E said how stupid I was.
E said she had rarely encountered someone so stupid.
E said I’m stupid.
Laura catalogued these shameful judgements as though they were the results of a lab experiment, unquestionable, hinting at a great truth, inconclusive. She was unable to capture the fascination of the person behind them. Her diary pages, full of E’s viciousness, were (for her, if not the reader) empty of E.
In the mid-1970s Laura fell briefly in love with a second woman. This is Dame Harriette, the eminent ninety-nine-year-old microbiologist first mentioned nine chapters ago.
Harriette was another manipulative old character with quiet sexual ways. Their relationship (from Laura’s side) was superficial, ecstatic, painful, startling but not disgusting – another schoolgirl crush. From Harriette’s point of view, Laura was barely there.
As usual, longed to press my lips to the old woman’s forehead etc.
My love for her made me feel thrilled and excited, and
I forgot to turn the tap of the hose off.
My birthday tomorrow, and I may demand a kiss from little Harriette, if I have the guts.
My birthday, and perhaps the most uncelebrated I have ever had! Little Harriette wished me well – but she hasn’t given me anything!
The old woman is subhuman and a psychopath.
‘It is,’ wrote Laura after tussling with another exhausting sequence of emotional ups and downs while she worked for this ancient person, ‘really like being with a child, but a sensible older child – one of ten, perhaps.’
I don’t like Dame Harriette. She has a kittenish manner and Laura is a mouse. The only time Laura doesn’t see her as the pinnacle of goodness is when she spots her as the nadir of bad.
For pages the two old women battle it out. Sometimes it is almost impossible to figure out which one Laura’s talking about. E is central to Laura’s life by precedent and out of Laura’s sense of loyalty; but then Dame Harriette is so much ‘sweeter’, so ‘adorable’, so ‘kissable’. In the confusion, Laura lets slip E’s first name: Elsa.
Elsa Julich. It’s a difficult name to say. The ‘a’ of Elsa sets your cheeks off in the wrong direction, and they have to switch and hurry back to say that ‘J’; the last two syllables clash.
Elsa Julich doesn’t appear on the internet as a concert pianist or a poet. There is an Elsa Julich who fled the Nazis in 1934, but she was an internationally famous soprano who died in Israel in 1964, at which time our Elsa was an enraged part-time music teacher living on the edge of the Fens, still energetically stamping on Laura’s character.
E said I look dreadful.
E said I didn’t seem to be liked very much.
E said ‘I know what a fool you are.’
E said she might not always be right.
Does Graeme’s musical analysis of Laura’s early mental state change my ideas about Elsa’s role in Laura’s unhappy life? Perhaps. If Laura was already so deeply ‘troubled’ before she met Elsa (a period for which there are no diaries) that the pathos of a twenty-minute piece of music could be critical in trapping her forever, then Laura was going to go wrong with or without Elsa’s predatory appearance. Yet the essential form of Elsa’s cruelty – the exploitation of a schoolgirl crush, the outrage at Laura’s refusal to be moulded in Elsa’s image, the vituperative criticisms because she has failed to give Elsa a second shot at artistic excitement – they are the same.
But perhaps I’ve been too harsh. Elsa was always adamant that Laura must continue to attend to her studies when Laura joined the Cambridge city library after leaving the Perse Girls (we are back in 1958–59 now). Elsa encouraged Laura to work harder, to pay more attention in her secretarial classes and to rein in her obsession with writing ‘Clarence’ novels and drawing ‘Clarence’ cartoon strips; in other words, to stop being so dreamy and hormonal. And Elsa does admit to frailties now and then. That always gave Laura a pleasurable tremble:
E said she doesn’t get afraid of things.
E said there have been times in her life when she’s been terribly afraid.
E said she was afraid when she was alone in that big house in Germany during the war with just one child, expecting bombs to be dropped on the house.
E said when she meets another person alone on a country walk she is afraid; once, when E saw someone coming towards her, she turned, & went back.
