For a moment, we all travel at the same speed. Or are stationary together. Nonstop services give you this feeling more intensely. On a train, perhaps more intensely than on any other form of transport, our spatial and temporal responsibility is gone, our destination preordained.
It’s just an illusion, of course. The train driver could suddenly decide that she wanted to stop. The train could break. It could blow up. I could jump out of the window. We could crash. It’s happened. One Valentine’s Day morning in 1927, the incoming 7.22 from Withernsea smashed into the 9.05 to Scarborough. The British Pathé footage shows ten men in bowler hats and raincoats inspecting the wreckage, the smoke from their cigarettes rises in spirals against the mist. A front engine is half-telescoped, a carriage smashed, open to the air. Trains are driven by people not machines, and that Valentine’s Day one person pulled the wrong signal lever. First nine dead. Then twelve. Human error.
My train is a safe place. I cannot be lost. The lady cannot vanish, except by a kind of illusion. The trajectory is set, and, as we power forwards, we look into something like a fixed future. Time is out of my hands, and, for that reason, for now, I feel free.
I cannot hold it, or hold it up.
Hackney Wick
— 2003 —
Having lunch in your flat for the first time, I rearrange my body as I eat, trying to work out which way I should sit. Leaning in, leaning out, leaning forward on the table to express interest, then back again in the chair, my hands neatly folded. Seen through a lens, we would have made an uncomfortable picture: dimly lit, bad angles.
I wonder where I should put myself.
Your images on the walls around me have no such trouble. A large canvas propped against the left-hand wall near the doorway. Careful still lives, stacked against each other, waiting to be taken for a hanging. A picture of what I think is a plate and a jug. Sturdy and weighted. You liked to look at objects and the ways they were positioned, one against another. The placement and arrangement. The spaces between.
I sit and try to work out the years between us. Over thirty, whichever way you counted. Years that meant not just time, but marriage, children, money, friends – all of which were unknown. I was just starting out. You were just starting to retire.
After a bit, a meal of steak and salad. (I tried to look not hungry.) It was the only time I saw you cook. Strawberries for afters, but we skipped them.
Ferriby to Brough
— 2016 —
people who make art … cannot do it blind.
You cannot do it by looking at a toaster.
Sheila Heti, ‘On the Subject of Artists Talking About Art’
What do happy families look like? I think through the cards in the pack. Mr Bun the Baker, Mrs Chip the Carpenter’s wife, Master Soot, the Sweep’s son. Neat groups of four, matching sets fitting neatly into the palm of your hand.
Fitting together is harder than it looks. It’s worst in the morning, as my family gropes its way towards various syncopated goodbyes. At some point, during toast and juice supervision, I run upstairs to pull on some clothes. Fishing around for a dress with no waist, and a pair of earrings, then hunting through the dirty-clothes basket for a pair of tights and finding some with a (painfully constricting) hole in the toe. I make my way to the front door, tripping over assorted shoes and a collapsing toy pram. My son stands by the front gate and asks if he can play Minecraft. I wonder when I last took the time to comb his hair. To read him a book. How much time is it fair to take? How much belongs to me? The question wheels in my mind, like a foot in mid-air, between platform and rails. I want to fall.
No more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall. So said Cyril Connolly. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of childcare equipment. With a pram there’s movement. A pram-pusher can think, walk and carry baggage. And there’s a chance that the pram’s occupant might go to sleep. Prams don’t even have to be taken out for an airing. They can be rocked up and down a hallway with a laptop in the hood and a paragraph has a possibility of being born. Other things get in the way of art. Laundry. The school run. Plates of food that always seem to need clearing away. The clutter on the living-room floor. The tidying up, and the nits, and the compromise. These are the things that get in the way. Along with the bills and the boiler maintenance. The train set’s wooden circle, its level crossings, its half-built bridge. The half-eaten fish finger on the plastic plate (not mine).
