Your neighbours?
I don’t think people on the estate would be interested. They’re mostly old people, on their way out. The ambulance comes up here every few days.
As I say, you’d have the right to veto the entire project if you don’t like it.
Yes, well, that’s okay, yes.
What do you think your mother will say?
I don’t think she’ll mind really.
And your family, your sisters?
I don’t think they’ll mind, yes.
You don’t always say very nice things about them.
Oh, don’t I? Noooo. Hmm.
What do you imagine such a biography might be like, about you?
I really don’t know. Obviously it will be about someone who’s been very disappointed in life, but I haven’t been on drink or drugs or anything like that. It’s not that degree of disaster. You know, a lot of people have been much worse off and had worse lives.
I’d assumed this book would end with a picture of your gravestone! How do you cook? Because your stove isn’t accessible. It’s under that blanket of dust and those tins.
I got my gas cut off. I had a row with the gas people. Before I lived here they charged me all the wrong bills, I just couldn’t get it sorted out, they charged me as if I was living here and then in the end they cut me off.
But that was ten years ago.
I have this little electric. I just boil things.
It doesn’t seem very convenient.
No, it’s not the way I really want to live.
But your fridge works?
Yes. Also, I have a little garden at the back.
Do you do much gardening?
No, I hate gardening. Another bit of my story is that I fell deeply in love with a lady who was a concert pianist when I was a girl, a lady who was a refugee, had come over from Germany. I fell so deeply in love with her that it went on for years and years. She was far older than me, of course – there was fifty years between us. Yes, from that age I was in love with her and it didn’t change.
Jacket illustration by Laura Francis for a book of Italian recipes
What was it about her?
Well, she played the piano. She was a wonderfully gifted concert pianist. She used to play professionally when she was in Germany. She used to play for me personally – that’s really quite wonderful, isn’t it?
Did anything ever happen between you?
Oh no! She wouldn’t have liked anything like that.
You didn’t mind that?
Oh no, certainly not. I did find her attractive. A little person, a little tiny person. Yes … I’m not as successful as the others have been in my family. I’ve not got married. I’ve really rather felt a failure.
It’s no good if you’re going to fall in love with a woman who’s fifty years older.
It’s ridiculous, isn’t it? It’s ridiculous! I just had such strong feelings for her I didn’t really bother with anybody else. It’s really a bit strange, isn’t it? It seems a bit strange. I think I would have liked to have got married. Didn’t have much chance to meet people, we lived out in the country.
Male or female would you like to be with?
I think a man probably, yes, yes.
But your sisters met people.
Yes, they did, but they were car drivers.
I think even a bicycle driver can meet somebody.
Anyway, it’s not an issue now.
I wanted to ask you about one of the books – the first one I have in the collection: 1952. [I hand it to her.] Are there any particular thoughts you have about this book?
Oh, yes, yes [laughing], yes, I vaguely remember this. I was about twelve or thirteen. This is a birthday list. ‘Gun for Henry’ – Henry was a doll. Yes! These are portraits of E.
Those horrible ones of platypus mouth are E?
[More laughter] Yes! Yes, they’re all E, it’s E again and again and again.
If you look at the back, you’ll see some of the pages have been taken out, as if with a razor.
Yes, I see.
What’s that about? It appeared to me violent and exciting.
Perhaps my dad used the pages. We were very far from the shops.
So there was nothing more dramatic about it at all? I had all sorts of sinister ideas about it. I thought you had severed the pages because they contained a terrible secret or [said with hope] perhaps E?
Perhaps my dad needed some paper and took these ones out to draw on. He was an amateur artist and sculptor. He made figures in clay.
Did he really? What sort of figures?
He made a little gnome for the garden.
(For the next few minutes, Laura looked through the book, delighted, laughing frequently. I had got a lot wrong. The drawing of the ballet dancer on page 99 was not by her, but by her sister Jennifer. The faint figure weeping at the piano, of which I make heavy weather on page 102, is not a tragic image of herself, but just another picture of E, dozing on the keys.)
And this one is E, and here’s another, and that one … She was a very funny person to look at. This drawing is by me. I remember that, ha, ha, ha! This is William. I loved the William books, ha, ha! I wasn’t into sport. I read William books.
Who’s your favourite writer now?
I like some of Iris Murdoch. I like Dickens. I’m fond of Dickens. I’m reading Rebecca at the moment, because that’s so real.
(An hour had passed. I got up to go. On my way out I noticed a book on top of the piano. As if put there as a joke, it was Dusty Answer, by Rosamond Lehmann, with an epigraph from Meredith:
Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul
When hot for certainties in this our life!
In the kitchen, I touched the swag of dust over the stove.)
It’s like a fabric, isn’t it? It’s rather wonderful.
It is really. It’s not what my family would think. They’d be horrified. Oh well, goodbye, goodbye.
I’ll ring next time I’m here, and I can begin showing you the manuscript. Is there anything in the diaries that you feel you wouldn’t want discussed?
Not really, no, because it wouldn’t be true otherwise.
30 Epitaph
Here lies Laura Francis, Who did nothing, Went nowhere, Was loved by nobody.
