A Woman on the Edge of Time (3 page)

Now, though I don't talk to my family, I find myself blurting out about her suicide to people I hardly know, cornering strangers like the ancient mariner, or Conrad's Marlow, with my inconclusive story.

I am almost exactly the age Simon was when he died, playing in the same weekly football game, when I have a cardiac event of my own. Like Simon, I begin to feel unwell during the game. I have a slight ear infection, and I tell myself it is my ear, that I will go to the doctor tomorrow to get antibiotics, and I continue playing. But when the game ends I am still conscious of a pressure on my chest, and I take myself to the hospital. It is a heart attack, but caught early, and fortunately a small one. The cardiologist threads three stents into my arteries, and within a few weeks I am back to running and playing football.

The symmetry of what has happened is not lost on me. I have survived in part because of what happened to Simon. If it wasn't for his death I probably wouldn't have gone to the hospital. I might have woken the next morning, gone for a walk or a run as he did, and ended up in a different part of the building.

It is common after a heart attack to be depressed, but I feel invigorated, re-engaged with life. We throw a party. I delight in telling people what has happened, how I have beaten the family curse, have not died young.

Within a few months, I complete my first proper piece of writing since Simon died, and I begin working on a new novel, an idea about an unexplained death I have had in my mind for a long time, though now I see it from the point of view of a journalist investigating the case. But while I know how the story should feel — part fairy tale, part detective story, magical and ordinary at the same time — I cannot get this feeling to come to life on the page, as if there is still a disconnect between my emotions and my intellect, my heart and my head.

Six months after my heart attack, leafing through a newspaper, I come upon an article about the recent suicide of Nicholas Hughes, the son of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. I have long known that there were similarities between Plath's death and my mother's, but what I read now sends a chill of recognition through me. It is not only the proximity of the two flats, the ages of the two women, the gas ovens. Nicholas Hughes was forty-seven, as I am. Like my father, Ted Hughes apparently tried to keep the truth from his children until they were older. Like me, the article suggests, Nicholas Hughes was deeply affected by a second death — in his case, that of his father.

By the time I have finished reading, I know I am going to write something about Hannah. I call the
Guardian
and all but insist that the editor I speak to commissions the piece, which I write in a state of nervous exhilaration, the words flowing from me, and I file straight away, so that I cannot change my mind.

Two

WHAT I WRITE
for the
Guardian
is as much about what I don't know as what I do, about living in the shadow of suicide as about Hannah herself, but waiting for it to be published I am more anxious than I have ever been over a book. With a book, my worries are about reviews and sales, whether readers will like it — not that the sky might fall in, that what I have written might finish off my father.

I spoke to him while I was writing it, and though he told me I must do what I needed to do, I could hear him stiffening down the line, as he had on our walk on Hampstead Heath a dozen years before. If there are two Hannahs, there are also two of my father: the confident, commanding patriarch he usually is, and the halting, almost wordless person he becomes when Hannah is mentioned.

Even in my earliest memories, there was something of the chief executive officer about my father, but he wasn't distant from Simon and me. He would get down on the carpet in his bedroom to play with us. At bedtime, he read me books like
The Wind in the Willows
, or told me stories he made up.

As I grew older, he came to watch me play sport for my school, standing on the touchline on cold, wet afternoons. For years, he took me for a walk every Sunday morning across Hampstead Heath. I don't remember any particular conversations, but I can see us in my mind's eye, my father asking about school, books I was reading, my sports teams, or trying to interest me in his world.

Nor was our house a furtive or unhappy place, at least until his marriage to my stepmother began to fall apart a decade later. New life soon came along in the shape of my half-sisters, and my stepmother, young and hippyish, devoted herself to us. More than twenty years after their divorce, she still likes to tell the story of how my father courted her. He wanted to be home in the evenings to put Simon and me to bed, so he took her for tea at the Ritz. He had bought a business in the last couple of years of Hannah's life, had gone out on his own and taken on debts, and he told her he wasn't sure his heart was in it. He talked of selling up, buying a boat, sailing around the world, starting a new life.

It was, my stepmother says, partly why she married him, though he never bought that boat. Instead he carried on with his business, forging it into a success, as we carried on with our family life, holding to the same course we had been on before Hannah's death, only with a different mother, the old one unmentioned, almost as if she had never existed.

