The Gaiety has long gone now, demolished in the building of Aldwych’s Grand Crescent – a sleek hotel stands in its place. I went there, once, to hunt for Kate Field’s ghost, and luxuriated in the feeling of being alone in a hotel bar for almost no reason at all. I spent some time staring at my printouts of Victorian floorplans trying to figure out where, in this space, the old theatre might have been. Then I gave up and ordered an egg sandwich and a glass of wine.
Sitting there, pretending not to be a happily married woman, I watched the people around me. Couples sitting tensely, sipping martinis. Imperturbable mauve-clad staff revolved around placing napkins on tables. In the middle of the room there was a large stone statue of a man in a rowing boat, frozen in motion, his oars aloft. (Marriage is like rowing a boat, said Tolstoy’s Levin. Very delightful. Very difficult.) Hunting for the stage space, I went deeper into the hotel, down towards the lifts and the carpeted foyer.
I couldn’t find a trace of Kate Field at the Aldwych, so I finished the sandwich and left. But maybe I caught something of her as I stood on the road outside. The figure of a woman in a black leather jacket, leaving Delaunay’s tearoom. I watched as she hailed a taxi and then looked back, over her shoulder, at a figure in the crowd.
As a cold Christmas in London approached, Field’s friends asked her whether she had ever loved for real. She wrote back cheerfully. She’d received offers, she said, but had to stay true to the dreams of her youth. Trollope wrote and asked why she hadn’t married. Others told her she was missing the real satisfactions of a woman’s life. Her response: I am misunderstood. Why, she wondered, should a desire for constant change be read as a kind of superficiality? Why would marriage to a man necessarily mean satisfaction? Why must a person be only one thing?
I think of my own understanding of marriage. I am, as I sit here, so far past the moment of wondering, of decision making, of thinking about getting married, so far into the world of school pick-ups and bin-days and reading articles about listmaking apps that will prevent relationship discord, that Kate Field’s concerns seem hard to comprehend. There never seems to be enough time.
I think back on yesterday. I feel guilt at my snappishness, guilt at my inability to compromise, guilt at my inability to take time with other people, my desire to take time for myself.
The words taking time suggest I’m removing it from elsewhere – from the space of the couple, from my children, from the family. I am, as I write this, taking time from the world of living together. Wanting to live alone. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to live alone and wanting to live together. Nothing wrong with that fantasy. In reality, though, most of us (not being Greek monks or famous philosophers) cannot have it both ways. We cannot have our own time and space and the company of others.
People talk of the art of parenting, the art of housekeeping, as an exercise in time management. Picking things up as you move from room to room. Never go anywhere empty handed. Grab five minutes. Multitasking. Planning ahead. Scheduling date nights. Tech sabbaticals. Gathering up the fragments of time. And fragments feels too true. Time is in pieces for me right now, in bits. Snatched. Prickly. Tense. There is in our household, an unwritten record of time spent. A balance sheet of who has slept and who has taken the children to the park, who has done the school runs and who got to go to work early that day. Who stayed late for a drink. Who didn’t sleep well because they stayed up too late, and who didn’t sleep because they are a light sleeper and were woken up by a noise on the road, and who is therefore owed a lie-in. There is never enough time to untangle these debts. Even less to untangle what needs to be done, or to do it. Some nights I despair and drink wine at the kitchen table, knowing I will wake in the night with a thirst and my head spinning. The bed seems to drop from under me then rise again, like a padded elevator. I walk downstairs and turn the light on to drink a glass of water. A small pink solar-powered Hawaiian hula girl tick-tocks on the counter, smiling happily to her hula beat.
Putting the story of my marriage into words – from the proposal to the arguments to the walking down the aisle in a white dress and forsaking all others – puts me on edge. It’s hard to write about saying ‘I will’. For any marriage, after all, feels like a kind of cliché. In doing this thing, in saying those words, you become one of a series, one of a long line of new beginnings, a tradable token, clad in white strapless satin. Marriage is a myth, of course. It connects with storybook ideas of a perfect call and response, an end to existential loneliness, a dream of ever after.
You can tell a little about how people feel about this from the way they display the aftermath. Some embrace the cliché, with a large canvas-framed shot of smiling hopefulness and cravats. Some hide them away in an album underneath the telly. A friend (now ex-wife) kept one silver-framed black-and-white shot on the mantelpiece of her sitting room. It was a deliberate shot of the pair of them dancing, taken from behind. You saw his face, looking down at his shoes, and nothing of her but a beautiful back, exposed by the cut of her draped silk wedding dress. I remember thinking about this display of back-turning as a kind of resistance – a resistance to being seen, even to being seen as married.
There is one photo of our wedding displayed in our house, slightly hidden behind others on the cluttered shelf. Looking at it, I hope it shows that there was something real, something that escapes the Hallmark card. But even trying to describe that photo, the fear remains that language will break the feeling into pieces.
