Sidewalk or not, they would have said farewell somewhere, somehow. We never know when the last word is said. Perhaps the last word is never said. Can anything indeed, Field’s biographer asked, in this part of life be ever said to be the end? We never know when our meeting with another person might be the final one. Even the most heartfelt goodbyes usually have a confident belief in au revoir, a next time, a next place. But on the very fringes of our consciousness there is always the sense that this might be, if not the full stop in the conversation, then a conversation left hanging. For some, the finality is always that bit closer. The hurried quality of lovers parting bears it out. Lovers’ time is carved out of real time – or stolen. It’s always under threat.
Any affair is an attempt to live twice. Set into the beige wall of everyday linear time, it exists beyond a door you think nobody else has noticed. You walk past doors just like it every day. Often you don’t even think to look at it. But now and again, you stand beside it. You might be the sort to push open that door. Sometimes it resists your touch, or bounces gently on the hinges before shutting, and you return to the beige world. You read a safety notice about fire drills on the wall, check your phone, or fish something from your bag, as if pretending that you never even tried to push. But sometimes you are standing nearby and that door swings open seemingly of its own accord, offering a floodlit view down a pathway of nylon grass. The walk seems impossibly short. And while you are there, you have two lives, and two heartbeats. You make believe that you have created a sort of a time pocket or vortex, a duplicate self. There’s something almost impossible about this other, Narnian universe. And while you are in it, nobody does it better. The moment you take your first step, you feel as if time has warped and split.
If photographs are a way of stopping time – their stilled presence, wet collodion and albumen transformed into something brittle, calm and dry – then affairs create a negative imprint, a second life. If a camera is a clock for seeing, as Barthes has it, then an affair is a clock for living. For anyone hungry for time, this door is the one to open for that oh-so-dangerous illusion, the illusion of more time, more space. Of more.
Trollope always hungered. He wanted to split into pieces, to live many lives. His characters multiply, revolving, double, inconsistent. An affair with words. You can see it right from the beginning. Please, sir, I want. First as a bullied child walking through the streets of Harrow, dreaming of castles in the air. Then, as an adult, sitting at his desk every day. He squeezed time, waking in the dark and writing into sunrise, spooling out a thousand words an hour between five and eight in the morning. Two hundred and fifty words every fifteen minutes. I attribute the power of doing this altogether, he wrote, to the virtue of early hours. It was my practice to be at my table every morning at 5.30 a.m. His groom got up first and made him coffee, then the real day began.
Trollope logged his life in grids. Targets met or missed, days of idleness or productivity. Late one night he writes to Field, asking her to meet him at Niagara Falls, the scene of so many Victorian clinches. I’ll come to you, he says, if you can get away.
I look at my book. You don’t need to be a writer or an actor or a lover to dream a second life, an unlived life. You don’t need to have an affair. Every reader does it. In the moment we touch the cover, a second world emerges – another reality with its own rules of space and time. And good novels knock us sideways, even as they take us forwards. With every story we turn the page for, we turn to feel the weight of the unlived life, the other ways we might have gone, or loved, or died. Some are unfaithful readers. A pile of books live next to my side of the bed, gathering dust and regret. For each book that we read, there’s another we don’t begin. And in choosing a tale to write, or relate, there is another we cannot, or do not speak. These small choices carry with them an accompanying sense of resistance, a gravitational pull towards the alternatives we leave behind. The mushrooms we never picked on the picnic we never went on with the person we never met. Most of us are missing something. In so many of our imaginations, there’s a vision of something like a train we missed, a moment in life when we were too late, or too scared to act. Or got stuck in the queue at the sandwich shop. Some of these trains move towards lands we’ve lost, some pause at stations of regret. We see others pass across the landscape of our memory with a sigh of relief. They are the boredoms we escaped, the journeys we avoided. But some are so painful we can only glimpse them at night. They pass at high speed, cornering the edge of dread, taking our breath away.
