Yesterday, for the first time in a year, I was without them. I sat in a small hotel room in Hull, overlooking a flat roof grimed with mildew. The schedule was mine, to take or leave. I took a bath at midday in the beige floral bathroom, and cut my toenails. I put the red cardboard Do Not Disturb sign on the door, and I slept. I dropped my clothes on the floor and enjoyed the experience of not picking them up. I watched Bargain Hunt on the big Samsung TV, which was unhappily bolted to the wall, isolated against a background of pine-look panelling. Nobody, for once, could come into my room without my invitation. I was responsible for nobody’s health and nobody’s safety. I could negotiate the space as broadly or as narrowly as I wished. I opened the wardrobe and looked at the Corby Trouser Press. I leafed through the Holy Bible, placed by the Gideons. It opened immediately at 2 Chronicles 32, its pages warped, as if it had been dropped in the bath. It told the story of Hezekiah’s pride, success, and death. The sign hung on the door handle like a drawbridge – and a moat.
The room had been booked for me by a man at the University of Hull, and he had no idea how happy it was making me. All hotel rooms are alike, but some hotel rooms are more alike than others. I was in Hull to give a public talk about jealousy and envy, and the difference between them. Why are we so ashamed, I wondered, of envy? Why is envy always cast as a woman? Ugly sisters. That foul witch, Sycorax, in The Tempest, who is grown into a hoop with envy.
It was as good a topic as any, but I’d left the writing of it to the last minute, working from an old talk I’d given some years before. My heart wasn’t in it. I would rather have been thinking about Anna Karenina. I imagined another talk I could give. ‘Anna Karenina at home’, I would call it. Complete with pictures of the places that Anna Karenina might have once lived. The life that Tolstoy’s wife would have inhabited. Grand houses then were arranged en filade – every room interlocking another. En filade means gunfire. That makes a kind of sense. Those moments when someone invades a quiet space, running through a room looking for their shoes or their wallet, metaphorically killing the moment. En filade houses are not-quite open-plan, but open to constant interruption. In Tolstoy’s Moscow house, the tourist groups make their way awkwardly around the building, reversing or side-shifting at the doorways, bumping into the potted ferns that burst out around gathered muslin curtains. A life in time and space punctuated by others. You can imagine the children crashing through the nursery, playing trains, rocketing past their mother, who is copying a manuscript in her bedroom, to reach the dull drawing room with its densely patterned navy blue carpet, its curtains hiding curtains and its candlesticks and mirrors. Everything is connected. The man fixing the gramophone would be walking into the sitting room to speak about the broken needles, past the maid walking to and fro to fetch water and fruit, and the stuffed bear that held the tray of visiting cards. Visitors walking through the living room would pause in the smaller drawing room, embroidered to within an inch of its life.
Sofia Tolstoy writes of the boredom of it all. She complains about the nursing, eating, drinking, sleeping and loving and caring for my husband’s babies. The collection of parcels and the sewing. Darning holes and attending to the children’s piano lessons. Sometimes shopping. Toys for the children – some tops, a thimble, warm gloves, a brooch. I wish something would happen soon. She copies out her husband’s diaries: There is no such thing as love, he writes. Only the physical need for intercourse, and the practical need for a life companion.
I am, she said, a piece of household furniture.
Part of the furniture. Parental life is full of it. Full of these tiny boredoms. And how cleverly memory erases them. The waiting in the queue for the infant swing in the swarming playground. The emptying of the lunch box the morning after the night before, and groping in the bread bin to find two matching slices of non-mouldy bread. The blockwalking with a squalling toddler in a buggy at 3 p.m., desperate for them to have the nap that they’re desperately fighting against. A few months later you realise that they wouldn’t go to sleep because they have outgrown the nap, and the whole exercise was pointless.
Boredom, though, is less about what you are doing, from emptying the bins, to washing up (mundane though these tasks may be), than about a sudden feeling of the absence of alternatives, a feeling of not-looking-forward-to. It’s a mode of waiting for something to wait for. Of wanting the experience of wanting. It has something to do with losing our normal experience of how we live in time. How we live together.
