A Life Discarded, Page 3

  Hearing the guardian’s footsteps they spring back to their proper positions. [The painter] stalks off, dripping brushes as he goes.

  Yet when ‘I’ finally lets us see what this seducing artist who is about to make off with the girl looks like, it is a startling surprise. Sprawled amid the cascades of brocaded silks and velvet, he squats like a braised toad: ‘middle-aged, rather ugly, a red-head & a Bohemian, perhaps a little plump’.

  The next morning, the diarist’s bleeding began.

  Feeling generally washed out from period. Heard some Beethoven on wireless as I looked out of kitchen window onto the daffodils and garden beauty – and felt a deep & poignant sorrow which can only be felt by a rather heavy loss of blood. Such a profound effect have bodily states on one – so that I am cheerful even though I have no post or prospects, & utterly depressed.

  In 1960, the monthly pattern of her period changed. It lost its euphoric element; the entire process became hateful. The pre-menstrual tension of her impending curse hung against her groin, pressed at her bladder, grew around her stomach – waiting to burst. A ‘congestion of body and soul!’

  Her male GP says none of this is worrying – this was just what it was to be a woman. She has, he murmurs revoltingly, ‘ripened’.

  The whole human race drives me to a frenzy of irritation, my habitual courtesy a very thin shell over my real passions.

  And then the ‘congestion’ broke, sometimes to ‘within half an hour of its due time’; other times it’s days late or early. Once, her period started in the middle of a Mozart sonata she was playing on her employer’s grand piano. Another time, she was on the bus again, watching her reflection in the window and imagining she was in Versailles. Suddenly, she was on the Niagara Falls.

  Felt I could hardly bear it today, when the flow came on again. It isn’t necessarily even pain, but a sort of queasiness, or faintness in the tummy or upheaval in the whole body. Don’t think I could keep any post with it like this, it is so incapacitating, but what can one do about it? Have lost a week over it as to doing anything – no work, nothing …

  If an exam falls on one of these days, tough. If ‘I’ needs to do something that requires close attention, fine mechanical behaviour or being more than five minutes from the nearest lavatory, hard cheese. It’s a wonder girls get up at all, let alone go to school and beat the socks off the boys at exams.

  Between the ages of twenty and twenty-five, as soon as the diarist tries to get started on anything, Nature sticks out a toe, trips her over and spends the next four or five days punching her in the stomach:

  How ill it makes you feel; one can do nothing but hug one’s pain.

  beating her on the head:

  felt dreadfully giddy, felt I couldn’t even focus straight.

  poking her ears:

  Went down slowly to the Post Office. Was afflicted with hyperaesthesia, could hardly bear the noise of passing cars, couldn’t bear sound today.

  yanking out her innards:

  the pain & disturbance of a plunging womb.

  and stopping her heart:

  Rose in morning, but soon had that overwhelming tummyache and consequent faintness. The pain was awful – lay sprawled on my untidy bed, fainting, and sweating all over, my blouse undone. After about an hour or so, the tablets took effect and the pain went; felt cold after that, put back on my jersey, got a hot water bottle. When that awful hour was over, lay back in bed, became very sleepy, and with an unusually low pulse.

  In October, she starts to develop ‘ugly feelings’ at her sixth-form college:

  Feel curiously criminal desires, not so far from committing them – would like to attack someone, threaten them, hit them, even knife them; burn the coats in the cloakroom; break things.

  She loses jobs, friends, including two possible boyfriends; the curse buggers up her holidays, her sleep, her eating – but, astonishingly, she never loses her self-control. She still walks down the street with a calm expression, as though nothing were wrong. ‘Don’t show it, because it isn’t right.’ She is a person of great fortitude.

  Think I am rather superstitious over the period, because it is exclusively a female process, & mysterious, not like a cold in the head. Certainly, with the period, have felt iller than anything else had made me feel, worse than measles. Suppose the pain is the burden of womankind; yet it shouldn’t by rights be painful, it is a natural process. I imagine people who live nearer the earth don’t get it so much, people like peasants & savages.

