It’s embarrassing. It weighs me down. Not just the bag, but the unwritten law that suggests I should conceal my apparatus from view. The rules of privacy are an imposition. I fantasise about walking over a motorway bridge, opening my bag and watching it fall onto the passing cars, pencil sharpenings and sticky pennies and all. Even having the time to wonder about this is a sign of my secure world, my excessive consumption, my middle-class privilege, my luck. But there’s something more. Something in this that irritates me enough to press on it. Just within my grasp, like an object that has disappeared into a hole in a pocket and can only be felt through the lining. However petty it may seem to want a bag of my own – or no bag – when my bag is so full of plenty, I do not want to give up on my small rage just yet. It touches on something more than half the world knows, in one form or another.
I think of my husband. A phone. A wallet. He has pockets.
Bag ladies – where the public and private collide. Our insides are guessed at from the outside. Surmised. There’s the assumption that you should want to be full of someone else. All those questions.
Are you trying?
Don’t leave it too late.
You should get breeding. (Don’t want to be an old bag.)
And the implications, the insinuations. Once you have carried another person, you are reshaped, remoulded by others. And often not in a good way. Any vision of my pregnant self as a cauldron of life, burgeoning wolf-woman, soon evaporated. In public, I became the human equivalent of one of those nylon money belts – safe, practical, but best left at home on a night out. I have lost myself.
Anna gets this. She has two children – and wants to have no more. She explains to her disbelieving sister-in-law that despite having a lover, she knows for sure that she will never become pregnant again.
Between the lines, Tolstoy hints at one important item in Anna’s handbag – an early form of the diaphragm, a womb veil. Anna’s handbag has a double life. It is, perhaps, both surrogate womb, and a protest against having a womb at all.
Those bags haunt the novel. Again and again, through Tolstoy’s words, we will watch her opening and closing clasps, packing them with items, and pulling others out, hiding her face in it as she rearranges its contents. The bag itself seems to have a life of its own, changing shape as the chapters unfurl. Midway through the book, it is described as large enough to hold a small cushion. Sometimes it seems more like an evening bag. As Anna’s selfhood diminishes, so perhaps does her luggage. Or maybe Anna has many bags – some large, some small, and most of them red. Maybe Tolstoy doesn’t want to be weighed down by the details of luggage. He didn’t need to, I suppose.
But Anna’s smallest bag – the little red one – (her мешочек) – really matters. It is her shield and her burden. Her way of surviving. The little red bag seems to be the one space that Anna can call her own. It is her companion on her travels – a small thing that stands for so much more.
Hackney Wick
— 2006 —
Hours would pass without us talking. You worked in your studio. I sat on the window seat, my boots and back braced against the alcove. I was paid by the word to write about other people’s words. Honing a line. Finding a place to stand in relation to others.
One day, while fiddling with a lamp, you ask why I don’t write something people might actually want to read. Get to read.
I watch as you adjust the light meter.
It takes a while for a subject to come into focus.
After rush hour, I pack my possessions up carefully and head back on the stopping service to my two small rooms. I left nothing behind, apart from that mark on the window-seat wall, which I’ve never told you about.
Goole to Thorne North
— 2016 —
You exhibitionist
P. J. Harvey
Cranes and cooling towers are hazy in the distance. Kylie Minogue sits by the edge of a swimming pool, enormous and blonde in her eyewear. The postergirl of solitude. People leave the train, duly reminded to make sure they have taken all their personal possessions with them.
Someone will no doubt have left something behind. Someone always does. Human nature to scatter ourselves carelessly around – a subconscious desire, perhaps, to leave a trace, a fragment of what we once were, abandoned in transit as we go on our way.
There are different textures of loss. The lost we hope to find again, and the lost that we think is gone for ever. The loss of an object in the silt of mud, the loss of a smell or a sound. People are lost to us, or make themselves irretrievable. They seek loss. A hundred years before my birth, among the classified sections of The Times, there are all of these things – page after page of absence. A catalogue of despondencies, absent-mindedness, ache.