Hackney Wick
— 2005 —
I have decided that seeing this is worth recording
John Berger, ‘Understanding a Photograph’
Your studio flat was hard to read. The place was all stripped back and bald, staging a bachelor existence that wasn’t yours. Even the few images that you chose to hang on the walls told a story of things that liked to be single. Black-and-white stills of an old milk jug, a spoon, a silhouette of a man on an empty piazza, pulling a lonely suitcase.
All the clean lines were just an illusion. Hiding that life made sense of course. I get the picture, now I could risk losing the same: a discrete affair keeps things discrete. But your silence got me wanting. You reminded me of one of those plastercast-moulded models I used to make as a child, the ones that fell into two halves. The fascination comes from looking at what’s being cut off. The straight, flat back, deliciously smooth, powder dry.
One afternoon, you left me alone to go to a shoot. Licence to stalk into your office. I looked behind the screen, and opened your desk drawers once to see if I could find any family pictures, then shut them again feeling guiltier than I thought I would. I sat back at your desk, tried out your chair. Imagined the album I would have found. Page after page of grainy squares, bearing witness to the theatre of family. Your role as husband. Your place as father.
There must be a photograph of the small you, walking on a wet promenade, smiling into a lens. I wonder if that’s where it began. When you were taken by the desire to capture things. Sometimes we can pin it down to a single frame. The moment we start to become who we are.
West Finchley to Belsize Park
— 1982 —
They were not railway children to begin with
Edith Nesbit, The Railway Children
My family looked happy enough. From a distance, or from the photos. We lived in an ordinary suburban house, a bit like the one in which Nesbit’s railway children begin their lives at the turn of the twentieth century. Ours was a bit smaller. Inside, there was a big square hall with an emerald green tiled fireplace, and a kitchen with a glass-fronted dresser and an archaic bell system that no longer worked. There were four bedrooms upstairs and a mock balcony, accessible from the main bedroom or by climbing out of a side window, where you could sit on the slatted wooden floor and smoke Camel Lights. We even had French windows, like Nesbit’s children, which hooked back so that you could walk onto a crazily paved patio. The garden was long. It had a gate leading onto the local woods. There were hydrangea bushes and a rockery in the garden. An unsteady sundial with an iron pointer that you could lift up to ambush a colony of ants running in frenzied circles. A gently rotting greenhouse, in which we used to store old furniture. It was a quiet road, the silence broken by the sound of the Tube making its way down the end of the Northern Line, or our next-door neighbour trying to kill squirrels with his air rifle. The house is my earliest memory. The front door in particular.
I remember walking down the path, looking at its pale blue wood (later painted yellow) and jewel-like panels of coloured glass – blue, green and red teardrops against a grid of lead. There were row after row of houses like this in our neighbourhood, all with their own individual take on topiary or pampas grass. Our road was one of the many suburban semi developments of early twentieth-century Metroland, the place with elastic borders, no beginning and no clear end. The architectural critics call these roads joyless. Phoney. A kind of Neverland. Semis like these were, in 1
910, bang on trend. Tudorbethan, blackened timber nailed onto the stucco, leadlights in squares or sometimes in diamonds. In the really posh bits of London, architects lovingly built houses along these lines, attempting to capture the idea of human craft in the machine age. The ones in our street were aspirational knock-offs – the rows of pseudo-artisan houses embodied that oddest of ideas: mass-produced individuality. All suburban semis are alike, but each suburban semi is alike in its own way.
Our road was a cul-de-sac. Bag End. Traffic calmed, there was nowhere to go. If you went back the way you came, further up the junction, onto the main road, there was the North Finchley cinema complex, and Brent Cross Shopping Centre, and the open road to Little Chef. And holidays. The North Circ, and Neasden and David Lloyd Sports Centre and multiplex cinemas. Homebase and B&Q. Smooth and bland. A place that brings with it a sort of atrophy of body and mind, a numbing alikeness. This is what J. G. Ballard called the real England. And with it, he writes, comes a boredom that can only be relieved by some sort of violent act; by taking your mail-order Kalashnikov into the nearest supermarket and letting rip.