Roland Barthes wrote a whole book about what it means to live with other people. A manual about what it means to endure or enjoy the condition of cohabitation. There is, for him, a way in which we might live together in time but still keep our individual freedom. An idea of idiorhythmic existence – the concept of living alone-but-together, living to a beat that is both distinct and communal. A group of Greek monks, apparently, have got this nailed. The philosopher managed it in his own way by living with his mum. His book doesn’t say anything about living with nits.
Perhaps it is the relentless requirement for presentness demanded by the role of parenthood that I find so difficult, and sometimes so frightening. My children, like most, live in the present. I see this in their wonderful impracticality. Their determination to start an elaborate craft activity involving PVA glue and balloons four minutes before we leave for school. In their ability to spend forty-five minutes transfixed by an earwig, and a worm called Jim. And if I let myself feel for their sense of time, I am required to live in the present with them too.
When I watch small children playing, it seems to me that they transform all the rules of time – all our forward-looking and ambitions and plans and schemes – into a fiction, a tower of cardboard boxes that can be felled at any point and repurposed to make a dolls’ house. This presentness, this being in the now, is delicious, but it is anything but sensible. It threatens all that I construct to keep me moving forwards as a responsible adult, as a mother, as a wife. Child’s play knows no consequence. Their sense for the moment is dangerous. It brings me close to the recklessness that I used to know so well.
Tolstoy kept his own time in his Moscow house, and a separate working room at the top of the second floor – oilskin walls, and a heavy desk with a small raised rail around the edge. It was calm there, peculiarly remote from the rest of the house, insulated from the sounds of the city or the children shouting in the garden. A separate back staircase provided a quick exit out of the rear of the house to the garden. His days were regularised by his own system – wood chopping, exercises, writing, shoe-making, riding his bicycle. But at 6 p.m., the cuckoo clock on the yellow wall above the dining table would call the family together. Time alone would transform to time together, regulated by the cabbage soup and the hiss of the samovar. You can go and look at his room. Beyond the roped-off boundary, in a glass box, lies the great writer’s briefcase. It is black with brass corners, propped up slightly, and the clasp is open, as if still in use.
I imagine the inside of his bag is clean, just a few papers and a pen. Perhaps a book, and an apple from his orchard – a gift he would take to the nursery, at a time that suited him. There was room in his life to think.
We flash through the runs of houses as the sun comes out. The green fields turn yellow, the speed and light create a kind of strobe effect, the leaves transforming into stripes or streaks as we move south. It’s a bright day, the sort where you could burn without realising it. I feel in my bag for my suncream. Safely stowed, not forgotten in the chaos and the mess. Years ago they used to call it suntan lotion. It came in bottles with foreign names. Ambre Solaire Piz Buin. Squeezed out to smell of holidays and sandcastles, of my mother in a bikini and my father with a white hat on, digging an enormous paddling pool on the beach for me, because I was scared of the sea.
My father was a golden man, much like my son. Flame red hair and skin so white the veins on the inside of his arms showed through blue. Growing up, he wanted to be a travel writer. He would have understood Kate
Field’s desire to keep moving, to keep walking, to see everything. Every summer in his twenties, he would pack his possessions up into a small rucksack and head for Greece – wearing a shirt and shorts. He stood for hours, sketching. The Acropolis. A lizard. A cliff.
The moles were bleeding for nearly a year, on and off, my mother told me. It was, for my father, a detail. A small thing. It didn’t matter. Nobody really knew about melanoma then. Or about proper suncream. Extraordinary how the body does it. The mutated melanocyte cells begin nesting deep within a freckle or mole, minute but persistent, pushing their way down through the subcutaneous tissue. They are the anarchists, growing out of pattern, careless of geometry and rank. Pleomorphic, giant, hyperactive. They form a mass, hungry for blood. Then swelling in number, they send their misshapen progeny down the line. Neoplastic pioneers heading for the bloodstream to make new families. In-laws and hangers-on pop up, some lost, some full of direction, building themselves new homes in the lymph glands, the watchful sentinels. They gather their force, heading off to distant locations, carried by the blood, and an unstoppable dynasty is begun.
