A Life Discarded by Alexander Masters
‘And when you made your breakthrough, you had already done this writing? You didn’t do it after the scoop? It’s very important to be clear about that.’
‘All written before. I’ve been working on these diaries for four years, and only discovered that she was alive last week.’
‘You understand my point? You’ve found documents about a person, studied them believing the person to be dead, formed your opinions about who the person was, what she was like, why she did the things she did, and now you’ve discovered she’s alive. Imagine if the subject of my recent book, Jacopo Peri, the man who wrote the first opera, suddenly walked through that door, able to challenge everything I have conjectured. Thank God, that will never happen, because he died four hundred years ago. My conjectures will never be called into question by the only person who knows the truth. But for the first time in historical research, you have written a portrait of a dead person, and then the dead person has come to life! It could be a catastrophe for historical research. What if all our ideas about how to interpret documents are wrong? That is why it is so important to know: have you written all your thoughts down – all the ones you had before you knew she was alive – and definitely not touched it? Think carefully: the future of history hangs in the balance …’
‘Not touched it since. Not a word,’ I confirmed, beginning to think rather highly of myself.
Richard sighed with satisfaction and picked up a menu. ‘Everything that I have worked for in the last fifty years depends on the truth of that answer.’
‘All I have to do now is get Laura’s permission to publish everything I’ve written, and I can send the manuscript to the publishers to see if they’ll buy it.’
Richard slapped his menu back down on the table. ‘You mean you haven’t sent your manuscript in yet?’
‘No. I need to meet Laura first, then I …’
‘So you could still have tampered with it in the days since your discovery?’
‘Well, I suppose …’
‘Phew!’ interrupted Richard, falling back in his chair and making a melodramatic gesture across his brow. ‘History is saved.’
Before I discovered that she was alive, I’d known that Laura was dead. In the British Library, against my better judgement and despite Vince the detective’s suggestion, I’d checked in the register of deaths and been lucky again. I hadn’t found anyone suitable in Cambridge named Laura born in 1939, but that didn’t mean she was alive. I couldn’t find her in the register of births either, and that didn’t make her not exist. After gazing at the microfiches for ten minutes I’d got bored. I don’t like this kind of research. It reminds me of the worst school mathematics, repetitious and inching along. Laura was dead, that’s what mattered. I’d decided on a likely sequence of events: Laura had died two years before Peter, which was why the books had been thrown out. Peter must have stashed the diaries in a cupboard. When he died, in came the house-clearance people, and bang! everything was chucked out.
Why had I decided she’d died two years earlier? I’m not sure. It popped up as a guess one day and then, as tidy narratives do, it became the truth. Two years felt about right. Deaths should not occur too close together.
‘It was because Flora told me to put the diaries in chronological order that I realised Laura was still alive,’ I explained to Richard. ‘I found that the last diary I had was from August 2001 – just weeks before my friend tipped herself into the skip. Instead of Peter outlasting Laura, I opened this volume to discover Laura sitting at the kitchen table after Peter’s cremation.’
It was early evening. The brown light of the declining day had stretched across the rolled-up carpet and thrown itself into the kitchen chairs. Laura sat at the table, not paying attention. The crockery and all but the essential pots and pans had been taken away. The paintings in the corridor had gone. ‘Now’ – the only moment that ever matters to Laura – had brought her to the end of fifty years. ‘Now’ she had been a fourteen-year-old girl weeping tears of love at her piano for her teacher. ‘Now’ she had been an artist in London, burning to take on the world, eager to suffer for beauty and truth. ‘Now’ she had become a housekeeper, but soon she would be a concert pianist. Now she was here, alone, middle-aged, sitting at a wooden table listening to the creaks and ticks of a house that didn’t belong to her. She felt that she had always been going to be here. This ‘now’ was the same ‘now’ she had been thinking of half a century ago, when she’d stood on the ridge of Whitefield among the ‘sprinkled oats’ and wondered what would become of her in the ‘fever and fret of modern life’.
