The Lost Properties of Love

It is quiet right now, apart from the sound of engine against track, that familiar juddering, grinding and groaning of metal. Out of the window to my right, the fields, cut across with drainage canals, lakes and spinneys and car parks and Portakabins. I look at the bag of books and papers beside me. This, if I’m lucky, is the beginning of the middle of my life. It is a time when promising thirty-something starts to give way to middling fortysomething – a strange in-between period where horizons and trousers shrink. My nights are spent chasing not men but lost PE kit. Middles can be hard to navigate: we never know exactly where they begin. How should we pace ourselves? Is there a schedule? I scroll through the mental calendar. Ghosts are planted on various pages, next to bank holidays and festivals. My dead teacher. My dead friend. Back to my father. Dead at forty-five, he hovers over each September, a corduroy shade, condemned to perpetual middle age. I imagine the ghost you will soon be.

I am alone in my carriage, with the fifty-six other passengers. Alone together, moving to the same rhythm. I pull my phone out. There are squares and squares of photographs that contract at the touch of the screen, disappearing into tessellated blocks, a mosaic of motherhood. One of a parent’s first instincts, one of the first things they do once a child enters their life, is to begin to capture it. To render it still and permanent. As children grow, the photograph album, or the ever-present camera phone, is like a talisman. We photograph our children a thousand times. To pin them down, as if the recording might render them ours for ever, ever more perfect, but never more perfect. Photographs: the only place where things can last, as the gaze from the screen stares out of time. An illusion. It’s where we outsource our lament against time’s passing. Where we park our fear of death. White borders contain it all. Nothing must be lost.

The man on the other side of the aisle is writing an email, and the woman in front of me is staring at a spreadsheet. My phone is about to go flat, but I can still look at pictures of my children, for now. And later, I will still picture them, like negatives, the pair of them shuttering across the back of my mind with a wave of impossible love. There they are – still – hanging upside down off the rails near the park, laughing with open mouths. Squinting into the sun beside a beach hut. Holding ice creams in hands that are small.

St Petersburg to Moscow

Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning.

George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

Anna turns another page of her English novel. The woman who has been out riding is now writing a letter, then putting an imaginary hat on, before walking out of the door for the imaginary station. What Anna reads is make-believe, but that’s her substance too. She is a chimera, pure fiction. Not that there’s anything pure about fiction. Anna is pieced together, as we all are, by fragments of others, imaginary and real. She is a combination. A blend. An infusion of people who Tolstoy had met, or missed. Of things that he’d read, or imagined his heroine might have read. Open her up, case by case, like a Russian matryoshka doll, and the selves reveal themselves. Lined up, an identity parade.

One of the dolls is slightly out of line. She refuses to fit. She wants to escape to another story, to break the case and start her own. Her name is Kate Field, and she was a journalist, lecturer and early telephone pioneer. Her thousands of articles – like the people she wrote for – are just a blur on the literary time-line, almost out of view. She is a real woman lost in time. A detail I cannot let go.

Kate Field wasn’t Tolstoy’s muse, not even in the loosest sense of the word. He probably didn’t even know she existed. But in the way that one late train can upset the entire South Western train service, Kate Field made an impression on Tolstoy’s world.

I know the beginning. Not the first day, first hour, first moment, but the general time and place. It began in Florence, where Kate Field first met a man with steady eyes and a way of watching the world. Anthony Trollope was forty-four and married. Field was twenty-one – and she got under Trollope’s skin. Gifts were exchanged (a copy of The Arabian Nights). And letters. And then they all went home.

But gradually, quietly, the Kate of his imagination entered his fiction. He wrote to her, and began to write about her. Numerous versions of Field haunt his novels. Different sorts of women, all a bit like Field, often called Kate, trail their way through the pages of his books. They found themselves printed and reprinted, imported and placed in bookshops in Paris and Berlin, Moscow and St Petersburg. Whenever Tolstoy readied himself to write, he turned to reading English novels. And this is how Kate Field found her way to Tolstoy. Sitting in Yasnaya, Tolstoy read about these women, these imaginary Kate Fields. He loved them. He lined the books up on his shelf. He remembered them. They crept into his mind, and into his work.

