— 2016 —
People wheel up to the doors at Banbury Station, dragging their suitcases by the handles, or stepping onto the train holding bags of crisps. The sounds are mechanical. The graceful cyborg announces the station stops as we get close, never quickening or slowing, never irritated. The triple beeps of opening doors and sighs of train carriages as they grind to a halt. It is not a recording but a real guard who blows a whistle, three short blasts, then one, a human grace note within the machine, that we hear but do not see. We glide off past the dark mirror-clad car park, and the next station stop in the service will be Oxford. The refreshment bar at the front of the car is still open, and I look out at the fields of yellow and green, cut across by the dual carriageway. Two men now sit opposite me, both staring at their tablets. A banana lies on the table between them. I see the steeple of a church I cannot place, the tracks of the railway and a pile of pallets stacked high to my left. Then a cluster of cows and horses, and hay bales wrapped in black polythene like enormous rolls of liver pâté. A viaduct bridge, and the flash of caravan parks and barges – and the flicker of green and yellow green and yellow. I am speeding faster and faster through a landscape that I know is near to home, but which I still don’t recognise. I head down to use the loo, but it’s IN USE, and I give up waiting in the vestibule.
The difficulty of writing about a life is the innumerable risks you take with the lives of others. There are people in my version of the story (for that’s all it is, my version) who have only just made it in around the edges – and for that, perhaps, they are glad. These minor characters, whose lives may not be as minor to me as I have suggested. The problem with not writing about these others is the false centrality of self that it creates, the floodlight I have shone upon myself. They too should have a ‘case’, as Henry James said. Their own bag. Their own sac à vider, un sac, un cas. If only for me to hide behind.
My husband. It is so hard to write about my husband that I don’t even know what to call him. If I were to ask him, he would probably suggest that I just use his name, an idea that would strike me with its pragmatism, and its honesty. Properties I seek. When will I ever dare to let him read these thoughts? My guess is that he knows most of them already, both the love and the pain, the distance. There is something in the writing of this, I know, that is both a way of holding us apart and pulling us together. In some ways, this story is a way of keeping myself shut away safe in my fictional compartment, my carriage of memory. This story is my double time, my door to a world that is mine alone, my way to self-possession. Like the glass cabinet of books, the story is a way of keeping myself possessed. But I write it partly for him too, risky though it may be. When I show him these words, my inner world, which depends entirely on its secrecy for its existence, will collapse into something shared. It will no longer belong to me. If I risk what I value, maybe that’s because something else might offer more. An opening. You can only go so far living behind glass. My husband has, besides, probably seen and heard most of it before. Keeper of secrets, he sits all day behind a desk, while patients tell him what they would never dare tell another soul. The Hippocratic Oath, like the seal of the confessional. He probably thinks this way himself. Don’t we all? There is nothing as banal as our belief in our own originality. That has been said before.
And then, of course, there’s you. You who are dying, in a room I will never see, in a place I will never know, except by virtual glimpses. Dying, Egypt, dying, as you’d have said to me, with a smile and a wave. All I can do now is imagine, but that is not nothing.
I never went to see you, that night after the exhibition, when I imagined you might have written to me. I had the deception and the outfit ready. I was, in my mind, so nearly there. But the sound of my baby daughter in the back of the car brought me back. It was pitch black. I flicked on the car lights, my heart beating fast. She gurgled happily, and laughed, and I felt the tears of self-reproach prick my eyes. Anna Karenina believed in omens – there was mine. A signal on the line, which brought me back from that road of double lives.
And I cannot go now. Now is not my time to be with you, and then wasn’t either. It was impossible, as you would say. Impossible. We have missed each other’s trains. Our timetables did not match up. It’s quite possible we wouldn’t have liked travelling together after all. But as I write this, I think there is no harm in saying that I still think of you and your train. I think there is no harm in saying that I hope that this book lands on your desk before you die. I hope you can see something in this. A glimpse of a face you can recognise. I hope you know that it was far more than nearly.