It is quiet right now, apart from the sound of engine against track, that familiar juddering, grinding and groaning of metal. Out of the window to my right, the fields, cut across with drainage canals, lakes and spinneys and car parks and Portakabins. I look at the bag of books and papers beside me. This, if I’m lucky, is the beginning of the middle of my life. It is a time when promising thirty-something starts to give way to middling fortysomething – a strange in-between period where horizons and trousers shrink. My nights are spent chasing not men but lost PE kit. Middles can be hard to navigate: we never know exactly where they begin. How should we pace ourselves? Is there a schedule? I scroll through the mental calendar. Ghosts are planted on various pages, next to bank holidays and festivals. My dead teacher. My dead friend. Back to my father. Dead at forty-five, he hovers over each September, a corduroy shade, condemned to perpetual middle age. I imagine the ghost you will soon be.
I am alone in my carriage, with the fifty-six other passengers. Alone together, moving to the same rhythm. I pull my phone out. There are squares and squares of photographs that contract at the touch of the screen, disappearing into tessellated blocks, a mosaic of motherhood. One of a parent’s first instincts, one of the first things they do once a child enters their life, is to begin to capture it. To render it still and permanent. As children grow, the photograph album, or the ever-present camera phone, is like a talisman. We photograph our children a thousand times. To pin them down, as if the recording might render them ours for ever, ever more perfect, but never more perfect. Photographs: the only place where things can last, as the gaze from the screen stares out of time. An illusion. It’s where we outsource our lament against time’s passing. Where we park our fear of death. White borders contain it all. Nothing must be lost.
The man on the other side of the aisle is writing an email, and the woman in front of me is staring at a spreadsheet. My phone is about to go flat, but I can still look at pictures of my children, for now. And later, I will still picture them, like negatives, the pair of them shuttering across the back of my mind with a wave of impossible love. There they are – still – hanging upside down off the rails near the park, laughing with open mouths. Squinting into the sun beside a beach hut. Holding ice creams in hands that are small.
St Petersburg to Moscow
Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning.
George Eliot, Daniel Deronda
Anna turns another page of her English novel. The woman who has been out riding is now writing a letter, then putting an imaginary hat on, before walking out of the door for the imaginary station. What Anna reads is make-believe, but that’s her substance too. She is a chimera, pure fiction. Not that there’s anything pure about fiction. Anna is pieced together, as we all are, by fragments of others, imaginary and real. She is a combination. A blend. An infusion of people who Tolstoy had met, or missed. Of things that he’d read, or imagined his heroine might have read. Open her up, case by case, like a Russian matryoshka doll, and the selves reveal themselves. Lined up, an identity parade.
One of the dolls is slightly out of line. She refuses to fit. She wants to escape to another story, to break the case and start her own. Her name is Kate Field, and she was a journalist, lecturer and early telephone pioneer. Her thousands of articles – like the people she wrote for – are just a blur on the literary time-line, almost out of view. She is a real woman lost in time. A detail I cannot let go.
Kate Field wasn’t Tolstoy’s muse, not even in the loosest sense of the word. He probably didn’t even know she exi
sted. But in the way that one late train can upset the entire South Western train service, Kate Field made an impression on Tolstoy’s world.
I know the beginning. Not the first day, first hour, first moment, but the general time and place. It began in Florence, where Kate Field first met a man with steady eyes and a way of watching the world. Anthony Trollope was forty-four and married. Field was twenty-one – and she got under Trollope’s skin. Gifts were exchanged (a copy of The Arabian Nights). And letters. And then they all went home.
But gradually, quietly, the Kate of his imagination entered his fiction. He wrote to her, and began to write about her. Numerous versions of Field haunt his novels. Different sorts of women, all a bit like Field, often called Kate, trail their way through the pages of his books. They found themselves printed and reprinted, imported and placed in bookshops in Paris and Berlin, Moscow and St Petersburg. Whenever Tolstoy readied himself to write, he turned to reading English novels. And this is how Kate Field found her way to Tolstoy. Sitting in Yasnaya, Tolstoy read about these women, these imaginary Kate Fields. He loved them. He lined the books up on his shelf. He remembered them. They crept into his mind, and into his work.