Parts of Kate Field live on in Anna Karenina. Anna Karenina is partly Kate Field. That’s what writers do. They change lives.

Hackney Wick

— 2005 —

A hot August morning and we lay on top of the bedsheets in a pile of body. You got up to take a call and I looked at my legs on the whiteness.

Summer in the city.

Outside the window, a bird settled on the nearby guttering. It was as free as a bird.

Double portraits are always the hardest, you said as you walked back in. The lens has to settle for something. It has to choose one thing or another. An eye. A coat button. A parakeet.

Battery Place to Cortlandt Street

The last word is not said, – probably shall never be said.

Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

Distance was Kate Field’s style. Walking down Broadway, taking her time as she crossed over to Fulton and then left again down Greenwich. Rain was promised, and few would have been tramping the usually crowded sidewalks, as the sky above Lower Manhattan turned dark grey. Then stopping at the Friend Pitts store near Amity Street (now West 3rd), to pick up a precautionary umbrella. Down to the intersection of Cortlandt and Greenwich Street.

She’d just been framed – a picture with Anthony – and now she was trying to get away. She was always trying to get away. Her life was a series of broken connections, a shimmering circle, closed on the outside. The sitting had taken an age. They could have gone to any one of the quicker Broadway studios. Fredericks’ Photographic Temple opposite the Metropolitan or to Gurney’s, further down. But Napoleon Sarony at 680 was the go-to. He could render the impression of something coming into relief, almost stepping out of the paper. His figures were all life and expression. No stiff jaws and staring eyes for him, none of those brocade drapes and sad ferns. Sarony made a body seem in motion, even while that body was caught in an iron head brace, waiting for twenty seconds or more, not moving. He was an illusionist, playing with time. Slow motion looked fast. Still looked like moving.

She was glad not to be near all those people any more, to leave the cluttered studio. A large alligator hung from the ceiling of his waiting room. Greek busts and tapestries jostled for space with stuffed birds and lampstands shaped like Buddhas. The studio itself was stark and strange – full of glare and bareness, metal posing frames. The smell of ether and lavender oil, asphalt and sandarac gum, of dragon’s blood.

The photograph of the pair hasn’t survived. Lost or destroyed. Broken maybe. But what would it have told us anyway? For it is feeling that we lose in time. The feeling that lies between. The tension or the frisson. The flirtation, or unrequited love. There is no earthly way to record the thing that never happened, even if two people know how nearly it did. What makes someone walk into the middle of someone else’s marriage or out of the centre of their own? What makes someone end a relationship, or a life, placing their foot into the future’s thin air? What makes someone start an affair?

People talk. They say Trollope and Field were in love – or, at least, that he loved her, or almost loved her. They say his wife knew, or was vexed by it. They read between the lines of his novels. Tell us that he never got over her. The photographs we have tell us something, and nothing. If the camera never lies, then the separate photos that remain show two people neither gazing into the lens, nor looking in quite the same direction. Trollope sits straightforwardly, angled just a little away from centre, as if he is about to say something to someone. His eyes look directly at the viewer through his metal spectacles, his enormous beard runs from the top of his ears out towards the camera. Her eyes are set at a middle distance dream, her face and shoulders a quarter-turn from the camera lens. Her hair looks fine. Caught before the rain began. Appearances mattered to Field. She had a resistant longing for belongings. For dresses and bonnets and gloves. She was flamboyant. Camp, even. Hoping that rules can be bent.

