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Tolstoy is good on details, like smiles and soup and eyes and trains. He is good on the small things – those miraculously ordinary things that make up life. He writes of the way Anna’s train pulls into the station, the coupling rod of the middle wheel slowly and rhythmically turning and straightening – of the muffled, hoarfrost-covered driver and the puffing steam … forced downwards by the icy cold as it draws into a platform. He notices the look of a luggage wagon, the sound of a little yelping dog. He writes, in a letter to his cousin, of the minute particulars of each of his children. One finds that currant jelly and buckwheat make his lips itch. Another turns his elbows out as he crawls around the kitchen floor. In the 847 pages of my paperback Anna Karenina, he tells us the precise colour of a mushroom, the type of leather on a sofa, and the way it feels to scythe a field of grass. He knows the places people keep their slippers and their dressing gowns, the particular North Sea coast where their oysters are sourced. He knows how people worry about their faces getting wrinkles, or about sick cows, or about running out of milk. He lists the things in one man’s pocket – the cigarettes, the pocketbook, the matches and the watch with its double chain and seals. He watches someone order cabbage soup. He describes the texture of a still-damp morning paper about to be read, the pattern of hairpins clustering at the nape of a woman’s neck, the little muff hanging from the cord of a skating girl’s coat.
Objects mattered to Tolstoy. They spoke, saying something in their intractability, in their power. The smallest of treasures. The properties that for him, constituted the whole of memory and the feeling of love. The tiny ball hanging from a nursemaid’s necklace. The plaited belt of a dressing gown, hanging down at the back. A pair of handmade boots. Perhaps these things mattered to Tolstoy because he had lost so much. As a young soldier, he had taken to gambling. The debts mounted up. He wrote back to his lawyer. Sell something, he said. The lawyer sold his house. Yasnaya Polyana. It means Bright Glade. When Tolstoy got back, they’d dismantled most of it. He was left with a hole in the ground.
He made his home in the little that remained and built on it. A new Bright Glade, next to the old, in the countryside south-west of Tula. There is a whole room at Yasnaya devoted to his stuff, ranged behind the cabinets, stacked carefully in tissue-paper-lined chests. You can see it all there – and more of it in his Moscow house. His music collection and his handmade shirts. His bicycle and dumb-bells. On his desk, under a glass box, there are two brass candlesticks. Three inkwells are ranged on a stand. A small brass dog and a paperweight sit beside a tarnished silver pot of quills. His writing chair is low, legs sawn down so that he could get closer to the paper as his eyesight failed.
Tolstoy needed to be close to things. Art, for him, begins with the smallest of differences. It begins where minute and infinitesimally small changes occur. Real life is not lived, he wrote in the big stories. Truth is not where people fight, and slay one another. Life is in the between-ness, the space in the margins – not in the headlines. It is in the brokenness of everyday things. Every one of the changes in the world comes to pass, and comes to be felt, through the pulse of our lives, through the smallest of happenings. We exist and make our way to our own truth in the same small fundamental movements, around the tiny portions of our own lives.
Tolstoy cared about the details you couldn’t touch, too. Details like a mood, or a blush, or a silence. Details like time. Nabokov said that Tolstoy was the only writer whose watch keeps time with the numberless watches of his readers. His prose keeps pace with our pulses. He knew slow time. The time it takes for two men to choose their dinner in a Russian-French restaurant. The time it takes to adjust a hat in a hallway mirror. The timing of a pause in conversation, when one person attempts to bring up a difficult subject, and the hesitation as the other looks away. The way time hangs heavy for those in love.
Anna’s time is governed by others. She is a moving character, forever coming and going, subject to other people’s clocks, never quite at home. This time, this now, she is on a visit to her brother in Moscow, leaving her own family, her husband and son, in St Petersburg. As it draws towards six o’clock, the sky turns from pearly grey to black. She sees the frosted conifers from the window, dark bottle-green. The ground is a white blanket, with patches of rough grass pushing up through the snowy verge like so many undone chores.
