A Woman on the Edge of Time (21 page)

Katerina is not the main character of ‘Six Sundays in January'. The story follows another young mother across a series of Sundays, on one of which she encounters Katerina in a café in the East End. The Sunday afterwards, the phone rings with the news that Katerina has killed herself.

It is not a head-on portrait, Arnold writes; he didn't know Hannah well. But he knew her a little, knew the times, knew women of her age struggling perhaps with similar things, was an intuitive witness to the world he was living in.

Sheila Rowbotham, writing of her own struggles as a young woman in the 1960s, used remarkably similar language as Arnold to describe her own ‘splintering identity, seeking words that somehow glance off my fingertips, clinging to an assortment of stray ends I couldn't fit together'. There is something, too, in Katerina's monologues of Hannah's sweeping dismissals of her contemporaries to her grandfather: ‘The young technicians are too busy acquiring their little car.'

Was this Hannah in her last days? Frail, battered, splintered. Oversensitive to fraudulence (those ‘bitchy' academics). Despairing of the ‘facile image' of women that ‘countless magazines perpetrate'. Bruised by her own young man with his ‘pleasant songs' who had disappeared and left ‘great confusion'.

‘I don't want any more knowledge of pain,' Katerina says. ‘Forgive me Annie,' Hannah wrote on the envelope. ‘But the pain was too much.'

Another woman might have struggled on, accepted compromises, confided in friends, waited for things to get better, the winter to turn into spring, her book to be published. But Hannah wasn't much good at patience, compromise, asking for help. In her nature was rather a family unreadiness to be taken beyond a certain limit, an accompanying steeliness, ruthlessness. A disregard, too, for the usual rules, the accepted codes, of life. ‘The whole of that terrific force,' my psychoanalyst neighbour said, ‘turned against herself'.

IN SOME WAYS,
I am the least qualified person to write about Hannah. Unlike the people I have interviewed about her, I have no memories of my own of her. But, at the same time, I am her son. Half the genes that shaped me I got from her. If I didn't know her, I knew her parents, her other son, know her sister, her five grandchildren. If the Hannah of these pages is a construct of other people's memories, viewpoints, and my own imagination, then that imagination is informed by the knowledge, the instinctive connection, that blood brings.

I have come, I feel, to understand her. I get her sense of humour. That she could be both selfish and generous, both emotional and rational, makes sense to me. I understand her irreverence, her outrageousness, her melodramas, her moral integrity, her sense of justice. I understand her when she is difficult.

I even feel that I understand her suicide, or at least the steps that led to her suicide — except for one key element of the story: how she came to invest herself so completely in a future with John Hayes that was so clearly a fantasy, a ‘fiction', as my grandfather's friend said.

We all make mistakes, see things wrongly, at times. Hannah was known when she was younger for imagining dull romances into great love affairs. But that was when she was a teenager. The Hannah who so misjudged what was happening with John Hayes was a woman of nearly thirty, with two children, ten years of marriage behind her. She was the Hannah who had navigated her controversial doctorate through hostile waters to the verge of publication, the author of the clear-eyed prose of
The Captive Wife
. The woman John Hayes himself described as having an ‘intense clarity of mind that burned like a sun'.

It wasn't that John wasn't worth wanting a future with. He was handsome, intelligent, charming, a grammar-school boy who had made his way to Oxford. He would go on to have sparkling friendships with brilliant women like Angela Carter and Carmen Callil, as he might have had with Hannah under different circumstances.

It wasn't even, or only, that he was homosexual, that he had never slept with a woman before Hannah. He wouldn't have been the first person to discover new elements of sexuality in a love affair. But while Hannah and my father had separated, and Hannah was talking about divorce, John Hayes was still firmly living with the other John, as he still does today. When Hannah mentioned marriage, moving in together, John had ‘a major recoil'. Their few sexual encounters had been ‘tawdry', a ‘mistake'. He had never met Simon and me, let alone entertained the idea of becoming our stepfather. And suddenly, out of nowhere, Hannah was talking about being married by Christmas.

Love can be blinding. Cherry Marshall told my grandfather how, when she had fallen in love with a man outside her marriage, ‘husband, children, work — all vanished. It was like catching a disease.' But for it to be so deluding to such an intelligent woman, such an acute observer of other people, someone who had managed her own life so successfully — it was as if she had lost her wits, lost her mind.

