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The Lost Properties of Love
Sophie Ratcliffe
This is a book about journeys and paths through life – those we choose to take and those we don’t. And the difficulties of taking those steps. It is set mostly on trains.Part memoir, part imagined history, in The Lost Properties of Love, Sophie Ratcliffe reflects on the realities of motherhood and marriage, revisits the experience of childhood bereavement, and muses on the messiness of everyday life.An extended train journey frames the action – and the author turns not to self-help manuals but to the fictions that have shaped our emotional and romantic landscape. Readers will find themselves propelled into Anna Karenina’s world of steam, commuting down the Northern Line with The Railway Children, and checking out a New York L-train with Anthony Trollope’s forgotten muse, Kate Field.As scenes in her own life collide with the stories of real and imaginary heroines, The Lost Properties of Love asks how we might find new ways of thinking about love and intimacy in the twenty-first century. Frank and painfully funny, this contemporary take on Brief Encounter is a compelling look at the workings of the human heart.
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Copyright (#u046c0c47-80cc-50b6-a516-a6bfb0fb7af7)
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
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London SE1 9GF
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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019
Copyright © Sophie Ratcliffe 2019
Cover photographs © Shutterstock
Sophie Ratcliffe asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008225902
Ebook Edition © February 2019 ISBN: 9780008225926
Version: 2019-01-04
Epigraph (#u046c0c47-80cc-50b6-a516-a6bfb0fb7af7)
For during a tiny portion of our lives we are not in trains
Louis MacNeice
Contents
Cover (#u33f38af5-1f99-5a6e-96dd-83072b339fb4)
Title Page (#ue05463ac-5959-5348-80ec-083544fd1d9b)
Copyright (#u14914d43-c4c6-5012-9cbf-ee6ca7b417b5)
Epigraph (#u95385cb8-f636-54fd-85e7-9222eebc6934)
Note (#uf12fe56c-b154-5fc8-b967-eb27813ebcf1)
Departures (#u0c542a3a-ed77-5229-a538-f79dfdff7e3b)
Hull to Ferriby (#ucb47c74d-5b44-540e-a7c8-dacfb6e21fc6)
St Petersburg to Moscow (#u645cdbf1-8a4c-5286-842a-c5f81031ce94)
Hackney Wick (#u0e893928-4290-5f14-bf7b-ee8a2291d9fb)
Ferriby to Brough (#ueef88168-3e5e-5a82-9f43-805d07748bf1)
St Petersburg to Moscow (#uc2204f2a-4851-5735-aee6-4dd7807d2a85)
Hackney Wick (#u0f2140b5-233e-5475-a98e-9e535fd76d5a)
Battery Place to Cortlandt Street (#uf5aeafac-e934-53d8-ae0a-8ee02b3d7816)
Brough to Goole (#u95f9f000-938f-5940-9bf0-5c3e1f2e26b3)
Hackney Wick (#u9e2e15eb-7382-51bb-b652-6dada359bb23)
West Finchley to Belsize Park (#u1ce23152-4842-5739-b0aa-23337d11a092)
Baker Street to Moorgate Street (#u454f8e4b-cff5-5d6b-98b8-6baf2b9838d6)
St Petersburg Station (#u6fb526bf-7c1c-5f27-a0f6-18bfaa3b72b6)
Hackney Wick (#litres_trial_promo)
Goole to Thorne North (#litres_trial_promo)
Hackney Wick (#litres_trial_promo)
Thorne North to Doncaster (#litres_trial_promo)
Oxford (#litres_trial_promo)
Moscow to St Petersburg (#litres_trial_promo)
Sheffield to Birmingham New Street (#litres_trial_promo)
Bologoye Station (#litres_trial_promo)
Ghost Train (#litres_trial_promo)
Finchley Central to Burnt Oak (#litres_trial_promo)
Chalk Farm to Belsize Park (#litres_trial_promo)
Birmingham New Street to Leamington Spa (#litres_trial_promo)
Elephant and Castle (#litres_trial_promo)
Paddington (#litres_trial_promo)
Euston to Inverness (#litres_trial_promo)
Carnforth (#litres_trial_promo)
Tenway Junction (#litres_trial_promo)
Grand Central to Utah (#litres_trial_promo)
Leamington to Banbury (#litres_trial_promo)
Banbury (#litres_trial_promo)
Oxford (#litres_trial_promo)
Sources of quotations (#litres_trial_promo)
Further reading and sources (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Note (#u046c0c47-80cc-50b6-a516-a6bfb0fb7af7)
Though not an autobiography, this book contains an account of my life. Small details have been changed to protect the privacy of others. I have also played the biographer, re-imagined other people’s imaginings, conjectured alternative lives, and wandered into fiction. It is an exhibition of kinds.
