A Life Discarded

  AM: I don’t think she was crazy like that. Not enough to be locked up in an asylum like Jacob. She was lonely, disappointed, not mad.

  VJ: She was locked up in her own asylum.

  That was enough. I didn’t want to give Vince any more. I didn’t want him to win another award for solving this mystery too. My initial reason for contacting him was not because I wanted to know what techniques to use to track down my missing diarist, but the opposite. I wanted to know how to avoid the successful approaches.

  Vince explained that the first thing I needed to do was look up the electoral register. I determined never to go near the thing.

  VJ: What happens if she wasn’t murdered and she’s not a spy or a brilliant scientist and there’s no big secret; there’s nothing significant about her – she’s just an ordinary person?

  AM: But that’s exactly the point. That’s the best result. As long as Not-Mary remains unknown, she’s valuable. Her ordinariness, and the fact that she has written so much about it, is what makes her interesting. If she was famous, that would ruin it. If she was a scandal, or a politician or a pop star, she will stop being the faceless person next door. I’m in trouble then.

  Vince got up to go. He clipped open his surprising briefcase and returned into it my photocopies and the background documentation about me.

  ‘You know, with 148 diaries, your trouble is going to be not enough troubles.’

  Then he swung his branch around his trunk again and shook my hand goodbye.

  17 The Second stabbing

  Crumbs, however am I going to get through life like this?

  Sat, April 2nd, 1960

  Luckily, not too afraid of Blue Danish cheese

  Wed, March 30th, 1960

  Aged twenty

  On April 3rd, 1960, Not-Mary began stabbing walls.

  She’d spent the morning in ‘utter mooching and idleness, obstinate in my depression’. Her sisters had ‘irritated around’. At lunch, ‘too angry & worked up’ to eat, she sat at the dining table with her hands on either side of her empty plate ‘jumping like fishes’. She winced at her family’s juicy gluttony.

  Not-Mary had been struck by a horrific idea: what happens if, when I swallow, the food goes into my lungs by accident? After a few months, what had started as a small mental tic – one of dozens of such things that plague children every day, and which most of us manage quickly to sweep aside – had in Not-Mary’s case become a full-blown neurosis, which Not-Mary called ‘The Phobia’. I had one of these too. Mine started aged seven when my American parents took me back to the US. Driving down a freeway one morning we passed a restaurant called ‘The Stop and Stuff Inn’. For some reason – who knows why? – that phrase fixed in my head and pounded there for two years: Stop and Stuff Inn, Stop and Stuff Inn, Stop and Stuff Inn, Stop and Stuff Inn … Even now, four decades later, I feel nervous putting the words down. I used to wake up in the night feeling like vomiting because I couldn’t get rid of them.

  For Not-Mary, the horror of solid food quickly spread to gulps of drink (sips, even at The Phobia’s worst, she could always manage). At mealtimes it took her up to two hours of nibbling to finish a single plate. The canteens at her sixth-form college, and then later at art school, were impossible. She could not make friends or go out with men. Even Lyon’s Corner Houses were troublesome: always there was a piece of cake. Dehydrated and in despair, she developed cystitis, so The Phobia spread to toilets. If she wasn’t jittery because she was about to eat, she was panicking because she couldn’t pee.

  One of the things I like about Not-Mary is that these early troubles have such a strong physical representation. Memoirs so often split their bindings with whining explanations of psychological traumas – Daddy didn’t love me; Mummy slapped me when I was four. Not-Mary never blames her parents for this madness of hers. It’s nothing to do with parents. There is a time when she goes to see a psychiatrist and he comes out with the expected erotic guff, particularly excited by the word ‘swallowing’; but his observations don’t have much effect on Not-Mary. Not-Mary’s difficulties came down to the beginning and end of her digestive tract. The beginning: the result of a childish mental tic about eating that might happen to anybody, but that had, in her case, got out of hand. The end: cystitis. On top of this are the understandable consequences of being reminded every month that you bleed, that your function is to produce babies, like a farm animal, and that no matter how much you plead for the help and support of your body during A-Level exam week, your innards will always be willing to betray you and start spasmodic cramping.

