London had made Field sick before. She was laid low one winter for three weeks with bronchitis, but this time she was better insulated, taking rooms in New Cavendish Street on the corner near Wimpole Street, which she decorated with newspapers and photographs. She needed her voice more than ever. She was in charge of promoting the eighth wonder of the world, the first public relations manager for Alexander Graham Bell’s new invention, the telephone.
Field believed in the telephone. Love at first sight. She writes of the excitement of approaching the small pear-shaped wooden instrument, which sat on a desk, looking for all the world like a misplaced stethoscope. And then her surprise when she picked it up – hearing a voice. A speaking object. Intimacy at a distance. Soon, she said, every house will be connected. Everyone wanted to see this invention, and Field was its natural promoter. She conjured an air of mystique around the new, otherworldly piece of tech. Invitations were issued to select VIP salon events, or telephone séances. This was the age of spiritualism, an age of table rapping and mesmerism, and the papers loved it. There were special guests, and celebrity visits. Prince Louis Napoleon turned up with the Duchess of Westminster and a large party of swells. George Eliot got her own private audience with the device, and a special telephone concert was fixed for Queen Victoria. Ahead of her time, Field pitched a Skype prototype as the next step.
All through the winter and spring of 1878, invited guests gathered in the Cannon Street offices. Bell took centre stage, placing the sacred instrument on a wooden platform. MPs and aristocrats chatted, lunched and talked politics, while they viewed and heard their voices make their way down the wires. The whole thing must have taken the edge off the melancholy weather and rising tensions in Constantinople. Field took notes, made introductions, hustled. Hidden in the guest list, somewhere between the actress Lillie Langtry and the publisher John Blackwood, was her friend Anthony Trollope.
When I was growing up, every phone call was a small journey. I would emerge from my bedroom at the back of the house, along the landing and past the airing cupboard, running my hand along the Anaglypta wallpaper, round and down the stairs to the front hall, where the beige plastic phone sat on the window-ledge, beside the address book and a pot of pens. Looking out of the window, you’d see the silver birch, then Mavis Pace’s house opposite, with the white glass-panelled front door lined with net that felt like silk.
Our phone had a transparent dial – a circle, divided in half, with a piece of paper in the centre bearing the number and code, and made of two bits of plastic, with a grooved line in between to collect grit. Even the act of using the phone was a journey in miniature. Every one of the seven digits involved the slow pulling back, and releasing, of the rotary dial. If your courage faltered, you could stop at any moment, and fiddle with the grit in the telephone case, or try to clear the white mist from the leadlighting with your thumbnail, until the final number was pulled back and the recoil spring took matters into its own hands. Then your only choice was to listen to the sound of ringing, or slam the receiver down before the other person answered.
Field and Trollope sat together in that sunny room in Cannon Street surrounded by the throng of guests. Was there something between them – a hint of smoke in the air? Perhaps they’d arrived together. Perhaps Trollope had written her one of his notes – If you like it I will take you. I will call for you at 3-pm in a hansom cab. Let me have a line to say so. Trollope was always waiting on a line from Field. We have the record of his invitations. The letters. The implications. If you are going out of town, let me know when you go. If you’ll go down close to the sea, & near enough for me to get at you, I would then go to you. He sends her a kiss that is as loving as you please. In another, he talks of something darker – the black phantom that lies between them, that vexes her, and teases his wife. In one short story he tells of a sleigh ride with a woman who sounds uncannily like Field. They sit, side by side, all enveloped in buffalo furs, and he thinks how nice it would be to drive on and on, so that nobody should ever catch them. He felt he would have liked to cross the Rocky Mountains with her, over to the Pacific, and to have come home round by California, Peru, and the Pampas. Everywhere, moving.
Trollope asks her again, in a letter, to meet. He writes of her with love. She is a ray of light to him. She is someone from whom he can always strike a spark. He asks for her to come and see him. Field’s replies have vanished.
