Surely two people with the same glow of artistic ecstasy on their cheeks should recognise each other? thinks Laura as she walks upstairs behind Mrs Ellis to be shown her bedroom. She wonders if Mrs Ellis is a fake, ‘a bit on the common side’, and not a designer at all.
‘Well, I am in a queer set up!’ she writes that night, wallowing in pillows. The room she has been given has a window seat looking out across the sands to a moon-speckled sea; the furniture has been arranged with ‘all sorts of furbelows, yet nowhere to put anything, not even my flannel’. Although this is supposed to be a temporary, low-paid, semi-skilled housekeeping job, she has been put in a four-poster bed.
Sunday, June 25th
First whole day here – what a curious post, I don’t have to do any work – so far, just a sort of guest. Got to sleep late last night – was so hungry visited the larder, & even that did not stop the pangs. It was the same this morning, ate what I could lay hands on.
Monday, June 26th
Love having this lovely big comfy four poster. Love it when the sea reclaims the vast miles of sand, as it does this evening – the running tide almost up to the windows, as it were, vast watery wastes with the racing little breakers all round. Around sunset, a greenish clarity of sky; beamy radiance on the sea from stormy clouds. Little pools by the rocks with shimmery shells, wind-blown ruffled clear water.
Thursday, June 29th
An extraordinarily happy day but love it here, everything is extremely nice … Wonderful to feel an unshadowed happiness, no tragedy; everything this summer is going all right for me; no mental conflict this summer, which is unusual for me. I enjoy my youth & health & gifts, and smile upon a smiling world.
Friday, June 30th
Still can’t quite make out the Ellises.
Saturday, July 1st
A really busy day; this post isn’t as simple as I thought, so many things to remember. The Bendix quite beyond me, & not very good in the laundry line. Unskilled at ironing. Mrs Ellis paid me £7 this morning (£2 was for my fare). That is a very nice little sum!
Sunday, July 2nd
A lot to do today. Hope the Ellises are satisfied with me. Took a ballet book on beach in afternoon – rich, sensitive enjoyment. The sea was lively & sparkly & exciting; a very windy day, rather cold. And in eve, the sea right out of sight, the vast distance of the sands, amazing, with other-planet, lunar aspect, grey, with bars, & craters of water.
Monday, July 3rd
Feeling extraordinarily happy, as happy as if I were in love. Wonder why I feel quite so happy, it isn’t comfortable to feel it to such a degree.
Am reluctant to be evicted from my four-poster, & it hasn’t happened yet, though Mrs. Ellis hinted today, but she is tolerant, I had already slept two nights overdue in their guest room.
Tuesday, July 4th
Mr. Ellis isn’t very nice, always sees what I don’t do, not what I do do …
Wednesday, July 5th
Have made a particularly funny & serious mistake here – given breast of lamb to the dog! Thought it was a scraggy old bit, & not good enough for the casserole. In spite of my discomfort at the revelation found it very funny, such a good story to tell.
Rather on the tired side, so not taking the work unduly quickly. Fagged away at laundry – it would have been better to have put it in the washing-machine.
Not yet been evicted from my four-poster!
Sunday, July 9th
Had a tummy-upset in the night – windy, spasmodic pains; wonder if being in labour feels rather like that. It must have been the lettuce, or over-eating generally.
The Ellises returned while I was out on my evening walk. Find them really very irritating. Mr. Ellis accused me of finishing up the bacon; I don’t know what’s happened to the blasted stuff. Could hear Mr. Ellis telling Mrs. Ellis …
Tuesday, July 11th
Got a very nasty shock today – the Ellises have given me the sack. I have taken it tragically, feel it very much. Never dreamt I’d be sacked even on a temporary post. must have been very bad work; yet surely it couldn’t have been, & I personally enjoyed the food I cooked.
Wednesday, July 12th
What on earth is a person who cannot keep a post to do? This is the third time I have been sacked.
