Throughout all this, the clock looms over the station. The famous Joyce of Whitchurch clock, its whiteness glowing like a tense eyeball. The clock is not on Alec and Laura’s side in this film. Their timing was bad in many ways. They met, after all, at the wrong time, in the wrong place. She was meant to be on a shopping trip. He was on his way to the surgery. They are both married to other people. This is the time they should each be raising a family. This is no time, as Laura says, to fall in love with someone else. But in some ways they have something in their favour. They are of an age. Laura, you can tell from the fine lines on her face, is nearer forty than thirty. Alec’s hairline recedes into the world of fortysomething too.
It was different with us. You were born before my father, and I could tell this from the start, if by nothing else than by your choice of music and your choice of pants. I remembered searching the Internet for help, and found a forum called ‘May to September’. These were the early days of webchat and it still seemed miraculous that a stranger called Leanne in Kansas promised me that she found happiness with Barry in Ohio, even though Leanne was twenty-three and Barry was eighty-nine. I held on to the story of Leanne and Barry in the hope that it wasn’t impossible.
You can theorise all you want about the two of us. Someone sitting there in Costa, watching us that day, might have said we were playing out some variant on an Electra complex. They could say that I was trying to replace my dead dad with a second father. That I was longing again for that unconditional love that had disappeared behind the crematorium curtains in September 1988. That I had merely slotted you into the shell of loss left behind by my father.
There may be some truth in this. But still, I take their Freudian reading, and I counter it thus:
With a parent’s early death comes not the desire to replace that person, but a defiance of the way in which the world measures things. The sense of time that other people live by no longer matters. Death robs you of an imagined future. It also removes your belief in standard chronology, in the idea that a life lived in time works like a railway timetable: predictable, assured, leaving and arriving when it says it does. Since my father’s early death, I’ve always wanted to turn time on its head, stretch it out like chewing gum, tangle it in my hands and hair, roll it into a ball and throw it as hard as I could at a wall, or off the edge of a cliff. If a man of forty-five can disappear, before his time, then the rules of time and age mean nothing. If a man of forty-five can lie on a sickbed looking so impossibly old that someone takes a thirteen-year-old girl aside, and asks her – so kindly – if she comes to see her grandfather often, then the rules of age are impossible. Death kills time. It no longer matters to me, because the logic of it disappeared long ago.
You made time to come to the station with me that day, travelling along the Victoria Line, then changing at Oxford Circus for Paddington, carrying one of my bags for me, full of spare shoes. It was not a journey you really needed to make. We could have parted at your door, or at the lift at the bottom of the stairwell. But you came anyway, for the ride, and I could hear the sound of your breathing as you walked up the steps onto the concourse, steadying yourself on the silver handrail near the defibrillator.
It was impossible now, we both knew that. You loved that phrase. ‘It’s impossible,’ you said, when I asked whether we could do things differently. Could I leave a toothbrush? Impossible. Would there ever be a future? Impossible. Children? I never dared to mention children, but the idea flickered – absurdly – on the edge of my vision, like a set of fuzzy dice on a rear-view mirror.
‘Impossible,’ you said, looking into the near-empty fridge and pulling out a pot of taramasalata, which we both looked at with a sense of gloom. We sat with the taramasalata and a bottle of warm white wine. Impossible, in your terms, didn’t mean undesirable, or unwanted. It didn’t even mean impractical. It wasn’t even a moral thing. Impossibility, in your terms, was a wall you had built up around yourself. Impossibility protected you from others. It divided sex from love. It divided marriage from commitment. It shaped the regular rhythm, the one that made your life as it was, possible. Impossible meant that you could work, that you could think, that you could capture images, that you could exist in solitary splendour.
I remember the first time I came to your flat – the awe I felt that anyone lived in a place like this. I remember the studio with its polished white floor, the light bouncing down from the skylights. The two black L-shaped tables. The enormous diffuser on its music-stand base, half broken open with a burn mark on the inside, the cord tangled down and around. A box of disposable vinyl gloves.
I’d imagined it would be a place of alchemy. A dark room. Trays of fluids and a slopping of chemicals. But that all happened elsewhere now, for the most part. The messy, technical stuff was sent out to labs. It was clean, almost dazzlingly so. But the residue of work in progress was still there. Prints hanging on butterfly clips on strings from the wall, showing the layering of light and time.
And then your two-door camera cupboard with the cameras and side mounts, lined up in a row like an army of overgrown wasps. The Hasselblad – the moon camera, the large format and the Leica. A row of boxes, containing light. These boxes of nothing, which could be made to mean anything. These boxes that meant everything.
And then up the wrought-iron spiral staircase to the bedroom on the second floor.
One night you photographed me sleeping. A time lapse of a dreaming woman and a dreaming room, blue-grey light. I saw the prints a week later, a mind set adrift, as unreal as a kiss. I looked at the picture. Did the dream belong to me or to you?