  During her lifetime, ‘I’ will have had around 450 curses, losing up to thirty-six litres of fluid and membrane, which is equivalent to pouring away her entire blood content six times over.

  I tested it at the petrol station the other day: with the nozzle full on, my hand squeezing the lever tight against the grip, it takes one minute and twelve seconds to pump thirty-six litres into my Honda Civic. It’s enough petrol to blow up the entire forecourt.

  Think the whole business of bladder and bowels is disgusting, and that Nature has shown shocking bad taste in creating such functions.

  7 Wor

  Aged eighteen(?)

  After an afternoon of studying the diarist, I put all the volumes back in their boxes exactly as I had found them: the old Cannings diary with its great project – the ‘it’ that MUST BE DONE!! – into the Ribena crate; the lurid modern books with their air of banal murderousness into the thigh box; the seven pads of drawings. I felt it was vital to preserve the order of the books in the boxes – as though even their arrangement captured something living and as yet unknowable about the diarist.

  It was as I was about to put the first Max-Val pad of cartoons back into place that I realised who Clarence was. Flicking through the pages one last time, I stopped at a baffling episode in which Flatface (as ‘Clarence’) is out of prison and walking around a monastic courtyard.

  One of the other characters is called Brakenbury. Brakenbury and Clarence? Hang on, isn’t that Shakespeare? Malmsey wine? Clarence must be the Duke of Clarence, the butt of Malmsey man. The room Flatface lives in with the Keeper and Worful is therefore the condemned man’s cell in the Tower of London. Yes, look! Here it is: Richard III … Duke of Clarence, brother to the king; Sir Robert Brackenbury [spelled with a ‘c’ in the middle], Lieutenant of the Tower … and there, the last name in the list, right at the end of the splendid round-up of extra parts: Bishops, Aldermen, Citizens, Soldiers, Messengers, Murderers, Keeper – the boy with a jaw like a casserole pot.

  (‘Wessar’ is ‘I’s word for (I think) ‘bottom’.)

  Shortly after Brakenbury appears in the cartoon strip, the point is absolutely settled, because in comes Richard himself, looking remarkably like Laurence Olivier:

  That’s what this is! These strange figures are the actors from the 1955 Olivier film of Richard III. The one with the sparse, angular street scenes and Olivier’s lizardish king. Clarence is played by John Gielgud.

  The reason for the baffling shifts in time in the comic strip is because the modern scenes are showing John Gielgud when he’s off set. For example, when he’s waiting to go to his brother Irwin’s lavatory:

  Irwin: “Damn it all, John, he’s gone and pinched “Pride and Prejudice”, and he’s !!” John was more amused than sympathetic.

  or being chased by eggs (‘I’s word for women):

  “I’d love to come out with you Johnnie,” said the egg.

  The young diarist is bewitched by John Gielgud. The actor’s face does not vary because it is a perfect denotation: those nine lines and the sprouting of hair are her hieroglyph of love.

  Forgot to put in diary, that on Monday night – or rather, Tuesday morning, a swerb dream of Clarence in his brown gown, lying on the ground, weeping, with his head on his sleeve – a vague & c-feel [arousing] & swerb dream. Bother my duties – eugh. Want to have a fling!

  Other exercise pads and jotters that I’ve discovered since contain attempts to start a novel about Gielgud. It’s an explosive story. Things co
nstantly happen ‘suddenly’. People are repeatedly unexpected. Several times per page a narrative hand pops out and slaps the reader across the face:

  John still felt upset, so accordingly partook of a great deal of Dry Martini, more than was perhaps good for him. His sense of injury and self-disgust began to melt away under the soothing effect of the drink and the stimulation of gay companionship. Irwin was also by now very cheerful, becoming more genial and expansive every minute, and waiting continually on Fleurette Blabbage, who proved herself to be extremely fond of shrimp-olive compote and exceptionally fond of mixed cocktail. The egg actually grew quite condescending and gracious after a session of these influences.