Across the aisle, a woman is reading a magazine article about the wonders of river cruising, eating a Kinder Bueno. Her T-shirt says something about love in curly writing. Her neighbour is folding up a small kite and putting it into her rucksack. A man stands, leaning against the seat as he checks his phone. Looking down the aisle, I see a row of elbows receding into the distance, with a mess of bag straps hanging down from the overhead shelf. Wifi is not available.
As we speed up past the drainage canals and conservatories filled with cactuses, I see a station appear and disappear too quickly for me to read the name, the letters blurring to a streak on the sign placed in a stretch of rainyday concrete. It was somewhere. The unreadable somewheres. Those are the lost places, the ones I never get to or, at least, never get off at. You can see them down the timetable. Hessle, Ferriby, Broomfleet, Thorne North. It’s one of them there, vanishing into the distance like a half-grasped memory. But the sense of loss, the feeling that you might have left something behind in the cloakroom, is displaced by the reassuring forward movement of the train.
For a moment, we all travel at the same speed. Or are stationary together. Nonstop services give you this feeling more intensely. On a train, perhaps more intensely than on any other form of transport, our spatial and temporal responsibility is gone, our destination preordained.
It’s just an illusion, of course. The train driver could suddenly decide that she wanted to stop. The train could break. It could blow up. I could jump out of the window. We could crash. It’s happened. One Valentine’s Day morning in 1927, the incoming 7.22 from Withernsea smashed into the 9.05 to Scarborough. The British Pathé footage shows ten men in bowler hats and raincoats inspecting the wreckage, the smoke from their cigarettes rises in spirals against the mist. A front engine is half-telescoped, a carriage smashed, open to the air. Trains are driven by people not machines, and that Valentine’s Day one person pulled the wrong signal lever. First nine dead. Then twelve. Human error.
My train is a safe place. I cannot be lost. The lady cannot vanish, except by a kind of illusion. The trajectory is set, and, as we power forwards, we look into something like a fixed future. Time is out of my hands, and, for that reason, for now, I feel free.
I cannot hold it, or hold it up.
Hackney Wick (#u046c0c47-80cc-50b6-a516-a6bfb0fb7af7)
— 2003 —
Having lunch in your flat for the first time, I rearrange my body as I eat, trying to work out which way I should sit. Leaning in, leaning out, leaning forward on the table to express interest, then back again in the chair, my hands neatly folded. Seen through a lens, we would have made an uncomfortable picture: dimly lit, bad angles.
I wonder where I should put myself.
Your images on the walls around me have no such trouble. A large canvas propped against the left-hand wall near the doorway. Careful still lives, stacked against each other, waiting to be taken for a hanging. A picture of what I think is a plate and a jug. Sturdy and weighted. You liked to look at objects and the ways they were positioned, one against another. The placement and arrangement. The spaces between.
I sit and try to work out the years between us. Over thirty, whichever way you counted. Years that meant not just time, but marriage, children, money, friends – all of which were unknown. I was just starting out. You were just starting to retire.
After a bit, a meal of steak and salad. (I tried to look not hungry.) It was the only time I saw you cook. Strawberries for afters, but we skipped them.
Ferriby to Brough (#ulink_0e83c7a1-4a1c-567b-ace6-7605ddd8ceb7)
— 2016 —
people who make art … cannot do it blind.
You cannot do it by looking at a toaster.
Sheila Heti, ‘On the Subject of Artists Talking About Art’
What do happy families look like? I think through the cards in the pack. Mr Bun the Baker, Mrs Chip the Carpenter’s wife, Master Soot, the Sweep’s son. Neat groups of four, matching sets fitting neatly into the palm of your hand.
