— 2008 —
Levin had been married three months. He was happy, but not at all in the way he had expected to be.
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Everyone was getting married in 1879. King Wilhelm, the greatest debauchee of the age, snagged a trophy wife. A young suffragette said ‘I do’ to the lawyer Richard Pankhurst. The American painter Frank Millet turned up in London, borrowing a room in Kate Field’s rented London house as part of his wedding tour. Most of the brides then would have worn white lace and orange blossom. Their mothers would have piled up a collection of silver forks and spoons. Perfume bottles and trifle stands and ready cash as gifts. The whole thing was like a delicious dream. Reflections of Persian carpets and white gloves and fish slices and pearls floated on a rose bowl’s watery surface. Weddings were big business for the Victorians. Presents were a weighty obligation. Honeymoons followed a set pattern. Tunbridge Wells or the Isle of Wight or Bath if you were on a budget. Those with more to spend would head abroad, for a version of the Tour. Rome or Paris, or touring the Italian Riviera, stopping at spas and casinos along the way. American brides would find themselves steamboating down the Hudson River, or falling in love at Niagara Falls.
Trollope always had marriage on his mind. Almost every one of his novels tackled the question of whether you should marry Mr X or Lord Y. Mr X, for the most part being the good-looking man who liked gambling, and Lord Y being your sensible cousin who you’d known all your life. But Trollope’s books that year took an especially dark look down the aisle. One told the story of a reckless bigamist. Another featured an Irish nobleman, a death on a clifftop and a pregnant mistress. Yet again he called her Kate, yet another namesake for his real Kate to wonder at.
And Tolstoy, too, of course. Honeymoons were, he thought, a kind of abomination, a disillusion, a hole in the sock that constituted the mundane truth of marriage’s reality. When he wrote of getting married he was searching the territory of the happy ever after. To taste life after candyland. He writes the story of a woman called Másha, seeking the excitement she believes should exist in marriage. Loving her husband was not enough for her, after the happiness of falling in love. She wants movement, excitement, danger. She feels a superabundance of energy running through her body, an itch, a restlessness. Things are not as she imagined they would be.
As for Kate Field, she only played at getting married. As she approached her fortieth birthday, she felt the need to escape the written page, to feel and experience an art that would use her whole body. She wanted to act. Perhaps it was the thoughts of her father, a man who’d spent his lifetime on the stage. Perhaps it was the memory of his loss that drove her, as she tried to get her acting career off the ground.
She did her best that year, from Boston to Broadway, New Haven to Providence, Buffalo to Cleveland. A well-known writer taking to the stage. She was cut down by the American press. Her appearance at Booth’s Theatre, Broadway was spun as a piece of hilarious arrogance, and critics trashed her at every turn. It was difficult to imagine anything more unsympathetic than Miss Field’s presence and delivery. She was neither young nor handsome.
It was sheer lack of money that led Field to see if she could do better elsewhere. Purchasing an eighteen-guinea ticket from J. Bruce Ismay’s office on Broadway, just down the street from Sarony’s photographic studio, she took her passage on a White Star liner to Liverpool. She sailed from New York in June of 1875, and had a little over a week to think through her decision. She was one of the few single women in first class, sandwiched on the passenger list between someone called H. J. Sheldon and J. Barclay McCarthay. White Star boasted about its speed, but marketed itself mostly through its luxury. For the first-class passengers, the run was not so much a racetrack but a sort of Peacock Alley, calling at Queenstown for mail and more passengers. Fashions that season were for black straw, feather lockets and dresses in cream. Far below the first-class elite, a thousand individuals travelled in steerage, wearing whatever they could afford.
Boats, like trains, are where marriages are made – and unmade. New York to Liverpool Docks. From the pictures, it looked like a floating palace-cum-hotel, with a piano, a library, baths and bridal suites with grand double beds. Couples courted in upholstered corners of the Grand Saloon. There is, reported one captain, always a Belle.
