The Lost Properties of Love

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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London SE1 9GF

www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com

This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019

Copyright © Sophie Ratcliffe 2019

Cover photographs © studiohelen.co.uk

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: 9780008225940

Ebook Edition © February 2019 ISBN: 9780008225926

Version: 2020-01-02

Epigraph

For during a tiny portion of our lives we are not in trains

Louis MacNeice

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Epigraph

Note

Departures

Hull to Ferriby

St Petersburg to Moscow

Hackney Wick

Ferriby to Brough

St Petersburg to Moscow

Hackney Wick

Battery Place to Cortlandt Street

Brough to Goole

Hackney Wick

West Finchley to Belsize Park

Baker Street to Moorgate Street

St Petersburg Station

Hackney Wick

Goole to Thorne North

Hackney Wick

Thorne North to Doncaster

Oxford

Moscow to St Petersburg

Sheffield to Birmingham New Street

Bologoye Station

Ghost Train

Finchley Central to Burnt Oak

Chalk Farm to Belsize Park

Birmingham New Street to Leamington Spa

Elephant and Castle

Paddington

Euston to Inverness

Carnforth

Tenway Junction

Grand Central to Utah

Leamington to Banbury

Banbury

Oxford

Sources of quotations

Further reading and sources

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

Note

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

— 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

— 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

‘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.

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

— 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

— 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 the pram 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).