A Life Discarded

by Alexander Masters

  She remembers that Sidney might be

  some sort of cousin.

  ‘If the ancestors of the Whitersites once lived at Penshurst Place … my distant family was entertaining Henry VIII, even.’

  ‘It was really good of Sidney to give water to a dying man like that, instead of having it himself,’ she adds fondly.

  As in all the diaries, Laura’s sense of self comes from comparing herself to other people. With art and music a failure, TV has become the measure of herself.

  Unable to sleep one night, she fishes around her room and finds Enid Blyton’s schoolgirl novel, Summer Term at St Clare’s:

  It’s stunning, it’s marvellous. It seems to bring me greater joy as an adult than it did as a child. I got as far as Janet is hauled over the coals by Miss Roberts for going to the cinema, when I needed to get up to go to the lavatory – left the book with a groan. To lie sleepless all night in bed, straining my eyes, has been a kind of happiness; I thought of nothing but this happy enthralling world of girlhood. The book, incidentally, was 15 pence – that little merit was thought of it – whilst rubbish in the bookshop sells for pounds. Can’t help thinking that Uncle Wick’s heavy treatise on Macedonia (at £25 a volume) is rubbish compared with this delightful little work of art.

  From which we learn that her uncle was Nicholas Geoffrey Lemprière Hammond CBE DSO, author of Philip of Macedon; The Macedonian State: The Origins, Institutions and History; History of Macedonia (three volumes); and (in case he hasn’t made his life’s purpose quite clear) History of Macedonia (one volume). Laura calls him ‘Uncle Wick’.

  Was her name Laura Hammond?

  I pushed the question aside. I liked this woman whatever her name. I enjoyed her clumsiness and her obsessions and her occasional desires for an outburst of violence. I thought I recognised a lot of her qualities in myself. I wanted to understand her. Biographers often report that they enjoy a private relationship with their subject that is, impossibly, acknowledged on both sides. Dido talked about it frequently when she was writing her biography of the comic novelist William Gerhardie, who died five years before she began her work. So what if Laura’s last name was Hammond? We had got beyond last-name terms.

  Laura frequently uses quotation marks in these books to hold certain terms apart from the rest of the sentence. Often these are clichés, or modern turns of phrase, or words she evidently thinks are vulgar or commercial, and so the quotes show that she has adopted the correct ironic detachment. ‘To “do one’s best” ’; ‘mother is not very good at “taping” things’; ‘the “safetypin youth” ’; ‘ “God” not quite “delivered”, after all’.

  ‘God’ always gets plucked out this way, but so do ‘yoghurts’.

  There is not always a suggestion of wryness, and she’s not being purely snobbish either. Frequently, the quotes surround the name of a TV programme or celebrity: ‘Father Ted’, ‘Alan Titchmarsh’, ‘Oz Clarke’, ‘Dame Edna Everage’. But she does the same for ‘Nicholas Nickleby’. These names get singled out because they are larger-than-life figures. Their days are so dramatic and hot compared to her own that they have to be handled with quotation-shaped tongs.

  Michael Barrymore doesn’t get this treatment, however, even though he’s the most preposterous real-life character of all. Laura loves Michael Barrymore like a disreputable younger brother.

  There is a small bulletin on Barrymore in the Sun – he ‘strenuously denies’ the allegations that he followed the 27 year old youth into the basement toilets. I feel sorry for Barrymore, I must say. He was so nice about it, when the tortoise in the show ruined his suit.

  Chopin, Mozart, Beethoven and Rosemary West, the serial killer, are also never put in quotes.

  I think if one saw Rose West in M&S, one would be able to see she wasn’t right in the head.

  Laura’s read and watched so much about these sociopaths and geniuses that they’ve shaken off their inverted commas. They’ve become mirrors of herself. By spotting shared characteristics with Barrymore or Beethoven she establishes that she has some existence outside her appalling room. She squeezes under the door, throws off her fears and lives everywhere:

  My life would be very, very different indeed, if I was the BBC Food and Drink presenter Jilly Goolden.