Parts of Kate Field live on in Anna Karenina. Anna Karenina is partly Kate Field. That’s what writers do. They change lives.
Hackney Wick
— 2005 —
A hot August morning and we lay on top of the bedsheets in a pile of body. You got up to take a call and I looked at my legs on the whiteness.
Summer in the city.
Outside the window, a bird settled on the nearby guttering. It was as free as a bird.
Double portraits are always the hardest, you said as you walked back in. The lens has to settle for something. It has to choose one thing or another. An eye. A coat button. A parakeet.
Battery Place to Cortlandt Street
The last word is not said, – probably shall never be said.
Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim
Distance was Kate Field’s style. Walking down Broadway, taking her time as she crossed over to Fulton and then left again down Greenwich. Rain was promised, and few would have been tramping the usually crowded sidewalks, as the sky above Lower Manhattan turned dark grey. Then stopping at the Friend Pitts store near Amity Street (now West 3rd), to pick up a precautionary umbrella. Down to the intersection of Cortlandt and Greenwich Street.
She’d just been framed – a picture with Anthony – and now she was trying to get away. She was always trying to get away. Her life was a series of broken connections, a shimmering circle, closed on the outside. The sitting had taken an age. They could have gone to any one of the quicker Broadway studios. Fredericks’ Photographic Temple opposite the Metropolitan or to Gurney’s, further down. But Napoleon Sarony at 680 was the go-to. He could render the impression of something coming into relief, almost stepping out of the paper. His figures were all life and expression. No stiff jaws and staring eyes for him, none of those brocade drapes and sad ferns. Sarony made a body seem in motion, even while that body was caught in an iron head brace, waiting for twenty seconds or more, not moving. He was an illusionist, playing with time. Slow motion looked fast. Still looked like moving.
She was glad not to be near all those people any more, to leave the cluttered studio. A large alligator hung from the ceiling of his waiting room. Greek busts and tapestries jostled for space with stuffed birds and lampstands shaped like Buddhas. The studio itself was stark and strange – full of glare and bareness, metal posing frames. The smell of ether and lavender oil, asphalt and sandarac gum, of dragon’s blood.
The photograph of the pair hasn’t survived. Lost or destroyed. Broken maybe. But what would it have told us anyway? For it is feeling that we lose in time. The feeling that lies between. The tension or the frisson. The flirtation, or unrequited love. There is no earthly way to record the thing that never happened, even if two people know how nearly it did. What makes someone walk into the middle of someone else’s marriage or out of the centre of their own? What makes someone end a relationship, or a life, placing their foot into the future’s thin air? What makes someone start an affair?
People talk. They say Trollope and Field were in love – or, at least, that he loved her, or almost loved her. They say his wife knew, or was vexed by it. They read between the lines of his novels. Tell us that he never got over her. The photographs we have tell us something, and nothing. If the camera never lies, then the separate photos that remain show two people neither gazing into the lens, nor looking in quite the same direction. Trollope sits straightforwardly, angled just a little away from centre, as if he is about to say something to someone. His eyes look directly at the viewer through his metal spectacles, his enormous beard runs from the top of his ears out towards the camera. Her eyes are set at a middle distance dream, her face and shoulders a quarter-turn from the camera lens. Her hair looks fine. Caught before the rain began. Appearances mattered to Field. She had a resistant longing for belongings. For dresses and bonnets and gloves. She was flamboyant. Camp, even. Hoping that rules can be bent.
Down the studio corridor, things are developing. Two men stand, side by side, by candlelight, next to a running water bath. One of them holds the tin sheet on his left hand, balanced like a chalice, his wrist tense with concentration. The other man passes him a small cup of developer. He flows it over the plate, timing his movements by tapping his right hand on his thigh. The lightest points appear first. Fifteen seconds in near darkness. Then the tones. The shadows come last. Surfaces and depths. The assistant leans closer to the other to check the image, looking at the levels. Then he begins to wash the plate with water, pouring the jug he has at the ready. Gently, for nothing yet is fixed. And so the surfaces of the glass transform, changing their nature. Silver nitrate and ferrous sulphate. A chemical’s properties reveal themselves in change. Action and reaction. Combustion, explosion, evaporation, smoke.
