That entry covers twenty-four hours without sleep and takes up thirty pages.
There was an article in the local paper last night about low pay – I see how astonishingly I have fallen behind – that even women are getting very much more in ordinary jobs; and men get as much in a week as I get in a whole month.
Why did she take this job? The dead diarist never tells us, but to me the explanation is clear. I blame the letter E.
23 Who E?
Rather flattered that E thought me a human-being.
Aged twenty-one
Laura was fourteen until she was thirty; sixty until she was forty, and better kept in the spare room from then on.
The cause of this peculiar ageing process was E.
E first crops up in the diaries when Laura had her job at the public library, but their first meeting occurred six years earlier. Laura was fourteen, and hadn’t yet moved to Whitefield House and become a pupil at the Perse School for Girls. It was the period of the oldest volume in the collection, the school exercise book dated 1952 with the central pages showing three ghostly sketches of a girl slumped against the keys of a piano, apparently in despair, and the back pages cut out using a razor. Laura was still living with her parents (‘not exploratory spirits – the search for truth is a dead area to them’) in Tudor Cottage.
E came to the house as her piano teacher.
He was kind, supportive, interesting, dogmatic, good enough (he says) to be a concert pianist and grotesquely irresponsible. He allowed a young girl’s adulation to get out of hand.
E sees the world in terms of buckets – that’s my interpretation. To each person, a bucket. A bucket is made up of one’s natural endowments, societal responsibilities and the application of hard work. The ordinary person has no endowments, many responsibilities and is concerned only with staying alive; such a person will never rise above a quarter of a bucketful of life. The Great Artist has a full bucket. What’s more, his genius is evident from an early age, he works like a galley slave and his societal duty is to produce Art. Society’s duty in return is to accept and encourage the Artist and not mind too much about the mess and occasional nastiness that spills from an overloaded bucket. E is an example of this type of bucket. He has considerable natural gifts (the piano, those poems he’d had published); his talent appeared early; he has worked exceptionally hard. But in his case society has failed to applaud him. He is an unrecognised bucket. He will soon be a bucket of bitterness.
Scientists are not worth thinking about. Nobody cares about their buckets.
Laura is mid-bucket. When we first met her properly, working in the public library in 1958, she still needed adult instruction; she had perhaps found her talent (writing – although it might have been drawing, or maybe symphonic music, but it could be song-writing and is probably opera), and though already nineteen she was, as E points out with unstinting helpfulness, foolish and stupid and couldn’t make her big body stand up straight. That’s why he fills up his bucket cheeks and blows Esaids at her:
E disapproved of my new handbag.
E ticked me off for lack of dress sense.
E said men are on the whole better at cooking than women.
E said ‘yes, it is bitter.’
The reason Laura left her parents’ house in Luton to go to school at the Perse Girls, in Cambridge, was because E had got a post as an extra-curricular music teacher there. Laura was not academically attentive enough to attend the Perse Girls; her parents could not afford to send her to the Perse Girls; there was no reason why she should go to the Perse Girls; yet Laura determined that she would go to the Perse Girls and so she did go to the Perse Girls. It was perhaps the last time in her life that Laura displayed resolve.
Laura frequently mentions that E is Jewish, from Berlin or Vienna (it turns out to be Bonn). In middle age, she admits that the reason she is so eager to watch the Tour de France on television is because she thinks one of the cyclists must be related to E. This sportsman’s name is Bobby Julich.
E is therefore E. Julich.
In Cambridge, he lived here:
Which is, believe it or not, a Grade II listed building. Sometimes when Laura visits E in the evening she cannot see where he is sitting in the large rooms of his apartment because he is fussy about electricity. Laura has to grope around in semi-darkness. She knows he is in here somewhere, she can sense him watching her. She can distinguish the blackness of the grand piano and feel the edges of the tables and chairs covered in crackly newspaper, but the only light in the room comes from street lamps behind the trees outside and the buses passing by on their way to and from the train station. However, E is never able to hide himself for long. Even in the dark his viciousness shines bright.
E said I am a ‘silly ass’.
E said I am stupid.
E said I am 14 years old [this written when she was twenty]. I am not ripe enough yet.
E said I shouldn’t live in London because of being raped.
E said I was weak in every way.
E kept saying I am a weakling.
E said there is no place for them in life, they ought to be hung up.
Why did Laura love this abysmal man? Although later she would be amazed by her thraldom, during the late 50s and early 60s she viewed E as more central to her being than she was herself. Laura was a robot directed by E; Laura was an E-shaped carcass.
Was aware of that feeling of me being a dead personality beside E.
At the risk of getting too lit. crit. about this, E was both E and ‘I’.
If only Laura’s subjection had not been so mingled with eroticism!
E told me I am stupid in my ideas about money.
Feel E loves me for my mistakes.
E said ‘I can hardly take any more of the things you say, they’re so stupid.’
Loved E terribly, E so loving & understanding & c feely & sweet. Hugged myself for rapture over E.
E put a hand on my arm, & told me seriously I had received such a lot of good advice, if only I’d taken it, goodnight.