  Although it’s difficult to see what other objects are in her housekeeper’s quarters apart from the television set, occasionally Laura complains about ‘the terrible ache in my eyes’ and turns her attention away from the screen so we can look around.

  The room is not on the ground floor. There is a window near the bed that looks down on the house orchard. If she leans out far enough she can see across a field owned by the Veterinary School to the Ascension Parish graveyard, where Wittgenstein is buried. At night, she can watch the moon arc slowly over the roofs of Churchill College.

  It really is strange, that there seem to be things on the moon, relics of a civilisation of giants. There is a crane that has a boom 25 miles long! There is a sort of chandelier thing, and a thing rather like the Eiffel tower …

  The ceiling in her room is high. The walls are wainscoted. There is a bedside table with a clock that she believes she can ‘remote view’, i.e. tell the time on it without looking, as CIA operatives were supposedly trained to do in the Cold War. Next to the clock is a box of Mogadon and another of aspirin and a mug of Horlicks.

  On the floor there are always several paperbacks. Almost all are novels, biographies or true crime.

  We know that Laura hates her own reflection, and therefore we can guess that there are no mirrors on the walls of her bedroom. She never cuts her luxuriant hair herself even though she could save money that way, and she always wants to save money.

  I had to wait a bit at the hairdressers, I must say how much I hated how I looked, in the big mirror; probably fatter than last year; and there might be something in it, when E used to say I have a ‘round face’ and ‘like a full moon’.

  Adding a moon-shaped jaw solves the boxer-in-a-wig problem, but it makes Laura look deranged. The difficulty is with the eyes (if you cover the eyes, the mouth is pleasant). I’ve been infected by the mania of the later writing, and I am not good enough at drawing to get rid of it. This is the mask of her young face stretched over her middle-aged diaries.

  She puts off buying smalls until her current underwear has fallen apart because she doesn’t want to see her reflection in the changing room.

  Make a note; that I made another attempt to get a bra at M&S. I tried on three, in separate stages. It really was exhausting, having to get undressed three times.

  Even when she does find something that fits, the acknowledgement of what she has become means she won’t pay for it.

  I nearly did buy the bra that was 42B … In my early years at Peter’s I used to have a 38B.

  Flora insists that all the humps I’ve drawn between Laura’s arms as a result of this new bra information are not right

  We also know that there is at least one radiator present, because just as the weather starts to get cold, Pongy Peter sneaks in when she isn’t looking and turns it off. Six months later, as soon as the outside temperature returns to 26 degrees, he creeps back and turns the radiator on again.

  One of the oddities of looking round a room by the light of a private diary is that the more precise the description of an object, the less likely that it is actually there. It’s not interesting to the writer to describe things that are in full view. It’s only the missing or imaginary items that she wants to dwell on. The old photographs of E – they should be in this pile in the middle of the room, but they are not. The sheet music of the Brahms sonatas E used to play during their holiday in Greece should be in that piano stool by the wall, but they’re gone – burned, she suspects, by Peter. Even comparatively dramatic incidents tend to be characterised by their absence:

  I wasn’t bothered so much by the mouse last night.

  When I think of Laura at this end of her life, she is always in bed, late at night: a tall,
angular woman with an indistinct but not very pleasant face who is, oddly, never writing. She is lying full stretch on the mattress, exhausted. Her white-haired head is hemmed in on one side by a window looking across Peter’s brutalised lawn, on the other by a side table, and at the top end by a mahogany headboard that looms up into the dark. The TV is glowing and flickering at her feet as if someone is hurriedly trying to complete a welding project, and beyond that, barely visible in the jolting shadows, are the teetering piles of brilliantly-coloured notebooks: the triumphs of a scribbled-down life.

  November 22nd, 1963, a third of a century earlier. BANG! Kennedy assassinated: Single bullet. 350 metres. It’s one of the few occasions in any of the diaries, late or early, that the outside world penetrates the self-obsessed fog. The poignancy of the young President’s funeral upsets her entries for six days.

