— 2016 —
We change at Sheffield and I have a lukewarm cappuccino. My new train (new to me) is less crowded, but I am near enough to others to see what they are doing. My neighbour’s telephone goes off from time to time, making the sound of a moderately sized object falling down the toilet. The sound itself is not irritating. The problem is more that I can’t predict when it is going to happen. I look at her knee. Her phone, with its cracked screen, trembles gently with the train’s rhythm. While conscious that this woman’s bare knee is closer to my knee than is psychologically comfortable for me (or, probably, for her) and that both of us can actually feel the heat of each other’s bodies radiating onto the thigh-bit of our knees, both of us silently accept our proximity as a necessary consequence of being on a train. Glancing to my right, I can see that the two men who are writing away on their laptops are considerably more comfortable sharing the same space than we are. Something about the positioning of their elbows suggests that they probably know each other.
I look at my book, which lies beside me like a kind of time/space capsule. Books, like trains, are another way of tricking time, of moving to a different beat, a different space. Perhaps this is why we read when we travel. Books break the rules of time. They can collapse time, and skip over it. Some people get lost in books. While forced to stand in the almost suffocating Underground air, the imagination is free to stroll on a beach with nobody telling it when to stop and start. You might have been thinking about the monotony of the day, with its checklist of bite-size tasks – the swimsuit that needs ordering that won’t look good because it flattens your top-half in a weird way, the milk to pick up, the overdue thank-you card – but the book opens a world that moves in leaps and bounds. A day in the office lasts a few seconds. A five-minute meeting in a café can last an hour or a day. If you could read for ever – maybe, just maybe, your life could go on for ever. A book can make time stand still. It can make it go backwards. And there is a kind of arousal to all of this. It can be thrilling to be in control of our own time. As a reader, you can read slowly. Turn back, hold back, keep the climax at bay. And no amount of clock time can stop us from doing this. Time and pleasure is in our hands.
Trains are erotic. (Anyone on the 7.15 to Birmingham New Street may not agree.) The arousing qualities of the rush-hour InterCity may be an acquired taste, if you don’t happen to be what is known as a siderodromophiliac. But in books, and in films, trains have always stood for some kind of arousal. (I read an article that tells me travelling by train can alter the body’s chemistry.) A train carriage is a forcing-house for the idea of sex, as one Edwardian heroine puts it.
So reading on trains intensifies the thrill. People have always wanted to read differently, think differently even, when they’re on the move. The aeroplane novel, the beach read, the flysheet, the trashy yellowbacks. Valentine Vox, The Ventriloquist, The Stockbroker’s Wife. (In that first film of the first kiss on a train, the woman isn’t looking out of the window, but reading a book. It’s double transport. Doubly erotic. The book is pushed aside as the clinch begins. She is a reckless thrill-seeker, dangerously addicted to her yellow-backed novel. Bigamy and bodices and bloody murder.)
Everyone still reads on Russian trains. If you look around the Sapsan Express, which runs nine times a day between Moscow and St Petersburg, you’ll see them all. A man turning the pages of an essay collection by Marilynne Robinson. A woman engrossed in a Russian translation of Brave New World. A bleached blonde, asleep, a copy of Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry resting on her patent red-leather handbag, an Anna for our time.
Anna is both hidden and on show. As a woman reading on a train, she is doubly disturbed, and doubly disturbing. Her mind is guessable – but nothing is really known. She is like any public reader. Nearly – but not quite – in a world of her own. Absorbed in her book, but visible to us, the reader is always an alluring figure. Abandoned, partially lost to us in another world. I cannot have, or touch, what she has as she reads. Reading is an act of retreat, of privacy – a pushing away. There used to be an art to reading on trains. Guides tell Victorian readers that the secret of reading in railway carriages is to hold one’s arms at a perfect 90-degree angle to prevent the vibrations from the carriages spreading to the arms and book. It sounds like an elaborate kind of yoga. It can only be achieved through the exertion of muscular power; the full elasticity of the arms, from the shoulders downwards, acting like carriage-springs to the volume.
The readers on my train are strangely hidden too. The woman near the aisle is looking through the back pages of an old Letts diary. The person near the door, in maroon and orange trousers, is scrolling on their phone. Another man opens up a blue plastic carrier bag, looking around him almost furtively. It contains a biography of Marilyn Monroe. I catch his eye and we both look down. The secret of reading.