  Ever since my visit to the petrol station, I’ve thought it a wonder that any woman is sane.

  If Not-Mary could just have sorted out the processes of ingestion and excrement, her life in the early 1960s might have been all right.

  She started to lose weight. On March 17th, 1960, she was 10 stone 2 pounds; on May 7th, 9 stone 13½.

  Watch with hysterical dread my increasing slimness, with horror at the thought of becoming a “walking skeleton”.

  Her fear was not translated back into lack of appetite. She’d have gnawed lichen off the rocks if her oesophagus would have let her. But each time Not-Mary raised a fork to her mouth her throat seized up – snap! – and she could not get the food down.

  The Phobia bounds after her across every page of these early diaries. In a dream Not-Mary imagined she was a cow, eating the grass: the earth was layered with food. But when she woke, another quarter of a pound had gone.

  It’s uncomfortable now to sit on a hard stool, my bones coming through.

  She devised elaborate tricks to try to get nutrients in. Lying on her back on the bed, she dangled her head over the edge and tried to eat upside down. That way (with gravity on her side) she had more control over which route the food took when it reached the vital divide between lungs and stomach. She hid behind the family car and pushed a bun into her mouth ‘directly from a paper bag’ without letting her eyes see what she was up to. It didn’t work. Another method was to lock herself in the bathroom, put her head in the basin, turn on the tap, and eat to the sound of running water. There was no rationale to this last one as far as I could make out. It succeeded now and then.

  ‘To write,’ she notes during one twenty-page entry, ‘creates a drive to live; “swallowing” a drive to die.’

  On the day of stabbing that opened this chapter, Not-Mary’s ‘repulsive’ young sisters had hurriedly started putting on their coats after their gluttonous lunch, because they’d wanted to visit Granny for supper, and start guzzling all over again.

  Appalled, Not-Mary had quietly stood up from the table and said she didn’t want to join them. She’d said she might go to Bedford instead, and watch Madam Butterfly at the cinema.

  Then she’d said she felt a bit tired for Bedford.

  She would just go to bed.

  After that, she’d walked upstairs to her room and attacked the wallpaper with a penknife.

  The Phobia, like the curse, was rarely absent, but was never at its worst for more than a week. The rest of the time it lingered behind Not-Mary’s chair during meals like a not very good butler, part of a cluster of smaller mental upsets that made her life miserable.

  There was also the fear she had about crossing roads, and the nervousness about riding bicycles; the conviction that she smelled, was stupid, was doomed to spinsterhood, was hated; the suspicion that she was about to lose her arms and her sight because what she wanted more than anything was to be a writer or painter or musician, and it would be just like God to take away the two bits of her needed for these things; the intermittent agoraphobia …

  The oppressive butler behind Not-Mary’s chair was not a man; it was an octopus.

  There’s lots of room here for psychobabble. But I’m still not especially worried for Not-Mary. Her clang-bang view of herself is more than the usual adolescent mental cacophony, maybe, but kids get through this. They sort it out. At twenty-one, Not-Mary’s also a little old for such
nonsense, but she’s grown up in a wood on top of a four-million-year-old hill.

  At the back of the stabbing diary, where the top edge has eroded into the shape of limestone cliffs, she fantasises about pain and killing:

  Had a dream … of “Mussolini” being

  tortured in a

  furnace, & he

  quite enjoyed it.

  (Actual date May 1960)

  Wond[er if] I am a potential murderer – my feelings

  become so p[oi]senous – don’t even feel blind rage – just a

  desire for pure revenge for my woes, a bitter cruelty.

  Am a potential suicide anyway

  Nizzy [her mother] just been beastly over the bedroom, … downstairs

  & got the sharpest knife, the carving knife, from

  the cupboard – am

  I crazy? But feel such agression.

  Crumbs, life is DIFFICULT –

  Not given up hope yet – not suicide thoughts – but

  if Life was something tangible, I would give it a

  good slash across the head – BLOODY thing.