  Bedtime:– Feel very sorry for Jackie Kennedy tonight; no longer the First Lady in the land, but the loneliest lady in the land.

  Nov. 25th. Saddens me beyond words to think of the young, gay president lying beneath insensate earth, knowing no more than the river or the flowers.

  Nov. 26th. America’s tragedy still makes me cry; nothing left of the President except his spirit in the hearts of the people; and I think of the eternal flame that Jackie has ignited, ‘that will henceforth always flutter and twinkle its message to the capital city across the Potomac River’.

  Nov. 28th. The world moving on now, and mourning put aside. Poor Jackie is already fading into obscurity; will be busy now, arranging a move of house …

  This is the last major political event mentioned in the books that I’ve read. Since then, four million words: nothing.

  Watergate scandal, Lebanese civil war, Margaret Thatcher.

  Not a mention.

  Bhopal gas leak, fall of the Berlin Wall, bombing of the World Trade Center.

  Not a peep.

  There is one letter in the handwriting that has not changed between the early diaries and these late colourful ones. It is always put down with care and given respectful, unnecessary end bars which would have slowed the pace of the script noticeably. But with this letter there is no compromise. It is the capital letter ‘I’.

  25 Who E? (cont.)

  It is rather as if I were on my bicycle – bicycling along merrily, and then a car passes too close, so that I wobble; so that if I’m not careful, I’ll fall off all together, out of fright. That is an analogy – E’s criticisms being the passing car.

  Aged thirty-five

  To get away from the living is easy, but the dead follow you everywhere. There’s no escaping an absence.

  It took Laura twenty years to recover from the death of E in 1979. She developed agoraphobia; she had a breakdown; she turned into a hoarder. The clutter in her room, mostly 10p trinkets brought back from charity shops, became catastrophic. It was to make a dent in this mountain that Peter had taken to sneaking in, carving off portions, and having a ‘burn up’ on the bonfire. He isn’t to be condemned too harshly. When she attacked Peter’s furniture in the middle of the night and made deep stab marks in the living-room door with a knife, he let it pass. They had known each other for half of Laura’s life. They had loved and lost several people in that time.

  There was never any sex between Laura and E. Julich in the thirty years they knew each other. Their affair was always what it had been at the start: a schoolgirl crush. When E died, Laura lost her closest friend, her mentor, her decision-maker, her personification of artistry and, for the next twenty years, herself.

  The fact that E has turned out to be an elderly woman doesn’t change my interpretation of the way she ruined Laura’s life, but it has made me more sympathetic. I want to know the details – how does a sixty-four-year-old female seduce a fourteen-year-old girl? How can E, placed in front of an attractive, heterosexual, independent teenager, turn her own wrinkles and white hair into such searing erotic beauty that she brings the girl to her knees?

  I have to say, now that I know the answer, I wish I’d met E. The woman deserves respect.

  She did it with a sonata.

  Beethoven’s Pathétique is a work of repeated assaults. It opens with a crash.

  To my ear, music that starts like this means the pianist should panic, slam down the keyboard cover and let the notes finish bumping about on their own. But immediately afterwards, the Pathétique hits quietness.

  The notes that follow are a lull between breakers; they feel as if they shouldn’t be trusted. And they shouldn’t … Bang! The big noise comes again; then more quietness.

  ‘You’ve heard of Gieseking, of course? Walter Gieseking?’ said Graeme Mitchison, jolting open his front door. Graeme is the only pianist I know. He has two concert grands slotted back to back in his drawing room, but how they got there is impossible to understand. They could not have fitted through the doors or windows. A strong set of bookshelves juts out from the wall behind one of these pianos and contains hundreds of stern-looking scores with titles that suggest the deeper parts of a German car engine: Klavierstücke, Präludien und Fugen, Band Zwei. You can see an unfortunate picture of Graeme on Twitter, playing in the portrait gallery of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge: ‘Amazing lunchtime concert’. He looks as if he’s driving one of Peter’s large lawnmowers. He seems a little cross. There appears to be a piece of marble pressing down the piano lid. Has he grabbed it from the sculpture gallery?

