The Lost Properties of Love. Sophie Ratcliffe

catch his attention. Now she was in the centre, holding court, one of the ‘taking’ things of the season. Either way, there would have been a moment when she passed the receiver to him. He could still feel the warmth of her hand on the wood.

      How long can two people be apart from one another – how many impossibilities between them – before the connection goes dead?

      The journey to an affair is like the longest dialling process in the world. Most of the time we never go further than rifling through our mental address book, looking at names and checking their Twitter feed, wondering what they might be up to. Thinking about who and what might happen if you ever called, and if they would choose to pick up. Perhaps they are already on another line.

      But sometimes you press the final number, the fatal eleventh, and you hear it ring out. You proceed to Go. You plan and choose what to wear, and buy a ticket, and get on the train, with an excuse in your pocket. You watch the people reading their books – facing each other, back to back. Then you step off the overground, and walk down to the slip road as night falls – and there are still a hundred moments when you can turn back. You can stop at the wharf and think it through, remembering how to compose your life in a way that will hurt neither you nor others. You can stand near the boats and the old warehouses and look at the way the metalwork frames the canal, before walking back down the road to the station. But you don’t. You keep walking and cross the road, turn right after the bridge, following the bend of the path with the stretch of graffiti. The buildings close in on you as you enter the yard. There’s a tension as you get nearer the door. A moment of space that feels as if you’re falling into a doubly indrawn breath – then you press the bell. You know you really should be somewhere else. And up until that moment you can always turn back, or turn aside.

      Then you have done it, and the door clicks open. The recoil spring takes over.

      Before that moment, though, you are waiting, turning, watching the wheel spin.

      You are free, even if pulled by an ache lodged somewhere between your shoulder and your heart. All my life I’ve made journeys like this, detours from the track that I’m meant to be on. The journey feels like a way to a cure, even as it speaks of an illness. Some of us have loved this journey itself most of all, loved it more than arriving.

       St Petersburg Station

      l’exécution est de plus en plus difficile … parce que j’ai vidé mon sac

      Gustave Flaubert, Correspondances

      Anna descends from the night train into the early morning grey, stepping down from the steep carriage stairs and onto the platform of bags and porters and cabs waiting to pick up fares. She would have reached Mockвa at 11 a.m. Moscow Time. (That said, all time was Moscow Time on Russian trains, which meant that if you were on a train near Ekaterinburg wanting blinis for breakfast you could end up being offered a cabbage soup lunch.)

      Like all good travellers, she kept her luggage near to her. Standing there, on the platform, in her dark travelling coat and hat, watching the movement at the station, the entrances and exits. She would have had a trunk or two – and a valise. Perhaps a shawl or rug over an arm. And a red silk pouch, her мешочек, would hang from her wrist – just large enough to carry her most immediate possessions. Tolstoy’s wife, Sofia, had three or four bags like this – some beaded, some fabric, some finished with braid, formed in each corner with two loops.

      Once you start looking through the novel, bags are all over the place. A rash of them. They break out like measles, all redness and leather, in chapter after chapter. After her first disturbing and thrilling encounter with the handsome officer, Vronsky, Anna hides her face from her sister-in-law’s gaze. She bends her flushed face over a tiny bag, stowing her nightcap and handkerchiefs. Later this is the bag where she keeps her books, the tiny pocket editions of English novels that, in themselves, provide other ways and places to hide. Anna’s handbag is a sign of autonomy. She is a Woman Who Carries Her Own Bag, a prototype of the emancipated New Woman to come. But it is also a sign of retreat. Holding her nightcap and handkerchiefs, the bag is a gathering point – a refuge – and it keeps Anna steady in her attempt to hold herself together. There is, for her, no other gathering point.

      So everyday in their status as totes, or carriers, that we barely register their existence, bags are entwined with the world of secrets and power, money and myth. They are not close to our body, like a pocket, nor do they live outside us, like a safe, or a chest. Prosthetic extensions. Intimate, but at arm’s length, the bag is a way of managing space. We condense our stuff, squeeze it into pockets and compartments, shut clasps and buckles and zips – so we can take some of our space with us as we travel. And, unless you’re a fan of transparent handbags (big in the 1960s), they also provide a private space in the public world. Even within our houses, bags usually belong to one individual. We rarely share a bag. They are our bastion, our fortress, our protection from communal space. They are the first place we hide things and the first place you would look to find something hidden.

      A Hermès Birkin sold in 2018 at Christie’s auction house for the price of a very small flat on the outermost reaches of London. White crocodile skin, encrusted with 10.23 carats of diamonds. There’s a museum entirely devoted to the history of handbags in a canalside house in Amsterdam. There you’ll find the early leather sacks carried by men, embroidered and inlaid reticules once held by grand Georgian ladies. The bags are backlit, hanging from hooks in cabinets – and the whole thing feels like an incredibly high-end charity shop. Many of the bags have some kind of story about them. A French beaded pouch commemorates the arrival of Zarafa the Nubian giraffe in Paris’s Jardin des Plantes. A clutch bag is made in the shape of an ocean liner. Others are more personal celebrations – miniatures of two newlyweds are embedded into the front flap of a delicate peach silk bag. Some are transparent, shaped like Cinderella’s carriage. A sequin-encrusted can of Coke, a fairy cake on a strap. Famous bags sit with everyday bags. Madonna’s bag outshines the one that belonged to Imelda Marcos. There’s something that looks like a nineteenth-century changing bag, with a decorative feature of a mother and a child in a playpen. There’s a 1920s Egyptian-style bag decorated with lapis lazuli. In the tearoom, admiring postcards of bags and bag paraphernalia, surrounded by paintings of Roman gods and goddesses, you can wonder at the felicitous coincidence that Charles-Émile Hermès, the Parisian leatherworker whose company went on to create some of the world’s most iconic bags, shared his name with the nearest we have to the god of luggage. Hermes – god of boundaries and doorways, the travelling god, god of trade and commodities, always depicted with a satchel on his arm.