Mr. Ellis particularly bossy & tiresome today, taking over my grilling of the steak. I hide my nervousness, my immature inferiority-feeling, as best I can, but he upsets me. Then on top of that, he produced a heavy sack of peas ‘to do in the afternoon’. I laughed & cried simultaneously.
Thursday, July 13th
Dreadful day; gross inefficiency after gross inefficiency of mine discovered as the day went on. Get nastier & more bullying than ever. Think they are horrid beastly people. But I probably have made a bit too free with the Ellis’s house, which also counts against me; I have eaten most of the cakes myself, as well as all my other ravages in the larder, stayed on in the guest room when they had told me in so many words I must move, used their soap in the bathroom, the man will have to come to see to the washing machine, I drink a good ‘pinta’ a day, have taken their bike in the rain, the plug of the iron broken …
Friday, July 14th
Drastically overslept this morning, didn’t hear my alarm, & didn’t wake till quarter to eight. It was a dreadful humiliation & had to rush round in a panic still in my night-clothes. Everything was in a dreadful mess, because hadn’t time to clear up after the Ellis’s party last night. My degeneration terrible …
This morning, afraid Mr Ellis might
Saturday, July 15th
Left the Ellis’s in utter ignominy and disgrace.
21 Oh, glorious blaze!
Will I soon be able to talk with fire?
Aged twenty-two
And so Laura was launched into adult life. She will try her hand at another housekeeping job. That will also go wrong. She is a disaster in the kitchen. It is absurd for her even to contemplate such work again. To her family she is a byword for clumsiness and domestic implosion. But at last she finds her way: she goes to London, secures a prestigious studentship at Camberwell College of Art – and we have arrived at the cheap black notebook covered in washable rexine that I picked out on the first day Dido gave me the diaries – the diary which announces a Great Project that MUST BE DONE!!
In the early 1960s people were racing out of Camberwell’s doors to become actors, models, fashion gurus, sculptors, painters, potters, animators, pianists, publishers, textile designers and lead guitarists with Pink Floyd. Laura, studying illustration, surged with the crowd:
Still in high excitement over Crystal Palace. Can still hardly believe it is my poster they like, mine that is chosen, mine, mine!!
‘The artist is the highest-developed human being one can have,’ she announces. ‘Intellectuals are less highly developed.’ She no longer wants to be a scholar; she hates science; she understands at last what E means by ‘work, work, work’. The work must ‘fill & dominate my soul’. ‘I must continue with this starving life I have at last entered into – the long, slogging hours with only a sandwich.’ Her difficulties with swallowing are because she is a genius. ‘The more gifted one is the heavier the price … such things artists have to suffer. People do not know of these things, do not see an artist from inside, as I do.’
What torture the cellist Paul Tortelier’s nerves must be – the man can’t keep still a minute – such facial tics & jerks etc etc. What a thyroid.
Laura feels glad that she is not so gifted as he. ‘I suffer enough as it is, through my gifts – they won’t let one alone, can’t release a minute, one is used up.’ But she is not weak. ‘Although I am a gentle, over-sensitive creature, am really a career girl type, more than domesticated; have a certain sophistication. Am ambitious, want to get on, to give of my work to the community; long to have it appreciated, & feel my worth … My work must get known, & give pleasure to others. – Although it is original, it is not exclusive, the layman can enjoy it.’
Wo
rked today across the road, standing at an impromptu easel concocted of a step ladder, planks, & string. It was fun, & aroused interest in the passing locals.
‘Oh, glorious blaze of the imaginative world!’
22 I have been stuck in this room twenty one years …
Can see it undetermined what I will become –
1) a personality, a writer of merit, perhaps even fame
2) moderately successful normal person
3) a lonely, embittered spinster, whom no one likes,
& who has got nowhere in life – me, with
all my dreams & hopes.
Aged eighteen
‘I have been stuck in this room twenty one years next February. It is as long as it took Moth & Pa to bring me up – my whole childhood and teenage years, and a bit extra. I was twenty one when we went to a shop in the main street in Bedford, and I chose that wireless.’
The diary that might have explained the significance of this radio was not in the haul that Richard and Dido rescued from the skip, and Laura never mentions the incident again, before or after this one note written in 1994.