THE NIGHT BEFORE
the article is due out, I can't sleep, and I get up early and walk down to the newsagent. Opening the newspaper in the street to see the headline, a photograph of Hannah holding me, my hands start shaking, and I glance around, but the street is empty: no one is staring at me.

As the morning goes on, the phone rings, emails start to arrive — none suggesting I have done anything terrible. My aunt Susie calls, pledging to try to break ‘the old pattern of silence'. Simon's wife emails with a memory of Simon telling her about Hannah when they first met, warning her that he wasn't a good bet. He would have appreciated the article, she writes, though I am not sure I could have written it if he was still alive. My father calls to say that several people have spoken to him positively about the article. His voice is a little easier, and I wonder if an old weight might not have lifted a little from him, too.

Letters also come, from family friends, from strangers to me who write that they knew Hannah. One is from a woman who recalls Hannah coming to her sister's fancy-dress party as ‘a ravishing Carmen (with a large flower in her hair) aged, oh, maybe 17 or 18. I remember how vivacious and beautiful she was.' Another is the letter in which David Page, Hannah's colleague at Hornsey College of Art, writes of her striding the corridors and fancying the students. ‘She was a wonderful vivid person, one of those you never forget. I'm really sorry you never had the chance to know her as an adult, the way we knew her.'

This letter makes me smile, and I keep it out to show to people, read it again and again. I write to David to thank him, and it is not until several weeks have passed that it occurs to me that I could ask him if he has more memories of her. It is an obvious thought — but to me it is a lightning bolt. It is engrained in me that we do not talk about Hannah in my family. But then David Page is not my family.

I send him an email, but he writes back to say he that does not think he has much more to tell me. I try the woman who wrote of Hannah as Carmen, but she only met Hannah that one time. I am disappointed, but something has shifted in my mind, and I think about who else I could try.

The obvious people are two sisters, Sonia and Tasha Edelman, childhood friends of Hannah's, who figured in my grandmother's stories. I have met Tasha, and have an added reason to want to see her. Some years ago, I learned from Susie that Tasha had some letters from Hannah, though when I called Tasha she said she had lost them. But Susie tells me now that Tasha's health, which has been bad for some time, has worsened. She has had a stroke, and barely talks. She suggests instead that I write to Sonia.

While I am waiting for a reply, I email an old neighbour of ours from Hannah's time. Deborah Van der Beek — Kartun as she was — is only a few years older than me, but I hope she might be able to give me something of the child's view of Hannah I never got from Simon and have lost in myself.

Deborah replies immediately, and a couple of days later I drive to Wiltshire to see her and her mother, who lives nearby. Deborah is an artist, and lives in a beautifully restored Queen Anne vicarage with a walled garden full of her sculptures; but, walking around with her, I find it hard to take anything in, and it is a relief when we sit down to talk about Hannah.

Deborah's family were the first to move into the modern development in Highgate where we lived next door to each other, she tells me, and we were the second. Her parents were quite a bit older than mine, but they soon became good enough friends to go away together. Deborah talks about a holiday in the New Forest, when Hannah took her riding in the frost, and another in the south of France, when she remembers my parents dressing up to go dancing in St Tropez, Hannah in ‘fitting slacks with foot straps, looking glamorous, laughing', and my father ‘clearly terribly proud of her beauty and vibrancy'.

Hannah was almost young enough to be Deborah's big sister, and she remembers her skipping and playing hula-hoop with her in the garden. She was fascinated by Hannah, she says, how ‘pretty and vivacious' she was, how she could be ‘feminine, but also tomboyish'. The families sometimes shared the school run, and Deborah talks of being in Hannah's car, a little Fiat, when she drove along the pavement to get around traffic — one of my grandmother's stories.

Later, we drive to the next village to see her mother. Gwen begins by saying how clearly she remembers Hannah, what a ‘terrific sense of humour' she had, how attractive and genuine she was, ‘down to earth, not phony at all'. But when I press her for more details, her eyes grow misty. She is in her late eighties, and the times we are talking about are half a century ago.

The only specific memory she can come up with is of the weekend before Hannah's death. She and her husband had flown to Paris, leaving Deborah and her sister with the au pair girl, but the night they were due back there was fog at Orly airport, and the planes were grounded.

