Sometimes I stalk you from afar. There was an exhibition of your work in my city. A retrospective. I think they meant it was a last hurrah. In the old days, I would have been waved in. A special friend on a special ticket. This time, I paid £8.99 on Ticketmaster and walked in quietly – just another stranger, another admirer in a gallery on a spring afternoon, an anonymous mother pushing a child in a buggy. I nearly didn’t go at all, waiting until the day before, the last few hours.
Your shots were perfectly imperfect against the blue walls. Blurring at the edges into whorls around the figures. Gleaming greys and violets, blacks and whites. Streaks of light and colour melting down the paper. A luminous juice carton, pressed by a hand into a leaning Tower of Pisa. A paper bag in the corner of a room, near a door. A doll with its stomach hollowed out, loose-jointed. There was a life in objects, you said. A life in things. And darkness.
Then, near the end of the series of rooms, there were the life studies – a wall of bodies, faces, people running, close-ups of laughing eyes. A series of nudes hung on the final wall. Tiny pictures, the size of a postcard, each developed in the old way, collodion and arsenic. Pulling you in close with all the risk that went into their making. Then a section of images in reverse, printed on tin. Dried Hypo. Fixed for ever backwards.
I stood there beside a couple in their fifties. They held each other’s hands as they scanned the rows. Each photograph showed perhaps a hundred images of a woman, one superimposed upon the other in palimpsestic blur like a Catherine wheel. I knew that the subject was posing on the edge of a bathtub, her hand trailing into the bath, like something out of Degas. It captured the almost imperceptible moving moment. The passing of time, the poses we take, the many versions of ourselves that we have and play.
I looked closely at the curve of her spine, the set of her hips, and neck, minutely different in each tiny photographic world. Was it me? Could it be? I remember the feeling of your metal bathtub on my thighs, and the act of turning my head to the right to look towards the blank wall. The diffuser and the lamp, creating a simulacrum of morning light.
If that had been a photograph of me, of then, then its meaning was no longer legible. Was it a message – a signal sent as a work of art by one person who can no longer speak to the other? A message that you were thinking of me? That you had something to say? That what we shared still mattered? That something had been achieved? Or was it simply a picture. Something finished, something over. Not so much a last word as a thing to fill a gap. It was hard to tell. The layering of bodies, of time in action, made it hard to unravel myself from any of the others who might have passed through that room. The hair looked different from mine, as if it had more curl. The waist was thinner. The neck longer.
Then again, do we ever know what we look like to others? Can we ever see ourselves from behind?
Perhaps it was just a photograph of someone else’s back, an image of turning away. Perhaps it came from long before we met. Or afterwards. We all imagine ourselves, in some way, as the one and only. But perhaps, after all, I was simply part of a series, one of many lovers, or imagined lovers, lying, one on top of the other, superimposed like one of those early photographs by Eadweard Muybridge, an endless moving graphic, a palimpsest.
It is a strange feeling, being caught by someone else’s eye or pen. Frozen in time, I have always felt smaller and drier in your images, caught in an empty box, then rendered down by light and print. We are all, I suppose, what other people make us – translated, more or less kindly, into something else. Your pictures were always the same. A reflection of what had happened, caught in a lightbox, shaded in greys and mauves, to suit your will. It is tiring being a muse. I am enjoying reversing the process. Turning your pictures into words. I like transforming you – for a while – into a negative of yourself, turning your lights to shade. I distort and bend the truth, moulding it in my imagination to create a story that makes sense to me.
And even that is not enough. It is a relief, after it all, to shake myself free from your images. To turn the camera on myself. This is what Sofia Tolstoy did in the end. In a box at Yasnaya Polyana they found her life’s work. A box of over a thousand photographs, silver gelatin, taken on a wooden Kodak bellows plate. She kept many, and threw away lots more. I wish I could see her mistakes. The things we throw away are often the most revealing.
