A Life Discarded: 148 Diaries Found in a Skip. Alexander Masters

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СКАЧАТЬ insisted on giving him at the time) he’d have been dead before the MacBook. Neuroendocrine tumours can be very slow-growing. Some people live the rest of their natural life with them, as long as they do not spread.

      Dido’s tumour had seeded over her liver. Its spores had crowded into her blood.

      The consultant at Dido’s local hospital was contemptible: bullying and scary. I arranged for Dido’s case to be moved to the Royal Free in London, a European Centre of Excellence for neuroendocrine cancer. There was a scan due in six weeks’ time; I had to be on the phone every morning to reduce that to ten days. The NHS is a wonderful organisation as long as you learn how to kick it. There were anti-cancer diets to be researched, exercise programmes to be uncovered, high-absorption liposomal curcumin to be ordered in from California at $95 a 100ml bottle (produced by a man who, I subsequently discovered, was being pursued on a manslaughter charge), electrically-operated pomegranate squeezers to be shipped from Istanbul, a remarkable peer-reviewed but forgotten therapeutic from Sweden to be investigated. In fact, why are we still talking? I had to get on …

      During the five years Flora and I stayed in the London house, I’d occasionally catch sight of the boxes and remember their contents with dislike: that terrible face; those tiny scuttling letters; ‘I’s sense of destiny and devotion to an unknown, perhaps unknowable project of vital human importance followed by the catastrophic failure of all his plans. Despite the glistening orange and shocking pea-green covers of some of the books, I thought of them as pallid objects. I had the same feeling towards the diaries in these boxes as I do towards the ghosts in an M.R. James story: thrilling, but forces of absence; not so much evil as empty of good. They marked a time when Dido was well. They emphasised that she might be dying. They were hateful.

      Occasionally, I’d creep under the Steinway and peer inside the Ribena crate. But I didn’t study the books. I reversed back out between the legs of the piano with the slightly appalled sensation that I was escaping quicksand.

      Flora and I moved again in 2011, to Great Snoring in Norfolk, by which time I had forgotten about the diaries. They were just three more boxes among the thousand or so that I drag about like Marley’s chain every time I change landlords. I shoved them into the back of the van with the rest, yanked them out among the chickens and runner ducks at the other end and dropped them into a storeroom.

      At which point the Ribena box burst open and twenty-seven diaries spilled out.

      One of them featured a bloodbath.

      The Collins ‘Three Day Royal Diary’ is greeny-blue, not much bigger than a jacket potato and caved in halfway up the spine, as if it has been crushed by a spasmodic grip. I tested it, waving it around the chicken yard in Great Snoring with various holds of my own. Only a left hand could make this type of depression. It was a gesture I imagined an outdoor preacher would use as he clutched the Gospels and harangued cowboys.

      An inside page printed with useful information calls New Year’s Day ‘the Circumcision’.

      Once again, the diarist’s handwriting races into the book many sides before the official diary section starts:

      November 19th, Saturday

      Spent most of today painting. Perhaps it is the best I’ve

      ever done, more like Van Gogh than anything else.

      and 126 pages and four weeks later shoots out from the bottom of the last possible page, with the words ‘watched her go with foreboding …’

      In between, ‘I’ describes a stabbing.

      Then,

      to my horror, – a sudden burst

      of blood rushed from my body

      Ran about, & outside the house

      calling for Nizzy desperately.

      never lost so much [blood] so suddenly before in my life,

      felt terribly afraid.

      Who has stabbed him? Why? Who is Nizzy? ‘I’ doesn’t say. Where is he outside? Bleeding on the road? In the garden? I picture him leaping about a rockery as he clutches at his wound. What time is it? It might be first thing in the morning, because ‘I’ reports that he’s in his pyjamas. But then he’s a painter, so it could be any time of day.

      Nothing about the methodical, evenly-spaced way ‘I’ forms his letters changes during this dramatic episode. If anything, a calm comes over the text. ‘I’ calculates that he will need a ‘blood transfusion’ and thoughtfully returns to the house to call his doctor so the hospital will be prepared for his arrival and have the machinery set up. But the sheet of telephone numbers beside the phone is missing – an absence that’s as good as finding the telephone wires have been cut. Weeping ‘with the added frustration’, ‘I’ scrabbles around for the phone list.

      Then, abruptly, the squall ends.

      The bleeding stops. Nizzy comes home and turns out to be his mother. ‘Crying in that uncontrollable way I sometimes have’, he tells her about the blood. Nizzy says he ‘is fussing unnecessarily’.

      Our mystery diarist hasn’t been stabbed, slashed his wrists or fallen out of a window into a greenhouse. He’s suffering ‘because of my sex’.

      The poor man’s got the curse.

      He’s a woman.

       6 A Chapter of curses

      I was born to love and be a woman as well as an artist Really have a very feminine nature, though not all lipsticky and screams.

       Aged twenty-one

      What man hasn’t wanted to gawp around a woman’s thoughts?

      It wasn’t just gloom and convenience that led me back to these books. It was eroticism. I was desperate to look at them again.

      ‘You want to know what I, a woman, think when I’m pacing around on my own?’ the author of the diaries seemed to be saying. ‘Settle back. Listen close. The answer takes 148 books.’

      If I read these pages I would be like Tiresias, the Greek seer who spent seven years as a woman after being bitten by a snake. Asked by Zeus whether women or men enjoyed sex more, Tiresias replied that women got nine times more pleasure, and was promptly blinded by Hera.

      Study these diaries, and I would learn secrets for which it was worth being blinded.

      I pulled the curtains in my study in Great Snoring, shut the door and locked myself in. Where would ‘I’ take me first? The bedroom?

      To my shock she took me to the toilet.

      ‘I’s curse began when she was fourteen, СКАЧАТЬ