I GO BACK OVER MY NOTES
, searching for an explanation. Anne Wicks told my grandfather that Hannah was worried she would be ‘an old maid if John did not marry her', and was ‘genuinely afraid of being alone'. Can this be the answer? Did she really think that John Hayes was her last chance?

It seems a ridiculous thing for a beautiful, intelligent, twenty-nine-year-old woman to believe. But is that a twenty-first century perspective? In my efforts to understand Hannah, I have been reading writing by women of her time. The great woman's novel of Hannah's last years was Doris Lessing's
The Golden Notebook
, published in 1962. It is a sacred feminist work, a ‘powerful account of a woman searching for her personal and political identity', as it says on the back of my paperback copy. But veined through the novel, for character after character, even those who are trying most forcefully to be ‘free women', is the question of whether a woman can be happy without a man.

‘Women's emotions are all still fitted for a kind of society that no longer exists,' says Ella, a fictional woman within the fiction. ‘My deep emotions, my real ones are to do with my relationship with a man.' Even the novel's protagonist, Anna Wulf, confesses, ‘I'd like to be married. I don't like living like this.' To be with a man is ‘to cancel myself out', but to be without a man is to be ‘alone, frightened to be alone, without resources'.

Memoirs of real free women of the period tell of similar fears. Sheila Rowbotham writes that she ‘could not become myself' while living in her boyfriend's shadow, but when she left him she found herself ‘unsure how to be apart and on my own. A diffuse anxiety assumed physical form one night when I was overwhelmed by a choking feeling which left me panting for breath.'

Even Joan Bakewell, the epitome of the woman who had it all, came to a crisis when her marriage fell apart. ‘I found myself alone with two young children to care for,' she writes in
The Centre of the Bed
. ‘Emotionally I was confused and unhappy, drifting deeper and deeper into bewilderment and despair.'

I AM TRYING
to make sense of this when the latest edition of the
New Yorker
magazine drops through my letterbox. Inside is an article by Susan Faludi about an American feminist who recently died. ‘Death of a Revolutionary', it is headlined. ‘Shulamith Firestone helped to create a new society. But she couldn't live in it.'

I am immediately struck by similarities between Shulamith Firestone and Hannah. Fiery and stubborn, Firestone skipped the last year of school to get away from her Jewish parents and train to be a painter. She published an early feminist text. She was both striking looking — ‘a mane of black hair down to her waist, and piercing dark eyes' — and charismatic. ‘It was thrilling to be in her company,' one friend is quoted as saying. ‘She flashed brightly across the midnight sky,' another said at her funeral, ‘and then she disappeared.'

As I read on, the two stories separate. Firestone never married, had no children. She was almost a decade younger than Hannah, and far more radical. She also developed schizophrenia. Not long after her book was published, she withdrew from the feminist scene, and in time withdrew from life. She became an eccentric, wandering her neighbourhood in New York. She was hospitalised several times and died alone in an East Village tenement walk-up.

This was not Hannah. But the article goes on to consider the ‘whole generation' of founding American feminists, how so many of them were ‘unable to thrive in the world they had done so much to create'. As well as Firestone, there was Kate Millett, who had a breakdown and was hospitalised after publishing the best-selling
Sexual Politics
, also in 1970, and others who ended in ‘painful solitude, poverty, infirmity', and in two named cases, suicide.

The article quotes another early feminist, Meredith Tax, who used the phrase ‘female schizophrenia' to describe ‘a realm of unreality where a woman either belonged to a man or was “nowhere, disappeared, teetering on the edge of a void” '. It also refers to Elaine Showalter's book,
The Female Malady
, about women and madness in England, and I look this up. Showalter's main thesis is that female madness is a construction of male society, that when women challenge the status quo they are told they are mad (as Hannah was pressed to see a psychiatrist when she fell in love with another man.) But Showalter also suggests that women's position in a man's world can actually drive them mad.

Her chapter on the 1960s focuses on R. D. Laing, the Scottish ‘anti-psychiatrist' Hannah admired. The book Hannah probably read was his 1960 work,
The Divided
Self
, which argues that schizophrenia in women isn't an illness but a response to an ‘unlivable situation'. With her nature in conflict with her environment, a woman is ‘split in two'.