I was thirty-one when my mother noticed the small mole on my arm turning from brown to black, almost red-black at one edge, and slightly harder to the touch. The doctor cut part of it out, then stitched me up. He sat, two weeks later, by the examination couch. We need to take more out, he told me.
There is nothing to worry about. It’s early, he said. He knew about my dead dad. You’ll have grandchildren, and you’ll see them. Loads of them.
They made what he called a wide local incision. I liked the words, which seemed both big and small simultaneously. As the scar healed, it turned smooth and polished, matching the ones on my father’s legs. I have two of them now, on my right arm, one making a large dent, the stitch marks still showing purple like train tracks.
I would give my right arm to get him back. And somehow, in doing so, I did. Those scars, that dent, give me something that nobody else has ever given me, something nobody else can take away. A memory of loss. Two patches of smooth and hardened skin. They are my near misses. My legacy.
The train goes past Kingswood. Looking around the carriage, the passengers gaze into the middle distance as we curve round the M40. They sit, glazed, like a disaffected theatre audience, spectators of lives that are not their own, watching nothing in particular.
Elephant and Castle
— 1986 —
Getting away with it
Electronic
Later, my father took me to the real Elephant and Castle. My Arabian Nights imagining grew dimmer as we made our way further down the Northern Line, crammed into a crowded lift with concertina doors, then out into the burgundy tiled station concourse. We ended up in a shopping centre near WH Smith. There really was an elephant, after all, but it was a small one, scratched, and made of fibreglass. It looked tired.
We walked across the road and the roundabouts and took our choice of four lifts to the seventeenth floor. There I sat in one of the tower block’s tiny hutch-like offices, as my father worked. I named all his cactuses. I busied myself with colouring, peering down at the cars and buses going around a roundabout like Dinky Toys. Colleagues came in and out. The men wore suits. The women smiled and gave me pencils.
I find myself returning to old spaces again. I walk the pavements and ride the Tube lines, as if through treading over the same land I might recover that person, and bring him back to life. I walk the woods and the lanes, up the alleyways, and lean over the bridges. And I go underground, an overgrown ghost of my school-uniformed self. I tread my father’s steps, Morden via Bank, returning once more to Elephant and the Castle. The building where my father worked later got diagnosed as sick, as if to match him. They tried to knock it down, but changed their minds, and made it into a hipster block of flats instead.
I found the sad elephant. I’d hoped I’d be able to find the building again with a kind of homing instinct, but instead I stood at the intersection, baffled by the traffic, feeling threatened by the noise and the woman flapping a copy of the Evening Standard at me. I crossed the road, rounded a corner. At the base of his building there was a pub full of couples drinking, talking, beginning affairs. I looked up at the windows, trying to place his office, but was met instead by a vision of a hundred curtains and pot plants.
I think of him as a student on holiday. I imagine his childhood. I admire cars that I think he would have liked to drive. I have invented a remembered past in motion for him, built up from my imagined version of a cine film that I am told exists but which I’ve never seen.
Distracted from work one day, with my computer teetering on piles of paper among the unwashed crockery, I watch iPlayer. A family is appearing in a reality TV experiment in which they eat their way through the food of the century. This week it’s the 1980s. The teenagers wear leg warmers, and headbands in pastel colours. The mother has a perm, and the family eat Pop-Tarts, and Boil in the Bag Chicken with Wild Rice and do aerobics in the front room to Mad Lizzie and Agadoo. There are plastic beads and SodaStreams, oven chips and Viennettas.
The show is cut through with clips from the period. The drab high streets with Woolworths, the yellow Chopper bikes, the brown television with circular knobs on it. There is a grainy shot of commuters, clad in grey and serge, making their way up the escalators at King’s Cross. Then the programme cuts to a scene of an office party. Out of the window I can see the blocks of the City. People are moving to a disco beat. The men are in shirts and braces. The women wear polyester pussy-bow blouses. Everyone looks uncomfortably hot. The camera pans around the figures then briefly focuses in on a couple laughing. In the background, I see a man with red hair, dancing intensely with a laughing brunette, his arms around her waist.
