Besides, the categories of public and personal are volatile. The boundaries are often arbitrary, often drawn by others. You are directed towards the laws of discretion as if into a lifeboat, but they can sink you. Women and children first.
I am beginning to float away, to create my own private public museum. Opening my bag. Exhibitionism. I curate the details of my inner world. My Loss drives me on, tapping one damp webbed foot on the ground, leaning over my shoulder, making sure that he gets enough space. He adjusts his skin, which falls in folds around the back of his neck, so thin in places that it is almost translucent. He must be seen. He must always be centre stage. He has no shame. But this is all my own work.
I keep a note in my purse, written on the back of a receipt for a taxi I shouldn’t have taken to I can’t remember where. I usually forget I have it, and pull it out by accident when I’m looking for something else, and its accidental discovery reminds me of something I can’t quite put into words.
The first half reads, in a rollerball scrawl, ‘I think I left the iron on’. The ink gives out here and there, and there’s a small smudge towards the end, caused by the shiny surface. I never iron, except when we are about to go to an important occasion like the one we were at when I wrote this – a friend’s wedding. I had ironed my top on a low setting, then gone to make a cup of tea. I had almost definitely turned it off. I even remember the unplugging bit, and placing of the snaky cord back on the board. But my mind began that loop of anxiety again, and was now circulating round the scenario like a hamster on a deadline, exacerbated by the fact that the bride was coming down the aisle, making it difficult to dash back to the church door in the other direction to phone our neighbour (who would probably be out anyway, and besides which I don’t think he had our spare keys as I’d borrowed them when I last locked myself out, and forgotten to return them).
The bride was smiling broadly, beautiful in strapless satin (no bolero), a troop of bridesmaids in a range of sizes following her. She was leaning on her stepfather’s arm, and looking from side to side at the congregation, who were leaning out at a thirty-degree angle, to glimpse the wave of white. The church was heavy with the scent of jasmine and eucaplytus. No pew or appliqué banner was left untrimmed. The groom shifted awkwardly from foot to foot as he tried to time when he should turn his head at the right moment, as practised in the wedding rehearsal.
We were probably not the only couple who felt ourselves hold hands as the about to be newlyweds exchanged their vows. I could see in the pew ahead, and in the one diagonally opposite, other pairs of people drawing imperceptibly closer, in an action both wondrous and knowing. As I dropped his hand for a moment to scratch my nose, then picked it up again, I thought about what it meant – especially what it meant to find holding someone’s hand such a familiar action that you barely register how it feels any more. It was a touch of hand on hand that spoke of memory and humour. A respect for the calluses on the tips of his fingers, and the slight rawness, a trademark of the regulation hand-washing that marks his days. It was a touch that remembered. A mutual recall of the time when we had shared that moment, that moment of first starting out, the moment before you’re really married, before you’ve stuffed it up, or completely disappointed each other. Before you’ve really known what you were getting yourself into. A tactile recognition that we were still holding hands despite it all. A renewed understanding that comes from the recognition of tetchiness, of witnessed miscarriage and childbirth. Of driving down the M4 while one half of the marriage removes the hair from her upper lip with a small metal torture device and the other negotiates a tailback. Of arguments about money and time and failures of tact. Of racing to the hospital to find his father in cardiac arrest, and standing there, watching helplessly, the doctors unable to resuscitate, while he was busy parking the car. Of knowing someone so well you know when he scratches his thumb in his palm, he’s trying not to cry. But also, somehow, of not knowing them at all.
Real marriage, the one with the white dress and the bridesmaids and the vicar, is a peculiar mirage. Marriage is not an event, but a process. It is an unfolding and refolding of two selves in time, and with all the ordinariness that time brings.
