things he’s not. But still, he annoyed her just then, and as they cross the road to a quiet street (on their way to a music recital in the parish church, where a quartet will play Beethoven), she continues as if they hadn’t stopped. ‘Well, do you?’
‘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.