Perhaps there’s a pile of lost letters and telegrams out there. But that month, at least, I suspect she had little time for correspondence. Maybe she barely noticed Trollope was there at all. Or perhaps she invited him just so that he could watch her show off, flirting with Millais, the painter, or giving Lady Henniker the eye. It could have been a kind of revenge. The first time they had met, in Italy, when all eyes were on him, Field had sat in the corner feeling like a nobody, waiting to catch his attention. Now she was in the centre, holding court, one of the ‘taking’ things of the season. Either way, there would have been a moment when she passed the receiver to him. He could still feel the warmth of her hand on the wood.
How long can two people be apart from one another – how many impossibilities between them – before the connection goes dead?
The journey to an affair is like the longest dialling process in the world. Most of the time we never go further than rifling through our mental address book, looking at names and checking their Twitter feed, wondering what they might be up to. Thinking about who and what might happen if you ever called, and if they would choose to pick up. Perhaps they are already on another line.
But sometimes you press the final number, the fatal eleventh, and you hear it ring out. You proceed to Go. You plan and choose what to wear, and buy a ticket, and get on the train, with an excuse in your pocket. You watch the people reading their books – facing each other, back to back. Then you step off the overground, and walk down to the slip road as night falls – and there are still a hundred moments when you can turn back. You can stop at the wharf and think it through, remembering how to compose your life in a way that will hurt neither you nor others. You can stand near the boats and the old warehouses and look at the way the metalwork frames the canal, before walking back down the road to the station. But you don’t. You keep walking and cross the road, turn right after the bridge, following the bend of the path with the stretch of graffiti. The buildings close in on you as you enter the yard. There’s a tension as you get nearer the door. A moment of space that feels as if you’re falling into a doubly indrawn breath – then you press the bell. You know you really should be somewhere else. And up until that moment you can always turn back, or turn aside.
Then you have done it, and the door clicks open. The recoil spring takes over.
Before that moment, though, you are waiting, turning, watching the wheel spin.
You are free, even if pulled by an ache lodged somewhere between your shoulder and your heart. All my life I’ve made journeys like this, detours from the track that I’m meant to be on. The journey feels like a way to a cure, even as it speaks of an illness. Some of us have loved this journey itself most of all, loved it more than arriving.
St Petersburg Station
l’exécution est de plus en plus difficile … parce que j’ai vidé mon sac
Gustave Flaubert, Correspondances
Anna descends from the night train into the early morning grey, stepping down from the steep carriage stairs and onto the platform of bags and porters and cabs waiting to pick up fares. She would have reached Mockвa at 11 a.m. Moscow Time. (That said, all time was Moscow Time on Russian trains, which meant that if you were on a train near Ekaterinburg wanting blinis for breakfast you could end up being offered a cabbage soup lunch.)
Like all good travellers, she kept her luggage near to her. Standing there, on the platform, in her dark travelling coat and hat, watching the movement at the station, the entrances and exits. She would have had a trunk or two – and a valise. Perhaps a shawl or rug over an arm. And a red
silk pouch, her мешочек, would hang from her wrist – just large enough to carry her most immediate possessions. Tolstoy’s wife, Sofia, had three or four bags like this – some beaded, some fabric, some finished with braid, formed in each corner with two loops.
Once you start looking through the novel, bags are all over the place. A rash of them. They break out like measles, all redness and leather, in chapter after chapter. After her first disturbing and thrilling encounter with the handsome officer, Vronsky, Anna hides her face from her sister-in-law’s gaze. She bends her flushed face over a tiny bag, stowing her nightcap and handkerchiefs. Later this is the bag where she keeps her books, the tiny pocket editions of English novels that, in themselves, provide other ways and places to hide. Anna’s handbag is a sign of autonomy. She is a Woman Who Carries Her Own Bag, a prototype of the emancipated New Woman to come. But it is also a sign of retreat. Holding her nightcap and handkerchiefs, the bag is a gathering point – a refuge – and it keeps Anna steady in her attempt to hold herself together. There is, for her, no other gathering point.