Down the studio corridor, things are developing. Two men stand, side by side, by candlelight, next to a running water bath. One of them holds the tin sheet on his left hand, balanced like a chalice, his wrist tense with concentration. The other man passes him a small cup of developer. He flows it over the plate, timing his movements by tapping his right hand on his thigh. The lightest points appear first. Fifteen seconds in near darkness. Then the tones. The shadows come last. Surfaces and depths. The assistant leans closer to the other to check the image, looking at the levels. Then he begins to wash the plate with water, pouring the jug he has at the ready. Gently, for nothing yet is fixed. And so the surfaces of the glass transform, changing their nature. Silver nitrate and ferrous sulphate. A chemical’s properties reveal themselves in change. Action and reaction. Combustion, explosion, evaporation, smoke.

Any photograph like this contains an element of risk. An ethereal solution of pyroxylin. The risk of taking too long to make a pose, or not long enough. The risk of moving during the exposure and blurring the image. And then behind the scenes, the scurry to develop the plate, the assistant holding the glass like a delicate tray, of clumsily flowing the developing fluid or leaving it too long, and turning it black. Of scorching the image in candlelight. This picture records all those risks, and some of a less technical kind. Through the cyanide, an affair was coming into focus. Someone was nearly getting burned.

It was done. The photograph was taken, and it was time to go. Beside them, a stagecoach draws up. An unknown woman in dark-red velvet is handed down from the carriage. An unknown man takes her by the arm, an intimacy legible in the way they touch. The two unknowns disappear. Trollope and Field shake hands on the sidewalk outside the marble building, as the clouds break and they ready themselves to part. Knowingly. This goodbye might, they thought, have been their last meeting, certainly for years. It could have been for ever. Field’s diaries speak of being sick at heart. She is angry with herself for wasting time. She had nobody, she wrote, to spur her into new fields. Looking on, a passer-by would not have guessed that something was going on. They couldn’t have seen the lines of a future absence taking shape between the two of them, the imagined distance starting to solidify.

I like to think that Trollope watched her, as she turned left. Nothing now remains of that part of Cortlandt Street. It was half flattened out for the building of the World Trade Center, then flattened again one September morning, seen now only in film clips of grey and yellow horror. She was drawn by the pictures she’d seen in the papers of iron legs, the idea of newly fragile structures hovering over the streets of Lower Manhattan. The El train. A city on the move. In her head, she’d make a sketch of mechanical speed with words, thinking through the violence of the drop, the idea of the small cars catching and releasing the iron hooks above them, like gymnasts on rings. They’d finished constructing the final sections of the railway by then. The fixed iron posts punctuated the roadways supporting the car-rails, all acrobatic, airy and perched-up, as the papers said. It was grey but hot, waiting to break into rain.

I imagine the road as it once was, crowded with horses and carts outside Peter Henderson’s, men smoking outside the Northern Hotel. She found a man from the railway company who let her climb the stairs to view an empty car. There she sat, right up on the rails, beside the second-floor windows of the dry goods stores, looking down at the heads of the passers-by. She was glad for that brolly, as the rain began in earnest. Pouring down in pitchforks and then buckets onto the sidewalk. I think of you, as she thinks of him, still fading.

Brough to Goole

— 2016 —

Miss you like …

Natalie Cole

A man sleeps opposite me, his head listing to the left. An inflatable navy blue suedette pillow matches the navy and silver seat velour. We go through a cutting, into the dark, then out again, past the lines of Heron Foods vans and the Emon Spice Lounge and the fields of hay cut short.

I think back to the photographs of Field. Even at a slant, her eyes look too pale to be true – almost luminously so. Another trick of the light. Collodion does not recognise the existence of blue. There was no way to catch her eyes.

Later, when they were apart, Trollope asked Field for a photograph of her facing straight ahead, full front. He said he wanted her natural look. Leafing through the images of Kate Field, you’ll hardly ever find it. There’s one of her leaning against a pillar, as if overhearing a conversation. One leaning back on a sofa, her head cupped in her hand. One profile, with French lace. One on horseback, on her way. Only one of her looking straight at the camera, all in white, a messenger bag slung across her torso. Something about her resisted that pose. Her pictures usually show her moving towards a world elsewhere, a profil perdu, so very French – or glancing over her shoulder, her gaze never quite meeting yours.