  Soon after she left the Perse School for Girls, Not-Mary, still only nineteen, began work on her ‘third novel’ (‘it is not quite as good as Dr Zhivago’). She had ambitions also to be ‘an authority & writer on Shakespeare’.

  Want to write as well as novels, plays, opera, & songs … lovely spring weather – winds, blown from heaven, fitful sun, rain, the trees roaring, whipped me up to a frenzy of excitement.

  Her artistry raged not just for literature, but also for music and painting:

  I am an individual, born to create, not to go with the masses! Look at my reflection – a profound sort of young face – in the mirror of the ’bus window, and think that I am not a librarian, or a cook … not even a student of English at the university, a scholar – but an artist, (but after being an artist in several mediums, would be a scholar).

  In a biography of Thomas Mann, she’d read that the true artist is ‘isolated & different, rejected by his fellow normal human beings’. Goethe, according to the book, was a well-known social fruitcake.

  I may – perhaps – have colossal powers in me.

  It was in order to be closer to the ‘the quiet, clock-ticking library temperament’ that she took a room near the centre of Cambridge, next door to where her maternal grandparents lived, on Castle Hill.

  Wonderful, gorgeous lodgings … Lovely view out of bedroom window – Kings College, & a panorama of Cambridge rooves, churches, & spires – smoking chimneys & blue slate tiles & tossing trees & dramatic skies.

  The Cambridge house where Not-Mary had her lodgings during this period is about a quarter of a mile from where Dido would find the diaries in the skip forty-four years later. Not-Mary’s landlady was Miss Ramsey, the aunt of Michael Ramsey, the Archbishop of Canterbury.

  Miss Ramsey charged twenty-five shillings a week, bills and breakfast included, and Not-Mary had to move out of the room whenever the godly nephew dropped by.

  The ‘Archbish’ has slept in my bed the last two nights – he came into the Reading Room today – little did he know he spoke to the girl whose bed he’d slept in last night.

  On such occasions, Not-Mary stayed with her grandparents next door. She rarely mentions these relatives, though she must have seen a great deal of them during this period. But she mentions looking in one of their mirrors.

  Saw in the glass in Granny’s room, my own face – it has changed again – still a bit small and thin, but well-looking & above all, it has more soul – which must be the radiance Mrs W. spoke of. The clear brow, the intense large eyes behind the light spectacles, the delicate half-smiling mouth & artist’s chin.

  As soon as Archbishop Ramsey returned to Canterbury Miss Ramsey would puff up the pillows, replace the sheets and let Not-Mary back in.

  ‘This fugitive bliss of Miss Ramsey’s I adore,’ wrote Not-Mary in a small red memo book.

  The “Archbish” has been using my pink soap.

  These eyes are intense and large; the mouth is delicate and half smiling. But she still looks like a boxer in a wig, now with make-up. I don’t know what an ‘artist’s’ chin is.

  I’ve got it wrong about Whiters again. Another biographical fact I thought I had fixed has gone poooooffff! and disappeared.

  Whitefield wasn’t her family home. Not-Mary hadn’t been born there. It was a place about which she fantasised. The only time Not-Mary stayed at Whitefield, which was owned by her paternal grandmother, was when she was a pupil at the Perse Girls, between the ages of sixteen and eighteen.

  Not-Mary was born thirty miles away, in a house in Haynes, outside Bedford, where

  All the buildings squat & ugly & dirty, and the people looking both stupid & repulsive …

  As usual with Not-Mary’s style of writing, it’s difficult to build up a solid picture of what the Haynes house was like. It had the vulgar name of ‘Tudor Cottage’. It was close to a main road. I imagine a house on a terrace corner with a low garden wall that faces into a crossroads; white textured walls; a wood-stained 1930s portico stuck between two bay windows containing pieces of bottle glass; asthmatic rosebushes with car soot under the leaves. The more I think about it, the more I dirty up the walls and ruin the flowerbeds. Haynes, during these post-war years, was kept awake by lorries transporting seething cargoes of fresh-baked building stock from the brickworks at Stewartby to supply the housing boom in the east.

