A Life Discarded Read online

  But still I couldn’t see a way in.

  It was only when I tried the road a third time that I discovered what I’d missed: two cracked walls curving up through the ivy and undergrowth to a pair of misaligned iron gates. A paper notice from St John’s College was stapled to a tree trunk alongside: PRIVATE, DANGER, KEEP OUT.

  Behind the metalwork, what had once been Not-Mary’s front drive up to Whitefield, the ‘house of dreams’, collapsed into a rivulet of tarmac among the weeds.

  11 It was easy to get in …

  The irony of it – that I should be born into circumstances like that.

  Aged sixty-one

  It was easy to get in. The wire mesh security panels on either side of the house gates extended only a few yards, after which the brambles took over. Bending over and sticking my bottom out, I pushed my way through the undergrowth backwards.

  The atmosphere was different among the trees: thinner and unsteady. The sun fluttered around the floor of the wood, giving it a feeling of playfulness; the weeds were enjoying their destruction of Not-Mary’s front drive.

  Adore the lightness of leaves in space, or anything which is lightly fashioned out of air with air again all round, like the twig of a tree, or blossoms tip-toe on a stem.

  Remnants of roadway appeared in gaps of ground elder, and then, close to where I was standing, the drive forked into two prongs. The left-hand one was stopped up by a bank of earth, but the right-hand prong passed alongside an unexpected field, as though the wood had pinched an oblong of good arable from a farm and hidden it in here to wait for the ransom payment. Then the way was blocked by a purple buddleia with spider branches crawling out of a hole in the macadam. On the other side of the buddleia were the remains of the clunch quarry. A fence that had once protected visitors from the edge of this great pit had been pulled down by nettles. Inside, wild shrubs burst from the rockface; roots exploded out of crevices, writhing and twisting, and shot away in fans of elderflower. Massive beeches blocked off the sky. I clambered down to the quarry floor, disturbing a crazed-looking bird that looped off among the leaves. The air down there was fastened in by tendrils. ‘A fairy glade’, Not-Mary calls it, ‘ethereal with the sunlight through the leaves … remote, misty, not real’.

  From the quarry a dirt track led back into the main wood, which quickly opened out into a large, overgrown patch of grass, perhaps a lawn, next to which was a hillock, which I climbed.

  Overhead, a small aeroplane passed across the gap between the treetops, and from where I stood among the trees looking out, it felt as if the pilot was searching for surviving communities after a war. Not-Mary mentions these planes as happy occurrences. They emphasised Whitefield as a retreat from the world’s ‘frenzy’, a woodland enclave separate from ‘reality’, a burrow of ‘dreaming’, a ‘paradise on earth’, the only place where ‘I feel spiritual and uplifted’.

  But there was still the question of the house. I couldn’t spot it. Two storeys, gabled roofs, eight bedrooms, a fourteen-foot-high ballroom, library, orangery and a proportionate number of chimneys on top. Not an easy thing to miss. Baffled, I began to clamber back down from my vantage point and, looking at my feet to take care around the various strange potholes in the earth, I suddenly understood. I knew where Whitefield was. I was standing on it. My hillock was a mound of rotting bricks.

  The Piano Room at Whitefield: I played my own tunes with great abandonment & enjoyment, & in the beauty of my own musicality. And with purified soul, thoroughly enjoyed all the rest of the evening.

  The Lawn, facing the Orangery: Dreamt E and I were among roses – a lot of green prickly leaves, & the roses of all colours, yellow, red, etc. Yet at the same time the rose bushes were what I was wearing – my hair, my shirt. E was ticking me off rather, & telling me I should have them cut shorter … and next dreamt I was lying on the lawn, and screaming protest, my head on a pair of shears, and my hands gripping the handles but my protest was not greatly in earnest. I liked it really. And E angrily cut away at the roses on me, cut my shirt shorter.

  The Maids’ Toilet?: Times of deep magic, unaccountable … in that cell-like maids’ wickery, shelter of dreams, with the wind in the pines outside, and light and shadow across the white-washed wall. A wonderful dreaming place … half wished it were my prison.