Midway through his book about time and space, and Greek monks, Roland Barthes looks out of his window and sees a mother, pushing a pram or buggy (the translator calls it a stroller) and holding her child by the hand. He talks about the whole scenario – the mother, the child, the contraption that people use to push children along, rather as an anthropologist might if they were making some kind of documentary about interesting visitors from another planet. The scene is a spectacle for him, not a daily truth. The mother is walking at her own pace, imperturbably. The child is being pulled, dragged along. The mother seems oblivious to the child, and to the child’s own life in time.
I couldn’t live with Barthes. Not that, I think, he’d want to live with me. He doesn’t get it. It’s as if he thinks he’s the only one to notice that the pair on the pavement are out of synch. This woman, who used to walk past the flat where he lived and wrote all his life, was all too aware of the disparity in speed and leg length between herself and this child (we do not know, of course, that it was her child). Nobody who has accompanied a small person along a pavement in a hurry can overlook the way a long adult arm and a small child’s arm fail to find a rhythmic consensus, that awkward re-gripping of hand in hand, as neither party is able to get it right. But perhaps this woman was late. Or angry, or just fed up. Maybe she was going to buy something to eliminate les poux. Is it wrong that when I read this, I spend my time thinking not only of the child-victim, but of the tired woman-also-victim. Perhaps the child has just had a tantrum. Or perhaps they’ve had to stop in a public toilet because it needed to do an enormous and long-awaited poo. Perhaps she is hurrying because she has to get to the nursery, which is closing in three minutes, to pick up the other passenger for the empty oh-so-not-a-stroller. Perhaps she resents the fact that it’s always her that has to do the school run. Perhaps she is running to visit a dying parent. Or a lover. Perhaps she was married to Cyril Connolly.
I turned away from the row of pictures and glanced down at my daughter – and noticed the time. Always the time, moving forwards in one direction. I needed to get home, to empty the washing machine, to defrost the chicken, to be a mother. Making my way out of the exhibition, past the smiling lady at the door, I wheeled the not-stroller up the side streets, then along Cornmarket past Debenhams, and waited for the bus. All around me on the pavements the road seemed full of grey-blue bodies, walking like photographic stills come to life. For a moment, through the double glass doors of the buses, I thought I saw you, coming out of a shop door with a red carrier bag in your hand. As I fished out the change for the bus from the bottom of my purse, I looked down. Looking up again, I lost sight of the shop and the door person who wasn’t you, behind a sea of Spanish tourists wearing orange rucksacks, following a woman holding a beacon umbrella aloft, like the Statue of Liberty.
Later that afternoon, at school pick-up time, I walked out to the street to find the car. The street lights were turning on down the road, and I could hear the sound of a dog barking from inside a house.
If I went to find you, it really would be the last time – I knew. Perhaps there was one last thing you wanted to tell me. An impossibly small, but impossibly important thing. I thought through my plans for tomorrow. It would be easy enough, I supposed, to find a way. My daughter could go for an extra morning at nursery. My son would be at school. There was a meeting I could move. If I got the 10.30, I could be in Paddington by 11.28. I would email you and you would come to meet me – a dishevelled mixture of coats and jumpers and cameras and love. It would be like no time had passed at all – as if you had just left the room and walked back in again. We would have lunch in that terrible pub nea
r the back of the station – the one we went to that day it poured with rain. We couldn’t go back to yours any more. But maybe we could sit in the back of a taxi, and I could listen to your voice again, one more time. You would be waiting at the barrier, and as I came through you would greet me with a kiss, and I would get to look again at a face that I had studied so many times – in photographs before I’d even met you, and again whenever I wished, at the click of a button. You would tell me about your pictures. Of the shades of black and the way you could catch the light and frame a scene. You would ask if I was happy. Does he deserve you, you would ask? You would tell me of friends who had died, people I should have known and met. Perhaps you would tell me about other lovers, the way you always did, in a peculiar and successful attempt to make me jealous to no end. Would we talk of dying? Oh, there will be dying. There will always be dying.
