In 1999, a woman walked into the Oxford Examination Schools to sit her English finals, treading the same path through the desks as the students I watched last week. Her name was Kate Gross. Another Kate. She would have sat the five papers over five days. Five days of Chaucer and Shakespeare and Behn and Milton. I went to the library and called up the bound copies of the question papers she took that May. Imagined her looking through the questions, chewing the top of her biro.
All disguise in Shakespeare is benevolent.
Contempt for women remains a major theme.
Is Skelton a transitional writer?
All reproduction is interpretation.
There is nothing outside the text.
Discuss.
Kate Gross was a brave person, and a traveller, like Kate Field. She travelled to Africa. She was private secretary to two prime ministers. She was destined to shine brightly, and briefly. She died at thirty-six, of bowel cancer. Her children, like Anna’s, were still small. She had twin boys. Gross wrote a book about life and death called Late Fragments. I read it one afternoon, through the night and into the next morning, and I cried again and again about the loss of a parent. I cried for myself and the child that I was. What struck me, in the bravery of that book, as Gross looked into the light and dark of death, was her honesty about the power that writing gave her. When asked why she would spend her precious final weeks writing, rather than with her children, she was candid about the way that writing was an affirmation of selfhood, a way of holding herself together, and a way of remembering the person that she used to be.
Her book’s epigraph says something more. There are two copies of this book that matter, she has written on its opening page.
There are two pairs of eyes I imagine reading every word. There are two adult hands which I hope will hold a battered paperback when others have long forgotten me and what I have to say.
Gross’s book, then, is a children’s book.
Perhaps not conventionally so. But it is written to be something for her children to read, to treasure, to hold, when she can hold them no longer. I think of my children’s small hands.
Writing is better than nothing. Better than thin air.
We are closer to my home now, and nobody near me is reading. The carriage has emptied out and the seats nearby bear the familiar detritus of a journey. An empty water bottle and a container of sandwiches are abandoned on the flip-down table across the aisle, and part of a free newspaper has fallen to the floor. Out of the window I see the flocks of sheep, the poplar trees and hedges and hedgerows. A lorry goes by, bearing the legend Enjoy Lunch!. Someone has thrown a small plastic doll down the side of the railway bank. She lies naked, upside down, legs open, with only a plastic bottle for company. Then a sea of innumerable retail chains, and on to the banks of tree branches, the horses wearing coats, the warehouse for Travis Perkins – a thousand shades of green, pushing their way through the boundaries of the netball court, reckless and refusing.
It matters that it is a children’s book that Tolstoy imagines Anna writing. This is a gripping detail, one to hold on to. It is something that is irrefutably central to Anna, a woman who lost both her parents as a child. She is depressed, angry and lonely. And she is writing a children’s book. It is a book that we in turn might imagine, sitting in its battered cover on her son’s bedside table – or that her plump, rosy little girl will one day read and wonder at as she grows older. Seryozha is nine when Anna dies. Her daughter, the little Anna, is still a baby. By the turn of the twentieth century, the boy with the frowning eyes and laughing smile would be a man.
In the act of writing a book, Anna is holding her children at arm’s length. It’s something that she does. Pulling them close, then pushing them away. Sitting on trains, looking at photographs of them in her album, set in time. She cannot bear to stay in the nursery for long. Something about her children, especially little Anna, the mirror of herself, makes her afraid. The writing, perhaps, is a kind of compulsion, a kind of excuse.
Being a mother and a writer is not the easiest of logistical exercises. Being a writer makes mothering more difficult. Sometimes it’s impractical. Or near impossible. Here’s the catch, writes Maggie Nelson. I cannot hold my baby at the same time as I write. Catching and throwing. Holding and dropping. When I only had one child, and he was small, I could type with one hand, while I held him in my other arm and fed him. It was slow, but it gave me time to think. And the feeding gave me an excuse to sit still. That only lasted as long as he stayed still. With two children, I waited until he slept in a buggy in the hall and then typed standing up, with my daughter strapped vertically to me in a sling. That gave me about an hour a day maximum, and if someone rang the doorbell, it was over. If the carefully titrated combination of sleep patterns went awry, there was no time at all. And often, simply getting them to that point left me too wrung out to write. Now they are rarely silent, and they see the time I spend staring at a screen as time stolen from them. Why should they not? They lean over my shoulder, or type sentences into my work. If I write by hand, they join me, then begin to doodle on my paper. I understand their frustration. My attention is elsewhere. My gaze is somewhere over their left shoulder. And besides, they are hungry. One cannot write and cook fish fingers at the same time.
Children are those others who haunt the pages of this book. The children we might have had, or the ones we have never had. The imaginary children who would have been born, if passing flames had become lovers. They are half alive. Dwellers in Hilary Mantel’s sly state of half becoming. The shadowland of chances missed.