Fitting together is harder than it looks. It’s worst in the morning, as my family gropes its way towards various syncopated goodbyes. At some point, during toast and juice supervision, I run upstairs to pull on some clothes. Fishing around for a dress with no waist, and a pair of earrings, then hunting through the dirty-clothes basket for a pair of tights and finding some with a (painfully constricting) hole in the toe. I make my way to the front door, tripping over assorted shoes and a collapsing toy pram. My son stands by the front gate and asks if he can play Minecraft. I wonder when I last took the time to comb his hair. To read him a book. How much time is it fair to take? How much belongs to me? The question wheels in my mind, like a foot in mid-air, between platform and rails. I want to fall.
No more sombre enemy of good art than thepram in the hall. So said Cyril Connolly. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of childcare equipment. With a pram there’s movement. A pram-pusher can think, walk and carry baggage. And there’s a chance that the pram’s occupant might go to sleep. Prams don’t even have to be taken out for an airing. They can be rocked up and down a hallway with a laptop in the hood and a paragraph has a possibility of being born. Other things get in the way of art. Laundry. The school run. Plates of food that always seem to need clearing away. The clutter on the living-room floor. The tidying up, and the nits, and the compromise. These are the things that get in the way. Along with the bills and the boiler maintenance. The train set’s wooden circle, its level crossings, its half-built bridge. The half-eaten fish finger on the plastic plate (not mine).
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 (#ulink_4c233692-cbd7-5121-9728-3e0dbe505eb7)
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 (#ulink_6c652cfb-1ad4-5e30-af37-466b7ee0ffd6)
— 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 (#ulink_e61ee51d-d82a-5169-abe0-0532a157a9df)
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 (#ulink_ba600e38-9972-58aa-b0dd-b7d0546311be)
— 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 (#ulink_9aa62eb0-784a-5377-a08c-228e03fc35d3)
— 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 (#ulink_faa3e51d-f6b9-59ad-8da7-1369a5c8a994)
— 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.
A century ago, Edith Nesbit had a similar, if less scary, response to Metroland. As a ritual, each evening, she would put aside her drafts of novels and make a series of models of factories and suburban houses out of brown paper. She’d then take them out to her back garden, and set them on fire. It’s little wonder that Nesbit soon has her railway children leave their villa, engineering the plot so that they are forced to take a cottage in the country.
Finchley in Nesbit’s day was an omnibus ride from town, up through Swiss Cottage and Golders Green. A strange mixture of city and countryside, famous for its compost heaps and Barham’s model dairy farm. Visitors on the omnibus would continue through Temple Fortune for their day in the country, on the edge of the city. Overlooking the presence of Simms Motor Units, they would head for the idyll on Regent’s Park Road, where they could view the rows of pedigree Express dairy cows, admire the silver bottle tops and have a scone in the adjoining tearooms. It was a stop-gap. A commuter village. From Tally Ho Corner, you could take the omnibus direct to Marylebone, or pick up the train on a cross route from Finsbury Park to Edgware. But Finchley didn’t join the London Underground for years. Perhaps it makes sense that the man who designed the Tube map was off the map, at least when he first drew it. When he died, nobody even knew it was his idea. Harry Beck lived just around the corner from me – a dweller in nowhere.
Nowadays, Finchley still feels more to me like a place to pass through than a destination. A few months ago, I took a journey down the road to my old house, rounding the corner past West Avenue and Lovers Walk. Everything seemed wider and larger than I recalled, but the quality of silence was still the same. The houses are the same mixture of the dark red of the late eighties and the determined solidity of 1930s mansion flats. I walked along the undulating road, past Chestnut Row with its pollarded trees. The house at the corner of my road has been converted to a care home. Shielded by a high fence, only parts of it are visible from the street. A burgundy awning perches above its door, desperately trying to create the effect of hotel luxury. The strange combination of porticos and extensions and satellite dishes make it feel as if it is about to fall into the road.