  “Everyone, listen, Mr Gielgud says he will play to us. Isn’t that charming of him?”

  John took up a volume of Beethoven’s sonatas. The place fell open, as if by itself.

  “What a messy page,” remarked Fleurette Blabbage.

  “That’s fingering,” Val [John’s other brother, both in this story and in real life] informed her. “He’s practised this one a lot.”

  John smiled at them, and put the book up to the rack. His hands stretched hungrily over the keys. Then he began to play.

  A simple, delicate, singing melody, touched with magic, passed from the piano to the listening room. Fleurette Blabbage’s cynical grin faded. Clunes [Alec Clunes, who played Hastings in the Richard III film] leant forward intently. Suddenly Baker listened too. Irwin made a face. And as for John he forgot them all, and his troubles, caught in a spell of sound, in the world of black and white, and undescribed colours, and the infinite. His playing was soft and dreamy; all of a sudden it changed. It grew wild and impassioned. John too. They all started up, with a certain sense of shock. Irwin stopped making faces. After all, John wasn’t a bad player – almost good.

  Then the first theme returned again. It was like a legend, remote, sounding through distant years. It was magic, mystical. John’s playing gave it that quality.

  No one paid any attention to Fleurette Blabbage. The egg was gazing at John Gielgud with all her heart. Her large eyes rolled over his face. With them she traced his curling hair, large nose, firm mouth, and stern Gielgud lines.

  “Mr Gielgud!” the egg suddenly yelled leaping to her feet. “Stop that at once! What a row! My poor ears! All the notes are wrong!”

  ‘I’ is a better artist than a novelist. The drawings can seem clumsy, as though she drew them in a deliberately primitive and rushed style, but they didn’t end up in a skip because of her lack of talent. She has an excellent feel for movement and a good sense of weight and balance. There are plenty of professional artists in Cambridge who don’t have half her unexpectedness and verve but still make a living with their flaccid still-lives and sculptures with holes in the middle.

  The reason for ‘I’s failure as an artist is in the drawings; but it’s not the drawings.

  It’s the figure of Worful.

  Who is Worful?

  He doesn’t appear in Richard III. There’s no character in the dramatis personae who sounds anything like that, or in Olivier’s film. But he’s the essential foil in the diarist’s strip: the hideous, rubber-faced, cowardly, sycophantic creature who jumps after Flatface across all the pages of the cartoon, belching, vomiting, pulling repulsive faces and betraying everybody.

  But Worful had the necessar torture, after all …

  The only time Clarence is laughing rather than looking sanctimonious is when he’s enjoying Worful’s pain.

  The answer comes in the first book of drawings. Written in large letters, in the diarist’s youthful hand, it is at the top of the first page before anything else. But this solution is easy to overlook because immediately after writing it ‘I’ crossed the explanation out, as though the revelation was too painful. It’s cost me considerable fussing with the scanner and Photoshop to get rid of the obscuring lines:

  Wor is me.

  8 As soon as I had the idea …

  My diary is now a work of art – am not afraid of people reading it, though it is so intimate.

  Aged twenty-one

  As soon as I had the idea to write a biography of this anonymous diarist – a biography in which the biographer doesn’t know who his subject is – I was struck by an odd fact. Whenever I fantasised that she was somebody famous I felt immediately, and as decisively as if the books had been dropped on my head, bored.

  The great excitement of an anonymous diary is that it might belong to anybody. Even giving ‘I’ a name destroyed a vital thing that made the books interesting – a sense of quiet universality. I wanted to know what the women I passed in the street or sat beside on the train were thinking, and these books, I thought, would tell me. Give the diarist a name and she became just another stranger who didn’t want to accept my gaze. Imagine that she turned out to be some celebrity and the books (and my voyeurism) became almost nauseating.

  It says a great deal for the diarist that, for the next four years, she managed to keep me reading without displaying a single moment of coarseness or impropriety. She has remained, throughout the guided tour she has given me of her mind, honest, funny, outlandish … and respectable.