Dreamt very sexily of E last night, I think of mouthing E on a bed, and the sexy feeling went over to my waking hours, found E even more desirable than usual.
E said lifts seldom go wrong.
There is also a sense in which E is quite right. Until Laura is thirty she is a neurotic, petulant, lazy, delusional girl who never, outside of those few years at Camberwell, sits down to work:
E said I don’t have the mental powers to go to university. E didn’t believe in any of my so-called gifts, not even writing.
E said terrible things. Didn’t know whether I can work.
E (head in hands in despair) said ‘I don’t know.’
The self-conscious sensitivity of people who have been ‘good at English’ at school has in Laura become corrupted almost into insanity. Even without E, this un-industrious worship of her artistic self could explain why Laura went wrong.
Laura, aged fourteen, was a typical schoolgirl who loved arty things and wanted to be a triumphant arty sort of person and was good (sometimes very good) at writing and drawing and not bad at the piano. Along comes E. Julich, potential concert pianist, and tangles up Laura’s ambition with a schoolgirl crush.
But then Laura did not develop into any sort of artist at all, because she didn’t work at it. She didn’t know how to. She was just another one of those silly people who says ‘Everyone’s got a book in them,’ or ‘I could write a book if I had the time,’ and so never gets anywhere. For Laura, Art is not something you have to grind, file and strop. That’s what she calls ‘materialism’. To Laura, a young teenager, Art is eroticism.
E said [my] song-capacity, nothing, just a manifestation of the sexual impulse, like the singing of the birds & animals.
And Laura becomes a failure not just at Art but at life, just as E – the great pianist, the published poet, the … er (so humiliating) A-Level music supply teacher – feels he has become. What happened after that was not part of a delibera
te policy by E, but it has the feel of an inevitability. E’s support turned to vindictiveness. He tried to crush Laura, his second failed self, and succeeded.
The only thing Laura ever applies herself to is her diary.
Her Great Project, whether she intended it to be or not, is not her art, or a new symphony, or an invention that’s now so common that I might be using it at this minute without realising it; it’s these books.
But you have to be careful. Most people sound unbalanced in their diaries (if those diaries are honest), because that’s one of their purposes: to let out unspeakable things for a little runaround.
There are, however, two facts I have definitely got wrong in my cynical interpretation of Laura’s life and E’s role in its collapse. I have just spotted them in a red notebook with black speckles dated 1961. The first is that E was …
a woman.
Two, she was …
seventy-two years old.
24 Despite the fact that time passes with treacle-like languor …
I who am always young will inevitably be old.
Aged eighteen
Despite the fact that time passes with treacle-like languor in the late, colourful diaries, they are compelling to read. Perhaps it is precisely because of the featurelessness that the narrative is so gripping: the story becomes as open to improbabilities as a fantasy.
Not that anything does happen.
Nothing ever happens.
I had reheated cauliflower stalks for supper
she writes from her bed one Friday night in June.
I do prefer cauliflower stalks, even reheated ones, to oranges and strawberries
she adds two pages on. Three days – 7,632 words – away from that: Shock news! Hold the front page!
I have just started a new cauliflower.
She is not perfectly monovegetabic. She enjoys other food. On June 4th, she savours a memory about radishes:
I treated myself to radishes two days ago which were 69p for only about nine radishes.
But then she hesitates. There is something wrong about this recollection. For a moment she cannot figure it out.
It may only have been seven radishes, I can’t quite remember.
Reading Laura’s entries in the 1990s is like listening to a tomb breathe.
But still you want to go on reading. It took me several years to understand the obvious reason why these pages are gripping.
I had moved again, and was living in Suffolk. It was October, the start of the shooting season. Several of the woods around the house I was renting had home-made chairs in them for culling deer, lashed to the trunks of big oaks. These seats were about twelve feet above the ground, with a ladder attached. The gamekeeper could perch here quietly above the flow of scent, out of sight, and when he fired, the single bullet passed safely through the brain of the passing animal into the earth behind.
One morning, sitting in one of these chairs working on a diary from the late 1990s, I heard a leafy unwrapping sound and looked down to see eight deer grazing at my feet. They had crept up on me without either them or me knowing. I had been too absorbed in reading; they, in grass. There was a shallow mist and just their heads were above the vapour, trophies before their time. They moved slowly and in silence, dipping their faces in and out of the obscurity to nibble at the ground. Several were small; only their ears showed above the mist. After ten minutes they wandered off, crackling softly between the trees.
It was as I was walking back, ecstatic, through the mud that I realised why I wanted to keep reading Laura’s diary entries, even when they are agonisingly tedious. It is because they are true.
Nothing exciting had happened with the deer. They had just been there, true things, thinking themselves alone. Laura is also a true thing. No novelist has clattered in to impose a narrative ‘arc’ on the images of incarceration and waste in these books; she has not obscured the truth in balanced sentences and well-chosen words. Without the crank of a managed structure that a fiction writer (or a biographer, for that matter) would need to force on Laura’s story nothing is off the point and anything is possible; yet the fact that drama never happens is not disappointing. With Laura you are alone with a woman who thinks she is alone – a woman in the final stages of tedium. She has absolutely no awareness of your presence. Her drama is that she is not fiction.