  Not-Mary mentions the difficulty of getting to sleep.

  Living with her in Tudor Cottage were her mother, two of her sisters (‘the sharp-tongued and naggy Woill, and that large-faced, smelly brat which is my sister Kate’) and her father, ‘a stingy stick’ who is mentioned as little as possible. In one of the diaries there’s a sketch of the house that also mentions a character called Bendlow, who might be a servant or the toilet:

  When her mother reached the top of the stairs during the wall-stabbing episode, Not-Mary, still holding the penknife, cried out, ‘I won’t come with you in the car to visit Whiters since you’d be ashamed of me; but I’ll probably cut my wrists whilst everyone is away.’

  They forced her to come to Whiters.

  During the thirty-mile drive Not-Mary huddled in the back of the car. The strength of her emotions had terrified her. The journey passed through ugly towns followed by slow, over-farmed hills. Much of the way was a blur of hedgerows. None of it had the brilliant, almost painful sense of experience that true life ought to have for an artist. It zipped noiselessly by.

  Only when the car reached the village of Great Shelford, close to Whiters, did the hollowness of her mood start to fill itself in. The spire of St Mary the Virgin church was, she admitted, at least pretty. The land in front of the high street pub – Saxons once lived there; that was comforting to know. At every field gate the hedges running alongside Hinton Way vanished and flashed back again, and in those swift gaps Not-Mary glimpsed the wooded sea of Cambridge below; she could pick out the conceited college spires.

  Her sister Kate was at the wheel, not her mother or father.

  ‘To drive a car is coming on in life,’ declared Not-Mary to herself. She was awed by the way Kate veered sharply through the howl of oncoming traffic, shot between the gateposts into Whitefield’s tree-lined drive and, quickly adjusting the gear lever and foot pedals, eased past the ‘pink-coppery rustling wheat with the poppies growing in between’. Not-Mary could not believe it when her sister later said that, in that deft blur of movements, she had ‘felt no nervousness’.

  Kate ‘is turning out in life much better than me’.

  On this evening after the wall-stabbing episode, Not-Mary asked to be let out at the bottom of the drive so she could walk up along the avenue of lime trees alone. She needed that, she explained, to give her time to return to herself. Only at Whitefield House, whether she was living there or not, did Not-Mary feel she had a real identity. Only at Whitefield was she not Not-Mary, the outcast, the woman who will go to her deat
h nameless and be thrown out in a skip, but

  ‘Laura!’ cried her grandmother, flinging open the front door. ‘Welcome!’

  18 Growing up

  I am too tall.

  Aged thirty-five

  On the train back from meeting Vince, I had had a shocking idea. I realised I could bring ‘I’ back from the grave and measure her height.

  ‘I’ mentions that she is tall. Her size bent over her. Disgusted by it, she had a stoop and walked oddly.

  E said I am nothing but a tall child.

  E said I walk like some one who is not quite right.

  E said Mrs Sophia looks after a girl who walks like I do, and she gets hysterical and right out of her mind.

  E said Laura you are …

  That’s how I’d discovered the diarist’s name was Laura: by reading it in one of E’s dehumanising attacks while I was searching for clues about the diarist’s height.

  Now I realised I didn’t need to wait for Laura to tell me the answer; I could calculate it. I stared through the train window at the passing countryside with remembered triumph – Laura! Her name was Laura! – and sensed that everything was a symbol. The woodland running along one side of the railway tracks was my ignorance. The view on the other side across sunlit irrigation streams to a village church – that was the revelation of ‘I’s Christian name. The sudden blocking of this view by a B&Q warehouse with garish orange signage represented my professionalism: although pleased to have uncovered this name, I was not going to let myself be distracted by it. A name is just a name. One must not draw cheap and superficial conclusions. All the same, I had never been able to picture Not-Mary as tall. Not-Mary is a short person’s name. ‘Laura’ has stature.