Could this be the explanation? That Hannah was schizoid after all? That she was driven mad, split in two, by the conflict of her situation?

Among the papers from my stepmother's filing cabinet is a rough draft of a review Hannah wrote of two films. It is unfinished, and I haven't been able to discover whether it was ever published. It is also undated, but the films were released in mid-1965, so it must have been written in her last months.

Darling
, starring Julie Christie and Dirk Bogarde, is a glamorous 1960s tragedy about a woman who gorges on the fruits of her beauty but then finds herself alone, and in desperation agrees to a loveless marriage.
Four in the Morning
is smaller, more sombre, offering little hope for female fulfillment and happiness in the modern world, and ends, as Hannah wrote, with the body of an ‘unidentified young woman aged about twenty six who has committed suicide'.

Other than her returned cheques, these are Hannah's last surviving written words.

THE FILMS
, Hannah's review, address the dilemma of modern women's ‘desire to be free, and given both the structure of our society and their own biological and emotional make up, their inability to hold onto that freedom'. But Hannah wasn't only trying to live as a free woman. She was, like the early American feminists, immersed in the subject intellectually. She had devoted much of the last years of her life to talking to captive wives, to thinking, researching, and writing about ways to free such women from that captivity.

As much, perhaps, as any other woman in England at the time, Hannah had a clear view of what was wrong with the world from a woman's point of view, what needed to be changed, and had experienced, too, in her work the difficulties of challenging the status quo. Victorian women pioneers ‘could still make a fuss and change things the way we can't any more', she told my grandfather. ‘Intellectuals are no use to anybody today.'

‘There are no easy answers to the question of how you live in a world you want to change radically,' Sheila Rowbotham wrote. If Hannah had been a few years younger, writing a few years later, she would have come across women like Rowbotham, Juliet Mitchell, Germaine Greer. In the last months of the 1960s, the first women's groups began to appear, offering support to women trying to change things in the world, in their own lives. But those few years earlier, Hannah in her work, and in a life informed by that work, was very much alone.

Whether because she was mad in those last days, or the world was mad, she put everything into her relationship with John Hayes, into the brave new life she imagined with him, because she had to — because, once she had seen a different way of being, she could not accept living by the old ways. ‘We were like pioneers who'd left the Old Country,' another early feminist told Susan Faludi. ‘And we had nowhere to go back to.' ‘When it didn't work out with John Hayes,' Tony Ryle told me, ‘she couldn't go back and she couldn't go forward.'

I grew up with the idea of there being two Hannahs: the Hannah who wanted everything out of life, and the Hannah who wanted nothing. Perhaps this was because her ‘unlivable situation' split her ‘in two'. Or perhaps there is another way to think about it. That she died not despite the life force, the character, that her friends remember, that won her showjumping cups, led her to marry at eighteen, to write
The Captive Wife
, but because of it.

This be one more fact

BUT OF COURSE
no narrative, no narrative verdict, is ever really complete. In one last conversation about Hannah, my father mentions that he thinks she had another affair before the one with John Hayes. He has told me this before, I realise, but I hadn't really taken it in — perhaps because I wasn't sure whether to believe him, perhaps because I wasn't ready to hear it myself.

‘With who?' I say now, thinking he will take it back, or tell me he doesn't know, doesn't remember.

‘A doctor.'

‘What doctor?'

‘You don't know him.'

‘What was his name?'

He purses his lips. ‘Why do you want to know?'

‘I'm interested.'

‘John Paulett,' he says, eventually.

He and Hannah met John Paulett and his wife on a beach in the south of France, he says. The Pauletts lived in Bexleyheath. Hannah was ‘always keen to visit them there'.

‘How do you know they were having an affair?'

‘I don't,' he says. ‘But I suspected.'

‘What made you suspect?'

‘I was sitting on the sofa with the wife, and she tried to make up to me, and when I protested, she asked me what I thought the others were doing in the next room.'

He hadn't thought anything of it at the time. He was naive, he thought the wife was just a bit strange, but afterwards —

His voice trails off; he has said more than he intended.

‘When was this?' I ask.

‘Oh, quite a lot earlier.'

‘How much earlier?'

‘The late Fifties.'

‘But that was before I was born,' I protest.

‘Yes,' he says firmly. ‘Between Simon and you.'