I thought about it all as I got into the car. I strapped in my daughter, and turned on the ignition. The pub, the food, the train. The journey to see you again was so clear in my head, so free and easy that I was almost there beside you. I would wear my silky dress, the short one, and boots, and my leather jacket. If I stuck the dress on a fast wash, along with a pair of tights, it would be dry by the morning. Perhaps, as we sat there, you would ask about my children. Tell me their names, you might ask. Tell me about them. Let me see a picture. There is nothing more important than family, you always said. Nothing.
Somewhere, very quietly, almost as if out of thin air, I heard my daughter’s voice. I wondered why the road ahead was so very dark, as if we were passing through a tunnel. I flicked the switch. I’d been driving in the dark for a while.
Tenway Junction
It is a marvellous place, quite unintelligible to the uninitiated, and yet daily used by thousands who only know that when they get there, they are to do what someone tells them. The space occupied by the convergent rails seems to be sufficient for a large farm … Here and there and around there is ever a wilderness of waggons, some loaded, some empty, some smoking with close-packed oxen, and others furlongs in length black with coals, which look as though they had been stranded there by chance, and were never destined to get again into the right path of traffic. Not a minute passes without a train going here or there, some rushing by without noticing Tenway in the least, crashing through like flashes of substantial lightning, and others stopping, disgorging and taking up passengers by the hundreds.
Anthony Trollope, The Prime Minister
The idea of coming to a crossroads is a commonplace. For most of us, a crossroads really is something that we pass through without too much thought. And a junction is simply a junction. If you have a satnav, or trainline app, you know where to go, although you can be scuppered by the confusion of escalators at Reading and the difficulty of establishing exactly which train you need to get to find your way to Paddington. If you don’t find out in time, you might be a little late. It’s usually not fatal. But there are those for whom a junction really is a matter of life and death.
Anna’s life ends too soon, but not soon enough for her. Too soon – for how could you ever wish the end of a woman full of irritating passion, complexity and kindness, with her quick movements and laughing head of black curls. Only four years after her story begins, it reaches its end. Her marriage over, her love affair has turned sour, Anna gets into her calèche and rattles away to a railway station. On this final journey, she is heading towards Nizhny Novgorod station, a low-roofed building to the south-east of Moscow. She is a married woman, trying to find her lover, chasing the evening train to Obiralovka, now Zheleznodorozhny. It’s a journey that seems to make almost no logical sense. We do not know what she intends to achieve when she gets there, but she is compelled to keep moving. She takes a purse out of her small red bag, and her servant Pyotr buys her the ticket. She endures a bumpy ride in a carriage with another couple. Everything, to Anna, feels suddenly ugly and damaged. Arriving at Obiralovka, she finds a note in scrawled handwriting, a careless hand. He will not return until later. She reads this as a sign that her lover no longer cares. Her marriage is over. The affair is over. It is a May afternoon. The landscape is level, interrupted by clusters of larch trees on the horizon. A series of bruised clouds stretch flatly along the sky. A goods train goes by.
Her death is too soon. But it is also too late. At this critical moment, Anna Karenina is left hanging around. Precise as ever, she wanted to fall halfway between the wheels of the front car, but she cannot let go – or something holds on to her. Her little red handbag which she began to take off her arm delayed her. She waits for the next truck, and as she waits, it feels as if the years of her childhood are called up to her. She thinks about being a girl again, and brightness. It flashes before her. But still, she keeps her eyes on the train, waiting for the next car. Just when she judges the moment is right – as the mid-point of the car passes her – she throws away her red bag. Almost as if she is about to dive into a swimming pool, she drops her head down between her shoulders, and throws her hands forwards, and drops onto the tracks, and onto her knees, lightly, as if she is just about to rise again.
Anna, of course, does not rise. She falls off the platform, off the earth, off the page. There are many suicides in fiction, but this, for me, is the worst. She falls and at that same moment regret pierces her. Time splits in two. She is horror-struck at her own decision. Bewildered. Lost. Where am I?, she asks herself. What am I doing? Why?
Then she tries to get up, to rise, to lift herself up, but the iron freight train strikes her head, and she is dragged down under its wheels. An image of a candle flashes across her mind, flaring up brightly as if illuminating all of her life. And then the candle flickers. It grows dim. It goes out.