Afterwards, I used to stand staring at the pinboard above your desk, with its images of objects and places and things. Some that looked like melting Rothkos. Others were attempts to capture the space of time. You were fascinated by time – the way the patina of time builds up over a life. You spent day after day trying to capture that moment of layering in a single image. Look at this, you would say, pulling me into a photograph of a chapel, or a hallway, or a town square, or a railway station. The way photography can make many times stand still. We unfold in time, thinking we are free, you said – but we are not. Only narrative can show us the temporal side-shadows, the way we might have been. You took pictures of many people, most of them were women, some of them famous. It was the way you framed things in the first place that drew me to you. It was the way you kept things in frames that pulled us apart.
But if affairs are things we remember, I have little, in the way of things, to help remember you by. Four books of photographs by people you admired, each inscribed with your name and a date (two of those dates from before I was born). There were more pictures of me, ones I remember being taken. Sitting on the edge of a disconnected bathtub. A series. My back turned. The trouble with photographs, you said, is that you cannot see round the back. That is where they stop short. That is also part of their joy.
I can still see the way I think that you saw me, stilled in safe rectangles of grey and half-tone blue. It is oddly flattening – and flattering – the thought of being put in someone else’s art. I could see that I might be there somewhere, somewhere in the shape of it all, but at the same time I had disappeared. I was being reduced and clarified somehow, turned into something that no longer belonged to me.
Maybe Kate Field felt this too, as she found versions of herself appearing in copy after copy of Trollope’s fat triple-decker novels. Trollope wrote of Field, or of a version of her, often. Perhaps, sometimes, he muddled her up with other people, too. That is what writers do. There must have been, for Field, a peculiar sense of living in a world of parallels, watching these fictional pseudo-Kate Fields walk and talk, and flirt and marry. They look like Field, but expanded, inflated in Trollope’s imagination: newer, bigger, cleverer, wittier. They are enlarged.
Later, you began to send me pictures of things you had seen. For safekeeping, you said. In case your computer broke. Really you just wanted me to admire them. I copied the files, f
aithfully, into my computer. I could look at them, you said, if I liked. I did. My inbox is still full of them. I remember making my way through the thumbnails, scanning the images too fast, carelessly, as I always do – hungry to find out where I was, almost as if my place in the picture would determine if I was. Decoding the image. Was it a picture of me, or her, or the one before me, or someone else? Tokens for an image, a book without words. Later, when it was over, I still scanned books of your work, impatiently clicking on the icon to Look inside. I would scroll through them, flicking the glassed pages of the Kindle versions, the acknowledgements, hoping I’m gone, hoping I’m there, fearing that even if I am there, I will miss it. Wondering if I still have a place in your imagination. If you still see me. When I had exhausted that, I would listen to clips of you on YouTube. Applause as you entered the room. The keynote speaker. Your voice always tinnier, tinier than I remembered. But still I could find a sense of you in the characteristic pauses and runs, in the polished phrases, the punchlines.
It’s obvious, in one way, why we choose to end impossible things in train stations. Stations are places of meetings and parting – and the punctuality of the whistle as the train draws out of the station where one journey ends, and another starts. But the mechanics of the station – the very fact of the train – also provides a way to make an end happen. It tears two people away from each other. When two people cannot say goodbye, when they cannot bear to say goodbye, the train makes the ending for them. When the display board lights up, it dictates the moment when you have to wrench yourselves away from each other. It takes the parting out of your hands. It’s nobody’s fault.
We’d played at it before, of course. I remember the second time we ever met. We had talked and talked over lunch until lunch became tea, and then nearly dinner. You had to go back for a meeting and I had to get to a party in London Bridge. You walked me to the Tube that time. I’ll show you exactly where to stand, you said, so that when you get out and change at Bank for London Bridge, you’ll be at precisely the right intersection. We knew something had happened that lunchtime. We hadn’t touched, but we knew something had changed. We parted on the bridge, which spanned the two platforms. I was going East, and you West. You walked down your platform, gesturing to me that I should stand opposite you, wherever you stood. We faced each other. My train drew up, and I could still see half of you through the sliding doors. Then your train drew up too, and you were blocked from view. You were right of course. I ended up by the exit.
This time, though, it was real. Impossibility had built up between us, like ether. The impossibility of your work being disturbed. The impossibility of my city not being yours. Your impossible desire for solitude. My impossible need for permanence. Your impossible desire for sex. My impossible lack of money. Your impossible generosity. My impossible demands. I walked to the train. As far as I remember, you paid for my coffee. I still owe you for that – as for so much more.
Euston to Inverness
— 2008 —
Levin had been married three months. He was happy, but not at all in the way he had expected to be.
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Everyone was getting married in 1879. King Wilhelm, the greatest debauchee of the age, snagged a trophy wife. A young suffragette said ‘I do’ to the lawyer Richard Pankhurst. The American painter Frank Millet turned up in London, borrowing a room in Kate Field’s rented London house as part of his wedding tour. Most of the brides then would have worn white lace and orange blossom. Their mothers would have piled up a collection of silver forks and spoons. Perfume bottles and trifle stands and ready cash as gifts. The whole thing was like a delicious dream. Reflections of Persian carpets and white gloves and fish slices and pearls floated on a rose bowl’s watery surface. Weddings were big business for the Victorians. Presents were a weighty obligation. Honeymoons followed a set pattern. Tunbridge Wells or the Isle of Wight or Bath if you were on a budget. Those with more to spend would head abroad, for a version of the Tour. Rome or Paris, or touring the Italian Riviera, stopping at spas and casinos along the way. American brides would find themselves steamboating down the Hudson River, or falling in love at Niagara Falls.