So everyday in their status as totes, or carriers, that we barely register their existence, bags are entwined with the world of secrets and power, money and myth. They are not close to our body, like a pocket, nor do they live outside us, like a safe, or a chest. Prosthetic extensions. Intimate, but at arm’s length, the bag is a way of managing space. We condense our stuff, squeeze it into pockets and compartments, shut clasps and buckles and zips – so we can take some of our space with us as we travel. And, unless you’re a fan of transparent handbags (big in the 1960s), they also provide a private space in the public world. Even within our houses, bags usually belong to one individual. We rarely share a bag. They are our bastion, our fortress, our protection from communal space. They are the first place we hide things and the first place you would look to find something hidden.
A Hermès Birkin sold in 2018 at Christie’s auction house for the price of a very small flat on the outermost reaches of London. White crocodile skin, encrusted with 10.23 carats of diamonds. There’s a museum entirely devoted to the history of handbags in a canalside house in Amsterdam. There you’ll find the early leather sacks carried by men, embroidered and inlaid reticules once held by grand Georgian ladies. The bags are backlit, hanging from hooks in cabinets – and the whole thing feels like an incredibly high-end charity shop. Many of the bags have some kind of story about them. A French beaded pouch commemorates the arrival of Zarafa the Nubian giraffe in Paris’s Jardin des Plantes. A clutch bag is made in the shape of an ocean liner. Others are more personal celebrations – miniatures of two newlyweds are embedded into the front flap of a delicate peach silk bag. Some are transparent, shaped like Cinderella’s carriage. A sequin-encrusted can of Coke, a fairy cake on a strap. Famous bags sit with everyday bags. Madonna’s bag outshines the one that belonged to Imelda Marcos. There’s something that looks like a nineteenth-century changing bag, with a decorative feature of a mother and a child in a playpen. There’s a 1920s Egyptian-style bag decorated with lapis lazuli. In the tearoom, admiring postcards of bags and bag paraphernalia, surrounded by paintings of Roman gods and goddesses, you can wonder at the felicitous coincidence that Charles-Émile Hermès, the Parisian leatherworker whose company went on to create some of the world’s most iconic bags, shared his name with the nearest we have to the god of luggage. Hermes – god of boundaries and doorways, the travelling god, god of trade and commodities, always depicted with a satchel on his arm.
A latter-day Anna Karenina would, I imagine, go bag shopping in the big department store on Nevsky Prospekt, with its arcades and concessions, its peculiar Christmas lights and stiff, half-dressed mannequins. There the bags sit side by side, looking pristine and oddly ridiculous. What is a bag without an owner? She would dismiss the cheaper brands, not even glancing at the rucksacks on the ground floor. The special cases of little Picard and Moschino bags look nearer to what the twenty-first-century Anna might carry, but it’s still hard to pin it down. Bags, after all, are a personal thing.
Maybe Tolstoy’s Anna would have gone bespoke – had one made in the latest style by one of the haberdashers in St Petersburg. Her sister-in-law, Dolly, would not have thought to carry a sac à main or reticule. She probably disapproved. The conservative papers called them ridicules. Anna’s bag was a public sign that she could be a woman and mobile agent. She could walk alone – and make her own financial choices – in public. A bag of one’s own meant a purse of one’s own. It meant she had the power to spend. Her handbag, then, came into fashion at the same moment as the arrival of the department store – and was a licence to enter a portable utopia. The larger bags had room for everything – the cartes de visite, the ivory note pad and address book, the candy box and the mirror, the rice-powder puff, the tiny handkerchief, the rouge. But bags were manacles as much as miracles. Those, like Anna, who carried them, were making a kind of declaration. Both showing and hiding all the stuff a woman needed to keep the fiction going.