And for a couple of lines – about seven seconds at the speed Laura writes – she gloats with a sense of existing independently of Elsa. ‘That amazed & thrilled me – fancy E of all people, of such courage & nobility, having such a weakness, the same unwarranted feeling I would get in the circumstances. I could hardly hide my joy and exaltation over having E being so sweet to me, & saying such lovely things … I adored E madly, and liked myself too.’
She cycled away from Elsa’s flat triumphant after these sad occasions. She forgot her nerves and raced down Regent Street, across the cobbles of the marketplace, along Trinity College Lane. As her bicycle flew over Magdalene Bridge towards her room in the house of the Archbishop’s aunt, she felt her future was coming together nicely: her library post (this was before they dismissed her), ‘my independence, my money, my classes’ in shorthand and typing, her soapy baths at Whiters; but above all of this her closeness to Elsa.
With Elsa’s encouragement, Laura had begun to relish library duties. Her job was to stack shelves, stamp books, collect fines, cover absences at the smaller satellite branches in the residential districts of Cambridge, and run errands such as bringing fresh change for the cash register. If she passed her library exams her future would be secure: she’d be able to get a job in any library, public or private – ‘my lovely post, my career as librarian’.
Then came that first catastrophe. Laura was sacked.
Howl! Desolation!
It was impossible for Laura to understand why she had lost her job. The head librarian sat her down in the staff room and, just as Elsa had warned, said she was too ‘dreamy’, too ‘muddleheaded’ and ‘cotton-woolish’.
Laura was certainly too cotton-woolish to comprehend what that kind of explanation meant. For the rest of her life she never understood it. Looking back when she was old, she marvelled about why she kept getting the sack from jobs during these early years. But anyone who reads the diaries can understand. Her disastrous performance as a housekeeper in the Wirral was not out of character. She was arrogant, full of cringing doubts, lazy, easily distracted and always going to the toilet.
The entries from this time raise the interesting idea that, although Laura wrote the diaries, she didn’t read them. She filled the pages with words but didn’t know what the words said.
On hearing about her failure at the library, Elsa revealed the full depth of her venomousness:
E said it incredible to her that I’ve spoilt it all.
E said she doesn’t have such people as me for her friends.
E said she’s glad she’s not my parents, to have such a child.
E asked (moving a little from me) ‘Are you insane?’
But E, even savage E, steadied her. However brutal the old woman had been to the girl, Laura could not stop herself from going back for more. Over the next days Laura knocked and knocked and knocked and knocked on Elsa’s apartment door for half an hour, then sank ‘weeping copious tears on the doorstep’.
Elsa would not answer the door, ‘though she was in’.
FOUL, BLOODY LIFE, it stinks. It is dog muck on iron-grey, ice-hard, barren pavements, and vile, noisy machines, and ‘factory hand wanted, female’, and ice on waste-buckets.
26 For years, Flora has been telling me …
How I wish I was Barbara Windsor – not myself. She had all the attributes I would have liked, such as not being shy; and being a small person.
Aged fifty-five
For years, Flora has been telling me to put Laura’s books into chronological order. It maddens her to listen to me puzzle about Laura, yet still not take t
his basic step of sticking labels to the spines with the date written on and arranging the books in the right sequence.
I don’t like the idea.
I insist that the disorder of the books captures something about Laura that the five million words written across fifteen thousand pages misses – although I’m not sure what that something is. My latest interpretation of the purpose of these books is that Laura’s not writing to record her existence, she’s writing to protect her brain. Her themes aren’t repetitive because she keeps forgetting that she’s already made the same point fifteen times before, in the same book, using exactly the same sentences, but because she’s trying, by repeatedly beating the words against the page, to kill off her loneliness, her insomnia, her mother, Peter’s toilet habits, her mortification that she’s wasted every single one of her childhood talents, the fact that no one loves her or is willing to be loved by her, and the terrifying price of fish fillets. She’s not thinking these subjects through, she’s trying to knock them out. She spends so much time attempting to eliminate wretched thoughts that it’s eliminating her life. As a young woman she was a good writer, but diary entries about not exploiting her talent gobbled up the time she had to develop her talent. Writing destroyed her writing.