In that last meeting at Costa, you had told me to get married
I had buried the memory of that conversation in my inbox, and tried to bury the memory of you
I spent eleven months living with a barman who was training to be a life coach
The barman slept with one of his colleagues in our bed
I met my husband-to-be on an online dating site
He kept a painting of an ocean liner in his hall
The barman’s stuff was still in my second bedroom
The online dating website asked me to tick my financial status
I ticked ‘solvent’, which was a lie
Before we got married my husband and I split up three times
When we were apart, I went to see you
My husband-to-be wrote me a letter about our break-up
The letter arrived when I had just got back from your flat
When I read that letter, I decided to marry him
The bride wore a second-hand white dress and carried green flowers
The groom weighed 180lbs
There were 175 people in the chapel
When the vicar came down to the door, he asked if the bride was ready
She wasn’t
She needed the loo
My husband came out of the wings, onto the stage of my life, with rolled-up shirt sleeves, a bicycle helmet and kindness. The first thing that struck me was the candour of his eyes. He seemed unembarrassable. He could be irascible. His kitchen was amazingly clean. His chest freezer was filled with sliced bread and pasta. He slept in the back bedroom of his house, surrounded by books and pictures that he hadn’t got round to putting up. He gave me a key to his door and he answered his telephone. He looked past the mess, and the mousetrap in my kitchen. He even looked past the barman’s boxes in my spare room. He looked past the tears, and asked why I had two circular scars on my right arm, with the skin polished like a dining-room table. He asked if I would marry him.
And this is no more adequate – this narrative of wholeness and unity and solidity. I think of my wedding photographs, my brother guiding me up the steps. Standing at one end of the church, I knew that my heart had my husband-to-be in it. It was, as hearts go, full. But it wasn’t necessarily just full of him. It also had you in it. And the barman. And that man who used to sell antiques at the corner of the road. And my old art teacher. And the man who ran the bookshop. And the one I dated but couldn’t commit to. And all the heroes and heroines I’d read about in storybooks. I kept this from him as I walked down the
aisle. It was my secret. All these other loves, or nearly loves, are built up in the layers of my heart. Romantic cholesterol. But even a congested heart still beats.
We went away. The inevitable cliché. The scenes unfolded in the colour palette of a 1970s art movie. We went to Skye, an island of flatland and scrubland and endless horizons and sudden hills blocking the view. Like so many honeymoons, it was an odd collection of shared pleasures and jarring disappointment. I had imagined the days stretching ahead full of crackling fires, sex and whisky. Reading the newspapers in bed, while the rain pattered down on the roof. Holding hands as we gazed through windows. A quick walk to the pub.
A hopelessly interior vision. I’d forgotten to ask what he wanted. He’d forgotten to ask what I wanted. I’d forgotten that he wasn’t a mind-reader.
The moment we arrived, I realised it wasn’t what I had imagined. There is, in Skye, far more outside than inside. This was a holiday made for walking, for hearty windswept togetherness on the move, for early mornings, and porridge, and cagoules. So that’s what we did. We drove to hills and farms with maps. We sat on link ferries to walk around lochs. We walked in a circle then climbed another hill. Stopping at a pub on one of these walks, we met a man who was unloading a crate of fish. Mullet, hake, squid, haddock, mackerel. I looked into the box of shiny dead scales and saw their many eyes looking back at me. We went to an island off our own island. An outcrop of grey and shale. Wondering what to do, we drove down the island’s one road, got out of the car and stood together, on the line where asphalt turned to grass, looking out into the sea.
Honeymoons are the oddest kind of holiday. The idea of travelling together, as newlyweds, is a metaphor – and more than that. It’s like a practical test, after the fact, to see if you really are going to get anywhere together, with all of the bag-carrying, the looking for parking spaces, the squabbling over the choice of restaurant, and the being sick on the ferry. Honeymoons are also, perhaps, a way of shaping memories. When the whole palaver is fixed in photographic form, they form a way of fixing what it is that the relationship might be. So that later on, you imagine you’ll know what needs to be fixed, to get it back to there. And on we sail.
In 1889, Kaiser Wilhelm was piped aboard the new White Star liner to meet his uncle Albert, the Prince of Wales. A little over twenty years later, Kate’s friend Frank Millet found himself sinking rather than swimming, perishing in the icy North Atlantic as he helped women and children into the lifeboats. Kate Field and Trollope were long gone by then.
I thought of death, and of life and death, on the night train on our way up to Scotland. I felt the side rail of the bunk bed holding me in as we cornered our way through the night. I moved my legs starfishwise under the tightly made sheets, feeling the resistance as I pushed back and forth. Barely room to move. My husband lay two or three feet beneath me, wearing a Bananaman T-shirt. One corner of the straitjacketed bedding was starting to give way.
The night after we married, an unexpected snowfall covered Oxford with a thick blanket of white. We woke up blinking. Iced like a cake. We have no one word for this in English. It’s so unusual, perhaps, that we don’t need to find one. In Russia they call such snowfalls пороша. A pristine awakening. It was April. I was happy when we left. But I still felt the fear of that happiness dissolving, and a resistance to that world of whiteness. I feared it then as I fear it now – the idea of forgetting what has been, as I step into the life to come. I held on to the bed rail, feeling the traces of my past life breaking into the new, like bits of sadness and grit.