The reality was a little less glamorous. Travelling the Atlantic induced a kind of nauseating tedium. Field wrote of the conflicting claims of protesting stomachs along with shivering timbers, groaning machinery, whistling wind, breaking china, crying babies and roaring waves. Four senses out of five are systematically outraged, as she attempted to pour water into a basin, before giving up, and entering the cage of the State Room, feeling limp and frowzy.
Field was engaged as an imaginary fiancée, appearing in a show called The Honeymoon at the new Gaiety Theatre on the Strand.
The play itself was a kind of updated version of Taming of the Shrew, in which an intelligent and articulate woman marries a rich duke, and is then taken on a false honeymoon to a grotty cottage. The duke pretends to be a pauper, and grinds his bride down with onerous tasks such as wine-pouring and folk dancing with yokels, until she is seen to be fully surrendered. Then she is (of course) returned to the duke’s palace and rewarded with a fully fitted salon for lounging, and all other mod cons. Field played the part of Volante, the sensible younger sister. After some capering around in confessional boxes, a selection of comedy tonsures and some cast members hidden behind unfeasibly large paintings, Volante gets hitched to the duke’s best friend, and everyone lives happily ever after.
Kate Field’s parents had, in fact, acted in this same play before she’d been born. The same plot, the same tensions between a man and a woman struggling for autonomy. After the first night, Field sat in her rooms in New Cavendish Street proudly copying out her reviews. She was, the papers said, excessively pretty – intelligent and piquante. She was bright and vivacious. She was possessed of a rare quality of ladyhood. Field’s version ran for thirteen nights. Thirteen nights of being dressed in white silk and roses, acting like a woman on the verge of marriage. Thirteen nights of surrendered autonomy.
The Gaiety has long gone now, demolished in the building of Aldwych’s Grand Crescent – a sleek hotel stands in its place. I went there, once, to hunt for Kate Field’s ghost, and luxuriated in the feeling of being alone in a hotel bar for almost no reason at all. I spent some time staring at my printouts of Victorian floorplans trying to figure out where, in this space, the old theatre might have been. Then I gave up and ordered an egg sandwich and a glass of wine.
Sitting there, pretending not to be a happily married woman, I watched the people around me. Couples sitting tensely, sipping martinis. Imperturbable mauve-clad staff revolved around placing napkins on tables. In the middle of the room there was a large stone statue of a man in a rowing boat, frozen in motion, his oars aloft. (Marriage is like rowing a boat, said Tolstoy’s Levin. Very delightful. Very difficult.) Hunting for the stage space, I went deeper into the hotel, down towards the lifts and the carpeted foyer.
I couldn’t find a trace of Kate Field at the Aldwych, so I finished the sandwich and left. But maybe I caught something of her as I stood on the road outside. The figure of a woman in a black leather jacket, leaving Delaunay’s tearoom. I watched as she hailed a taxi and then looked back, over her shoulder, at a figure in the crowd.
As a cold Christmas in London approached, Field’s friends asked her whether she had ever loved for real. She wrote back cheerfully. She’d received offers, she said, but had to stay true to the dreams of her youth. Trollope wrote and asked why she hadn’t married. Others told her she was missing the real satisfactions of a woman’s life. Her response: I am misunderstood. Why, she wondered, should a desire for constant change be read as a kind of superficiality? Why would marriage to a man necessarily mean satisfaction? Why must a person be only one thing?
I think of my own understanding of marriage. I am, as I sit here, so far past the moment of wondering, of decision making, of thinking about getting married, so far into the world of school pick-ups and bin-days and reading articles about listmaking apps that will prevent relationship discord, that Kate Field’s concerns seem hard to comprehend. There never seems to be enough time.
I think back on yesterday. I feel guilt at my snappishness, guilt at my inability to compromise, guilt at my inability to take time with other people, my desire to take time for myself.