Any photograph like this contains an element of risk. An ethereal solution of pyroxylin. The risk of taking too long to make a pose, or not long enough. The risk of moving during the exposure and blurring the image. And then behind the scenes, the scurry to develop the plate, the assistant holding the glass like a delicate tray, of clumsily flowing the developing fluid or leaving it too long, and turning it black. Of scorching the image in candlelight. This picture records all those risks, and some of a less technical kind. Through the cyanide, an affair was coming into focus. Someone was nearly getting burned.
It was done. The photograph was taken, and it was time to go. Beside them, a stagecoach draws up. An unknown woman in dark-red velvet is handed down from the carriage. An unknown man takes her by the arm, an intimacy legible in the way they touch. The two unknowns disappear. Trollope and Field shake hands on the sidewalk outside the marble building, as the clouds break and they ready themselves to part. Knowingly. This goodbye might, they thought, have been their last meeting, certainly for years. It could have been for ever. Field’s diaries speak of being sick at heart. She is angry with herself for wasting time. She had nobody, she wrote, to spur her into new fields. Looking on, a passer-by would not have guessed that something was going on. They couldn’t have seen the lines of a future absence taking shape between the two of them, the imagined distance starting to solidify.
I like to think that Trollope watched her, as she turned left. Nothing now remains of that part of Cortlandt Street. It was half flattened out for the building of the World Trade Center, then flattened again one September morning, seen now only in film clips of grey and yellow horror. She was drawn by the pictures she’d seen in the papers of iron legs, the idea of newly fragile structures hovering over the streets of Lower Manhattan. The El train. A city on the move. In her head, she’d make a sketch of mechanical speed with words, thinking through the violence of the drop, the idea of the small cars catching and releasing the iron hooks above them, like gymnasts on rings. They’d finished constructing the final sections of the railway by then. The fixed iron
posts punctuated the roadways supporting the car-rails, all acrobatic, airy and perched-up, as the papers said. It was grey but hot, waiting to break into rain.
I imagine the road as it once was, crowded with horses and carts outside Peter Henderson’s, men smoking outside the Northern Hotel. She found a man from the railway company who let her climb the stairs to view an empty car. There she sat, right up on the rails, beside the second-floor windows of the dry goods stores, looking down at the heads of the passers-by. She was glad for that brolly, as the rain began in earnest. Pouring down in pitchforks and then buckets onto the sidewalk. I think of you, as she thinks of him, still fading.
Brough to Goole
— 2016 —
Miss you like …
Natalie Cole
A man sleeps opposite me, his head listing to the left. An inflatable navy blue suedette pillow matches the navy and silver seat velour. We go through a cutting, into the dark, then out again, past the lines of Heron Foods vans and the Emon Spice Lounge and the fields of hay cut short.
I think back to the photographs of Field. Even at a slant, her eyes look too pale to be true – almost luminously so. Another trick of the light. Collodion does not recognise the existence of blue. There was no way to catch her eyes.
Later, when they were apart, Trollope asked Field for a photograph of her facing straight ahead, full front. He said he wanted her natural look. Leafing through the images of Kate Field, you’ll hardly ever find it. There’s one of her leaning against a pillar, as if overhearing a conversation. One leaning back on a sofa, her head cupped in her hand. One profile, with French lace. One on horseback, on her way. Only one of her looking straight at the camera, all in white, a messenger bag slung across her torso. Something about her resisted that pose. Her pictures usually show her moving towards a world elsewhere, a profil perdu, so very French – or glancing over her shoulder, her gaze never quite meeting yours.
The Lost Properties of Love Page 2