Feel I must must write, to get things out of my system, & it takes time
It got in the way of piano practice and drawing exercises – the other things she was good at. Instead of preparing for her secretarial exams, paying attention during work at Cambridge Central Library, cleaning up properly for the Ellises on Wirral Point, improving her life-painting at Luton, she wrote her diary, and wondered in them why she had failed at work and art.
The result of this, I declare to Flora, is that the words in the diaries (especially the later ones) often have a dead feeling, and it’s the circumstantial/incidental/conjectural things about these books that suggest life – things such as the fact that (1) at the bottom of the Ribena crate there are the decayed remains of a plastic bag, and the decay is not due to rat nibbles; (2) the lurid colour of the later volumes and the grey mood of the writing suggest a split personality; (3) Laura clearly did not read what she wrote, or did not understand what her words meant, because despite fifty years of labour she did not grasp the essential message of these pages, which any other reader spots at the first glance: namely, that her life was a failure because she never focused on anything in particular. She didn’t know how to concentrate her attention. She thought of sixty ambitions:
Want to make my life a work of art
and developed none.
I want ‘God’ hung, drawn and quartered for how I was cheated.
It is funny that Laura gave the lamb roast to the dog when she had her disastrous post in the Wirral; it is unfathomable that she continued to throw out the best things for the rest of her life while always managing to reveal to the reader the idiocy of what she was doing, but not understanding the revelation herself.
These circumstantial/incidental/conjectural things, such as the jumble of the books, force us out of Laura’s brain, back into the living world, and let us think about Laura as somebody we’ve just passed in the street.
It’s not just Laura. The diaries teach us that it is too much to be inside anybody’s head. It is a horrible place. All that repetition; that endless analysis that doesn’t analyse, just mulls a point over and over until it drops dead from banality. What goes on in a person’s brain is the opposite of what makes a story live. I thought Laura wrote these diaries because it confirmed that she was alive. But a lot of the time it’s not ‘I am alive’ that she’s repeating, it’s ‘Here I am, still sufficiently alive to try to wear down another obstacle to my contentment; here I am, still sufficiently alive to try to wear down another obstacle to my contentment; here I am, still sufficiently alive to try to …’
In particle physics, I suggest to Flora, beginning to sound pompous even to myself, there are two incompatible ways to describe the state of an object. The world is either captured in a slice, like a photograph, telling you with perfect accuracy where everything is, but not where it’s going next; or the world is wind: nothing is visible, everything is breezes, we haven’t the faintest clue where anything is, but know exactly how fast it’s going and in what direction. To get round this peculiar situation, physicists have to make compromises – settle for a description of the world that is, say, two parts breezes to one part photograph.
With Laura, the disorder of the books and the plastic bag remnants are the breezes. Her words, especially by the 1990s, are the lifeless photographs.
Flora listens patiently to this agonising, waits a few more months, then makes her point again: who am I to talk in this presumptuous way? Where is my evidence for all these fancy-sounding conclusions? Have I read all the diaries? No. Have I read above a third of them? No. So, I haven’t studied them properly. Do I then have any right, until I have done these basic things, to draw any conclusions about Laura whatsoever? No.
Unless I arrange the books chronologically I cannot know how everything ties together, and therefore cannot make a proper biographical study of the contents.
This morning I began to do as she said.
It has taken me until twenty past midnight. Many of the later books are, as I’ve explained, not dated. Laura simply arrives on page one in the middle of a Wednesday in June and bores through and out the back cover on a Friday in August. The only thing to do is read the tiny handwriting until you hit a TV celebrity death or a fresh court appearance by Michael Barrymore, then cross-check on the internet. The prawn-cocktail-pink volume is from the year 2000, because
there was the unexpected news at one o’clock that John Gielgud has died; and I feel astonished that it should happen on my birthday. It is indeed a coincidence, as there were 364 other days that he could have died.
