Читать книгу A Life Discarded: 148 Diaries Found in a Skip - Alexander Masters, Alexander Masters - Страница 16

I shall miss me.

Dido

Nothing is certain – that’s the number-one cancer cliché. Less than a year after Dido’s first course of chemotherapy, the tumours on her pancreas and liver began to grow again. On rare occasions, these chemo drugs work. Often they simply toughen the growths up and make it harder for later therapies to have an effect.

‘We return to the soar and the plunge,’ said Dido. ‘You’re not going to die, yes you are, no you’re not. Whoops, sorry, yes you are.’

One morning when I went to visit Dido in hospital, the London consultant, a usually excellent man, had not given her the correct anti-emetics. Her retching in the hospital toilet sounded like three men having an argument.

Scientific ignorance, avoidable errors of judgement, the appalling realisations of hindsight – these are integral to cancer, not separate from it. They are as much a part of the disease as the tumours themselves. I do not discuss this perception with Dido. It is my way of isolating the feeling that she is easing away and that life has, in some sense I cannot understand, already allowed death in.

To avoid thinking about dying, we have increased the amount of work we do on each other’s manuscripts – both of us are writing types of detective story: she, about the hunt for St Thomas More’s bones (she is the only person in the world who knows where they are buried); me, the hunt for ‘I’.

In her chapter on More in prison (coincidentally, the same prison where Flatface/Clarence was locked up), Dido had written: In the Tower kitchens the cook is building a pile of slow-burning hardwood and dry-crackle kindling, with which to stoke his cauldron: More’s head, before being stuck on a pole on London Bridge, must be parboiled to the consistency of pasta.

‘What sort of pasta?’ I wanted to know. ‘Heinz alphabet or al dente?’

From my bag, I plucked out a twisting, wriggling object.

‘Nooo, I don’t think that’s a rat,’ said Dido, taking it between her pinched fingers. It was a fragment of plastic, milky with age, that I’d found in a mound at the bottom of the Ribena box. ‘The second favourite thing for a rat to gnaw is a book spine, and the spines on the diaries are untouched. Their first favourite is an electricity cable.’

A faint, green-tinted segment of the letter ‘G’ filled up one corner of the piece of plastic.

‘But you agree that that’s a piece of disintegrated shopping bag?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then it tells us that our diarist had south-facing windows and is unlikely to be an accountant or a policewoman.’

Dido flicked her infusion tube up and down impatiently, as though it were a cloak hem.

‘And here’s why,’ I continued. ‘The reason the books in the Ribena box are packed so badly is because the diarist first put them in this plastic bag, then squashed it into the box. So, if it’s not a rat that ruined this bag, it’s sunlight, which suggests a south-facing window, that it must have remained in this position for many years, and that the person is not well organised …’

Dido dropped the fragment of plastic back into my hand. She had a theory of her own. ‘She came from a village or a town.’

‘We don’t know that. She hasn’t said anything about her home yet.’

‘We do know it, because she can’t find the sheet of telephone numbers when she wants to ring the hospital to arrange a blood transfusion after her curse. Why did she need a sheet of numbers? Why not just ring 999? The reason is, 999 wasn’t introduced across the country until the mid-seventies, and she was writing in 1960. 999 was only available in cities then.’

On the train back to Great Snoring I read the rest of the diary from 1960. It is early December. The diarist is ‘tired and nervous’. She is in love with several men. One tells her she is ‘very sexy’; another is ‘a very virile sort’ (although ‘don’t like muscular strength in a man very much, it makes me afraid’), and has the inappropriate name of Mr Weakley.

One evening, ‘I’ takes herself to see Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera Iolanthe. The fairy Iolanthe has married a human and borne a son who is fairy down to his waist. His legs are human. He is in love with Phyllis, a ward of court, but the Lord Chancellor is in love with her too:

But there’d be the deuce to pay in the Lords

If I fell in love with one of my Wards:

Which rather tries my temper, for

I’m SUCH a susceptible Chancellor!

While listening to this song in the winter of 1960, the diarist was struck by a revelation:

As I gazed at the painted figure singing on the stage to an engrossed audience, wondering so deeply over life that suddenly the man no longer seemed real, nor the theatre, or the audience; and as I watched that visual thing we call life, there came in a flash to my mind a universal truth, a fairly simple & obvious explanation of the purpose of life, & what it is which makes this life transitory, together with all its little simple delights & sorrows …

I looked up from my train seat with a sob and watched the fens itching in the summer heat. The landscape here is as flat as a page. The trees and tracks through the peaty fields are handwriting. The Isle of Ely and its cathedral spire are where the writer has splodged her pen, got angry and broken up the fibres of earth. The river, where she has found her rhythm again.

Was this ‘I’s Great Project: the meaning of life? Did she want to be able to answer such questions as why Henry VIII liked boiling heads; why the sanctimonious, self-aggrandising Thomas More wanted to be boiled; why all his bones, except his skull, had been lost; why the diaries had been thrown away; why the diarist had been given so much hope and endured so much failure; why Richard was strapped to a wheelchair, with brain damage; why Dido was dying? Had the diarist detected something during the Lord Chancellor’s ridiculous song that could make sense of this relentless destruction? Had she spent the next four and a half million words explaining it?

Mastering my emotion, I returned to the book to find out what this ‘flash’ of ‘universal truth’ that she had witnessed could possibly have been:

but the momentary metaphysical insight passed & was gone.