  The Drawing Room: A very nice day, being happy & well, and enjoying the jokes. Nice lunch. After lunch when music was on the wireless, felt the true, deep, creative mood come over me.

  12 Two close shaves

  Quick kiss of E in doorway, a taken kiss.

  Aged nineteen

  ‘The diarist I told you about?’ I whispered the next time I stepped into the Cambridgeshire Collection room. It was the same efficient female behind a computer screen who’d brought me the Whitefield House folder two weeks earlier. ‘I’ve unearthed something new, an astonishing coincidence: she used to work here! Yes, the woman who wasn’t called Mary whose address I don’t want to know was a temporary librarian for six months here, in Cambridge Public Library!’

  The librarian’s friendly face popped out above the VDU just as before. For a moment it jiggled there. She looked a little strained, I thought. The absence of readers was perhaps particularly exhausting that day. Then she disappeared from view again, re-emerged on the right of the screen and leaned forward, intrigued.

  I’d hoped to be able to write this biography in a correct chronological sequence: first Not-Mary’s ancestors (starting four hundred million years ago with the ammonites), followed by her birth, her schooling, her adulthood, including answers to the great questions in order of emotive importance (What was her ‘immortal’ project? Who was the Peter whom she describes as her ‘gaoler’ in the later books? Why were the diaries thrown out?) – all this somehow without learning her name, which would appear for the first and only time on the final page, as in a Gothic short story, with a photo of her gravestone. The world’s first biography of a nameless subject would follow the same pattern as a biography of Einstein.

  But vile ‘information’ kept popping up – clues about new ways to discover the writer’s identity that threatened to destroy everything, but which I couldn’t ignore.

  It was my own fault. I should have locked myself in my study for five years like a proper scholar. Instead, each time I hit a fresh lead I jumped up and rushed into the undergrowth on the tops of hills. Now here I was again, putting the project at risk of a solution. ‘See?’ I said, pressing open a little black rexine notebook.

  A library day again. What a work-a-day world this is – hard, cold fact of work to do, endless ‘overdues’. Feeling very much in love with sweet little darling E …

  ‘That’s this library she’s talking about. She got a post here in 1958. And here’s another one, when she was also staffing some of the village branches’:

  A chilly hall (though modern. Has less books than Trumpington, and thoroughly common & brainless people) …

  ‘But she has lots of nice things to say too,’ I added hurriedly:

  Jan. 22: today absolutely intoxicated with joy; a wonderful day of deep magic … My library day a real treat. Enjoy shelving – feel how shelving books around the library gives me a deep feeling of librarianship & how it suits my personality – a feeling of being cultured, serious, sensitive and intellectual. Jolly Swerbles, the sweep of the counter with the books, & those great big carry trays.

  ‘She loved it so much, she was going to take librarian exams’:

  Jan. 26: Feel that I am born to librarianship, and pride in it as a profession. Got a nice compliment today – one of the readers said Johnny [the head librarian] said I am ‘one of the intelligent ones.’ Must keep up this enthusiasm by perseverance, & get somewhere in life – what could make one happier than success?

  ‘And then three days later you sacked her. See, here’:

  Thursday Jan 29th: Lost my post – and thus, like a house of cards, the complete collapse of all I have – my lovely post, career as a librarian with Cam
bridge City Libraries, my independence. Feel really afraid of life now …

  ‘Fifty years ago she probably had your job. You have all the facts about who she is here after all. It’s in this building somewhere – down in that document cavern of yours. You’ve had her name in the archives all along.’

  It was a tense moment. All this librarian had to do was check the file of past employees to locate ‘I’s name, at which point my hunt would be over. There was no way, I realised with eager sadness, that I could fail to succeed.

  The librarian shook her head and returned to studying her computer screen. ‘Sorry. Can’t help you. We’re not allowed to keep that sort of information, because of Data Protection. Just last week I got rid of fifteen more folders about old employees. Ironic, isn’t it? Here we are, the local history department, and we burn our own.’

  I left the library with a sigh of pleasure and walked around the market square three times, perked up by the fact that, when writing a biography, you can’t trust certainties. Just as you’re about to pounce on something that will condemn you to a tidy answer, pooooofff! It vanishes.