Sidewalk or not, they would have said farewell somewhere, somehow. We never know when the last word is said. Perhaps the last word is never said. Can anything indeed, Field’s biographer asked, in this part of life be ever said to be the end? We never know when our meeting with another person might be the final one. Even the most heartfelt goodbyes usually have a confident belief in au revoir, a next time, a next place. But on the very fringes of our consciousness there is always the sense that this might be, if not the full stop in the conversation, then a conversation left hanging. For some, the finality is always that bit closer. The hurried quality of lovers parting bears it out. Lovers’ time is carved out of real time – or stolen. It’s always under threat.

Any affair is an attempt to live twice. Set into the beige wall of everyday linear time, it exists beyond a door you think nobody else has noticed. You walk past doors just like it every day. Often you don’t even think to look at it. But now and again, you stand beside it. You might be the sort to push open that door. Sometimes it resists your touch, or bounces gently on the hinges before shutting, and you return to the beige world. You read a safety notice about fire drills on the wall, check your phone, or fish something from your bag, as if pretending that you never even tried to push. But sometimes you are standing nearby and that door swings open seemingly of its own accord, offering a floodlit view down a pathway of nylon grass. The walk seems impossibly short. And while you are there, you have two lives, and two heartbeats. You make believe that you have created a sort of a time pocket or vortex, a duplicate self. There’s something almost impossible about this other, Narnian universe. And while you are in it, nobody does it better. The moment you take your first step, you feel as if time has warped and split.

If photographs are a way of stopping time – their stilled presence, wet collodion and albumen transformed into something brittle, calm and dry – then affairs create a negative imprint, a second life. If a camera is a clock for seeing, as Barthes has it, then an affair is a clock for living. For anyone hungry for time, this door is the one to open for that oh-so-dangerous illusion, the illusion of more time, more space. Of more.

Trollope always hungered. He wanted to split into pieces, to live many lives. His characters multiply, revolving, double, inconsistent. An affair with words. You can see it right from the beginning. Please, sir, I want. First as a bullied child walking through the streets of Harrow, dreaming of castles in the air. Then, as an adult, sitting at his desk every day. He squeezed time, waking in the dark and writing into sunrise, spooling out a thousand words an hour between five and eight in the morning. Two hundred and fifty words every fifteen minutes. I attribute the power of doing this altogether, he wrote, to the virtue of early hours. It was my practice to be at my table every morning at 5.30 a.m. His groom got up first and made him coffee, then the real day began.

Trollope logged his life in grids. Targets met or missed, days of idleness or productivity. Late one night he writes to Field, asking her to meet him at Niagara Falls, the scene of so many Victorian clinches. I’ll come to you, he says, if you can get away.

I look at my book. You don’t need to be a writer or an actor or a lover to dream a second life, an unlived life. You don’t need to have an affair. Every reader does it. In the moment we touch the cover, a second world emerges – another reality with its own rules of space and time. And good novels knock us sideways, even as they take us forwards. With every story we turn the page for, we turn to feel the weight of the unlived life, the other ways we might have gone, or loved, or died. Some are unfaithful readers. A pile of books live next to my side of the bed, gathering dust and regret. For each book that we read, there’s another we don’t begin. And in choosing a tale to write, or relate, there is another we cannot, or do not speak. These small choices carry with them an accompanying sense of resistance, a gravitational pull towards the alternatives we leave behind. The mushrooms we never picked on the picnic we never went on with the person we never met. Most of us are missing something. In so many of our imaginations, there’s a vision of something like a train we missed, a moment in life when we were too late, or too scared to act. Or got stuck in the queue at the sandwich shop. Some of these trains move towards lands we’ve lost, some pause at stations of regret. We see others pass across the landscape of our memory with a sigh of relief. They are the boredoms we escaped, the journeys we avoided. But some are so painful we can only glimpse them at night. They pass at high speed, cornering the edge of dread, taking our breath away.