On the way back from visiting Dido in the oncology ward at the Royal Free, I tested other words in place of ‘wireless’.
‘I was twenty one when we went to a shop in the main street in Bedford, and I chose that hammer and nail.’ That ‘grapefruit’. That ‘stuffed toy rabbit’. That ‘chicken’. Each time I changed the object, the image that I had of the type of shop and the display also changed, but the expression on Laura’s face remained the same. Even though she was twenty-one at the time of the incident, a fully-grown adult of seven metres, in my mind it is a girl of about fourteen, watchful and tentative, who reaches out to pick up the prize. Her mother is standing closer behind her than her father. Her father is awkward and pompous. He has a fat belly and a thick nose. Her mother, though I feel I know her better, is indistinct – a presence, bent over; not a person.
Modern words also worked. I tried ‘iPad’. As if puncturing through soap bubbles, Laura’s fourteen-year-old hand stretched out to a shop shelf five decades in the future. Something, to my mind, has fixed her as a child trapped in an adult’s body. It is not endearing. It is slightly nasty. I know several people like this: old women who are teenage boys; grown men who are twelve. They are children poured into old people’s skins. Their bodies have aged but their brains have encountered a hitch.
I try ‘Fluorouracil (5FU)’, one of the three poisons the well-intentioned hospital is mainlining into Dido and which (it will turn out) are doing nothing much except hardening up the tumour and destroying her brain cells so that she can’t write, can’t think, can’t read, can’t edit, shits uncontrollably in nappies and has to keep a purple Really Useful plastic crate next to her bed into which she vomits twice an hour.
By 1994, Laura was fifty-five and close to suicide, but there is a mordancy about her grumbles. It’s like listening to traffic: annoying but reassuring when your best friend is being savaged by illness and medical barbarity.
If I had an ounce of mercy or courage I would shoot Dido. I do not have an ounce of mercy.
I read Laura instead.
The two decades of ‘imprisonment’ Laura suffered at the end of her life, in what may or may not have been an asylum, subject to the control of this man Peter – her confinement wasn’t absolute. She could leave her room and the house; but she was back on her mattress by the end of the day. She was allowed to attend her father’s funeral, visit her mother (who, like so many ex-Cambridge University students, has ended up growing old near her former college, in Girton), shop for food and clothes, spend an afternoon in the cinema. ‘Grinding’ back and forth on her bike she visits the Co-op on Histon Road and purchases:
A 50p bunch of watercress that had started to rot,
A liver casserole ready meal, which she boiled up ‘to make it safe’,
Seven cauliflowers,
A fat-reduced garlic dip for 15p (‘if it isn’t nice, it isn’t a disaster’),
The ‘remains’ of a swede,
Five kiwis in a packet that she found in a trolley waiting to be thrown out, and which the Co-op cashier insisted it was against the law to sell; but he charged her 10p for them anyway.
She drew the line at a bit of Stilton that had maggots in it, and took it back to the shop to complain. ‘I was prepared to excuse one, but it had several.’
On one occasion, returning with a Rosamund Pilcher book bought from the market for a triumphantly small sum, we discover that although Laura detests Peter, she has attempted erotic thoughts about him:
The story strained my credulity a bit. Knowing my experience of Peter, so horrible and pongy, etc. It is not really romantic – this woman walking into this man’s bedroom first thing with the tea, and them making love. As if people feel like it, first thing.
Is she suffering from a mild version of Stockholm syndrome, in which hostages fall in love with their captors?
There are reasons to believe she might be in an asylum. The graphologist’s comments suggest madness. Vince the detective suspects that the size of Laura’s handwriting is a metaphor for imprisonment. Laura, in the days of The Phobia, thought she might be fundamentally insane. If she is in a prison for criminals, it must be a Category D, and she must be at least a quarter of the way through her full sentence, because only then are inmates allowed into the community. But I can say categorically that if these are the diaries of a mad woman or a convict, she was not incarcerated anywhere among the streets near where Richard and Dido found the books. The Arts and Crafts houses in that neighbourhood are reserved for the captains of academic industry: heads of department, retired vice chancellors of the university, the older generation of multimillionaires who made their money in computers. Wittgenstein died in the house on the corner called, blissfully, ‘Storey’s End’. Each one of these widely separated properties has the acreage and oaken stillness of a national archive. There are no bang-ups here, at least not official ones.