Carnforth
— 2015 —
Just hang a light, when I pass tonight
‘The Engineer’s Child’, Neal and Davis
I went up to Carnforth Station in Lancashire a few months ago. It’s a long journey there and back from Oxford, changing at Wolverhampton and Lancaster on the way, and an extra stop at Preston on the way back, in rush hour without a seat. I’d been invited to talk about trains. A former student was making a documentary, and needed an expert for hire at short notice. Carnforth, of course, is the scene for Brief Encounter, along with Stalybridge, which often gets forgotten. It was a baking-hot May day, nearly 28 degrees. My make-up was sliding down my face, and I could feel my feet sticking slightly to the cork at the bottom of my sandals as I began to talk.
Carnforth is a quiet station, down a hill and a slip road. One of those places where the clock seems to have frozen in time, and nothing happens for hours until a coach tour arrives. So the guards turned to listen as I spoke about what trains do to our imagination, the way they play with our sense of time and space. Most people who come there are on the black-and-white movie trail, to visit the Heritage Centre, open daily, seven days a week – and they too turned to watch as I waved my hands around in front of the cameras, under the enormous clock. The near silence is interrupted every half an hour by the sound of the express train going through, or a person coming through the tunnel with a wheelie suitcase. All the signs from the film are there, and room after room of railway memorabilia, and some very nice loos. After an egg sandwich, I stood on the spot where Alec must have walked off after saying goodbye to Laura, and looked up and down the empty track. A man came up and told me he had been researching the film for the last fifty years. I looked into his pale blue eyes and wondered what it was about the story’s sense of missed opportunity that had held his attention for so long, and I wanted to stop and ask. But I had to catch my own train home.
They sit over their final cup of tea. She in her fur-trimmed coat, and her leather clutch bag is on the table beside the teacup. Alec asks if he might write to her. Laura says they mustn’t. A clean break. It has to be. They promised. I wonder if they ever did stay in touch – if they had been real, that is. They didn’t have email then. It’s easier to break promises with email. With letters you have to go to the trouble of a stamp and a pen, and write it and cross it out and write it again. All those tiny opportunities to change your mind. With email, just a touch of a button and it’s sent.
I often hope that you will write to me. Email, that is. When I sit at my computer, my eye still gets caught by the icon on the bottom line, the way it turns just that shade lighter. It’s usually spam, or a reminder about a report I haven’t written. But one day, I still dare to hope, you’ll send me a photo, or a line. Just coffee, you’ll say. Or a drink. x
It will be sent from the same address – one of those old-school email addresses that people acquired in the late nineties that you never bothered to change. Sent at 4.30. After lunch. You’d be sitting at the big desk facing the black bookshelves, with the window to your right. Now maybe you have a laptop, or an iPad. I couldn’t imagine you using a touchscreen. You barely knew how to work a mobile phone.
Just coffee.
Is coffee ever just coffee? There’s that line in that movie Brassed Off where he asks a girl in for coffee. I don’t like coffee, she says. I haven’t got any coffee, he replies. Would it be possible, I thought, for us to meet and for it to be just coffee? For in that act of drinking coffee, surely, you would see the layers of our lives play out – the ways we had crossed and touched, spiralling outwards like so much stirred cream.
Anna Karenina sits on the train on the way back to St Petersburg and remembers that there is a life that she will return to. The life with its familiar rhythms of motherhood, of being a wife and a hostess. A life where time moves according to the expected beat, as regular as the movement of the trains in and out of Moscow. But Vronsky follows her. Onto the train. And back to St Petersburg. Standing at the tea table, at a Russian soirée, he comes up to her. The samovar. It must have been the nineteenth-century equivalent of the water cooler. They speak. They arrange to meet alone. Eventually – through the painful space of a chapter break – we know they have slept together. Anna is on her knees, literally. She has found everything, and lost it.
If there is a line to cross, as Anna crosses, I have not crossed it. We haven’t met since my marriage. We h
ave written once or twice. Come and see me, you had said. Just a thought, you once wrote, though the thought often strays in your direction. But since your illness, it has been silence. I know you must be drawing those around you closer. Your wife. Your children. There is no space for me, for us, for whatever it was that we shared.
I read a book that compares a relationship to a house, with walls and windows. People have affairs, it said, when we build a wall in our house, between our self and our partner – and leave a window open for someone else to get in. It’s an analogy that works, and doesn’t work. Perhaps it makes sense if you feel that, in the first place, you are someone who lives on solid ground. Someone who owns property. The analogy works if you’ve looked around the emotional equivalent of your house, and know where the foundations are to start with.
What about those of us who feel that they live, not in a house, but in something closer to a train, or a caravan. Who’ve lost the property of love, or who never found it in the first place.
When we met before, before it all ended in Paddington, it was you who was most truly leading a double life. Both of us stepped through that door, down that fluorescent green path to an affair, but it was you who had to hide it the most. It was you who had the most to risk. These last few months, I’ve thought about re-opening the door again and again, if only to say goodbye. But the risk is now as great for me, and I can feel it in the way my heart starts to beat faster just at the thought of you.
The Lost Properties of Love Page 13