The Lost Properties of Love. Sophie Ratcliffe

and telegrams out there. But that month, at least, I suspect she had little time for correspondence. Maybe she barely noticed Trollope was there at all. Or perhaps she invited him just so that he could watch her show off, flirting with Millais, the painter, or giving Lady Henniker the eye. It could have been a kind of revenge. The first time they had met, in Italy, when all eyes were on him, Field had sat in the corner feeling like a nobody, waiting to 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.