  When, beyond the grave, I meet this extraordinary ordinary woman, I will tell her so.

  9 Nothing is certain

  I shall miss me.

  Dido

  Nothing is certain – that’s the number-one cancer cliché. Less than a year after Dido’s first course of chemotherapy, the tumours on her pancreas and liver began to grow again. On rare occasions, these chemo drugs work. Often they simply toughen the growths up and make it harder for later therapies to have an effect.

  ‘We return to the soar and the plunge,’ said Dido. ‘You’re not going to die, yes you are, no you’re not. Whoops, sorry, yes you are.’

  One morning when I went to visit Dido in hospital, the London consultant, a usually excellent man, had not given her the correct anti-emetics. Her retching in the hospital toilet sounded like three men having an argument.

  Scientific ignorance, avoidable errors of judgement, the appalling realisations of hindsight – these are integral to cancer, not separate from it. They are as much a part of the disease as the tumours themselves. I do not discuss this perception with Dido. It is my way of isolating the feeling that she is easing away and that life has, in some sense I cannot understand, already allowed death in.

  To avoid thinking about dying, we have increased the amount of work we do on each other’s manuscripts – both of us are writing types of detective story: she, about the hunt for St Thomas More’s bones (she is the only person in the world who knows where they are buried); me, the hunt for ‘I’.

  In her chapter on More in prison (coincidentally, the same prison where Flatface/Clarence was locked up), Dido had written: In the Tower kitchens the cook is building a pile of slow-burning hardwood and dry-crackle kindling, with which to stoke his cauldron: More’s head, before being stuck on a pole on London Bridge, must be parboiled to the consistency of pasta.

  ‘What sort of pasta?’ I wanted to know. ‘Heinz alphabet or al dente?’

  From my bag, I plucked out a twisting, wriggling object.

  ‘Nooo, I don’t think that’s a rat,’ said Dido, taking it between her pinched fingers. It was a fragment of plastic, milky with age, that I’d found in a mound at the bottom of the Ribena box. ‘The second favourite thing for a rat to gnaw is a book spine, and the spines on the diaries are untouched. Their first favourite is an electricity cable.’

  A faint, green-tinted segment of the letter ‘G’ filled up one corner of the piece of plastic.

  ‘But you agree that that’s a piece of disintegrated shopping bag?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then it tells us that our diarist had south-facing windows and is unlikely to be an accountant or a policewoman.’

  Dido flicked her infusion tube up and down impatiently, as though it were a cloak hem.

  ‘And here’s why,’ I continued. ‘The reaso
n the books in the Ribena box are packed so badly is because the diarist first put them in this plastic bag, then squashed it into the box. So, if it’s not a rat that ruined this bag, it’s sunlight, which suggests a south-facing window, that it must have remained in this position for many years, and that the person is not well organised …’

  Dido dropped the fragment of plastic back into my hand. She had a theory of her own. ‘She came from a village or a town.’

  ‘We don’t know that. She hasn’t said anything about her home yet.’

  ‘We do know it, because she can’t find the sheet of telephone numbers when she wants to ring the hospital to arrange a blood transfusion after her curse. Why did she need a sheet of numbers? Why not just ring 999? The reason is, 999 wasn’t introduced across the country until the mid-seventies, and she was writing in 1960. 999 was only available in cities then.’

  On the train back to Great Snoring I read the rest of the diary from 1960. It is early December. The diarist is ‘tired and nervous’. She is in love with several men. One tells her she is ‘very sexy’; another is ‘a very virile sort’ (although ‘don’t like muscular strength in a man very much, it makes me afraid’), and has the inappropriate name of Mr Weakley.

  One evening, ‘I’ takes herself to see Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera Iolanthe. The fairy Iolanthe has married a human and borne a son who is fairy down to his waist. His legs are human. He is in love with Phyllis, a ward of court, but the Lord Chancellor is in love with her too:

  But there’d be the deuce to pay in the Lords

  If I fell in love with one of my Wards:

  Which rather tries my temper, for