A carriage clock is left in a cab from St Pancras to Westminster on Monday last. A lady’s sealskin muff-bag, containing articles of jewellery, is lost in a first-class carriage of a local train on the Great Northern railway, on a Monday afternoon. There are things people seemed to lose a lot in those days. Keys, bond shares, purses and small bags (generally containing money, as well as, sometimes, nothing of value except papers, which are important only to the owner). They lose their watches, their rings and their lockets, their bracelets and other jewellery. Dogs, opera glasses and pencil cases, Bank of England notes and spectacles are misplaced or abandoned or stolen. Each loss feels like a novel in miniature. A roll call of lost objects in 1875 brings some poetic specifics: a London dock warrant, a cane of Brazilian palm, a map of the British Channel, an opal brooch, a small case of surgical instruments. On 12 August, an aeronautical pioneer seems strangely deflated.
BALLOON LOST. Started from Taunton at 3 o’clock. Direction about a line from Taunton to Chepstow – Joseph Simmons, Aeronaut, 38, Regent-street, London, W.
There are the sadnesses of letters, possibly lost. Someone who calls themselves AMULET complains of not hearing from their correspondent on Tuesday. Perhaps it was never sent. There are some strangely coded missives. I look at one placed on Christmas Eve, 1875:
WILL a Black Swan glide again to the entrance of a stream? Exit on last occasion more hurried than graceful. Same address. – GRAPE AND SEALSKIN.
I long to know who GRAPE and SEALSKIN was or were. Did the Black Swan ever arrive? It seems a language buried too deep to recover, lost in time.
People are missing too. A young gentleman, age 26, height 5 feet 6 inches, fair and pale complexion was last seen at Charing Cross. It’s often young men (some presumed to have enlisted) who disappear. But women young and old vanish too – some, in Hitchcockian fashion, have vanished on trains before arriving at their appointed destination. One gentleman with very depressed and emaciated appearance: walks with short steps, and narrow feet not turned out, disappeared while looking much troubled in mind. I worry for those left behind. The costly ads.
Every day of the year seems to bring new trauma, large and small. On 4 January, along with a lost gold Albert chain, there is an advert placed for FRED D.L., its tone hovering somewhere between the plaintive and the demanding.
If you have any regard for yourself and your family, WRITE, or telegraph at once to B.S., and say when and where you will meet him.
January brings further losses, in trains and cabs and hearts. A black bearskin carriage rug, lined in red, is left in a brougham; a brown leather case, well labelled, on a first-class carriage from Ealing. Fred D.L.’s family continue to ask for him. There is a letter for him at the General Post Office. He must not fail to call for it. Someone called A.T. has left. If they return at once, all will be forgiven. ‘T.’ writes to ‘W.’ for £20. They are still very ill. The doctor says there is no cure.
A lady’s black silk umbrella, ebony handle, with a carved pug on the top ring, has gone astray in the last fortnight, along with a black leather portenoisie purse containing a first-class return ticket to Barnet. A son admonishes his mother. He has nothing to say. Someone has received a black bag from Newton. They are full of love and
pity and entreat a reader to write. No inquiries will be made.
Two manuscripts are lost. One has been borrowed and not returned. The other left in a hansom cab in Fleet Street, wrapped in a sheet of The Times. People hesitate about where exactly something was lost. Either in Chapel-street or Belgrave-square. Between Kew-bridge and the Strand, via South-Western Railway and Waterloo-Bridge, near Paddington Terminus. It is hard to retrace your steps when they have wandered.
A black portmanteau has been taken by mistake. The owner of the similar one, unclaimed at the Victoria Station, will have been surprised to find a case full of baby’s linen.