The Kool-Aid purple volume is 1996, because Laura is worried that Michael Barrymore doesn’t visit his mum enough. She turned eighty-one that year. The chip-shop-mushy-pea volume is 2001, because Laura gets a hotel guide out of the library to look up the resort where Michael Barrymore is staying after ‘a youth’ was found floating, dead, bottom up, in his swimming pool.
Now it is done. The books are lined up in correct order on my study shelf.
And, exactly as Flora suspected, I have discovered two new facts about Laura.
The first is that my 148 diaries represent only about one eighth of the total number of volumes Laura wrote. It turns out that I don’t have a single complete year after 1962, and that almost all the 70s, the second half of both the 60s and 80s, and most of the 90s are missing. From 1952, when Elsa first appeared in Laura’s life, to 1958, I have nothing at all, except that one opening book of doodles. Before 1952, nothing. Estimating from these gaps in my collection, the correct total number of books is closer to a thousand, or forty million words.
The second fact: Laura is still alive.
PART TWO
Crisis
27 The End of history
I have a different ‘God’.
Aged sixty-two
‘Here comes the man who is going to destroy history!’ declared Professor Goldthwaite, his arms aloft as I entered the room.
It was ten days after I’d discovered Laura was alive. I had come to meet Flora in a Lebanese restaurant off the Edgware Road. Waiters hurried up and down the kitchen stairs, pressing past one another along a narrow corridor, balancing plates juicy with food. Plump customers leaned against the cash desk, putting on their cashmere coats, getting ready to pay, while new arrivals, thinner and watchful, squeezed between the tables hunting for places to sit down. The air was sharp with the scent of fresh herbs and the noise of clanging colanders.
I shook the rain out of my hair and stamped my boots. I had no idea what Professor Goldthwaite was talking about. Who was this man who was going to destroy history? Why was he standing in my direction? My glasses steamed up and he and his bow tie disappeared into foggy speckles.
Professor Richard
Goldthwaite is a historian from Johns Hopkins University. His The Economy of Renaissance Florence is ‘magisterial’ (The Economist), ‘will set the parameters of the field for decades’ (Journal of Modern History), is ‘one of the most important books in Renaissance history’ (Renaissance Quarterly).
Had he intended his announcement to refer to me? ‘The destroyer of history’? How had I managed that? I can barely remember the date of Waterloo. I stepped across the room flushed with delight.
As well as Flora, there were two other academics at the table: Gian Mario, a philosopher, and Iain Fenlon, a musicologist. Iain smiled grimly at me, half stood and held out a bear-sized hand which I shook with care. He had recently saved a woman from being run over by a Post Office van by throwing himself in front of the runaway vehicle and knocking her out of the way. The woman is fine, but his back is ruined.
Gian Mario gave an amused nod. He is a specialist in scepticism, internationally renowned for the depth and meticulousness of his scholarship, and has a beard that scoops below his chin like a tooth bandage. ‘Ciao,’ he murmured.
‘Flora’s told us about your breakthrough with the diaries,’ said Richard, sitting down with the careful air of an after-dinner speaker. ‘Now, don’t speak. Before you say anything more about it, answer this: have you written it all down? The original discovery of the books in the dumpster? The development of your theories about the author? This latest development? I mean everything. Everything you have thought about this … person.’ He said the last word quizzically, as though there might still be some doubt that Laura had stopped being merely a noun and become flesh and blood. ‘Everything you’ve conjectured. It is very important for the future of my subject that you answer this question carefully. Thousands of livelihoods may depend upon it.’
‘Of course.’ I felt a stir of self-confidence, because I could answer the question so easily. ‘I write everything down as I go along. Why?’
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