After marriage, Stanley Cavell writes, we must have what he calls the comedy of remarriage. By this, he means something other than a wedding blessing and eternity rings. More of a realisation. An accommodation – much like one might accommodate oneself to a too-small seat in the back of a car, squeezed in between two children’s car seats and a pile of suitcases, as your knees are bent up to your chin and someone is being sick. A becoming accustomed to scenes of breastfeeding a child in the back seat by kneeling backwards and hanging your boob into her mouth while she is still strapped into her child seat when there’s no lay-by and she won’t stop screaming. A screwball comedy of errors, which recognises the fact that we do not go to bed in satin nor wake up in a good mood. It’s not a million miles away from what Tolstoy writes about too. What mattered was what he called the family idea. For him, the entire movement of a novel was away from what we might understand as romance. For Tolstoy, in a marriage, love remains, but it is not the old love that one began with. Sofia writes about this too. Something in marriage has changed. It is always changing.
1940s Hollywood loved this idea. It Happened One Night, Bringing Up Baby, The Philadelphia Story, My Favourite Wife. They look like capers on the surface. People get drunk and chase lion cubs or turn up in their pyjamas and accidentally commit bigamy, but underneath the surface are stories of couples in which lives shatter into fragments, in order to be rearranged in different shapes. In these films, the point of the story is not to get down the aisle. The film wants not to get the central pair together, but to get them back together again … only those can genuinely marry who are already married. It is as though you know you are married when you come to see that you cannot divorce, that is, when you find your lives simply will not disentangle. If your love is lucky, this knowledge will be greeted with laughter.
The sermon in the church that day was a harsh one, and it seemed to have no natural shape or possible end. I fiddled with the clasp of my bag as I waited for my husband to write back. The flames would be just licking around the bedroom door by now, smoke beginning to build up a head of pressure at the front window. I wondered how long it would take for the fire to reach the ground floor. It was our fourth wedding that year, and the vicar had decided to dispense with the usual niceties about understanding and fallibility, and go for a full-on campaign in which marriage was compared to a battlefield, demanding courage, stoicism and a pith helmet. Marriage, he said, was like Afghanistan. A wave of suppressed laughter made its way round the congregation. A baby started to cry, and its sibling began to run into the vestry, hammering at the door. The organ creaked into action for the third hymn. ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’.
Underneath my question are six words, written in his careful hand.
It’s probably ok.
Then a space. A pause. I remember watching as he wrote it.
I love you.
Banbury
— 2016 —
People wheel up to the doors at Banbury Station, dragging their suitcases by the handles, or stepping onto the train holding bags of crisps. The sounds are mechanical. The graceful cyborg announces the station stops as we get close, never quickening or slowing, never irritated. The triple beeps of opening doors and sighs of train carriages as they grind to a halt. It is not a recording but a real guard who blows a whistle, three short blasts, then one, a human grace note within the machine, that we hear but do not see. We glide off past the dark mirror-clad car park, and the next station stop in the service will be Oxford. The refreshment bar at the front of the car is still open, and I look out at the fields of yellow and green, cut across by the dual carriageway. Two men now sit opposite me, both staring at their tablets. A banana lies on the table between them. I see the steeple of a church I cannot place, the tracks of the railway and a pile of pallets s
tacked high to my left. Then a cluster of cows and horses, and hay bales wrapped in black polythene like enormous rolls of liver pâté. A viaduct bridge, and the flash of caravan parks and barges – and the flicker of green and yellow green and yellow. I am speeding faster and faster through a landscape that I know is near to home, but which I still don’t recognise. I head down to use the loo, but it’s IN USE, and I give up waiting in the vestibule.
The difficulty of writing about a life is the innumerable risks you take with the lives of others. There are people in my version of the story (for that’s all it is, my version) who have only just made it in around the edges – and for that, perhaps, they are glad. These minor characters, whose lives may not be as minor to me as I have suggested. The problem with not writing about these others is the false centrality of self that it creates, the floodlight I have shone upon myself. They too should have a ‘case’, as Henry James said. Their own bag. Their own sac à vider, un sac, un cas. If only for me to hide behind.
