Читать книгу The Lost Properties of Love - Sophie Ratcliffe - Страница 14

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.