A century ago, Edith Nesbit had a similar, if less scary, response to Metroland. As a ritual, each evening, she would put aside her drafts of novels and make a series of models of factories and suburban houses out of brown paper. She’d then take them out to her back garden, and set them on fire. It’s little wonder that Nesbit soon has her railway children leave their villa, engineering the plot so that they are forced to take a cottage in the country.
Finchley in Nesbit’s day was an omnibus ride from town, up through Swiss Cottage and Golders Green. A strange mixture of city and countryside, famous for its compost heaps and Barham’s model dairy farm. Visitors on the omnibus would continue through Temple Fortune for their day in the country, on the edge of the city. Overlooking the presence of Simms Motor Units, they would head for the idyll on Regent’s Park Road, where they could view the rows of pedigree Express dairy cows, admire the silver bottle tops and have a scone in the adjoining tearooms. It was a stop-gap. A commuter village. From Tally Ho Corner, you could take the omnibus direct to Marylebone, or pick up the train on a cross route from Finsbury Park to Edgware. But Finchley didn’t join the London Underground for years. Perhaps it makes sense that the man who designed the Tube map was off the map, at least when he first drew it. When he died, nobody even knew it was his idea. Harry Beck lived just around the corner from me – a dweller in nowhere.
Nowadays, Finchley still feels more to me like a place to pass through than a destination. A few months ago, I took a journey down the road to my old house, rounding the corner past West Avenue and Lovers Walk. Everything seemed wider and larger than I recalled, but the quality of silence was still the same. The houses are the same mixture of the dark red of the late eighties and the determined solidity of 1930s mansion flats. I walked along the undulating road, past Chestnut Row with its pollarded trees. The house at the corner of my road has been converted to a care home. Shielded by a high fence, only parts of it are visible from the street. A burgundy awning perches above its door, desperately trying to create the effect of hotel luxury. The strange combination of porticos and extensions and satellite dishes make it feel as if it is about to fall into the road.
Ahead to the left is Lovers Walk, the shortcut up to Ballards Lane. Not much in the way of love ever happened to me there. The closest I came was being flashed at while walking back from Tesco. My road bends to the right, down a shallow hill. It seems much the same. The same green-gated park on the left-hand side. I remember the overwhelming shades of green – conifers – and the slow descent of the road down to the bottom where our house stood, still marked by the leafless silver birch, with its white trunk and electrocuted shock of narrow branches. The road was still quiet, apart from the banging of some builders a few doors up.
There was an ache about the house that I couldn’t put into words but which I remembered from before. Growing up, I understood that our house was steeped in compromise. It was not quite a mistake but felt a place in which we could never truly settle. Every few months, an outing with an estate agent acted as a peculiarly ineffective kind of family therapy. We trooped around other houses, further down the Northern Line, nearer to town. They smelled of polish or mice, or a different kind of pain. But the houses we saw, the ones without net curtains and stucco, were unaffordable. Window shopping over, we were stuck.
Sometimes there were arguments. Quiet arguments. Voices never raised. Tension about money, I think. Holidays. A particularly vivid un-shouting match seemed to be about what shade of beige we should paint the front room, but probably wasn’t. Mostly there was just a sense of things unsaid. My father insisted on long journeys to National Trust stately homes, and I threw up in the back seat.
Once, at the end of one weekend, something happened. Someone was not able to talk. Someone else was angry. The contents of a coffee cup were poured around the kitchen table, like a bizarre midsummer rite. We were packed into the car with suitcases. We drove to my friend’s house where we arrived without warning and were awkwardly made lunch. Our suitcases remained in the hall. When we returned home and walked back into our kitchen, accomplices of this short, failed separation, my father was still standing in front of the square window above the draining board, staring at the revolving washing line and fiddling with the silver tankard full of screwdrivers, as if he’d been there all day. The magic coffee circle had been cleaned up. I watched the raindrops make their way down the glass, breaking off and then joining one another, like companionable tears. Then I went outside and played with the tap, pressing my hand against the pattern of small shiny stones embedded in concrete until it hurt. Nobody felt at home, and there was no hope of anyone going anywhere.