Heart-shaped gold lockets are lost. Presumably hearts too. E.P., who left Eastbourne by the 2 p.m. train for Victoria on Monday, and was expected at a station on the Sevenoaks line, is earnestly requested to communicate with one of his anxious relatives. Perhaps he wants to be lost. Many do. Maybe the thirty-year-old woman with dark brown hair, dark blue eyes and a slight limp, who left Sheffield for her home in Devon, but disappeared at Paddington Station, wanted not to be found. Four children aged nine, seven, five and two, disappeared with her.
So many of these missing people seem like ghosts:
MYSTERIOUSLY DISAPPEARED from her home, on Friday, the 5th inst., a YOUNG MARRIED LADY, 24 years of age, tall and upright, straight dark hair, dark eyes, finely arched eyebrows, very pale complexion; lisps slightly when speaking; was dressed in gray silk dress (two shades), moleskin jacket, black bonnet, with white feather. INFORMATION of her present whereabouts will be most handsomely REWARDED
So fine and slight and pale. She is destined to vanish, to dwindle away. I wish her luck. A shade (two shades) in Victorian limbo.
There are many lost letters, and lost addresses. Quite a few lost tempers. Writes THE ONE of the VALLEY – You do not know how sorry you have made me. Farewell. There are ongoing stories, too, some of which stretch across the years: Mrs T is concerned about the wellbeing and whereabouts of Mrs M Jones for at least two years in the 1870s; ‘W.’ writes that he wishes to see his friend at 96, particularly at regular intervals throughout the same time period. Others are brighter, shorter-lived flames. What trouble was ‘Fred. D.L.’ in, I wonder? Did he ever get out of it? I see the reaching out of nearly lost hopes. Write to me, one advertiser begs. Do not fear about the thing lost.
Have you forgotten me and the pretty gardens? asks ‘M.’. Will you write, or call?
Or a simple message to ‘Henry’ – Your return will be most welcome.
No doubt whole conversations, indeed whole lives, are hidden here in these classified columns. An exhibition of loss. Take the one from 9 February 1875:
BR. – Same address. Nothing constant. Wants.
Hackney Wick
— 2006 —
Our fights always began as I was leaving for the station. Always after it had been a lovely day, a lovely weekend. A wonderland of photographs and sex. Meeting your beautiful friends in beautiful houses. Pretending that’s all we were. Meet my assistant, you said to them. They looked at me with a raised eyebrow. We went to someone’s fiftieth birthday party. I made my way around the groups, losing sight of you in the paths around the middle, but always hearing your voice over the others, seeing you out of the corner of my eye. We would stop, late and hungry, at a restaurant, and collapse into bed. You promised we would talk about what we were, where we were. You always said that we would talk about our destination. Tomorrow.
We often went nowhere. Or just out on the Tube and back. If anyone had looked down on us, I think we would have looked like shop mannequins of sorts, plasticised and stiff, adopting the posture of a couple that we had never learned to be.
The next morning we would wake up late and screw and fall asleep, and the time had gone. Lust or love flickered around us, somewhere in the movement of oestrogen or testosterone, dopamine or norepinephrine. A drop in serotonin, a surge of oxytocin.
I had to go to work, for my half job. No time for conversation now as I began to pack my bag. Leaning on the door jamb, you told me that you loved me. What more did I want. This was your life. I was part of it. Could we just not worry about the future. Already as you spoke I could see you in your mind, getting behind your lens, disappearing as if down a circle of glass. You were beginning to see the light. To make a picture. I attempted to master the trick of closing the zip of my bag over the lumps created by my trainers. It nearly closed, leaving a small opening at one end. The fabric was pulled painfully tightly over my possessions. I made my way down in the lift, on my own. Somewhere near Highbury, it started to come undone.
Thorne North to Doncaster
— 2016 —
Two men on the platform in safety jackets are crouching over a station lamp post, which has collapsed onto itself like an overgrown tulip. The woman across my aisle has finished refolding her kite and is now colouring in a picture of a squirrel. The other woman has put away her half-eaten Kinder Bueno in the plastic bag at her feet.