Oxford, June 2018
Departures (#u046c0c47-80cc-50b6-a516-a6bfb0fb7af7)
— 1988 —
When I wake up in the morning, love
Bill Withers, ‘Lovely Day’
Death, for me, smells like summer and commodes, and sounds like pop.
It was September of 1988, and I’d already spent most of the holidays in my bedroom with my purple radio cassette player, waiting for my father to die. Guns N’ Roses were slipping back down the charts, and the highest climber was Jason Donovan with ‘Nothing Can Divide Us’. Kylie Minogue and Belinda Carlisle and Big Fun had a strong showing. I clung to the upbeat of Yazz and the Plastic Population, and the sunshine mix of Bill Withers. Term had started and nothing changed. I had a flute exam coming up. New in at 37 was ‘Revolution Baby’ from Transvision Vamp. He was still dying. Anthrax had gone down a spot with ‘Make Me Laugh’.
I was woken by a noise. I could tell from the volume that my mother was standing somewhere near the airing cupboard, the one with the copper cistern wrapped in a red life jacket. The baby, my sister, started crying, too. I got out of bed. As a short, flat-chested thirteen-year-old with unfeasibly large feet, I spent a great deal of time thinking that I had nothing to wear. But that particular morning, I felt it more distinctly than usual. Neither Just Seventeen nor Good Housekeeping’s ‘A Look for a Lifestyle’ had covered the matter of what to wear on the day your father dies – painfully and messily, before his time – when you have a day of corpse-viewing ahead of you.
In the end, I put on the skirt that I wore for choir, with panels that swirled on the bias, a three-quarter-length navy sweatshirt with an ersatz-Victorian plasticised picture of a floral bouquet on it, and my best electric blue loafers. The black tights were a mistake. It was going to be a lovely day.
Hull to Ferriby (#u046c0c47-80cc-50b6-a516-a6bfb0fb7af7)
— 2016 —
It’s no use pretending that it hasn’t happened because it has
Noël Coward, Brief Encounter
I am sitting at the back of the train, near the loo, two hundred and eighty minutes from home. For the next few hours I will look out of the window at Gilberdyke and Goole and Derby and nobody will sit on my lap. As we move, I can see the edges of Paragon land, the scrubby waste and half-slant new builds, and the warehouses and lorry parks around Hessle Road.
You knew this landscape well.
There’s a moment, today, where our lines will cross. I know you’re out there, as I make my way south. Out there, hanging in there. Longitudes. I press a hand against the glass and look at the imprint – a trace map. The acres of purple sky and scrap metal give way to green. This is as close as I can get.
It began as a game. I was single, in my best coat, with half a job. You were married and owned the room. Lanyarded, we stood at the conference buffet, spiking mini fish balls on cocktail sticks. I asked if I could write to you. For work. An interview about your last exhibition. You looked at my face and I could see. Something crossed your mind. You wrote your number down in my notebook, and you wished me luck.
I played it cool to start with, even with myself. I kept losing the notebook, as if it were all down to a lucky dip. If it turned up, I would call. I could let chance choose if we ever met again. And then I phoned. When I did, after that, it was you who called most, and we spoke late into the night. Soon, I knew where you were sitting when we spoke, at your desk, with the film reels and cameras around you, and the blinds half shuttering out the grey city air. Once you wrote down the other number, with instructions about when I could use it and when I must destroy it. The betrayal of your other life – your betrayal, my complicity, our betrayal – was something I rarely felt, but then it struck me clearly in the surprisingly delicate precision of your light blue biro.
You used to call me and stay on the line for ages, sometimes so quiet that we could hear each other breathe. I’ve never liked phone calls. I do not like the act of dialling out, the being called. But with you I didn’t mind. It was one of our ways of being together. Being on the line. There was no line of course.
I still dream about you. We are at a Christmas party. In a lift. Eating a pizza on a bench in Battersea. (We are an unlikely couple, even in dream world.) An older man with a camera bag and a newspaper. A not young, but younger, woman, wearing a leopard print top. I wake and hope to dream again.