When Gwen called home to say they were having to stay another night in Paris, the au pair told her that Mrs Gavron had telephoned. If she had known, if she had had any idea, she would have phoned Hannah immediately, she says. But she didn't know, how could she have known? — she didn't even know that my parents' marriage was in difficulties. A year or two earlier, we had moved to another, slightly larger house in the same development, and though it was only around the corner, she hadn't seen so much of Hannah.

‘I didn't know she was depressive,' she says.

‘She was depressive?'

‘Well, she must have been, mustn't she?' she says. ‘To do what she did.'

A COUPLE OF DAYS
later, I take the train down to Bristol to see Sonia Edelman, or Jackson as she is now. Staring out of the train window, I am excited, nervous, as if I am going on an assignation. The Kartuns were friends, neighbours, but Sonia was Hannah's childhood intimate — the possessor, surely, of some deeper knowledge.

Sonia has offered to meet me at the station, and when I walk out, the first thing she says is, ‘You look like Hannah.' I feel myself blushing. It is the first time anyone has ever told me I look like my mother.

Sonia herself is handsome, her hair still blonde, though I am taken aback by how old she is. I always think of Hannah as young, never more than twenty-nine, but Sonia is in her seventies. Glancing at her as she walks to the car, trying to imagine Hannah this age, is like trying to imagine a fairy-tale princess as a grandmother.

In the car, Sonia starts talking in a rush about Hannah, their childhoods in the Buckinghamshire countryside, her own family. ‘But you know this,' she keeps saying, and I have to keep telling her that I don't, that all I know is that during the war Hannah lived in a cottage on the edge of Amersham, that it was here she locked the housekeeper in the chicken shed.

Hannah and my grandparents moved to Amersham in 1942, Sonia thinks, when Hannah was six. The Edelmans were already living in a big house with a tennis court a couple of miles away in posher Chesham Bois — Sonia's father, Maurice Edelman, was a novelist and Labour member of parliament.

Hannah often came to stay. They had a group of friends who lived around Chesham Bois, with whom they would go riding. Amersham still had a squire in those days, and his wife took a particular interest in Hannah and let her keep her pony in their stables. I ask why, and Sonia looks at me if I am being deliberately obtuse. ‘Because Hannah was so charming and attractive and beautiful, of course,' she says. ‘Not like the average child at all. And a wonderful rider.'

Sonia and Tasha also competed at the pony club meetings, but it was Hannah who ‘won everything', though on the rare occasions she lost there would be ‘floods of tears', and she would need ‘lots of calming down'.

Sonia was the older, but Hannah was the leader. She remembers a holiday to Bexhill. Hannah took out a rowing boat and managed it perfectly, but when Sonia and Tasha took out a boat, they drifted out to sea and had to be rescued.

When Hannah went off to board at Frensham Heights in Surrey, Tasha insisted on following her. Sonia was already at another school, but she remembers going with her parents to Frensham and seeing Hannah in a production of
The Duchess of Malfi
, in which ‘she was brilliant, naturally'.

She talks of another boating holiday, when they were fifteen or sixteen, to Sweden, run by a man who had sailed with Shackleton. She and Tasha had been with the same group to Holland a year earlier, and Hannah was the newcomer, but she made herself the centre of attention by ‘picking on this rather ordinary boy and deciding to have a passionate affair with him'.

Hannah was ‘notorious for always wanting to be in love with some boy'. She was ‘always creating dramas around herself'.

She talks about Hannah and my father, who met when she was seventeen and he was twenty-three, ‘how completely wrapped up in each other they were'.

She didn't see so much of Hannah after she was married. The last time they met was when Hannah was interviewing women for
The Captive Wife
, which must have been a couple of years before her death.

I ask about Hannah's suicide, and she says she always assumed it was ‘a dramatic gesture', that she hadn't meant to kill herself. Someone had told her that she was expecting the woman whose flat it was to come back. Though she says also that she didn't think ‘Hannah would have liked ageing. I don't see her having a happy life.'

Hannah wasn't ‘prone to depression', she says, but she did have ‘fits of despair if things didn't go her way'. She didn't like ‘having to compromise'.

‘The thing about Hannah,' she says, ‘is that you were always interested in her. You were never bored with Hannah.'

LATER, AT HOME,
I stand at the mirror. I have taken pride in my daughter's resemblance to Hannah, but it is only now, after Sonia's words at the train station, that it occurs to me to look for my mother in my own face, to reach up and touch my broad jaw, run my finger along my full lips.