And the children we once were. Children who have had to grow up too soon, but in growing, leave a ghost child behind. I have one of those. My small blonde familiar, lost somewhere in a Finchley garden, wearing a green dress with yellow flowers. I have photos of her, with smiling eyes, before the frown set in. The young Kate Field had a child self too, treading the boards with her father Joseph. Anna’s children, and the child that Anna was once. These ghost children are met with everywhere, these nearly beings. Some of us are quicker to see them than others, but they spook us all, waiting at those stations we pass by at speed, while the direct line presses on. Those children in the apple tree, Not known, because not looked for but heard, half heard, in the stillness.
It feels, to me, as if there is never enough of myself that I can give to my children. Even if I were to hold nothing back, they would be left wanting. In their wholeness and their present loveliness, they deserve so much more than the fragmentary bits that I staple together, daily, into a person. I do not feel this always. This is just one of the stories that comes from one of my distracted array of selves, the draft-versions of me. But it emerges from time to time. It’s hard to explain quite what loss takes away from a heart. If you were to dissect me, I feel as if one particular organ might look depleted and dented, still with the essence of itself, but not quite as it should be.
Given this, I wonder why I take so much time away from them. Why should I take time to look out of train windows, to type on a keyboard, to think of the ways in which words might be placed against words. Sometimes I steal time from sleep. I wake at 5 a.m., and creep down the stairs. I make cups of bad instant coffee and write to the tune of the buzzing fridge at dawn. Or sit and watch the wall. Should I not, even in this stolen time, go back upstairs to be with them as they sleep? Time is passing, and they will not be like this for long. The stilled photographs are an illusion, just like the illusion of my memory of them. Our son sleeps with his arms held back, a perfect profile, like one of Botticelli’s cupids. He sleeps lightly, and wakes if you turn a light off. He dreams of falling down stairs, or of an octopus that lives in our kitchen. Our daughter is curled in a ball under a Disney princess duvet, her tow-coloured hair hiding her beautiful baby face. So fast asleep that she can roll off the mattress and onto the floor without flinching.
I walk into the bathroom and see my face in the mirror, framed by a row of novelty toothbrushes. The foo
l. The screwball. To be a 1950s comedy wife, you have to learn to fool about. For what people do together is less important than the fact that they do whatever it is together, that they know how to spend time together, even that they would rather waste time together than do anything else – except that no time they are together could be wasted. Life is not the search for epiphanies. But how to write that down? How to write, and be together? How are we to live together?
I wonder if I will always be drawn to the myth of together, no matter how I run away. It is a myth that always puts the pair at the centre. Whether it is the screwball couple or the Russian lover, whether you end up with Crosby or Vronsky, the love triangle always ends in a line, a partnering of man and woman, hand in hand. It’s an image I have been shown so many times. That banal commonplace that everyone knows, writes Doris Lessing. It is the one you hung on the wall.
If I seem to have trained my lens too much upon the triangle and the line, the man and the woman, it is because I cannot find a new shape until I examine the one that I have held for so long. It is also because the shape of this commonplace has been my truth. Not to tell it would be to cancel myself out.
I fear my exhibition is a broken version of yours. A parody. (Parody is a byway of tenderness. It is also power.) Time to frame myself.
Things are developing still. Slowly does it. Ever so gradually, in Sarony’s Broadway studio, two faces appear. Layer by layer, two bodies come into focus. A man and a woman, his arm around her waist. He is older than she is, by some twenty years or so. Perhaps even thirty years. They do not look as if they have done this before, but they both stare at the lens, almost boldly, as if challenging the viewer to stop them. See if we care, they seem to say. See. It took more than just a moment or two. Twenty seconds were counted, each figure looking into the dense glass circles of the lens, each for a moment living together. The chronology has printed itself onto the glass. Measured out in particles, chemicals changing states, changing properties. The younger man touches his teacher’s hands as they pass the plate between them. By accident, perhaps. A hand slips on the edge, slides, the fluid moves. One false move. You cannot go back now. The plate shatters on the floor. Irrevocable past. Glass is everywhere.
Perhaps writing is itself an act of holding. As a life closes in on itself, nearing its end with each turn of the page, writing is a way of distilling, of warding off that moment. Writing is a not melting away into a sea of forgetting, a not fading away like an old photograph. It can be an act of discovery, too. Of remembering something that you never realised you had lost, or of discovering something that hasn’t even happened yet, and grasping it. Writing can be more than finding, even. It can be winning. Writing is tactile. It’s touching, even if what it offers is not quite the same kind of touch as the warmth of another’s hand, or the powerful, dry heat of another body. The book has a different, touching, kind of power. A different strength.
The book, after all, has the power to endure something. Something intimate. Something that – at the end of her life – Anna Karenina can no longer bear. She has run from everything. She has left her son. Her daughter, her baby. Her husband. Her lover. Nothing and nobody can hold her. But her book endures, and will endure beyond her. Assuming, of course, that someone finds the manuscript pages lying there beside that Russian railway line. Assuming someone picks them up and gathers them in. Her book – perhaps any book – is a way of being close to someone, while keeping your distance. It frames. It gives a certain light. The book can be held.
The train has pulled in now, though the engine is still running. The platform is shining wet under the strip lights on the platform. We come to rest on the exit side of the station, and by this time the barriers are all open, as well as the side gate into the car park. We are a little late, due to the delay after Banbury, but I am still in time. Only a little further behind than I expected. I can make it up. I can make it up. I’ve been doing that for some time.