My husband. It is so hard to write about my husband that I don’t even know what to call him. If I were to ask him, he would probably suggest that I just use his name, an idea that would strike me with its pragmatism, and its honesty. Properties I seek. When will I ever dare to let him read these thoughts? My guess is that he knows most of them already, both the love and the pain, the distance. There is something in the writing of this, I know, that is both a way of holding us apart and pulling us together. In some ways, this story is a way of keeping myself shut away safe in my fictional compartment, my carriage of memory. This story is my double time, my door to a world that is mine alone, my way to self-possession. Like the glass cabinet of books, the story is a way of keeping myself possessed. But I write it partly for him too, risky though it may be. When I show him these words, my inner world, which depends entirely on its secrecy for its existence, will collapse into something shared. It will no longer belong to me. If I risk what I value, maybe that’s because something else might offer more. An opening. You can only go so far living behind glass. My husband has, besides, probably seen and heard most of it before. Keeper of secrets, he sits all day behind a desk, while patients tell him what they would never dare tell another soul. The Hippocratic Oath, like the seal of the confessional. He probably thinks this way himself. Don’t we all? There is nothing as banal as our belief in our own originality. That has been said before.
And then, of course, there’s you. You who are dying, in a room I will never see, in a place I will never know, except by virtual glimpses. Dying, Egypt, dying, as you’d have said to me, with a smile and a wave. All I can do now is imagine, but that is not nothing.
I never went to see you, that night after the exhibition, when I imagined you might have written to me. I had the deception and the outfit ready. I was, in my mind, so nearly there. But the sound of my baby daughter in the back of the car brought me back. It was pitch black. I flicked on the car lights, my heart beating fast. She gurgled happily, and laughed, and I felt the tears of self-reproach prick my eyes. Anna Karenina believed in omens – there was mine. A signal on the line, which brought me back from that road of double lives.
And I cannot go now. Now is not my time to be with you, and then wasn’t either. It was impossible, as you would say. Impossible. We have missed each other’s trains. Our timetables did not match up. It’s quite possible we wouldn’t have liked travelling together after all. But as I write this, I think there is no harm in saying that I still think of you and your train. I think there is no harm in saying that I hope that this book lands on your desk before you die. I hope you can see something in this. A glimpse of a face you can recognise. I hope you know that it was far more than nearly.
Oxford
— 2016 —
Hold on
Yazz and the Plastic Population
I keep my own compartments. There’s something sealed about my world. There is home, and there is work, divided by a transparent wall. I make my way from one to the other by foot or bicycle, carrying bags of paper. I keep my books at work, apart from the few I need at home. The home books are stored in a glass-fronted cupboard, as if to keep them in place, securely bound. The worlds must not collide. If they did, I fear that one or the other might, perhaps, transform. Combust, change its state, oxidise, disappear into thin air. I keep no photographs of my family in my office. I take none of my home mess there, but make a separately work-related mess in my office. My work world is through that door, divided, separate, apart. Sometimes I wonder why I avoid bringing my handbag into the room where I lecture – why I hide it behind a chair when I teach. When I teach I want to be a person with no baggage. It is this fiction of completeness, which allows me to listen to the stories of others.
And that world is full of people with compartments of their own, their own glass walls. It is full of my students, who come to see me every day, with essays and plans and the odd crisis. We are on different trains, and this is as it should be. Their lives and mine never quite meet, but brush against each other at speed, registering each other the way trains pass, rocking momentarily on their tracks with the speed of the encounter. And then they leave.
Last month I watched fifty such leavers walk into a hall to take their final examinations. They were a various group, brought together by the task of getting a degree, and they brought little else with them. A pile of messenger bags and rucksacks, abandoned to comply with the regulations, sat outside the door, underneath the screens directing them to the correct examination room. I had set the paper. I looked down the lines as they checked the desks, figuring out where they should sit, then up at the portraits, which looked down on them in turn. Lines of ghosts. Most of the living looked deep in thought, but some exchanged a smile. A few carried a bottle of water. Some clutched a single biro. Most held a small bag, gathered like a delicate bladder. There was something sad and heroic about these see-through bags, with their tissues, pencils and Polos covered in fuzz. One by one, they took their seats at the fold-out desks, and bent their heads as if in prayer. The bags, disgorging their contents onto each desk, spoke of a moment where there was nowhere to hide, and little to hold on to.