  It was during a description of a day in the library that the mysterious figure of E first appears in Not-Mary’s diary. In those days, the library was not where it is now, in the city shopping mall, but just off the market square in a building that is now a Jamie Oliver restaurant. In Not-Mary’s time the prosciutto counter was the Fiction bay; the ravioli machine, Gardening. On the day that E first appears in the diaries, Not-Mary was nineteen years old and stamping books in the middle of a basket of tomatoes waiting to be made into ‘Cilindretti Pasta Pillows’.

  Feeling ‘strangely excited, and very hot’ because she’d just spotted a ‘swerb picture of John Gielgud – curling hair, side view’ in a picture book about Peggy Ashcroft – she looked up from her stamping desk and there it was: the letter E, standing in front of her, at the head of the queue.

  I gave the usual terrific jump I do at the sight of E unexpectedly, & sat down on the chair.

  ‘You’re a funny girl,’ said E when Not-Mary had recovered from his unexpected appearance. He didn’t leave the library after that; he wandered around, out of sight, keeping Not-Mary’s heart pounding. Not-Mary describes him as a ‘little’ person, Jewish, with at one time ‘intense, blue eyes’ and at another ‘vivid’ brown eyes, and ‘manly hands’ which she calls ‘knobbly’ when she’s cross. He has a foreign accent, possibly German or Austrian. Although he never steps out from behind the capital letter E to give us his name, between the second volume of the diaries in 1958 and the books of the early 1980s, there is not a single volume in which Not-Mary mentions E fewer than 350 times. In the early books she quotes his sayings with hypnotic loyalty:

  E said I am exceptionally pretty.

  E said Florence [the city] smells.

  E said the period is a great handicap and burden to a woman, a dreadful thing and unnecessary.

  E said Men have their troubles too, eg the bother of shaving.

  E believes that genius in Art is the greatest attainment of mankind, Beethoven’s 4th Piano Concerto is the summit of that lofty pinnacle, and acknowledges sweetly (if you press him) that he has himself published a few poems. In the 1950s and 1960s Not-Mary records a total of sixty or seventy pages of his pronouncements, each beginning ‘E said …’

  Sometimes he expands his lungs and emits five pages of Esaids in one puff:

  E said I must work, work, work.

  E said it is no good crying.

  E said I should stay up all night if necessary to get my work done.

  E said it not all depressing, to the contrary.

  E appeared twice in front of Not-Mary on that day in the library. The second time, he came back holding a book. What would his choice be? Rilke’s Duino Elegies? Bach and the Meaning of Counterpoint? Volume Two of Study and Criticism of Italian Art?

  No. As he reached the front of the queue, he gave Not-Mary a ‘mischievous smile’. It was English Villages in Colour.

  E knew how to enjoy himself as well as the next man.

  After she was sacked from the library, Not-Mary had to fill in application forms to get another job, and these included a question about her education:

  Have said I was at the Perse School for Girls in Cambridge. I should not really tell such things, it is bad for the reputation of the Perse.

  I hated to do it, but I called them. It was possible that they would be able to tell me who Not-Mary was.

  One of the best secondary schools in England, the Perse School for Girls (now called the Stephen Perse Foundation) is hidden in a genteel sector of the city close to the University Botanical Gardens. It is pressed in by macaroon houses, the smallest of which costs half a million pounds; Not-Mary calls the area a ‘slum’.

  There is a large quantity of school squeezed behind these houses, but the way in is disguised to look like a tradesmen’s entrance. Through this unassuming side door the world opens large. Posters in the lobby show splendid young females playing football; begoggled young females surrounded by chemistry retorts; bronzed young females with furrowed brows helping Africans with water-based projects. Among the posters, corridors scuttle off to different parts of the school.

  ‘Have you nothing else to go on apart from the fact that she was not Mary?’ asked an amused woman named Catherine, who stepped out of one of these tunnels to greet me. She was the school librarian and archivist.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ I said. ‘I know a lot more than that. I know that she was here from 1957 to 1959, and I know that she wasn’t called Mary because she didn’t seduce a man at Luton College of Art.’

