The Lost Life Read Online Free Page B

variety of subjects in the company of equals. More importantly, one trusts and receives trust on the unspoken assumption that it will never (on pain of death) be betrayed. And, ultimately, one is judged fit to receive confidences. That sense of being taken under Miss Hale’s wing early in the summer, the interest Miss Hale took in all she did, it struck Catherine later, might not just have come from her friendly nature but the result of curiosity, a desire to find out if this young woman was fit to receive confidences. If it was a test for which Catherine didn’t even realise she was sitting, she apparently passed it. Yes, she had, it seemed, been found up to receiving what confidences Miss Hale might see fit or find necessary to bestow upon her. She had, in fact, already received one.
    For it was, in just such a way, that Catherine first heard of Miss Hale’s special friend. You may, she told Catherine early in her employment, you may, from time to time, see or meet a special friend of mine who comes up from London to visit. You will do me a service more valuable than work, shesuggested, if you say nothing of it. And Catherine had nodded, saying nothing, both flushed with the tone of the request (one adult to another) and intrigued as to whom it could possibly be. It was all part of that world of confidences and trusts, the kind of confidence bestowed on Miss Hale’s girls and the kind of trust expected of them. If, her manner clearly implied, if you were one of my girls (and if you attended my college you most certainly would be, for, you have, her manner once again clearly inferred, that something extra that all my girls have), you would know without being told the need for discretion. She doesn’t use the word ‘secrecy’, Miss Hale. Whenever she speaks to Catherine on the subject of her special friend, she instead speaks of discretion. And care. And, on one such occasion, as if to dispel any unnecessary sense of mystery, as if to explain that this required discretion was no affectation, she spoke, in distant terms, of someone she knew, a dear friend who had made a most unfortunate match in his youth and married a very weak woman. And don’t imagine that the weak don’t have power, she’d said, gazing from her cottage window on to the garden below, they have enormous power. The selfishly weak will always rule the strong.For they cling and they hold on long after they have any right to. This is the selfishness of the weak. They hold on to things long after they have any right to, just so nobody else can have them. Do you know such people, she had asked, turning her head back from the garden the way actors do on the stage. Just the way actors do when they have revealed something of their inner character and are momentarily vulnerable. Catherine shook her head and Miss Hale had smiled. Good, the smile implied. You are lucky. Let’s hope it stays that way.
    Without as much being said, Catherine was given to understand, very early in her employment, that such discretion was crucial, in case this woman, this weak woman, who held on to things longer than she had any right to, intruded upon their special time together. For, although she was weak, Catherine was given to understand through the urgency that Miss Hale radiated when speaking of these visits from her special friend, she was, this woman, cunning, as the weak and selfish inevitably are, and not to be under-estimated. She follows him, this woman, plagues and turns up just when he thinks he is alone. It is not an exaggeration, Miss Hale had suggested, to say there are even times when, withsome justification, he can lay claim to being haunted, her friend.
    ‘You may even know of him,’ she once murmured, with the faintest of smiles, not even a smile but a hint that one was not far away, a suggestion that when Catherine was out of the room and she was alone, Miss Hale might allow herself a smile, and a vaguely satisfied one at that.
    It was said in such a way