Free The Lost Life by Steven Carroll

Some of the young girls from the town have made their way out to these fields on summer and autumn nights, and already done it with other young men of the town. A few have even got themselves in the family way. But only a few, for as much as she’s been warned off ‘going too far’ (and that is another way of putting it) by the school mistresses because it would make you a ‘fallen’ woman and get you pregnant, her observations of couples and marriages in the towns she’s lived in have taught her that it is actually rather difficult to get pregnant.
    During the summer with Daniel, Catherine has reached a point where she has tired of simply thinking about all this, she wants to know it, this mystery dance that everybody knows the steps to and that she doesn’t. Not yet. Most of all, she’s met the boy she wants to dance with. Or, rather, she’s met the boy, and, well, now feels that the inevitable should inevitably follow. She smiles briefly to herself because she imagines that Daniel would like that line (he’s the sort that likes lines), even though she stole it from a favourite book by Mr Somerset Maugham. But she doesn’t tell him because she’s dwelling on the summer and the happy coincidence of Catherine and Daniel that has transformed it. And she has more than a sneaking feeling that all the talk from her school mistresses about pain and hardship and duty is just the talk of middle-aged spinsters who’ve never actually done it, never would, and who now console themselves with the belief that they are better off without it.
    So, when Catherine makes love to Daniel, when she kisses him and holds him, as she does now (instead of braining him), she feels pleasure. She likes to receive pleasure and she likes to give it. Her nature is ardent. And as she kisses Daniel, she remembers again that ‘ardent’ is their word.
    But they have a problem: nowhere to go. The local girls may be happy to give themselves up to a roll in the country fields with their young men but Catherine isn’t. For her, there is nothing romantic about rolling around in a country paddock with the grass and the dirt and the sheep bleating. You went there because you had nowhere else to go, and, if you weren’t careful, you came back with grass stains all over your dress telling everybody in the town or within eyeshot exactly what you’d been up to. No, they were ‘going to bed’. And she’s communicated this to Daniel, who understands perfectly, because, for all the crazy little pranks he gets up to, Daniel is head over heels in love with Catherine, and, for all his professed belief in the objective forces of History, he has precisely the kind of subjective outlook, the kind of sensitive nature, that would make him a complete disaster in a revolution. He (as does she) has no time for all that guff in the novels of the infamous Mr Lawrence, where that combination of earth, dirt and sex becomes the gateway to some long-lost organic society. No, it was so serious you couldn’t take it seriously — that world in which characters knew each other with the fullness of ‘dark knowledge’ as they rolled around in country fields exchanging alltheir vital sensual reality and whatnot. Catherine and Daniel, in fact, have had many amusing conversations in the language the two of them call Lawrence- sprechen . The infamous Mr Lawrence may have been worshipped back at university, but Daniel just had to laugh. And so he agrees with Catherine. They are ‘going to bed’. But where? Friends’ places? His friends were all back in Cambridge. And he didn’t have a room at university any more. He was leaving; he’d finished his degree. He’d really only come back to the town to say goodbye to his father — the town itself did not mean a great deal to him. He’d only been vaguely aware of Catherine. That she was new, that her mother was a school teacher. He hadn’t counted on this — on their spending the whole summer together and now the beginning