This is a terrible imagining. It happens not for real, of course, but in the pages of a book set long ago, and far away from me. But something not unlike this still happens most days, all around the world. In twenty-first-century Britain, two hundred people a year step, or jump, or run off a platform. Two hundred desperate bodies, flying, jumping, crushed by metal. It usually happens on a weekday, most often on Mondays (rarely, for some reason, on Wednesdays). Anna is early, not late, in this sense. She kills herself on a Sunday evening, and Tolstoy catches, in her fall, every moment of regret and missed chances and possibilities and waste. He catches the hopes of those who are loved, and who are gone. The moment is shot through with bright light – the intensity of Anna’s thoughts, the image of the candle, and perhaps most poignantly, the sudden memories of being a girl. Anna, we realise, is only twenty-eight years old. To be fair, she has lived more than most. She has a husband and a lover, and two children – a son from the marriage, a daughter from the affair. She has a reputation. She could have had it all. And now she lies on the railway line, pale, twisted, gone – her skull crushed by freight.
So much of this is invented by Leo Tolstoy. So much of this I invent, and elaborate in my mind. But something of this is real. In January 1872, just before he began writing Anna Karenina, one of Tolstoy’s neighbours jumped in front of a train at the busy railway station Yasenki. Her name was Anna Pirogova.
You can still visit Yasenki, a broad low building in an expanse of snow. If you walk through the main entrance, decorated with its pictures of Tolstoy’s military ancestors and incongruous orange gathered curtains, you will come to the platform that Anna Pirogova would have walked down, past the slatted fences. Heavy goods trains still pass through. Witnesses say that they saw this real Anna cross herself before she jumped.
Tolstoy has taken the genuflection, and her name, but added a detail, a variation. In the middle of this tragedy, though, is the lightness of comedy. Anna Pirogova carried something pragmatic – almost poignantly necessary. The newspaper account from 1872 reports that, in her hand, this Anna carried a bundle with a change of underwear. The bundle, the baluchon, is a fairy-tale object, but this Anna was in no fairy tale.
Nor was Tolstoy’s. Anna Karenina carries not a bundle, but a handbag –
a handbag that gets in the way. Her little red handbag which she began to take off her arm delayed her. It might seem like a mere detail. But its presence here, as wardrobe malfunction, lifts us up for a moment. Its awkwardness, the way it hangs off her arm, signifies all that holds her down. The idea of being held up by a handbag as you try to end your life is almost laughable. The flash of colour against the freight train allows us a flickering hope of a change of mind.
Grand Central to Utah
I only desire to be myself
Kate Field
It was a small funeral, with a procession stretching from Welbeck Street, round the corner of Portman Square and left onto York Street. Then the long route north-west, along the Marylebone and Harrow Road, to the cemetery. The mourners made their way through the winding London streets by carriage, and some by foot, a light drizzle in their faces, to bury Trollope alongside Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Charles Babbage. Although it was a private affair, many gathered near the gates to pay their respects. It was, according to the papers, a plain mourning coach, drawn by two horses that carried the kindly and inimitable writer to Paradise, by way of Kensal Green. Rose, his wife, did not attend.
Trollope had married Rose, a bank manager’s daughter, one June day, just before his thirtieth birthday. They ran like a well-oiled machine, give or take, for forty-two years. My marriage, he wrote, was like the marriage of other people. It’s a simile that seems to close a door, while opening up a vortex in its central panel. What are other people’s marriages like? For Trollope, they are made up of a thousand tiny repetitions. Marriages are worlds of likenesses. Married characters in Trollope’s novels go to bed in the usual way, walking up the stairs of their red-brick town houses, putting on their tasselled nightcaps and their nightgowns. The Trollopian day is full of statutes and planning, of laws and gossip, people passing by one another on the street, arrangements being made. The Trollopian night is characterised by its regularity of movements – the allotted portion of domestic pillow talk, the setting the world to rights, the deliberate turning of backs.
The Lost Properties of Love Page 14