The words taking time suggest I’m removing it from elsewhere – from the space of the couple, from my children, from the family. I am, as I write this, taking time from the world of living together. Wanting to live alone. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to live alone and wanting to live together. Nothing wrong with that fantasy. In reality, though, most of us (not being Greek monks or famous philosophers) cannot have it both ways. We cannot have our own time and space and the company of others.
People talk of the art of parenting, the art of housekeeping, as an exercise in time management. Picking things up as you move from room to room. Never go anywhere empty handed. Grab five minutes. Multitasking. Planning ahead. Scheduling date nights. Tech sabbaticals. Gathering up the fragments of time. And fragments feels too true. Time is in pieces for me right now, in bits. Snatched. Prickly. Tense. There is in our household, an unwritten record of time spent. A balance sheet of who has slept and who has taken the children to the park, who has done the school runs and who got to go to work early that day. Who stayed late for a drink. Who didn’t sleep well because they stayed up too late, and who didn’t sleep because they are a light sleeper and were woken up by a noise on the road, and who is therefore owed a lie-in. There is never enough time to untangle these debts. Even less to untangle what needs to be done, or to do it. Some nights I despair and drink wine at the kitchen table, knowing I will wake in the night with a thirst and my head spinning. The bed seems to drop from under me then rise again, like a padded elevator. I walk downstairs and turn the light on to drink a glass of water. A small pink solar-powered Hawaiian hula girl tick-tocks on the counter, smiling happily to her hula beat.
Putting the story of my marriage into words – from the proposal to the arguments to the walking down the aisle in a white dress and forsaking all others – puts me on edge. It’s hard to write about saying ‘I will’. For any marriage, after all, feels like a kind of cliché. In doing this thing, in saying those words, you become one of a series, one of a long line of new beginnings, a tradable token, clad in white strapless satin. Marriage is a myth, of course. It connects with storybook ideas of a perfect call and response, an end to existential loneliness, a dream of ever after.
You can tell a little about how people feel about this from the way they display the aftermath. Some embrace the cliché, with a large canvas-framed shot of smiling hopefulness and cravats. Some hide them away in an album underneath the telly. A friend (now ex-wife) kept one silver-framed black-and-white shot on the mantelpiece of her sitting room. It was a deliberate shot of the pair of them dancing, taken from behind. You saw his face, looking down at his shoes, and nothing of her but a beautiful back, exposed by the cut of her draped silk wedding dress. I remember thinking about this display of back-turning as a kind of resistance – a resistance to being seen, even to being seen as married.
There is one photo of our wedding displayed in our house, slightly hidden behind others on the cluttered shelf. Looking at it, I hope it shows that there was something real, something that escapes the Hallmark card. But even trying to describe that photo, the fear remains that language will break the feeling into pieces.
In that last meeting at Costa, you had told me to get married
I had buried the memory of that conversation in my inbox, and tried to bury the memory of you
I spent eleven months living with a barman who was training to be a life coach
The barman slept with one of his colleagues in our bed
I met my husband-to-be on an online dating site
He kept a painting of an ocean liner in his hall
The barman’s stuff was still in my second bedroom
The online dating website asked me to tick my financial status
I ticked ‘solvent’, which was a lie
Before we got married my husband and I split up three times
When we were apart, I went to see you
My husband-to-be wrote me a letter about our break-up
The letter arrived when I had just got back from your flat
When I read that letter, I decided to marry him
The bride wore a second-hand white dress and carried green flowers
The groom weighed 180lbs
There were 175 people in the chapel
When the vicar came down to the door, he asked if the bride was ready
She wasn’t
She needed the loo
My husband came out of the wings, onto the stage of my life, with rolled-up shirt sleeves, a bicycle helmet and kindness. The first thing that struck me was the candour of his eyes. He seemed unembarrassable. He could be irascible. His kitchen was amazingly clean. His chest freezer was filled with sliced bread and pasta. He slept in the back bedroom of his house, surrounded by books and pictures that he hadn’t got round to putting up. He gave me a key to his door and he answered his telephone. He looked past the mess, and the mousetrap in my kitchen. He even looked past the barman’s boxes in my spare room. He looked past the tears, and asked why I had two circular scars on my right arm, with the skin polished like a dining-room table. He asked if I would marry him.