Epitaph suggested by E
‘Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul, when hot for certainties in this our life!’ The quote inside the book on Laura’s piano pestered me home. Laura had been hot for certainties: the certainty that she was an artist; the certainty that she was capable of writing an opera; the certainty that she was a rival to van Gogh; the certainty that she would one day be published.
Laura had got a dusty answer. She had ended up spending over a quarter of a century as a housekeeper-companion to a dehydrated professor of IT – a Victorian job trapped in the twentieth century, for which she was paid, per month, less than the average worker was earning in a week.
I’m the most illiterate writer I’ve ever met. I can spend five years studying diaries nobody wants in which nothing happens, but I’ve never read the classics. When I reached London, I found a café and looked up the lines from Meredith. The quotation is from his novella in verse called Modern Love, one of the first ‘psychological’ poems. I downloaded a copy from Internet Archive. Published in 1862, it is about the break-up of a marriage, told in fifty sonnets.
The narrator is the husband, speaking sometimes in the first person, sometimes in the third. The man’s wife (generally assumed to be based on Meredith’s first wife) has betrayed him. In gloominess he finds a mistress, but he can’t love her because he still loves his wife. There is no clarity or resolution. Over fifty pages the husband and wife destroy each other. He is cold, aloof, hurt, inconsistent, disdainful. She is broken. Desperate not to expose their failure to the world, they pretend to their friends that they are happy; determined to be masterful and polite, they sleep, side by side, ‘Like sculptured effigies they might be seen/upon their marriage-t
omb, the sword between’.
I must have been in an odd mood, because I couldn’t let these overwrought, occasionally clunky, subtle poems go. I repeatedly had to get up from my café table with my eyes smarting and a catch in my throat and try to pace off my emotion in front of the sandwich refrigerator; then I’d jump into the next sonnet so fast that I couldn’t understand what Meredith was talking about. The words were made from trumpet blasts. The punctuation boomed with exclamations. Forcing myself to be calmer, I went through the sonnet a second time and saw that it was perfectly clear: the poem was about Laura.
Cold as a mountain in its star-pitched tent, Stood high Philosophy, less friend than foe: Whom self-caged Passion, from its prison-bars, Is always watching with a wondering hate.
It was simply a matter of translating the terms correctly. E was self-caged Passion, enraged by her failure as an artist, taking it out on Laura. ‘High Philosophy’ was to be read as ‘High Art’ in Laura’s case, ‘less friend than foe’. She had watched High Art all her life with ‘a wondering hate’ – hatred of her inability to grasp it.
In Love’s deep woods,
I dreamt of loyal Life: – The offence is there!
Love’s jealous woods about the sun are curled;
At least the sun far brighter there did beam. –
My crime is, that the puppet of a dream,
I plotted to be worthy of the world.
Those last two lines are not Meredith reflecting back to when his marriage was happy; they are Laura at the edge of Whiters’ wood, gazing down at Cambridge, speculating on her future life as a triumph ‘in three or four different mediums’, including being ‘an authority and writer on Shakespeare’.
The poems were not just about Laura, they were also about Dido, now too weak to get out of bed, who was not going to finish her groundbreaking book on Thomas More or her six-hundred-page ‘fiendishly devilish’ murder mystery, and about Richard beating his legs and hands against his wheelchair. Every poem seemed to me to contain jumbled insights into someone else. The lines were easy to pry apart. Their meaning was only lightly hidden behind the commonplace narrative of a collapsing love.
I left the café, and spent the rest of the afternoon pondering in Regent’s Park. Modern Love is as incisive a description of the process of loss as I have ever read.
That night I met Gian Mario at a hotel bar in Soho.
‘What did you find with your lady?’
‘She is seventy-three. She still cycles and walks everywhere. She could do with a new pair of glasses. Her wrist hurts because she broke it, but it is not her diary-writing hand. She does not know how she lost the books. She did not even realise they were missing. She continues to write one to three thousand words a day.’
‘Suicidal?’
‘Not remotely.’
‘Mad?’
I shook my head. ‘Eccentric.’
‘Happy?’
‘Content,’ I suggested. ‘Not so discontented,’ I corrected. ‘Accepting,’ I corrected again, and felt, as I said each word, that I chased Laura out of it. ‘She says she is surprised. She hadn’t expected to feel as well as she does since leaving the man Peter’s house.’
Gian Mario bent forward until the top of his head almost reached the sugar bowl. When he straightened up he had a green book in his hand. Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Scepticism. He gave the cover two stern taps, as though settling the contents inside. ‘I must reheat the sceptical cabbage for you once again.’
Laura was not only in Meredith’s poems, she was also in a two-thousand-year-old philosopher’s account of ‘how people struggle and eventually fail to discover the truth’.
‘Sceptics become overwhelmed by the different and conflicting accounts of what happiness, justice, truth are all about. For every description, every argument, every theory, no matter how apparently compelling, another description, another argument, another theory exists that neutralises the former.’
‘E attacking her one day, encouraging her the next?’ I suggested excitedly. Gian Mario shook his head from side to side in a way that might have meant yes.