Hackney Wick

— 2005 —

I have decided that seeing this is worth recording

John Berger, ‘Understanding a Photograph’

Your studio flat was hard to read. The place was all stripped back and bald, staging a bachelor existence that wasn’t yours. Even the few images that you chose to hang on the walls told a story of things that liked to be single. Black-and-white stills of an old milk jug, a spoon, a silhouette of a man on an empty piazza, pulling a lonely suitcase.

All the clean lines were just an illusion. Hiding that life made sense of course. I get the picture, now I could risk losing the same: a discrete affair keeps things discrete. But your silence got me wanting. You reminded me of one of those plastercast-moulded models I used to make as a child, the ones that fell into two halves. The fascination comes from looking at what’s being cut off. The straight, flat back, deliciously smooth, powder dry.

One afternoon, you left me alone to go to a shoot. Licence to stalk into your office. I looked behind the screen, and opened your desk drawers once to see if I could find any family pictures, then shut them again feeling guiltier than I thought I would. I sat back at your desk, tried out your chair. Imagined the album I would have found. Page after page of grainy squares, bearing witness to the theatre of family. Your role as husband. Your place as father.

There must be a photograph of the small you, walking on a wet promenade, smiling into a lens. I wonder if that’s where it began. When you were taken by the desire to capture things. Sometimes we can pin it down to a single frame. The moment we start to become who we are.

West Finchley to Belsize Park

— 1982 —

They were not railway children to begin with

Edith Nesbit, The Railway Children

My family looked happy enough. From a distance, or from the photos. We lived in an ordinary suburban house, a bit like the one in which Nesbit’s railway children begin their lives at the turn of the twentieth century. Ours was a bit smaller. Inside, there was a big square hall with an emerald green tiled fireplace, and a kitchen with a glass-fronted dresser and an archaic bell system that no longer worked. There were four bedrooms upstairs and a mock balcony, accessible from the main bedroom or by climbing out of a side window, where you could sit on the slatted wooden floor and smoke Camel Lights. We even had French windows, like Nesbit’s children, which hooked back so that you could walk onto a crazily paved patio. The garden was long. It had a gate leading onto the local woods. There were hydrangea bushes and a rockery in the garden. An unsteady sundial with an iron pointer that you could lift up to ambush a colony of ants running in frenzied circles. A gently rotting greenhouse, in which we used to store old furniture. It was a quiet road, the silence broken by the sound of the Tube making its way down the end of the Northern Line, or our next-door neighbour trying to kill squirrels with his air rifle. The house is my earliest memory. The front door in particular.

I remember walking down the path, looking at its pale blue wood (later painted yellow) and jewel-like panels of coloured glass – blue, green and red teardrops against a grid of lead. There were row after row of houses like this in our neighbourhood, all with their own individual take on topiary or pampas grass. Our road was one of the many suburban semi developments of early twentieth-century Metroland, the place with elastic borders, no beginning and no clear end. The architectural critics call these roads joyless. Phoney. A kind of Neverland. Semis like these were, in 1910, bang on trend. Tudorbethan, blackened timber nailed onto the stucco, leadlights in squares or sometimes in diamonds. In the really posh bits of London, architects lovingly built houses along these lines, attempting to capture the idea of human craft in the machine age. The ones in our street were aspirational knock-offs – the rows of pseudo-artisan houses embodied that oddest of ideas: mass-produced individuality. All suburban semis are alike, but each suburban semi is alike in its own way.

Our road was a cul-de-sac. Bag End. Traffic calmed, there was nowhere to go. If you went back the way you came, further up the junction, onto the main road, there was the North Finchley cinema complex, and Brent Cross Shopping Centre, and the open road to Little Chef. And holidays. The North Circ, and Neasden and David Lloyd Sports Centre and multiplex cinemas. Homebase and B&Q. Smooth and bland. A place that brings with it a sort of atrophy of body and mind, a numbing alikeness. This is what J. G. Ballard called the real England. And with it, he writes, comes a boredom that can only be relieved by some sort of violent act; by taking your mail-order Kalashnikov into the nearest supermarket and letting rip.