Peter’s house was in a disgraceful state. Cupboard doors were open, shelves emptied, dust that was a century old exposed. There were fresh splinters of wood at the edge of the floor. A few months before he died, Peter had whispered to his friend Lynley that he had twenty-five secret ‘cubby holes’ around the house in which he had stashed jewels and millions of pounds’ worth of postage stamps. He wanted Lynley to have them; he had drawn a map of the house to reveal where these hiding places were, so that Lynley could extract them before the house was sold. But he had also hidden the map, and before he could tell Lynley where it was, Peter had had a stroke.
Even before the body was burned, Lynley and another of Peter’s friends, Tom, had started coming round twice a week to tap their knuckles against the wainscot, yank at floorboards and shuffle about in the attic poking through boxes. They unscrewed the legs of Peter’s bed, opened up the mattress, upended the tea caddy in the larder (although ‘there were finger marks in the dust, so if there had been anything in it, the assessors have got there first’), peered through the ventilation bricks at the base of the house, lowered a torch tied to a piece of string into a cavity discovered under the sitting room, and picked back the lino in the upstairs ‘slouch’ (Laura’s word for a toilet). Among the things they found were a copy of the Daily Telegraph dated 1971 and an old French shopping list, which Lynley scuttled off to have evaluated. It was worth 75p. Lynley decided to bring in ‘a medium in Teddington called “Brenda” ’, who specialised in ‘finding things’. He showed her pictures of the stamps and offered her £75 for an afternoon of psychic concentration.
She saw no Penny Blacks.
Laura helped Lynley and Tom conduct these ravenous searches, but she wasn’t greedy herself. The moment a new ‘hotspot for a cubby hole’ occurred to her, she rang up Lynley to let him know, and then prepared lunch or tea while he prised away the panels and levered up floorboards.
I haven’t enjoyed such kindness from people since 1993 –and it has made all the difference, after Peter’s death; the nuisance of people coming, and being the society hostess, small price to pay.
When Peter’s will was read, it turned out that he had excluded Lynley. It’s hard not to suspect that all that talk of ‘cubby holes’ somewhere ‘in the structure of the house’ had been a dying man’s practical joke on a rapacious friend. Whispering to Lynley just before his fatal stroke that there was a treasure map, but that it was also hidden in one of the unfindable ‘cubby holes’, is a delightfully mischievous touch.
With an oddly contrasting lack of imagination, Peter left the house to St John’s College, one of the richest in the country. It quickly hawked the property to a developer, and the lawyers wanted Laura out of the house asap. She had no money. She had lived there for thirty years, half her life. Everybody she had loved had died while she’d been cocooned in this building. She was to be evicted by the end of the week.
She clung on for six months.
‘Of course, all my own plans in my youth were just a pie in the sky,’ Laura writes on the closing page of the final entry of the last book, ‘as I have a different “God”.’
The next morning, as I picture things, the clearance men swarmed in and pitched Laura on the street. In the confusion, she left behind 148 of her diaries; the men dumped those in the skip from which Dido rescued them later that afternoon.
After that the developer sliced open the fron
‘Once I realised that Laura might still be alive,’ I continued with my explanation to Richard, ‘I made quick progress. For £9.50 I checked the online electoral register, and discovered her last name. Ten minutes later I was looking into her living room on Google Earth.’
It had taken me a while to get used to the Google controls. Each time I came close to where Laura’s new house should be, the orientation buttons became wildly sensitive, shot me past as if I’d slipped on a patch of oil and repositioned me thirty-five miles above Scotland.
Eventually I’d mastered my excitement. Laura Francis’s semi-detached bungalow is at the end of a short cul-de-sac on a developer’s estate. It squats beside the pavement like a resting fly. The front wall faces the road, and has a glazed door and side panel. Pieces of post have climbed up the glass below the letterbox. They are still there as I correct this final draft of the manuscript.