Ahead to the left is Lovers Walk, the shortcut up to Ballards Lane. Not much in the way of love ever happened to me there. The closest I came was being flashed at while walking back from Tesco. My road bends to the right, down a shallow hill. It seems much the same. The same green-gated park on the left-hand side. I remember the overwhelming shades of green – conifers – and the slow descent of the road down to the bottom where our house stood, still marked by the leafless silver birch, with its white trunk and electrocuted shock of narrow branches. The road was still quiet, apart from the banging of some builders a few doors up.
There was an ache about the house that I couldn’t put into words but which I remembered from before. Growing up, I understood that our house was steeped in compromise. It was not quite a mistake but felt a place in which we could never truly settle. Every few months, an outing with an estate agent acted as a peculiarly ineffective kind of family therapy. We trooped around other houses, further down the Northern Line, nearer to town. They smelled of polish or mice, or a different kind of pain. But the houses we saw, the ones without net curtains and stucco, were unaffordable. Window shopping over, we were stuck.
Sometimes there were arguments. Quiet arguments. Voices never raised. Tension about money, I think. Holidays. A particularly vivid un-shouting match seemed to be about what shade of beige we should paint the front room, but probably wasn’t. Mostly there was just a sense of things unsaid. My father insisted on long journeys to National Trust stately homes, and I threw up in the back seat.
Once, at the end of one weekend, something happened. Someone was not able to talk. Someone else was angry. The contents of a coffee cup were poured around the kitchen table, like a bizarre midsummer rite. We were packed into the car with suitcases. We drove to my friend’s house where we arrived without warning and were awkwardly made lunch. Our suitcases remained in the hall. When we returned home and walked back into our kitchen, accomplices of this short, failed separation, my father was still standing in front of the square window above the draining board, staring at the revolving washing line and fiddling with the silver tankard full of screwdrivers, as if he’d been there all day. The magic coffee circle had been cleaned up. I watched the raindrops make their way down the glass, breaking off and then joining one another, like companionable tears. Then I went outside and played with the tap, pressing my hand against the pattern of small shiny stones embedded in concrete until it hurt. Nobody felt at home, and there was no hope of anyone going anywhere.
My father was invisibly sick. We all knew he was sick, but I didn’t fully understand why or how or where. Sometimes he was at work, leaving every morning in a suit with a briefcase to do things that had something to do with the Government. Sometimes he left a little later, with a vinyl suitcase packed with pale blue pyjamas, and then he was going to the Big Hospital, and didn’t come back for a while. Once he was there for a very long time. We visited. The Big Hospital corridors unfurled like a medical version of Oz, rising and falling as we walked. Everything smelled of oranges and Pine Harpic. I was allowed to buy a Beatrix Potter cookery book and a stained-glass colouring book on the way home. Then my aunt arrived with a neat collection of bags and a bright smile and made marmalade.
When my father finally came home, he spent a long time upstairs in bed and there was a differently strange smell in the bedroom. His left leg was marked with two shiny ovals, bigger than my mother’s hand. It looked as if someone had drawn on him with a stencil and then polished his skin like an albino dining table. First the oval was surrounded by ugly black threads with little knots on them. Then these disappeared, leaving a border of pale mauve marks and ridges.
He spent the weekends avoiding the inside of the house. Leaning on the hall windowsill, I could see his corduroy trousers sticking out from under the car, against a background of various greens – the sickly privet and spotted laurel over the road, the bitter green box hedge next door, and the grey-green lamp post rising behind him. The scene, as I looked out, was contained by the neat grid of lead, like a picture in a maths symmetry book. Our garden was filled with his temporary structures. A broken caravan. A homemade treehouse. A lean-to for the mower. Half a green Renault sat on the drive, plundered for parts. I keep this world in the few photographs I have, a dozen round-cornered prints of birthday teas and Christmas trees. I remember it too, in reverse, in the memory of negatives I used to find in boxes. I loved pulling them out of their little pockets in strips, wondering at the inverted world they gave me. The childhood face of my past is pale umber, my pupils translucent, my hair almost black. It is in this looking-glass memory that I get closer to the moment of the taking.