In physics there is no specialness about ‘now’. The physicist’s picture of the world encompasses the entire sweep from future to past. The junction between the two, that minuscule ring of the present that matters so much to us, has no distinctive theoretical role. In Laura’s diaries from the 1990s, the situation is the inverse: only ‘now’ is clear; only ‘here’, in this room, tonight, matters. A TV show might provoke thoughts about the past, but it is the act of having those thoughts, not the past itself, that she wants to record. Everything that this woman locked up in her bedroom late in the evening writes, and by writing makes interesting, could be replaced by a single, endlessly repeated, mysterious sentence: I am alive. I am alive. I am alive …
When she is not shopping, cooking, dusting, washing up, negotiating with the milkman, bickering with the cleaner, the gardener, herself –
Going to be a mouse no longer – jolly well might tell Betty I won’t have her doing the kitchen on Fridays when I’m cooking; & tell Evans not to grow sprouts always. Shall tell Peter the truth about my ‘fit of spleen’. It’s about time he knew how I really feel about things. Bloody well am going to be a musician too, & will play Mozart with an orchestra if I want to.
– mopping the floor, picking apples, emptying the garbage, changing sheets, defrosting the fridge, filling the washing machine, handwashing woollens or writing her diary, Laura watches TV.
For twenty-five years.
I felt very depressed when I woke up this morning – reality hitting me again, last night’s enjoyment evaporated. The TV is like a drug, and prevents me thinking … If I had had a TV when I was in digs, I might have been less likely to break down. It makes such an enormous difference, to have it. It is also nice before lunch.
She is never going to be a musician, because she never thinks of herself as a musician first. She is always a housekeeper, then a person, then a musician. I’m the same about physics. To me, the only subject worth anything is physics. By comparison, writing is pathologically self-obsessed, emotionally trite and meretricious. Physics is intellectual work; writing is part of the entertainment industry. This is why writers tend to be boring people, and scientists not. But I will never be a physicist, because I think of myself as a biographer first, a human second, and a physicist never. The opening trick to becoming is to convince yourself that you already are. Laura and I both fall at the first hurdle.
Everything about Laura’s writing in these colourful books from the 1990s suggests constriction. From the 1960s to the 1980s, she was a remarkably diligent diarist; now she’s an obsessive one. Each book, containing between 120,000 and 150,000 words, is filled in two months. The ‘o’s and ‘a’s have almost disappeared into themselves; they are punctured balls. The ‘s’s at the ends of words have shrivelled into tails. The ‘d’s are still deltas, rather haughty; the dangly-down bit on the ‘y’ still shoots back as if it’s been thwacked with a bat. But these flourishes now seem like releases instead of ornaments, as though Laura needs to use up the ink she’s squeezed away from the other letters. Meanwhile, the words pour in until the page is done, then she turns over and begins again.
The passage of time is still clear, but the calendar has started to disappear: few of the later books mention what year they were written, sometimes not even what month.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Laura spent her free time going on careless bike rides in the country; ‘slaying’ Schumann preludes on her employer’s piano; taking week-long holidays to Rottingdean with E, where they argued about who stole the butter in the night.
After 1990 everything succumbs to television. Laura’s idea of bliss is to sweep her boss out the front door,
boil up a pack of Vesta chicken curry (which is so corrosive that when she’s not eating it she uses it to clean egg off the saucepan) and spend three weeks ogling doped-up men in Lycra battle over the Pyrenees in the Tour de France. If it is the Queen’s day at Ascot or there’s a royal wedding, she won’t even go into town to cash her pay cheque from Peter, although she is always overdrawn. When E lies dying in London, it is because she wants to see more French bicycle racing that Laura refuses to visit her. She disappears as a human being during these last years, and reappears as a 2-D reflection on the TV screen.
From the biographer’s point of view, it’s a big improvement.
In the earliest books, Laura rarely tells anecdotes, reports dialogue or gives descriptions of people she’s met. Her interest is to transcribe the burble of her obsessions. After 1990 unexpected biographical breakthroughs appear because of the television. In 1998, Pet Rescue on Channel 4 features a dog called Buster who is sent to a rich house where the woman cooks him a supper of fried steak and carrots, served on a plate ‘like a hotel’. The event is so shocking to Laura, so cleanly contemptible, that for a moment she is taken back forty years:
It was a better dinner than I get myself … really, the food Auntie Doll did for the dogs at Whiters was ideal. She did a side of horsemeat for them, and used to cut bits off every day, and give it with biscuits.
Where do you store a side of horse in 1962? Laura doesn’t say. Pretty Auntie Doll pops up like a medieval monster, makes a savage attack on a dead horse, and is gone.
In 2000, on an episode of Antiques Roadshow (BBC 1) broadcast from Penshurst Place, Laura spots that the Elizabethan poet and courtier Sir Philip Sidney
looked rather like Uncle John.
A Life Discarded Page 11