It’s nine years since I’ve seen your face. Or heard your voice. I don’t have either of your numbers any more, and if I did, I wouldn’t call. But the other day I tried to find you again, circling the streets of your city on my computer screen in a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree spin. Then closer up, zooming in on the house numbers as if I might, if I looked hard enough, catch sight of you through the window, walking away.
Not that your face was much to write home about. Not that I could write home about it in any case. Happily married women don’t write home about other men’s faces.
There’s a flash of names beneath the bindweed. Shipham Valves. Wan Hai. Atlas Leisure Homes. Then levelling out to follow the motorway, chasing the cars past the Humber. The light changes, turns brighter, over the stretch of brown with its drag of sand. I open my bag to look for my book. In a week, my students will get back and my lectures are still unwritten. They’ll have their own copies of different books, and most will remember to bring them. Some of these books will be well-read, well-thumbed, decorated with lines of tiny Post-it notes like stiff fluorescent tongues. Others will look more like mine – almost brand new, with an uncreased spine and a shine to its cover. This is the fourth Anna Karenina I have bought. I have a habit of losing anything I am trying to work on, of leaving it in a cupboard or a suitcase or a plastic bag. Somewhere, back home, there are three other books like this. Each has its own cover, its own bends and creases, and corners rubbed with wear. They will turn up in the end, among piles of paperwork or under the bed. Eventually, I will group them all together on a shelf, and they will stand there, reproachful relatives, as if I should have stuck to one of them. I turn the title page. All happy families are alike, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
That’s not the real first line of course, but I have no Russian. I close the book and look out of the window. The train goes over a metal bridge with a whistling sound, then past the endless backs of houses. We are stopping and starting now, slowly enough to peer into other people’s conservatories, at their laundry and sheds and swing sets and greenhouses and statues of frogs on toadstools, and upturned trampolines, then out to the fields lined with yellow rapeseed, and the crowd of wind turbines, circling like alien gymnasts. I press my finger against the glass again and try to write.
Someone I nearly loved is dying.
The letters evaporate, replaced by lines of turbines, receding into the distance, grey and slim. One has got stuck mid-cycle. Its paddles seem to droop against the sky. Perhaps it can’t go forwards without turning back.
St Petersburg to Moscow (#u046c0c47-80cc-50b6-a516-a6bfb0fb7af7)
‘Every heart has its own skeletons’, as the English say
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Anna opens her book and starts to read, settling back on the white sprung seat nearest to the window side. She turns the pages carefully, studying the shape of the words and feeling the soft, thin paper between her fingers, then looks up and around. There is a pleasant kind of loneliness to this train world. A moment where she can ask where to be, how to be a person, when the strings of life have been loosened from around her. The others seem deep in thought. Perhaps they are loosened too. The first-class carriage seats four. Four bodies, set against a background of patterned wallpaper – two, like her, staring into the distance, lost in thought. A mobile salon. She is unencumbered, her smaller bags and trunks stowed on the luggage rail above her head, the hatbox on the top of the pile pulsing slightly to the train’s rhythm. The telegraph wires disappear in the distance like broken trees, and outside the window the skeins of smoke float gently upwards, then break into strands, vanishing, as if lacking the conviction to go on. The older woman opposite has finally drifted off to sleep. Anna fingers the covered seat button, feeling the pressure of compacted horsehair under the fabric. The oil lamp is growing dimmer, but still gives her enough light to read. She sips her glass of tea in its silver holder, half-conscious of the sound of the train jolting over the rails. She follows the rise and fall of the English prose.
The characters in her book walk in and out of rooms with boxes of papers. A government minister forms an alliance. A woman called Kate rides to hounds. Anna imagines joining the ride, sitting side-saddle in her habit, with a fur collar and dancing eyes. A proposal might happen. A frisson. Everyone is watching as they jump the fence. It would make a good picture.
Her album sits on the arm of her chair, the album she carries everywhere. Inside it is her son’s portrait. Her favourite photograph, the latest one – him in a white smock, sitting backwards on a chair, with frowning eyes and smiling lips. This was how he looked. It was his best, most characteristic expression, the one he brought to her when he wanted a new toy or another story at bedtime or a warm cup of milk or a song. She can only think of him with a smile. Her small love.