The houses in Storey’s Way are hidden behind bushes.
The neighbours are unworldly.
It would be easy for an unofficial gaoler to convince people here that a middle-aged woman’s cries for help were nothing remarkable. You could say that what had just been overheard was you listening to your old reel-to-reel research recordings of the call of Gracula religiosa, the famous ‘talking bird’ from the Nicobar islands.
Then you would stroll back inside, pausing to reposition a dahlia stake on the way, and drag your victim to a room that was deeper in the house.
Over the years, small but suspicious details about Peter emerge. He has a passion for grapefruit slices. He never finishes bottles of milk. He does not wash his hands after peeing. He is blandly well off, and never does anything interesting with his money – he once hid £30,000 worth of his stamp collection in a hole somewhere in the garden, and forgot where the hole was. He never found those little sticky bits of paper again. As in the case of Josef Fritzl, the Austrian who trapped his daughter in the family basement for twenty-four years, Peter trained as an electrical engineer. He mows the grass until it bleeds.
I imagine Peter as a short but energetic man, with a limp and an unexplained swing of his arm as he walks along, mentally lopping off those dahlia heads. On the mowing machine, his knuckles are white from wrenching at the steering wheel. I see him spin round the pear trees, a freshly opened tin of grapefruit slices on the bonnet (he liked the giant size, enough for twelve servings), and race up the lawn through the bonfire smoke.
But Peter is never clearly defined. Even the way his name keeps popping up and disappearing on the page has something furtive about it. He is never caught in the act of doing anything; he has always either done it five minutes ago or will do it again in twelve hours. This gives the strange effect that he seems to be as aware of our presence as we are of his, and therefore confines his bad behaviour to the moments when we turn the page. By the time we have pressed the next side down, regaine
d our focus and begun to read again, it is too late: the lawnmower is back in the shed and another bag of Laura’s photographs and sheet music roaring on the garden fire.
He is, according to the diaries, in his early seventies and worth between five and twelve million pounds.
She is not his prisoner.
She is his live-in housekeeper.
Of all the jobs, how on earth did messy, dreamy, impractical, hopeless cook and artistic snob Laura land this one? Following her abysmal performance in the Wirral, what made her think of applying for it? It was precisely to escape this type of work that she had fled to Camberwell. Working as a housekeeper-companion for a bachelor professor is a domestic situation that belongs in the nineteenth century. She does his supper, his washing up, his shopping, his cleaning. She sometimes helps with the gardening; they frequently have meals together, occasionally even breakfast. She is, as she frequently points out, his wife – without the sex (‘thank goodness’).
The late diaries with the merry coloured covers are a long howl of protest against this glutinous existence. When Peter is away, which is not often enough, she plays Mozart and Beethoven on the grand piano in his living room and weeps over her wasted life. Once, at the Co-op on Christmas Eve, she spots his bicycle leaned up against the window:
I couldn’t resist giving the basket a push – the basket is starting to break up in any case, so I just pushed the rest of the side in. I hoped it would make it difficult for the bleeder to get the shopping home – but he still got back long before me, must have gone slipping home …
In her eagerness to damage his bicycle she forgot to pick up anything in the Co-op for herself, and ended up celebrating Christmas that year with ‘one packet of stewing turkey’.
Another time she assaults his furniture:
My excessive tension no indication of happiness here on my part – but yet can’t bear to leave – the thought of other jobs, or going home, still worse. I am so irresponsible that I am starting to smash the place up – I also reduced that chair of Peter’s to matchwood the other day. I also set about with the poker, belabouring other articles – wished for an axe … I am not even a wife to this man Peter – am nothing, just a caretaker, who has vandalised his property!