‘One day the theory would be that E hated her; the next, that she loves her,’ I continued, regardless. All it took, once again, was to translate the terms of the metaphor correctly. ‘Another example: God has been wicked to Laura because he got her sacked from the public library. But God is good because he is providing her with the neuroses needed to be a true artist.’
‘After a while, we find this condition of competing theories and arguments quite hard to take,’ continued Gian Mario. ‘It is exhausting, if not depressing. What next? Basically the Sceptic ends up saying, “Whatever.” To me the sceptic elements of your lady’s story amount to 1) her feeling of happiness as being completely unrelated to the actual achievements of her life, and to 2) the fact that such a feeling came unexpectedly. As soon as she gave up, as soon as she stopped waiting for one kind of happiness, some other form of happiness, or at least tranquillity, took over.’
I had to get back to Victoria station to catch the last train. It started to rain. The wind rattled shop doors and kicked boxes along the alleyways. As we walked down Oxford Street I remembered my voice recorder, and held it up to Gian Mario’s face, but all I can hear now of what he calls his further ‘lucubrations’ is a scraping sound.
The last service to Eastbourne passes out of London in a sequence of diminishing sparkles. After the costume jewellery of Chelsea Bridge comes the glowing solder of Clapham Junction, then the embers of East Croydon. Twenty minutes later the train breaks through the North Downs into Sussex, where there is darkness.
Gian Mario was right – Laura was a practical example of scepticism, a two-thousand-year-old philosophy made flesh. Meredith was right – a messy love story combined with a desire to play a certain social role (the sensitive artist, in her case) was at the heart of Laura’s unhappiness.
Everyone was right, except E.
‘Here lies Laura Francis, who did nothing,’ E began her proposed epitaph. Laura has done something for which she deserves to be remembered forever: she has written a forty-million-word description of being alive. If I were an extraterrestrial wanting to understand humans, I wouldn’t bother with literature or films or music, I’d go straight to Laura Francis. Life is never so distilled and simple as in a novel or a song. Laura deals with the daily murmur. Four decades before people began wearing portable computers twenty-four hours a day to record their physiological data and video their lives, Laura began a more perceptive work: a daily record of an ordinary woman’s thoughts about her existence, written without any artfulness or false drama – written, so to speak, from the inside.
‘Went nowhere’, continues E.
Another lie. Laura did go somewhere. In 1974 she went to Rottingdean, in Sussex, with E.
‘Was loved by nobody’.
This is more difficult. I want to be able to say that Laura was loved by lots of people – that E herself loved her, that Dame Harriette loved her, that Peter loved her. But I don’t think they did. When she was young, her sisters and parents loved her, but that’s not what E means. Apart from E, Laura never had a close friend.
Laura is funny, poignant, clever, perceptive, kind, generous, and has, against the probabilities, achieved something great in life with her diaries – but she remains Laura, an awkward woman at odds with the world. I am still learning what sort of person she is in real life, but in her books she is not a person who invites love, however much she might deserve it.
E’s wrongness here isn’t the fact of Laura’s lack of love, it’s how E places the blame. She suggests it is Laura’s fault: too gauche, too bad-postured, too bursting with peculiarities to attract love. But the Laura she is talking about is a Laura she helped to create. That raw, exposed creature of the early diaries; the ill-tempered middle-aged cleaner at Peter’s house – that was what was left of Laura once E had shorn her of love.
It was time to return the books. The skip had loaned the
m to Dido, and Dido had loaned them to me, and for five of the twelve years I had owned them I had been a gossipy god looking through solid walls into a person’s privacy. And what had I seen? The muffled violence of an ordinary-extraordinary, mundanely outlandish, limp and taut life called Laura Francis.
And now Laura was discovered, and that part of my life was over. I had been privileged. Because I’m lucky enough not to have many principles and to like tittle-tattle, I’d opened the books and enjoyed myself for half a decade. There were no conclusions to draw. Scepticism, Meredithism, what instructive messages Laura’s at first frightened and then entombed existence might hold for the rest of us; whether diaries do or do not accurately represent the people who write them – it was all so much nonsense and noise.
It was time to shut up.
A year after I met Laura for the first time, Dido died.
Her last days were ghastly. Just after a friendly nurse had inserted a drip into her arm at the local hospital, the odious consultant who’d been causing difficulties for some time insisted, through an intermediary, that the tubes be pulled out and Dido informed that there was, after all, no hope left. Horrified and defeated, she was transferred to the hospice. For three days the excellent staff there put her on what the government calls the Liverpool Pathway, which means drugging a person up until she can endure what is about to follow, then dehydrating her to death. Dido’s flesh sank away as though it were being sucked into her bones.
I still wake up at 3 a.m. with nightmares about those days.
It wasn’t until the morning of the funeral that I realised I had forgotten to invite Laura.
I raced up to the bungalow, but I was too late.
She was out. She had gone shopping with her sister in Newmarket.
PART THREE
Biography
31 Laura Penrose Francis
Feel pretty sure that I’ll have something published sometime in my life – either artwork, or written work, or both; it is inevitable, really, even if hard-won.
Aged twenty-five
Laura Penrose Francis, May 22nd, 1939 –, Diarist.
A Life Discarded Page 16