I remember tagging along with my brother on my mother’s biennial handbag-shopping expeditions. We would always go to the enormous shopping centre, north London’s flagship attempt at the American mall, built on the site of a sewage works and a greyhound stadium. There we would stand in the concrete marvel, staring at the people who had enough money to eat in the sunken café surrounded by silver railings. We were allowed to stand for five minutes by the enormous fountain beside Lilley and Skinner, watching the shoppers ride the escalator over it, as if entering another world. I remember listening to its roar and feeling the cool air – a kind of postmodern Niagara Falls. At the counter, in the leather, jewellery and gifts section, my mother would range for what felt like hours, comparing two seemingly identical models of navy blue Tula bags, checking that the number of compartments and zips was suitable for use, would prevent pilfering, would allow for diary fitting, and ensure comfort. I could sense that this purchase was not a pleasure for her. It seemed freighted with all the things she had to bear. This life was not her bag, as it were. Sitting under the clothes rail, I came to a realisation that being a grown-up meant spending a lot of money on a sensible navy blue bag that would go over one’s shoulder. I vowed I would never carry one.
Fashion bloggers make choosing a handbag sound like a v. big deal. The ideal handbag is not just a microcosm of our world and identity but also a bit like choosing a life partner. There’s a real language of commitment about it. A new handbag will be a constant companion that will migrate easily from one situation to another. Some bags may be celebrations, representing a key moment in an individual’s handbag journey. Only one can emerge as the Holy Grail Bag, the one that must complement all our changing moods, yet still be consistent to our inner self.
As if.
I have sold my soul. Today I own a moderate collection of relatively nasty and sensible bags. In my wardrobe, there’s a blue leather one with a fabric lining that I thought might make me look sort of upbeat and perky, but managed to look frumpy. I’ve a navy mock-croc number that I got cheap on eBay. I thought I might manage to look chic and grown-up with it, but whenever I pick it up I feel like Margaret Thatcher. I’ve got an enormous leather sack, with a broken lining. It looks quite nice, but everything I own slides down between the leather and the lining, causing frenetic scrabbling in train stations for purse and keys. And then there’s the sensible brown one I’m using at the moment. It looked OK online, but in reality it is so obviously fake leather, and the zips and straps jangle in a way that seems designed to irritate the wearer. I also have a satchel with a broken strap, and a selection of rucksacks (orange, grey and gold), which I bought in a fit of hatred of the feminine handbags. I dislike and resent all bags, in different and complicated ways. They all seem like a public declaration. A statement that I must keep things about myself conventionally hidden from view, safely stowed away.
My favourite bag in the Dutch museum is the one that looks like an alarm clock – round, hanging from a chain,
its dial face directed outwards as it bangs against the hip. For bags also tell us something about our place in time as well as in space. They are our past and our future. They carry our money, our receipts, our tissues and our tampons. They speak of contingency and autonomy. They store the things we can’t quite bring ourselves to leave behind, or have forgotten that we don’t need any more. A pair of broken sunglasses, the residue of a broken heart, a magazine, a button, a paperclip in the shape of a spiral.
An American hiker has become famous for walking the roads of the States with a bag no larger than a child’s knapsack. He leaves possessions behind. He is freeing himself of anxiety, he says. Each object in a bag represents a particular fear: of injury, of discomfort, of boredom, of attack. (This sounds good on paper, but it’s probably easier to live in the present if you don’t bleed every month. The hiker’s future fears are hypothetical. For some of us, they are not so much fears as inevitable happenings.) But something of this makes sense to me. A bag is a container of emotion. The ever-steady Mary Poppins – the ideal mother substitute, always there but never feeling. Hers is an impossible vortex of a bag. A magical carpet bag with no floor. It contains everything from a potted palm to a standard lamp. Perhaps even her tears.
As I sit here now, I am less held, than a holding bay. A place for hopes and hands, attention and tissues. My handbag’s contents are partially mine, but also my children’s – I carry their treasures, their games and their rubbish in equal measure. Along with my copy of Anna Karenina, it contains, in no particular order: a half-coloured-in Shrinky Dink™ pirate picture, a container of Lightning McQueen bubble mixture (nearly empty), a pair of socks, an old ham sandwich still in foil left from the school run, a tube of roll-on sensitive suncream, a pack of TopTrumps™ cards (Avengers), a Smashbox lipstick (First Time), one stale chocolate croissant, still in its bag, one piece of toast in a napkin, seven bus tickets, a hairbrush (with hair).
The Lost Properties of Love Page 5