Sixty years ago, sophomores sitting down to take an exam at Cornell University might have felt similarly exposed. As they turned over the paper, they prepared to write about the European novel. Expecting topics about religion and social class, the questions instead asked them to describe Emma Bovary’s sunshade and shoes; map the Liffey’s movement through James Joyce’s Dublin and enumerate the contents of Anna Karenina’s handbag. This unusual exam about unusually great novels was set by one of the world’s greatest novelists – Vladimir Nabokov – and if the questions seem almost idle or frivolous, it certainly wasn’t intended to be seen that way. In reading, Nabokov said, one should notice and fondle the details. Detail, he told his students, is everything.
The red handbag must have been lying on the railway line, a few feet away from Anna’s body, near the edge of the platform. Nobody would have picked it up for hours, I suppose. The station master would have been the first to run down the platform, in his absurd multi-coloured hat. A crowd would have followed him, shouting, running back again, asking questions, half-horrified, half-fascinated by the scene. All their attention would have been on her body, on an attempt to revive a woman who had been crushed by the weight of Russian iron. People would have gathered round, asking if anyone recognised her. Her coachman would have made his way to the front of the crowd, barely believing his mistress could have done such a thing.
To a traveller, waiting on the other side of the platform, Anna’s handbag would have stood out. Bright red – almost tomato-coloured – the soft, vulnerable silk still shining on the ground. It would be gathered together by a cord, slightly worn from her travels, the end of one tassel beginning to fray. Someone surely would have rescued the bag as it lay there on the ground, a little apart from its owner. I hope they would. There’s a risk, of course, that an opportunist might have filched it in t
he flurry. But I think that before too long, one of the station guards, or a policeman, would have brought it in – and handed it to her driver, who would have held it with a mixture of reverence and awkwardness as he telegraphed to Vronsky and awaited an answer. He would have looked at the clock as he sat there, watching the hands move slowly, and feeling the objects in her bag underneath the silk, the remnants of a self.
What, then, is in Anna’s handbag? What sundry items spill out onto the railway tracks at Obiralovka Station on that day in May, 1876? Perhaps these:
1. Cambric handkerchiefs
2. A photo album
3. A paper knife
4. A cushion
5. Some opium (she drinks her usual dose before she leaves the house)
6. Some form of contraceptive – maybe a sheath for Vronsky, but probably the newly invented Dutch cap/diaphragm
7. An imaginary novel by Anthony Trollope
But most important of all, perhaps, is a book. Not the novel by Trollope that we see Anna is reading on the train – but a book of her own making. A book that she would have written on her lap as she travelled, collating the manuscript pages as she worried about Vronsky, wrote letters to her husband Karenin, and packed and unpacked her bag. This book is one detail of Anna Karenina that rarely gets a mention. It is, admittedly, one of the many hundreds of items that clutter and cluster in the pages of Tolstoy’s epic. It lives alongside the mushrooms and the handkerchiefs and the absence of milk and the death of a cow. A detail.
Near the novel’s end, Stepan, Anna’s brother, speaks of Anna’s loneliness to a family friend as they sit together, jolting in the carriage. Anna’s friends and family have started to notice it. She seems bereft, almost deadened by her situation. She is desperate for company. The friend wonders why Anna would be lonely, for she has a child, a new baby daughter as well as her son, as consolation. Stepan, in an unprecedented moment of enlightenment, corrects him. Women, he points out, are not simply breeder hens, or incubators. They are not simply bags for carrying others. Anna, he explains, assuages her loneliness by writing. She is writing, we learn, a children’s book and does not speak of it to anyone. She is looking for a publisher. Anna is a parent and a writer. How to be both?
The Lost Properties of Love Page 16