  ‘Not heard of Gieseking?’ Graeme bobbed backwards in surprise. ‘No, of course not, quite right, quite right.’

  Gieseking turns out to have been a famous pianist. Another German, like E.

  ‘The reason I mention him is because he used the same sonata to seduce me.’

  I have been friends with Graeme for twenty-five years, but in many ways I don’t know him at all. I know nothing about his private life. I know few of his friends. Startled by his confession, I squeezed up to a chair beside his grands and sat down.

  ‘And this Gieseking – he was also much older than you?’ I asked at last.

  ‘Oh yes. Much older. Almost dead. It was wonderful.’

  Pathétique does not mean ‘pathetic’ in a French accent. It comes from ‘sympathetic’ – it is an appeal to shared emotions.

  ‘It was with this intense, contrasting opening movement that Gieseking caught me,’ said Graeme. ‘It would have been the same for Laura. I was in the attic of my parents’ house. You said this woman E invited Laura to her house?’

  ‘Her bedsit. She was a German refugee. Not much money.’

  ‘Yes, that would have been better than an attic. It is a piece for the troubled soul. The great contrasts in the intensity of the chords, all the clashing, the titanic forces, the thrilling rustle of activity, the dynamics going from fortissimo down to pianissimo … and to think Laura heard it live, whereas my seduction was just a recording. An old 78 that my parents had stored out of the way. It started me practising seriously, and I have never stopped since.’

  I listened intently as Graeme performed the piece. He played, I am sure, gloriously.

  It did nothing for me.

  With the slow decline of Dido I have come to find romantic music irritating – pop or classical, grand like the Pathétique or gentle like Chopin. It wants to barge its way into places where feelings are complex and subtle, and substitute a summary. Precisely what appealed to Graeme and Laura when they were fourteen is what I, nearing fifty, hate about it: its power, in Graeme’s words, ‘to reflect something that is going on in the world, take it, codify it, remove it from the area of chaos’. Such music is like clingfilm to my mind: it stretches across your tumbled mood, missing out the smaller bumps, suffocating everything by its attempt to sympathise with and represent the world of your disordered feelings. It makes me feel a little ill. When I do listen to classical music these days, the only type I can face is stuff that doesn’t attempt to ambush you emotionally. I’ve discovered it by riffling through Flora’s CD collection. Renaissance composers with bouncy name
s: Monteverdi, Gesualdo. The notes in their music sound to me pleasantly chilly.

  ‘But why? Why exactly?’ I pressed Graeme. ‘If I’m Laura listening to you perform this sonata, why do I fall in love with you? If there’s a book I think is magical and marvellous, I don’t fall in love with the author. I never want to look at the photo of who’s written a book. Authors are horrible to look at. Why is it different for pianists – especially since they’re not even doing their own work, they’re performing someone else’s creation? Instead of E, why didn’t she form an obsession for Beethoven?’

  ‘Because E was playing to her personally. You’re a troubled teenage girl and you walk into the room and a concert pianist begins to perform this to you alone, just to you, on a grand piano – obviously you’re going to fall in love!’

  Reading her diary later, Laura must have felt she would never capture E. The words were there, written down – E’s own words, present and correct, just as she had said them – but never the proper flavour of the woman; and when Laura returned to her memory to recollect what she had missed, the essential sense of E had already gone from there too. Laura needed to leap on her bicycle and ride off to visit E again.

  Expect her fascination will draw me to her like a magnet, even tomorrow, probably just to trail about with her in the path of car-bonnets, & be told I am weak willed, or need clean underwear.

  To fix E to the page, Laura had to repeat the woman’s demoralising criticisms in a chant.

  E said I have no common sense.

  E said I must overcome my allergy to people.

  E said I don’t learn by my mistakes like others, because

  I always return to them, like my posture.

  Sententious remarks, with an identical meaning but slightly different word order, were recorded as if they were new revelations. It was like trying to hold water in with bars:

  E said I’m stupid.

  E said I am stupid.