This is Shakespeare, by Emma Smith
Autobiography, he referred to an unnamed ‘American woman’ who is ‘a ray of light to me’, and Kate Field must have seen that his heroines resembled her.
Sophie Ratcliffe was ‘nearly in love’ with her former (unnamed, married) lover, who she hopes will get to read this book before he dies. She wonders if she is perhaps writing a love letter, which would make The Lost Properties of Love a high-risk activity because she is now also married, and has two small children.
But at the same time as being very much a letter to her past lover (addressed throughout as ‘you’), this isn’t really a book about or for him at all. It’s a collection of aphorisms on affairs in general (‘Any affair is an attempt to live twice’), the imagery of old-fashioned telephones (‘the journey to an affair is the longest dialling process in the world’), messiness (‘without my mess, I have lost something’), and all the handbags Ratcliffe has ever owned. But it is really, overarchingly, a book about trains. Because train lines, and train journeys, are about connections and, if The Lost Properties of Love were a station, it would be Crewe.
The book is shaped, with wit and precision, around a train journey from Hull to Oxford, where Ratcliffe, sitting with her copy of Anna Karenina, considers the whole business of trains as a metaphor for life: missed connections, sliding doors, diverted tracks, the way in which memory seems sealed like a train compartment, and the way in which the early death of her father robbed her of the idea that life was as predictable as a train timetable.
‘There is something about childhood bereavement,’ as she puts it, ‘that has placed me slantways to loss.’
Train time is different to real time: it is on trains, for example, that we find the time to notice things, and Ratcliffe is a bit of a trainspotter when it comes to jotting down the details of train life. She notices how single bodies become one corporate self on train platforms; the way we lean forward simultaneously to see if the delayed train ‘has miraculously appeared’; how we look at train announcement boards as though we were in prayer.
Trains are also erotic. The first ever film kiss takes place on a train, and it is no accident that, when Alec takes the grit out of Laura’s eye in Brief Encounter, it is in the tearoom at Milford Junction, where they will also eventually part. Ratcliffe’s affair similarly ended in a station café, in her case the Costa on Paddington concourse.
What Sophie Ratcliffe pursues, as she detours down these tracks, is the way in which every connection leads to the lost properties of love, a phrase which unpacks its meaning as the journey progresses.
This book confirms what I have long suspected: that until you have lost something you have no real story to tell about yourself; that the best memoirs are born of loss.