At teatime he came in, washing his hands with green Swarfega, before watching the wrestling and the Grand Prix. One of the wrestlers was called Big Daddy, which made me think he might be something to do with God and forgiving our trespasses as we forgive those, but my father told me that his real name was Shirley. Shirley wore an enormous pair of blue and white striped stretch dungarees. He bounced off the ropes and straight into Giant Haystacks. At some point Haystacks bounced up and down on Shirley’s stomach and the bell rang. Someone quietly turned the thermostat up.
All houses have their own climate, their own smell, their own temperature and particular ecosystem of air currents and creaks. They all have that specific combination of humid or fetid, of warm or cold that depends on the kind of central heating system you have or do not have, or whether or not the window in the bathroom is open. Smells and sounds can be put into words. Ours had a scent of McVitie’s digestive biscuits and furniture polish about it, with a sad hint of hamster in the back living room. A ticking sound as the central heating system turned on and clanged through the pipework. But atmospheres are speechless. When we say that a house has ‘an atmosphere’ it is as if the sentence has given up hope of explaining itself. Atmospheres exist somewhere between sound and silence, and in the pitch and cadences of voices. In a house with an atmosphere, it is as if someone has imperceptibly turned the volume down, and flattened every voice. When there is an atmosphere in a house, a question is answered with silence, or in the way a head is moved just an inch away from centre when someone speaks, so that there’s space for a roll of the eyes. The television, of course, is the friend of the atmosphere. In periods where the difficulties of shared space and time have felt too much, the television, eternullity in a box, gives the bodies within the family permission to stare forwards, like communicants at an altar.
My brother once told me that the Germans have a word for that feeling you get on a Sunday afternoon – they call it Sonntagangst. I thought he was joking, but held on to the joke nonetheless, as a good way of catching the mood of those suburban weekends. We were stuck in, or under, the grip of it – and I could feel that bored sadness drifting around the room, so strongly I felt that I could almost hold it. Monday sat on the front steps waiting for us, and we thought about its world of beginnings – polishing shoes and washing in the avocado green plastic bath, with its crack along the front panel. But Sunday afternoons seemed soaked in desolation, as limp as the toast and honey on the blanket-box coffee table. Alain Prost drove his nose around Brands Hatch again and again, the dust flying off the curves of the track, with a sound like someone screaming through the air.
Perhaps the most frightening thing about an atmosphere is that it’s contagious. It gets everywhere, like glitter. The atmosphere begins when two people refuse to understand each other. She, let us say, wishes to eat a bowl of cornflakes and do some work. He, perhaps, wants to hang out some laundry. She perceives his laundry hanging out to be a tacit criticism of her choice to work. He wonders why she needs four cups to be on the table simultaneously, rather than using the same one each time she makes a cup of tea. Everything about his actions of laundry-collection are perceived by her to be a kind of aural reproach. The way he is sighing quietly as he untangles a leg of her wet tights that is knotted, lumpily, around the leg of his wet jeans, and the way he hefts the lump of laundry into the basket – both are obviously directed towards her. He sees her gaze into the middle distance, not visibly working, as a sign that she has disconnected, too easily, from the family unit. He walks out of the room carrying the basket. A sock falls out of the silver drum, onto the floor, and she follows him, then feels obliged to join in. They put the smallest wet clothes on children’s hangers. He silently corrects the way she carelessly places the socks on the stand, smoothing out the creases that will delay drying time or cause mildew by doubling or tripling the damp factor. Both know they are right. The atmosphere settles in, like mist on an autumn evening. The terrifying thing about it is that atmospheres, like mist, get everywhere. There is no escape. So the two people who are trying to retain autonomy find themselves floating in the same emotional soup. They have seeped into each other. They are both pissed off. Somebody suggests a walk.