And this is no more adequate – this narrative of wholeness and unity and solidity. I think of my wedding photographs, my brother guiding me up the steps. Standing at one end of the church, I knew that my heart had my husband-to-be in it. It was, as hearts go, full. But it wasn’t necessarily just full of him. It also had you in it. And the barman. And that man who used to sell antiques at the corner of the road. And my old art teacher. And the man who ran the bookshop. And the one I dated but couldn’t commit to. And all the heroes and heroines I’d read about in storybooks. I kept this from him as I walked down the aisle. It was my secret. All these other loves, or nearly loves, are built up in the layers of my heart. Romantic cholesterol. But even a congested heart still beats.
We went away. The inevitable cliché. The scenes unfolded in the colour palette of a 1970s art movie. We went to Skye, an island of flatland and scrubland and endless horizons and sudden hills blocking the view. Like so many honeymoons, it was an odd collection of shared pleasures and jarring disappointment. I had imagined the days stretching ahead full of crackling fires, sex and whisky. Reading the newspapers in bed, while the rain pattered down on the roof. Holding hands as we gazed through windows. A quick walk to the pub.
A hopelessly interior vision. I’d forgotten to ask what he wanted. He’d forgotten to ask what I wanted. I’d forgotten that he wasn’t a mind-reader.
The moment we arrived, I realised it wasn’t what I had imagined. There is, in Skye, far more outside than inside. This was a holiday made for walking, for hearty windswept togetherness on the move, for early mornings, and porridge, and cagoules. So that’s what we did. We drove to hills and farms with maps. We sat on link ferries to walk around lochs. We walked in a circle then climbed another hill. Stopping at a pub on one of these walks, we met a man who was unloading a crate of fish. Mullet, hake, squid, haddock, mackerel. I looked into the box of shiny dead scales and saw their many eyes looking back at me. We went to an island off our own island. An outcrop of grey and shale. Wondering what to do, we drove down the island’s one road, got out of the car and stood together, on the line where asphalt turned to grass, looking out into the sea.
Honeymoons are the oddest kind of holiday. The idea of travelling together, as newlyweds, is a metaphor – and more than that. It’s like a practical test, after the fact, to see if you really are going to get anywhere together, with all of the bag-carrying, the looking for parking spaces, the squabbling over the choice of restaurant, and the being sick on the ferry. Honeymoons are also, perhaps, a way of shaping memories. When the whole palaver is fixed in photographic form, they form a way of fixing what it is that the relationship might be. So that later on, you imagine you’ll know what needs to be fixed, to get it back to there. And on we sail.
In 1889, Kaiser Wilhelm was piped aboard the new White Star liner to meet his uncle Albert, the Prince of Wales. A little over twenty years later, Kate’s friend Frank Millet found himself sinking rather than swimming, perishing in the icy North Atlantic as he helped women and children into the lifeboats. Kate Field and Trollope were long gone by then.
I thought of death, and of life and death, on the night train on our way up to Scotland. I felt the side rail of the bunk bed holding me in as we cornered our way through the night. I moved my legs starfishwise under the tightly made sheets, feeling the resistance as I pushed back and forth. Barely room to move. My husband lay two or three feet beneath me, wearing a Bananaman T-shirt. One corner of the straitjacketed bedding was starting to give way.
The night after we married, an unexpected snowfall covered Oxford with a thick blanket of white. We woke up blinking. Iced like a cake. We have no one word for this in English. It’s so unusual, perhaps, that we don’t need to find one. In Russia they call such snowfalls пороша. A pristine awakening. It was April. I was happy when we left. But I still felt the fear of that happiness dissolving, and a resistance to that world of whiteness. I feared it then as I fear it now – the idea of forgetting what has been, as I step into the life to come. I held on to the bed rail, feeling the traces of my past life breaking into the new, like bits of sadness and grit.