Soon – not long now – I will get off the bus that stops near the chip shop and the mini roundabout. I’ll walk down the road, past the house with the barking dog and the skip that never seems to go. The sound of trains is distant but still audible. I will round the corner and open the gate, which squeaks as I push it.
I’ve been a good way. They do not know that I have not been to see you, and that you are dying now. The last word is not said. Now is the time to let them in. I close the book. I will pick up my bag and go home.
Sources of quotations
For during a tiny portion, Louis MacNeice, ‘Train to Dublin’, Collected Poems (London: Faber, 2007), 17
Departures
When I wake up, Bill Withers, ‘Lovely Day (Sunshine Mix)’. By Bill Withers and Skip Scarborough. Produced by Bill Withers and Clarence McDonald. Remix Ben Liebrand. Chelsea Music Publishing Company Ltd. CBS, 1988.Vinyl
Hull to Ferriby
It’s no use pretending, Noël Coward, Brief Encounter in Noël Coward Screenplays, ed. Barry Day (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 300
All happy families are alike, Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, tr. Rosamund Bartlett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 3
St Petersburg to Moscow
‘Every heart has its own skeletons’, as the English say, Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, tr. Constance Garnett (London: Heinemann, 1977), 100
muffled, hoarfrost-covered driver, Anna Karenina, tr. Bartlett, 62
minute and infinitesimally small, Leo Tolstoy, ‘Why Do Men Stupefy Themselves?’, Essays and Letters, tr. Aylmer Maude (London: Grant Richards, 1903), 28
watch keeps time with the numberless watches of his readers, Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature (New York: Harcourt, 1981), 141
Human error, ‘Hull Hospital Remembers 1927 Train Crash Victims’, BBC News, 10 February 2012, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-humber-16978180; see also J. W. Pringle to the Ministry of Transport, ‘Report on the Accident that Occurred at Hull Paragon on 14 February 1927’, 13 April 1927, http://www.railwaysarchive.co.uk/docsummary.php?docID=308 and ‘Express Train Disaster (1927)’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBBzLjExbp0
Ferriby to Brough
people who make art, Sheila Heti, ‘On the Subject of Artists Talking About Art’, Back to the World: Untimely Talk About Culture, 19 December 2012 https://backtotheworld.net/2012/12/19/sheila-heti-on-the-subject-of-artists-talking-about-art/
No more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall, Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 116
St Petersburg to Moscow
Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning, George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 3
English novels, see Sofia Tolstoy, diary entry for 23 October 1878, The Diaries of Sofia Tolstoy, tr. Cathy Porter (Richmond: Alma Books, 2010), 53
Hackney Wick 2006
Summer in the city, ‘Somewhere in My Heart’, Aztec Camera (Michael Jonzun and Roddy Frame), vinyl record, WEA, 1987
Battery Place to Cortlandt Street
The last word is not said, Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 163
all life and expression, ‘Photography in the Great Exhibition’, The Philadelphia Photographer, 184–186, quoted in Erin Pauwels, ‘Resetting the Camera’s Clock: Sarony, Muybridge & the Aesthetics of Wet-Plate Photography’, History and Technology: An International Journal, 31/4, 484
sick at heart, Kate Field, diary entry, 1 January 1869, quoted in Lilian Whiting, Kate Field: A Record (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1899), 196
acrobatic, airy and perched-up, New York Times, 12 January 1868
Brough to Goole
Miss you like, ‘Miss You Like Crazy’, Good to Be Back, written by Gerry Goffin, Michael Masser and Preston Glass, performed by Natalie Cole, 15 March 1989, produced by Michael Masser, EMI-USA, 1989, Vinyl
full front … natural look, Anthony Trollope to Kate Field, 18 June 1868, The Letters of Anthony Trollope, ed. John N. Hall
, 2 volumes (Redwood City, CA: California), 1, 433
Can anything indeed in this part of life be ever said to be the end?, quoted in Whiting, 194
clock for seeing – ‘cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing’, Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, tr. Richard Howard (London: Vintage, 2000), 15
Please, sir, I want, Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), 56
I attribute the power of doing this altogether, Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography and Other Writings, ed. Nicholas Shrimpton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 169
I’ll come to you, Anthony Trollope to Kate Field, 1 December 1876, Letters 2, 698
edge of dread, Adrienne Rich, ‘What Kinds of Times Are These’ in Collected Poems 1950–2012, ed. Claudia Rankine (New York: Norton, 2016), 755
Hackney Wick
I have decided that seeing this is worth recording, John Berger, ‘Understanding a Photograph’ in Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (Leete’s Island Books: Stony Creek, 1980), 292
West Finchley to Belsize Park
They were not railway children to begin with, Edith Nesbit, The Railway Children (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 1
can only be relieved, J. G. Ballard, ‘Millennium People: Entertaining Violence’, Spike Magazine, see https://www.spikemagazine.com/0104jgballard
The Lost Properties of Love Page 17