Today was a good day because Leonora did not come. So this is the day I shall begin a diary, partly because it is 1950, the start of a new decade, but mostly because I feel so much stronger and happier when Leonora is not here.
I shall record everything important that happens, and it will be a place where Leonora cannot come – it will be my world, safe, private, and I will be able to shut her out completely … Please, God, let me be able to do that.
I don’t know yet what important things I will be writing. I know about diaries, though. My father has printed copies of diaries written by famous people – Samuel Pepys and John Aubrey – men who lived hundreds of years ago, but whose diaries are still read today. So perhaps someone in the future will read this and wonder about me, and think how interesting it is to know about life in the 1940s and 1950s. My diaries might even be displayed in museums, so that scholarly people like father will consult them. Or I might have children some day, and they will read them, although I can’t imagine where a husband to provide the children will come from, because I hardly ever go anywhere, except to church on Sundays, and we seldom have visitors in case it disturbs Father’s Great Work. Also, Mother says visitors mean a lot of work and she has quite enough to do as it is; a house of this size does not run itself, we should all remember that – I could do more to help, and it would not hurt father to tidy his desk occasionally, either.
Because of Father’s Work I must never be noisy or go rampaging about the house. I never do. I don’t think I would know how to rampage, even if there were other children to rampage with, which there never have been.
Michael turned the page. Apart from that mention of 1950, Luisa had not dated any of the entries, but she appeared to have started a fresh page for each new one, and it did not look as if she had written in it every day. There were large gaps on some of the pages, and the ink varied in colour and in quality. The writing varied as well, and so strongly that it almost looked as if another person had made some of the entries. This was such a worrying thought, however, that Michael refused to give it attention.
Leonora was here today. I know she is trying to get into these pages, but I shall not let her, I shall not … I am stronger than she is, and as long as I remember that Leonora is a separate person, she cannot hurt me. It’s important to keep hold of that thought. I have started saying it to myself each night, after I’ve said my prayers. I say, I am not Leonora, I am not, over and over again. I think it is what father calls a Coué exercise of the mind. He tried to teach me about émile Coué who believed in the power of the mind, but Mother said the concept was beyond someone of my age and Father was wasting his time – no fourteen-year-old could be expected to recite mind-exercises.
I would recite the Devil’s scriptures every night if I thought it would keep Leonora away. No, I don’t mean that, of course I don’t.
Leonora is trying her tricks to get into this diary, but I have learned how to cheat her. I know the times of the day when she tries to force her way into my head and lay her thoughts and memories over mine, smothering them so I can’t get at them. Early evening is the time she likes best – twilight – or sometimes the hour just before dawn.
To make sure she does not get into these pages I am closing them very firmly after each entry and placing a paperweight on the cover.
This morning my governess asked if I had twisted my ankle, because she had noticed I seemed slightly lame. I do not remember twisting it, but we have strapped it up with a crêpe bandage. It is a nuisance, but I expect it will heal very soon.
Today, Mother and Father are making preparations for their visit to France and Belgium. It is all part of Father’s Great Work, and something they do two or three times a year. I hope that when I’m older I might be allowed to accompany them on their journeys. The prospect is a bit alarming though, because I have hardly been beyond this corner of Norfolk. I don’t count the three years when Fosse House was requisitioned for a convalescent home for soldiers wounded in World War II, and Mother and Father decamped to a house in Scotland to live with Mother’s cousins. I was only four at the time; we were there for four years and the memories are all bad ones. The younger Scottish cousins bullied me and made apple pie beds and tied my plaits to the bedposts while I was asleep, and there were uncles with loud bluff voices and aunts who sniffed disapprovingly at Mother. I hated them all and I hated living there, so I don’t think about it, not ever. I don’t even look at the photographs and sketches of Fosse House in those years – the soldiers and the nurses who lived here then – because I can’t bear knowing the house had a life of its own while I was away. I think my father hated being away from the house as much as I did; he had locked up his beloved library and left reams of instructions about what could be touched in the house and what could not, and how windows on the ground floor must never be opened after dusk on account of the poisonous night air from the marshes. He took as much of his work as he could to the Scottish house, but it was not the same. He did not like doing the things Mother’s family liked doing, which was shooting game and tramping about the hills, and making disparaging remarks about people who read books and foraged into the past.