JOHN PAULETT
, I discover online, was born in 1918 — he was twelve years older than my father, eighteen older than Hannah — and died in 1997. He had three wives and two children. One of the children is called Daphne, and I find a Daphne Paulett in Greece. She has an email address, and I send her a brief email saying that I think her father might have known my mother.

‘Yes, John Paulett was my dad,' she replies, ‘and I do remember your mother. Please ask me what you want to know.'

I write back a careful email, suggesting only that her father may have had some influence on Hannah. I don't want to be the one to tell her about her father and my mother, or to claim something that is not true.

But she writes back, ‘I am pretty sure that my dad had an affair with Hannah.'

They lived in St Paul's Cray, not Bexleyheath, she says. She remembers my parents visiting: ‘a couple who used to live in London who would bring us strange things from the city, like avocado pears'. This sounds right — my uncle used to send boxes of avocados from Israel.

In further emails, she tells me a little more. Her father was ‘a strong influence on everybody that knew him'. Her mother also killed herself, in 1963, when Daphne was twelve — after ‘a very huge fight with my dad'. Daphne found her.

Her father wrote a book called
Neurosis
. He had lots of affairs. Her mother's death was several years after his affair with Hannah, she assures me — was nothing to do with that.

She sends me a photograph of him: a good-looking man in a white shirt, collar turned up, sleeves rolled, standing in his garden holding up a fox he had killed, she writes, because it invaded his chicken run. Three dead chickens also lie at his feet.

I AM STUNNED
by all this. I thought I had understood Hannah, had made sense of her life and death — and now this changes everything. John Paulett wasn't the ‘other side of the coin', as Tony Ryle had said of John Hayes, but another powerful older man.

I spend more time at the computer, and learn that he was a political radical, one of the original Committee of a Hundred, the anti-war group set up to demonstrate against nuclear weapons in 1960, along with Ralph Miliband, Arnold Wesker, Lindsay Anderson, John Osborne, and others.

How do I reconcile this with my theories about Hannah's need to be young again, to free herself from male domination, that it was at Hornsey that she was radicalised?

BETWEEN SIMON AND ME
, my father insisted. Before I was born. My God, I think for a minute, John Paulett could be my father — before reason returns to me. I only have to look in the mirror to know who my father is.

My father, who is not usually good on dates, was surprisingly sure about when this affair happened. What could have fixed the time in his mind? I think of his spine operation — how he was on his back in hospital for six weeks in 1959. He made a point of telling me how good Hannah was to him then, how she was at his bedside every day — but perhaps she was being so nice to make up for what she was doing when she wasn't there.

I remember also about Hannah's miscarriage between Simon and me. I am not John Paulett's son — but could the miscarried baby have been? Was this what Hannah's story of the two-headed baby was about? A baby with two heads because it had two fathers — because she didn't know which one was the father?

FOR THE FIRST TIME
in my life, I am angry with Hannah. I think of David Page's description of her fancying male students. I have loved this image ever since I got the letter — this ballsy, Mae West-ish Hannah. But now there is something disturbing about it. Who else was she sleeping with?

There is something sickening, too, about the thought that she was having an affair before I was born. Why bring a child into an already fractured family?

THOUGH, AS TIME PASSES
, my anger fades. It is hard to be angry with someone for giving me life. It is hard to be angry with someone whose own life was so foreshortened — who missed out on so much.

She would be in her seventies now, if she had lived — a grey-haired grandmother of five. In all the years since, I have only ever had one dream in which she appeared. It was shortly after I had come back to London from my years abroad. I was her last age, though in my dream she was middle-aged, motherly, even a little plump.

I don't remember her saying anything, only sitting at the end of my bed, as if I had woken from sleep to find her there. I remember how happy I felt in my dream — and that the happiness stayed with me for days.

I SET OUT
on these inquiries as a son looking for a mother — but the Hannah I have found is not that motherly, middle-aged woman, or the woman in her seventies she would be now. She is the Hannah of her childhood, her teens, her twenties. The Hannah who will never grow older than twenty-nine. I am fifty-two as I write the final version of these last words, the years between us almost the same as they were when I was born, though I am now the older, old enough to be her father.

I have done what I can to give Hannah life again, in my head, on these pages, as a father gives life to a daughter. Now, as a father must eventually let go of his daughters, as I have already begun to do with my own daughters as they grow towards adulthood, I must let my mother go.