My father was invisibly sick. We all knew he was sick, but I didn’t fully understand why or how or where. Sometimes he was at work, leaving every morning in a suit with a briefcase to do things that had something to do with the Government. Sometimes he left a little later, with a vinyl suitcase packed with pale blue pyjamas, and then he was going to the Big Hospital, and didn’t come back for a while. Once he was there for a very long time. We visited. The Big Hospital corridors unfurled like a medical version of Oz, rising and falling as we walked. Everything smelled of oranges and Pine Harpic. I was allowed to buy a Beatrix Potter cookery book and a stained-glass colouring book on the way home. Then my aunt arrived with a neat collection of bags and a bright smile and made marmalade.
When my father finally came home, he spent a long time upstairs in bed and there was a differently strange smell in the bedroom. His left leg was marked with two shiny ovals, bigger than my mother’s hand. It looked as if someone had drawn on him with a stencil and then polished his skin like an albino dining table. First the oval was surrounded by ugly black threads with little knots on them. Then these disappeared, leaving a border of pale mauve marks and ridges.
He spent the weekends avoiding the inside of the house. Leaning on the hall windowsill, I could see his corduroy trousers sticking out from under the car, against a background of various greens – the sickly privet and spotted laurel over the road, the bitter green box hedge next door, and the grey-green lamp post rising behind him. The scene, as I looked out, was contained by the neat grid of lead, like a picture in a maths symmetry book. Our garden was filled with his temporary structures. A broken caravan. A homemade treehouse. A lean-to for the mower. Half a green Renault sat on the drive, plundered for parts. I keep this world in the few photographs I have, a dozen round-cornered prints of birthday teas and Christmas trees. I remember it too, in reverse, in the memory of negatives I used to find in boxes. I loved pulling them out of their little pockets in strips, wondering at the inverted world they gave me. The childhood face of my past is pale umber, my pupils translucent, my hair almost black. It is in this looking-glass memory that I get closer to the moment of the taking.
At teatime he came in, washing his hands with green Swarfega, before watchin
g the wrestling and the Grand Prix. One of the wrestlers was called Big Daddy, which made me think he might be something to do with God and forgiving our trespasses as we forgive those, but my father told me that his real name was Shirley. Shirley wore an enormous pair of blue and white striped stretch dungarees. He bounced off the ropes and straight into Giant Haystacks. At some point Haystacks bounced up and down on Shirley’s stomach and the bell rang. Someone quietly turned the thermostat up.
All houses have their own climate, their own smell, their own temperature and particular ecosystem of air currents and creaks. They all have that specific combination of humid or fetid, of warm or cold that depends on the kind of central heating system you have or do not have, or whether or not the window in the bathroom is open. Smells and sounds can be put into words. Ours had a scent of McVitie’s digestive biscuits and furniture polish about it, with a sad hint of hamster in the back living room. A ticking sound as the central heating system turned on and clanged through the pipework. But atmospheres are speechless. When we say that a house has ‘an atmosphere’ it is as if the sentence has given up hope of explaining itself. Atmospheres exist somewhere between sound and silence, and in the pitch and cadences of voices. In a house with an atmosphere, it is as if someone has imperceptibly turned the volume down, and flattened every voice. When there is an atmosphere in a house, a question is answered with silence, or in the way a head is moved just an inch away from centre when someone speaks, so that there’s space for a roll of the eyes. The television, of course, is the friend of the atmosphere. In periods where the difficulties of shared space and time have felt too much, the television, eternullity in a box, gives the bodies within the family permission to stare forwards, like communicants at an altar.
The Lost Properties of Love Page 3