LITMIR.BIZ

      The diary after that, she’s in a locker room, ‘heart beating fast with expectation’, hoping to wrap those bony arms around the etching master, a man called ‘J’ with ‘gorgeous eyes, the eyes of genius’ (yellow highlighter: anecdote) – at least, she thinks that’s what he’s got, because ‘am too short sighted to see him well’.

      While waiting for him to lunge at her, she hands him a love letter.

      But it turns out ‘J’ doesn’t know her first name.

      The situation is disintegrating rapidly, so as he accepts the envelope he makes a stab in the dark:

      ‘Mary?’ he mutters.

      Her name is not Mary.

      But she doesn’t tell us what her name is.

      After a few days I abandoned the highlighter approach. It made the pages look like a municipal flowerbed.

      In these early books one name is particularly important: Whiters. He is a figure of yearning, despite his butlerish moniker. ‘Just adore Whiters so.’ He whips Not-Mary into poetry. She loves Whiters ‘like a passion in my blood’. With him, romance ‘fills my soul’. But he is also a murky figure. There is no physical description of him. He is clearly manly, yet Not-Mary gives us no sense of his body. To me ‘Whiters’ suggests somebody in late middle age, barrel-chested, with elegant legs, wearing a dry-cleaned, off-white linen suit. He is a little like my father. The fact that she refers to him by his full nickname, ‘Whiters’, rather than just ‘W’, also suggests to me that he is a type of father figure, remote and comfortingly superior, and married. She has known him since she was a very small child.

      All the same, only when she is with Whiters does Not-Mary feel fully alive, intense, thrilled to her essence by the thought of what life has to offer her – a life that will be ‘dominated’ by Art, Beauty and Music. Whiters embodies this mood of radiant potential negatively. He is not an artist. He does not play the piano with thin hands, as does her main boyfriend, ‘E’. Whiters’ value is that he is a figure of relaxation: he is ‘so lovely, so soothing’. Whiters is ‘understanding, restful’; Whiters is ‘a solace to my irritable, jittery nerves’. In Whiters’ presence, the outside world and all that is fretful drop away, and Not-Mary expands into artistry. E (boyfriend number one) is positively artistic, but E is difficult. Whiters is ‘joyous’.

      Not-Mary appears to be in her early twenties at this period. She is living in bedsits and has no money and, when not thinking about Whiters or E, she is thinking from breakfast to supper about other men.

      Think I am rather a ‘sex fiend’ just lately – men excite me! Would love to lie in the arms of a man (but with clothes on, think the idea of nudity rather disgusting).

      As I was putting one of these early diaries back into the Ribena box, a sheet of blue writing paper dropped onto my duvet. It was small and carefully folded in half, and had created a light indentation in the pages on either side of its hiding place. There was no handwriting. It was blank on both sides. But it was a message from Whiters, all the same: in the left-hand corner at the top, embossed in black in an old-fashioned, self-conscious font, were three lines of an address:

       Whitefield

       Hinton Way

       Great Shelford

      ‘Whiters’ is Whitefield: not a lover, but a house.

      ‘No! Not there, love!’

      ‘Take a plastic bag to sit on if you go in there, darling!’

      ‘That’s the … B … F … I.’

      ‘The British Film Institute.’

      ‘Booths For you know what, more like! Two residents’ permits, did you say? No, you can’t have that …’

      I was at the parking permit desk on the top floor of the Cambridge Public Library, trying to find my way to the local history section.

      ‘Last week,’ whispered the woman behind the nearest counter, ‘when the staff went in to get them out, the man refused to stop! The door you want, love, is over there, on the left.’

      The Cambridge Public Library is busier and more fun than the University Library, half a mile away. It is open to everyone and satisfies every need, except privacy. School children mumble intimately down their mobile phones. Foreign students make pingy noises with electronic products. Mothers repack their shopping while their children shoot each other among the DVDs. There is only one place where silence reigns: the Cambridgeshire Collection, set apart from the bustle in a bright room behind a bank-vault door. The tables inside are broad and glossy. There are display cabinets exhibiting pamphlets by famous Cantabrigians who have nothing to do with the university, and a collection of clippings about the 1956 flood. There are also three sets of metal shelves containing small, decaying telephone directories. Otherwise, few books and fewer readers. The place has the feel of a doctor’s waiting room, when you’ve arrived on the wrong day.

      ‘How can I help?’ said a sharp voice from behind a computer screen, which turned into a woman’s face as I entered. The computer made a gentle whirr. There was a pleasant hum of strip lighting, and from somewhere a suggestion of an open window letting in the summer air.

      I handed across my sheet of blue letter paper with the Whitefield address.

      ‘Great Shelford, yes, mmmm … Hinton Way,’ said the woman’s face. A tall body appeared under it, and walked with pronounced steps across the carpet tiles to the telephone directories, reached over the top of the books and tapped at one from behind to nudge it out. ‘And who lived at this address?’

      ‘I don’t know. Well, I call her Not-Mary, because she’s not called Mary. I don’t want to know her name, in fact. If you find her name, would you mind covering it up?’

      The librarian stopped tapping, considered me thoughtfully and without surprise, and moved six books to the right.

      ‘When did she live there? Or is that another thing you don’t want to know?’

      ‘I don’t know that she did live there. Maybe she just stole letter paper from there. That would explain why she kept this blank sheet – a sort of trophy. The writer doesn’t give her name or home address. She’s just “I”, who lives … “I”, who might be anybody,’ I added portentously.

      The librarian stepped around and behind me, because I was the only real obstacle between her and the facts, and reached down for a third book, riffled the pages, nodded at one in particular, and hurried away.

      ‘The diary I found the paper in was dated 1962,’ I called after her.

      The Readers’ Room of the Cambridgeshire Collection is not where the research material is kept. The proper archive is behind the librarian’s desk, past a set of swing doors in the Cavern of Documents.

      Twenty minutes later, the librarian returned carrying a thick folder. She let

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