  For a few seconds the librarian and I were in open air, beside what appeared to be a small park. ‘Amanda!’ shouted Catherine as we passed a line of girls carrying sports shoes, ‘Mary Beard’s The Parthenon is back. I have set it aside for you.’

  We hurried down a ramp and passed alongside a large refectory hall. ‘But you cannot have it,’ Catherine called again, remembering, ‘until you have returned Simone de Beauvoir.’

  ‘The archive is slightly disordered, I’m afraid …’ she said when we reached a dim room filled with misshapen cupboards and display cabinets. She stooped inside and immediately began blowing dust off old reports, lifting aside architects’ models for new classrooms and grimacing behind a framed poster advertising a performance of The Oresteia. Within minutes she was halfway round the room.

  For almost an hour this enthusiastic, kind woman and I riffled among the clutter. But there was nothing. No appropriate list of previous pupils that included one living at Whitefield. Nothing in the alumni catalogue suggested an Old Persean who had set out from the school for a future in painting, determined to master an ‘immortal’ project that would one day leave the world gasping at her legacy; no record of fundraising packs sent care of a man called Peter whom she describes as her ‘gaoler’.

  Then abruptly Catherine let out a cry of triumph. ‘Is this, perhaps, a photograph of the woman you are looking for?’

  And, undoubtedly, it was.

  But it was also a picture of seventy-two other unnamed people. It was the school photo of 1957.

  13 Birth

  Am coming to the daily increasing opinion that I am born an artist, an artist in whatever medium I choose to create …

  Aged twenty-one

  ‘Whooooooaaah! The first thought I had when I saw this handwriting? I thought: Nameless Person, whoever you are, I don’t want to be in the same room as you.’

  Barbara Weaver, chairwoman of the Association of Qualified Graphologists, laid the diary I’d given her onto the dining-room table and studied it from behind her thin glasses with looming hazel eyes. She was wearing a brown blouse that was halfway to becoming a kaftan. Dropping from her chair, she sped voleishly from the room – then sped back carrying a magnifying lens the size of a breadboard.

  ‘Yes, that’s the first thing I’d think,’ she resumed with a contented shuffle of her hips as she sat down again. �
�The person who has handwriting like this is a complete nutter.’

  Barbara is also principal of the Cambridge School of Graphology (‘Though when I say “school”, there’s really only me’), and runs all her business from a converted set of barns in a village just north of Cambridge called Landbeach. We were sitting in her Sunday dining room. The mahogany table shimmered with polish. The light-blue carpet glowered with suspicion that I was about to drop a blob from my coffee mug. The next village along from Barbara’s is Waterbeach, where the subject of my first book had lived: Stuart Shorter. Not many people had wanted to be in the same room with him, either.

  Barbara dug out a plastic ruler from the mound of pencils and protractors she’d dumped beside her on the table, balanced the breadboard magnifier against her bosom at the same angle that sunbathing actresses put mirrors, and leaned over the page excitedly. ‘Ooooooh, look at those mid-zones …’

  Diaries are terrible liars. They record dramas out of context, encourage paranoia, rearrange facts, are deliberately biased and self-justifying, blind you with irrelevance, censor alternative opinion, exaggerate petty complaints into tragic emblems and, in particular, wallow in the fact that any fool can write about dejection, but describing happiness takes determination and skill. Most diaries are moans in writing, even when the person writing them is happy.

  I’d come across Barbara on the web. She has an old-fashioned site, like a parish magazine, with columns and boxed inserts and a tone of suppressed gossip. ‘Psychoanalysis by biro’, boasts her home page. ‘My sister and I were frankly astonished at how accurate your findings were,’ write ‘identical twins’ M and L (‘names withheld for privacy purposes’). ‘Our husbands read them’ and ‘they thought the same. Some of your findings caused heated debate and quite a bit of soul searching.’

  Beneath a specimen of script in which the closing letter of each word throws up its final stroke like a girl flinging up her skirts in a village pub, Barbara has written stiffly: ‘Desire for attention.’ Not-Mary’s words do not end like this. Her words appear to be squeezing along drains. Not-Mary, as the later books make clear, has a desire for disappearance.