Trollope always had marriage on his mind. Almost every one of his novels tackled the question of whether you should marry Mr X or Lord Y. Mr X, for the most part being the good-looking man who liked gambling, and Lord Y being your sensible cousin who you’d known all your life. But Trollope’s books that year took an especially dark look down the aisle. One told the story of a reckless bigamist. Another featured an Irish nobleman, a death on a clifftop and a pregnant mistress. Yet again he called her Kate, yet another namesake for his real Kate to wonder at.
And Tolstoy, too, of course. Honeymoons were, he thought, a kind of abomination, a disillusion, a hole in the sock that constituted the mundane truth of marriage’s reality. When he wrote of getting married he was searching the territory of the happy ever after. To taste life after candyland. He writes the story of a woman called Másha, seeking the excitement she believes should exist in marriage. Loving her husband was not enough for her, after the happiness of falling in love. She wants movement, excitement, danger. She feels a superabundance of energy running through her body, an itch, a restlessness. Things are not as she imagined they would be.
As for Kate Field, she only played at getting married. As she approached her fortieth birthday, she felt the need to escape the written page, to feel and experience an art that would use her whole body. She wanted to act. Perhaps it was the thoughts of her father, a man who’d spent his lifetime on the stage. Perhaps it was the memory of his loss that drove her, as she tried to get her acting career off the ground.
She did her best that year, from Boston to Broadway, New Haven to Providence, Buffalo to Cleveland. A well-known writer taking to the stage. She was cut down by the American press. Her appearance at Booth’s Theatre, Broadway was spun as a piece of hilarious arrogance, and critics trashed her at every turn. It was difficult to imagine anything more unsympathetic than Miss Field’s presence and delivery. She was neither young nor handsome.
It was sheer lack of money that led Field to see if she could do better elsewhere. Purchasing an eighteen-guinea ticket from J. Bruce Ismay’s office on Broadway, just down the street from Sarony’s photographic studio, she took her passage on a White Star liner to Liverpool. She sailed from New York in June of 1875, and had a little over a week to think through her decision. She was one of the few single women in first class, sandwiched on the passenger list between someone called H. J. Sheldon and J. Barclay McCarthay. White Star boasted about its speed, but marketed itself mostly through its luxury. For the first-class passengers, the run was not so much a racetrack but a sort of Peacock Alley, calling at Queenstown for mail and more passengers. Fashions that season were for black straw, feather lockets and dresses in cream. Far below the first-class elite, a thousand individuals travelled in steerage, wearing whatever they could afford.
Boats, like trains, are where marriages are made – and unmade. New York to Liverpool Docks. From the pictures, it looked like a floating palace-cum-hotel, with a piano, a library, baths and bridal suites with grand double beds. Couples courted in upholstered corners of the Grand Saloon. There is, reported one captain, always a Belle.
The reality was a little less glamorous. Travelling the Atlantic induced a kind of nauseating tedium. Field wrote of the conflicting claims of protesting stomachs along with shivering timbers, groaning machinery, whistling wind, breaking china, crying babies and roaring waves. Four senses out of five are systematically outraged, as she attempted to pour water into a basin, before giving up, and entering the cage of the State Room, feeling limp and frowzy.
Field was engaged as an imaginary fiancée, appearing in a show called The Honeymoon at the new Gaiety Theatre on the Strand.
The play itself was a kind of updated version of Taming of the Shrew, in which an intelligent and articulate woman marries a rich duke, and is then taken o
n a false honeymoon to a grotty cottage. The duke pretends to be a pauper, and grinds his bride down with onerous tasks such as wine-pouring and folk dancing with yokels, until she is seen to be fully surrendered. Then she is (of course) returned to the duke’s palace and rewarded with a fully fitted salon for lounging, and all other mod cons. Field played the part of Volante, the sensible younger sister. After some capering around in confessional boxes, a selection of comedy tonsures and some cast members hidden behind unfeasibly large paintings, Volante gets hitched to the duke’s best friend, and everyone lives happily ever after.
Kate Field’s parents had, in fact, acted in this same play before she’d been born. The same plot, the same tensions between a man and a woman struggling for autonomy. After the first night, Field sat in her rooms in New Cavendish Street proudly copying out her reviews. She was, the papers said, excessively pretty – intelligent and piquante. She was bright and vivacious. She was possessed of a rare quality of ladyhood. Field’s version ran for thirteen nights. Thirteen nights of being dressed in white silk and roses, acting like a woman on the verge of marriage. Thirteen nights of surrendered autonomy.
The Lost Properties of Love Page 12