I slide the player button on the clip back and look at it again. It is my father’s shirt, and his hair. The tortoiseshell glasses and the smile are his also. I rewind the clip again. She is distractingly young. On each repetition of the playback, her arm is lifted up and blocks his face, just as I get near enough to saying yes or no.
Is it possible that my father had another life – a life that I haven’t imagined? Somewhere in the loop, from home to work, perhaps there was a kink of time. Did my father, too, find that door in the wall, the one with the fluorescent green grass? He pushed it and walked in. It began, I’d say, in the office, the one below. Or they met in the lift, every Thursday, when she came in with a contract for accounts. Then a drink after work. Whisky and ginger ale and a lager top. Smoky bacon crisps. A sharing platter at the Beefeater.
I’ve never seen him dance.
We never fully know our parents, even though there is something of the childish urge for knowable predictability in all of us. We like to keep them as they are, in their grainy, reliable poses, half squinting into the light as they hold us by the hand. There is safety in this two-dimensional parent, even when they’re gone. We can imagine them as more committed than they are. Clearer. Straighter. Dead or alive, the flat parent seems simpler in their needs. You can look at them and hold them, without the fear that they will slip away.
Yet maybe he wasn’t always there as I wished him. And here he was – or here was his double – sweaty, delighted, in love, moving at double disco time as I slid my finger along the time bar.
Paddington
— 2006 —
‘It won’t do, cara mia.’
‘It’s impossible?’
‘It’s impossible.’
Henry James, The Golden Bowl
Surely nobody ends it in a train station any more. It seems like an impossible cliché. But there we were, sitting at a table at Costa, not drinking the coffee in front of us, and wondering whether there were any words that could touch the sadness and the waste. I ate the complimentary wafer biscuit, as if to make up for it. A shame to throw it away. Two and a half years of near goodbyes and desperate reunions and not-so-accidental meetings. The time you called me at midnight and asked me to come down on the bus bec
ause you wanted to see me right now, right then. The time I left a friend’s wedding early, walking off the dance floor and onto the last train to London in my bridesmaid’s dress, because I missed you. The time we were no longer seeing each other and I sat at one of your exhibition talks, in the front row, and you looked at me and smiled and then it all started again. The time, the time – and the sheer embarrassment and waste of the whole thing. Perhaps the couple to my left, also staring at their cups of tea, were having the same trouble. Breaking the heart of another, or having their heart broken. It’s never far away.
Paddington is a strange half-sealed nowhereland. The painted panels between the struts of the iron roof turn into transparency, on a ceiling just that bit too high and too clear to feel like a ceiling. The little islands of shops, the Whistlestop, and the ones for very expensive chocolate and business shirts, make it seem like a novelty temple to a religion that never existed, or a monstrous, plantless greenhouse. The clusters of commuters stand or sit in the same posture, their heads all raised to a forty-degree angle, gazing at the departures board as if waiting for the latest saviour to descend from a cloud.
It has little to say for itself either, in terms of grand passion (although its bronze bear still sits, full of love and hope, just past the McDonald’s on Platform One). Other stations have greater claims for romance. There’s the wet Marseille (actually Warner’s Burbank lot) where Rick stands, abandoned by Ilsa, rain streaming down her nose like tears. New York’s Grand Central, where Elizabeth Smart famously sat down and wept. And, of course, the fictional Milford Junction, scene of tearoom devastation in David Lean’s Brief Encounter. There, in a black-and-white moment of painful decision-making, a man called Alec and a woman called Laura decide that their affair must end. In some ways the affair had barely begun. They have sat in the cinema together. He has removed a piece of grit from her eye. They have had lunch. And somewhere, painfully, along the way, they have fallen in love. They have to force it to an ending. Alec is off to South Africa. He is going far, far away. Laura is going back to her husband. They sit staring at their tea in the refreshment room, the strains of Rachmaninov in the background. The expression on Laura’s face, played exquisitely by Celia Johnson, makes it look as if she’s holding a cup of hemlock.
The Lost Properties of Love Page 11