I read that novel on the train to London a few weeks ago, and sat in a coffee shop in Victoria station to finish it. Then, my head full of the characters Lily, Sinead, and Aidan, I walked to the V&A along streets I’ve walked so many times before. My earliest memories of this part of the city are from the year I was five, holding tight to my grandmother’s hand. I spent my late teens and twenties in London, and my most of my forties only an hour away. I was a Cordon Bleu student, an apprentice, a Chef, a wife, a divorcée, a Masters and then PhD student, a new wife. I was a granddaughter, a niece, a cousin.
In Life after Life, Kate Atkinson describes time as a palimpsest; I thought of this as each step sparked memories from a different period of my life. There’s the shop where Aunt Em and I bought completely impractical (but very beautiful!) wine glasses for the directors dining room I ran, there’s my doctor’s surgery, a Mews where I catered a dinner oblivious to the celebrity guests (whose names I didn’t recognise and have long since forgotten), Divertimenti, the cooking store which used to be just down the street from the Cordon Bleu, the club where a then-friend celebrated his 40th, the Food Hall I loved introducing to Doug . . . and all the empty spaces where landmarks from my life used to be.
And this route (Knightsbridge, Chelsea, Kensington) is just one tiny patch of London. . . I’ve lived in Clapham and Notting Hill, worked in The City and a dozen other places, partied in Soho and Covent Garden, walked mikes and miles across almost every other neighbourhood. This was my city, once.
My sister gave me Joy Sullivan’s Instructions For Traveling West for Christmas, and “First, you must realise you’re homesick for all the lives you’re not living,” has become my new mantra. But I struggle. I can so easily picture a parallel world where Doug is well, and he and I are living happily ever after. Where he was joining me on this walk, meeting our friends, Tiff and Amy, exploring our favourite rooms of the V&A together.
Imagining is what I do best (there’s a reason I write fiction). So I also imagine (returning to O’Farrell) where I might be had I not met my first husband and lost my twenties and thirties to him. Impossible to know.
And here I am now. Sullivan's poem continues: "Get lost. Keep going. Give grief her own lullaby. remind yourself - joy is not a trick."