There were a few moments of silence before I left home. It will be silent again as I come back through the door. When I turn off the lights and walk up to bed, I will tread on something, because I always do. Perhaps a sneaker, or a piece of toast, or a discarded plastic penguin. Tomorrow will be busy with small acts of tidying up. I wish I didn’t have to. When I get to be alone I make a mess. I put teacups and cereal bowls in the bathroom sink. I eat out of a frying pan, sitting on the kitchen floor. I drop clothes on the stairs and leave a ring of shaved leg hair round the bath. I go to the loo and sit there and type. I get an intense kind of pleasure from this behaviour. As a messy person living with other less messy people, these spells of solitude are an oasis, a few hours when I can release my inner slob.
Twenty years ago, I could do this all the time, albeit in a smaller arena. I lived, pretty much, in one or two rooms, and always in a mess. The wardrobe doors were open, clothes spread out in an unbroken carpet from the wardrobe floor to the bed, a jumbled pile hanging off the chair. Dirty underwear was mixed with old receipts and books. An overflowing wastepaper bin sat in the corner and a number of mugs and empty Pot Noodle containers near the bed, which was also my sofa – the same fold-out foam futon I had slept on as a child.
Mess has a meaning. It is a real habitat – and one that I miss. It stands, partly, for privacy and freedom. If we exist in two spheres, the public and the private, then my messy room of my own was more private than most. A house, after all, is always partially invaded. A house may not seem public in the way that a street or a park is, but beyond the world of mess and toasters there is always a family show on the road, a communal commitment. The sitting room, the front door flanked by wellies, the front garden, the way the shutters look from the street. Keeping the display going takes effort.
My small bedsit existence was, for the most part, free of these demands. I liked the mess in itself. I liked what it did even more. It kept people out. It kept me in. When I walked home and someone asked to come in for the night, I would remember the extravagantly jaw-dropping quality of my mess – the open tampon box, the lidless empty tube of hair-removal cream left inexplicably on the desk, the half-eaten plate of food on the floor, the unchanged bedding. Self-disgust and shame won out over loneliness, and I said goodbye on the doorstep. Untidiness was my own advanced kind of barrier method.
A divorce barrister once told me that a third of marriages break down over issues concerning cleaning and chores. I moderate my messiness now, out of sympathy for my husband, who looks at my trails of clutter with dismay. But the urge to make a mess is strong in me. It’s still there, trying to take over.
My messiness is a kind of play, too – a light rebellion, a denial of responsibility. I am what some, my husband included, might call a mess terrorist, using mess to define my own identity at the expense of others. But as the mess-theorists (there really are mess-theorists) point out, there can be a surprising creativity in kinds of mess. Those who refuse to live in time and space tidily, who live an improvisational life, c
an stumble across revelations as they stub their toe. Sometimes I tidy up. But even then I keep my mess close to me, in small middens in drawers, behind screens, in plastic bags full of junk hanging over the banisters. My discarded mugs of coffee breed under the bed like mushrooms, colonising, encroaching. My mess is an abortive force, relentless, trying to make itself known. I think of the table back home, with its mess of lunch boxes and computer cables, babywipes and bills, with a sort of pride.
Messiness is a key part of the art of losing. Mess gives us a world in which to play with loss. To misplace things. In a messy room, or house, stuff can disappear in the knowledge that it still exists, somewhere in the muddle. As the magician’s magic box with its secret compartment holds his assistant – still there, but out of view – so my mess holds and hides, and hides what it holds. Of course, there’s always the risk of accidentally throwing things away. But most of the time, the mess just accretes, acquiring a sort of sedimentary quality, fossilising what is missing.
Without my mess, I have lost something. A kind of intensity. I am left to keep my chaos in my handbag. A mess of my own. Some physical testament to the fact that I have lived, even if I’ve lost much evidence of it along the way. As we go forward in time, we keep our pasts in mind. It’s in there – among the disintegrating tissues, and the boxes of crayons, and the peculiarly shaped piece of (probably) Plasticine – the traces of the people we have known, lost properties of love.
The Lost Properties of Love Page 6