In front of the house is a miniature front garden with fuchsias and evergreen shrubs bordering a patch of mildly overgrown grass; a dingy, run-down scene. A narrow drive runs up to the side of the bungalow, squashes past a fence, passes a door and ends at a wooden garage. A small collection of cooking implements and food tins is piled next to the door, which is slightly ajar, as though Laura is on the other side, enjoying the first catch of the morning breeze.
The Lebanese food arrived, steaming and fat. The conversation with Richard, Gian Mario, Iain and Flora changed. It wasn’t until the end of the meal that I remembered I had brought one of Laura’s books with me to read on the tube, and fetched it from my raincoat. It was from 1978 – the Middle Period of Laura’s life, when all the volumes are the same: small, hard-backed, dark red, with the word ‘IDEAL’ impressed in gold outline letters down the spine. 1978 is one of the few almost complete years in the collection. Elsa is dead. Elsa’s temporary rival Dame Harriette is dead. All talk of becoming a writer or artist has stopped. The handwriting has begun to shrink, but Laura is still following the printed lines on the page. She has been working for Peter for four years, and has realised again that she might be a musical genius.
The exquisite, simple little minuet in the Haydn sonata makes me weep this morning. I play it so expressively, know that I really am musical. Even on the radio, a pianist may not play it with such sensitivity and personal feeling as I do.
Once more, the reader sees immediately what Laura does not: that she has forgotten to consider the only important element in any judgement about her musicality, i.e. a listener who is not herself. Her reason for believing she is a great musician is because she is playing for herself only, to herself only. She is deafened by solipsism.
Richard wiped his hands, took the book and held it up with teasing solemnity, like a libation. He didn’t look inside. Richard never looks at anything immediately. After a second he offered the parcel across to Iain, who carefully turned it over and back and over again: back cover, front cover, top and bottom of spine. He made appreciative smacking noises between his teeth and treated the volume as though it were a small anaesthetised animal.
‘It reminds me of that very sad story about Frank Kermode …’
‘Precisely,’ I interrupted. ‘That’s exactly what my friend Dido said when she took the books out of the skip.’
‘Hhhhhhrrrrrrrrummmmph!’ Iain cleared his throat. ‘I know because I was with Frank on the day it happened. He came to college for supper that evening, directly afterwards. He was in shock. He was completely dazed. He chewed his pipe and said, in his characteristically understated way, “I’ve had a bit of a problem.” That afternoon, two chaps in high-vis jackets had arrived at the door of his house to move his books to his new flat, and Frank had said, “Come in, come in.” Now, in many circles Frank was regarded as the greatest living critic of certain types of English literature, and he died when he was ninety, so he had lived a very long time – he had a lot of signed first editions.’
But the two men weren’t the removal men, they were the city refuse collectors, and it wasn’t until they’d taken out quite a few of the boxes that Kermode realised they were throwing them in the crusher.
‘For the rest of his life,’ said Iain, his voice catching with the awfulness of this story, ‘Frank’s library began with the letter I, because A to H had been pulped.’
Iain took a deep breath, let out the air meditatively and handed the book to Gian Mario.
Gian Mario inclined his long Roman face forward, gave the book two barely perceptible nods of appreciation, then returned his gaze to mid-air. Stillness and Gian Mario have an opaque relationship. His gesture could mean that he thought nothing of Laura and the diaries, or that he thought everything of them, and was now imagining what a project this would be in the hands of a true scholar.
‘There must be in mythology or philosophy somewhere,’ I suggested, ‘a figure who represents what she is – a figure of failure on all fronts. A stock character who stands for the fear of becoming Laura Francis: the person who ends up not meeting a single one of her hopes and gets thrown out in a skip. That’s why this is a valuable life. She can be an excellent writer, she is a good artist, perhaps she had the makings of a pianist too, but the real thing is that Laura Francis represents in a pure form the feeling that everyone feels, of a life not lived.’
Gian Mario cosseted his beard, stared at his fruit salad, then nodded. ‘Do you know her state of mind now? No? Do you think she is sad?’
‘I’ve written to her twice. The first time I said I was a biographer and I was researching a book that I thought she could help me with. I began that one, “Are you the Laura Francis who used to work for Professor Peter Mitchell?” I didn’t say anything about the diaries. I didn’t want to horrify her! I just said, “I’m a biographer, and if I’ve got the right Laura Francis could we meet?” ’
‘And?’
‘She didn’t reply.’
‘Sensible woman. How do you know she received this letter?’
‘I sent it recorded delivery, and then checked the tracking number online. She signed for it.’ Seeing this record of her signature, just a tick in a box on the Royal Mail website, had been the first real sign I’d had that Laura was not just alive, but moving, conscious, more than a piece of government data. That tick had been a clod of earth kicked off her grave. ‘Last week I sent another letter. But this time I tried a different tactic. I said, “Next Thursday I will be in Auntie’s Tea Shop in Cambridge at 4 o’clock.” ’
‘Auntie’s Tea Shop?’
‘I know she knows it. It’s got lace and cakes under glass. “Come and meet me,” I said. “If you like, please bring a friend.” I didn’t want her to feel nervous, she’s seventy-three years old, and a very fearful sort of woman.’
‘And rightly so, with people like you around! Poor woman,’ said Richard. ‘I think we should warn her – There’s a biographer on the loose. He knows where you live.’
‘Then I said, “If you don’t show up at 4 o’clock, I will come and knock on your door at 5.30. And I will also be in Auntie’s Tea Shop on Friday at 4 o’clock. If you can’t make that appointment either, I will come up to your house at 5.30 that day, too.” ’
‘That’s harassment.’
‘Nonsense. If she really doesn’t want to see me, all she’s got to do is not show up twice and hide in her bathroom twice. I’ve given her four ways to say no, so I can be perfectly clear that’s what she really wants, and won’t spend the rest of my life wondering if her lack of reply is simply due to the fact that she lost my first letter with the return address, or that it wasn’t actually her who signed for it, or that I missed her by ten minutes because just before my letters came she was taken off to a home.’
‘What do you think will be her attitude to this book,’ pursued Gian Mario in a pleasant and remorseless wa
‘I should think she’ll run a mile.’
‘Do you think she might be right to have the police waiting for you?’
Richard reached across to where Gian Mario had placed the diary, and took it back. He laid it down on the table, lifted the taut, red cover with one hand and, as if moving bubbles across the surface of water, flattened back the opening page with the other.
‘So you carry this about in your pocket? The End of History – like a bag of potato chips?’
28 Auntie’s Tea Shop is a seaside shop …
Oh, glorious blaze of the imaginative world! Would like to enter into it again and write, write, write; only stopping for meals or a walk, as I used to. A pity that I can not allow myself to do that now – the material business of everyday life has to be seen to. I have nothing to say.
Aged twenty-five
Auntie’s Tea Shop is a seaside shop fifty miles from the coast. It is just off the market square, in the middle of Cambridge. Squashed between the university outfitters and a shop selling nasty key fobs with scorpions trapped inside, it’s a place for undergraduates to bring their bored parents after a tour of the colleges.
Dido and I arrived an hour early. Doctors, especially when they have not been ill themselves, make a great point about not letting their patients give in to desperation. But behind the sensible advice and encouraging expressions, their drugs are also desperation. Dido was exhausted from her latest round of chemotherapy. The tumours weren’t responding. She’d lost two stone. It was difficult to tell which was murdering her quicker: nature or medicine.
She sat down and disappeared behind a pile of Thomas More papers. I kept my eye on the other customers. There were two elderly ladies and a large young man with a ponytail. The man’s knees bumped about under his table, making the crockery rattle. One of the women looked up sharply. She was tall, in her early seventies and busty. She wore thin-rimmed glasses. Immediately I caught her eye she stood up, reached into her trouser pocket and, staring back at me, pulled out something white and crumpled as if it had been scrunched up in a rage.