A Woman on the Edge of Time (8 page)

We find the room Carole shared with Hannah. It is smaller than I expected, with space for only three or four beds. We go, too, into the headmaster's study, and I look around, trying to see ghosts, though it is only another dusty room. When we come back out, I realise we are standing in the corridor Hannah walked along to see the headmaster, though it is shorter, less gothic, than I imagined. On one of the bare walls, a corner peeling away, is a poster for Childline.

LATER WE GO
downstairs to read the material Rosellen has dug up from the late 1940s and early 1950s. I had hoped there might be copies of Hannah's reports, but Rosellen explains that most of the old records are in unsorted boxes in the cellars. What is here are photographs and old school magazines.

Leafing through the magazines, I find reviews of school plays Hannah was in. Her first part, when she was thirteen, was as a maid in
Tobias and the Angel
, by James Brodie, but a year later she had claimed her first lead, as Cleopatra in Shaw's
Caesar and Cleopatra.
Hannah ‘
made Cleopatra precocious without being aggressive and kittenish without affectation', the review says. Photographs show her in a long black wig, sleek and womanly. ‘At the time of the play,' the review says, ‘Cleopatra is sixteen years old and Caesar fifty-two.'

I also find some articles Hannah wrote, about a swimming event, her French exchange trip (‘I saw all the things that one should see and a few that one should not'), and a day spent collecting money for charity — or not collecting money, as she and Tasha had somehow picked a road that didn't exist.

They meet a man pushing a cart of logs who ‘burst forth in a torrent of words to the effect that he had lived here for sixty years and never in his life had he heard of Ellerslie Lane'. He goes off ‘muttering in sepulchral tones' and they try a different road, but other Frensham Heights students have already been here. After meeting a dog that takes ‘an instantaneous aversion to us', they return to school and hear from a boy about ‘a tussle with a lady who had tried desperately to persuade him to take a feather bed instead of money'.

IN THE MAGAZINES
are also the headmaster's annual speech day addresses, with their emphasis on the wellbeing of the students. On the train back, I ask Carole what she thinks went on during Hannah's ‘extra German coaching', but all she thought at the time, she says, was that Hannah had a crush on him.

I have heard from Shirley and Bill Wills, the carpentry teacher, that Hannah wasn't the ‘only one', and Tasha even named a girl she said had been Hannah's ‘successor' in the headmaster's affections. I haven't done anything about this; but when I ask Carole now, she says she is still in touch with this woman and offers to contact her, and a few days later the woman sends me an email.

‘You must remember that Hannah was not a very special friend of mine and it is now all more than fifty years ago,' she writes. ‘I would however hope to be able to help a little in your understanding of her suicide.' She gives me her phone number, and suggests a time to call. It is a few hours away, and as the time passes I become increasingly more nervous, convinced I am about to discover the secrets of the headmaster's study.

But when we speak it turns out there has been a misunderstanding. Nothing inappropriate took place between her and the headmaster, she insists. She only has favourable things to say about him.

What she meant about suicide was that she has had some professional experience of the subject. The problem was the coal gas used in homes in those days, with its high content of carbon monoxide in its natural state, which made it easier for people to kill themselves. When the switch was made to natural gas, the suicide rate dropped by a third.

Six

HANNAH APPLIED TO
the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in the autumn of 1952. She was just sixteen, and her application form is filled out in childish block capitals. ‘I have passed 4 subjects at O level and hope to obtain A levels in English Lit and History in July,' she wrote. The form is signed by my grandfather, as next of kin, and the headmaster, as ‘Referee for Character and Respectability'.

I read this in the library at RADA, which still holds her file from fifty-five years ago. From this I learn that, because of her age, she was initially admitted to the Preparatory Academy, or PARADA, before being moved up after a term to the main school. I have always assumed that she graduated, but a pair of letters show that she left after a year, rather than the two needed to complete her studies.

In the first, dated September 1954, she wrote to give notice for the end of term. ‘My English teacher at school always warned me that being the person that I was the stage would never be intellectually satisfying for me. I now am beginning to realise that he was quite right. I am afraid that I have expressed all this very badly. The truth is that the feeling of vocation has completely left me.'

A week later, she wrote to say that she was leaving right away. She had been for an interview at the Institut Français and been told that she needed to start immediately. She didn't say what she planned to do there, but ‘the choice is out of my hands'.

THE STORY I HAD HEARD
about Hannah at RADA was that she played the lead in Shakespeare opposite Albert Finney and Peter O'Toole. When I spoke to my father while writing my article, I asked if he remembered which play it was, and he said he thought it was
Twelfth Night
, with Hannah playing Viola, and either Finney or O'Toole as Sir Toby Belch.

But on the sheet in Hannah's file listing the plays in which she performed there is no mention of
Twelfth Night
. The only Shakespeare is
A Midsummer Night's Dream
— or ‘The Dream' as it is listed — and Hannah played not Titania, the fairy queen, but two minor male parts, Puck, the king's jester, and Snug, the joiner, who plays the part of the lion in the play within the play.

The librarian confirms that Finney and O'Toole were at RADA at the same time as Hannah, though they were a year ahead of her. I ask him whether there is any way of finding out if either of them was in ‘The Dream' with Hannah, or in any of the other plays on her sheet. He goes away into a back room and returns a few minutes later. Neither Finney nor O'Toole was in any of those plays.

FINNEY AND O'TOOLE
are the only fellow students I have ever heard mentioned. The library has a list of Hannah's contemporaries, but there are hundreds of them, and I have no idea who might have been friendly with or would remember Hannah. The librarian suggests I speak to the alumni office, and a woman there offers to send a notice out with an alumni mailing. The only reply I get is from the actress Sylvia Syms, who writes that she didn't know Hannah, but that her own mother committed suicide when she was young, so she knows ‘the mark it leaves on those left behind'. ‘We will never know their reasons,' she adds.

ALTHOUGH MY FATHER
knows what I am doing, he doesn't ask how my research is going, and the couple of times I try to ask him about Hannah it is uncomfortable for both of us. But one afternoon, when I am round at his house, he starts talking about Hannah — or at least about himself in relation to Hannah.

I know, from one of my grandmother's stories, that he and Hannah first met as children. Hannah, so the story goes, climbed a tree and wouldn't come down. I have always imagined that Hannah was nine or ten and my father fifteen or sixteen when this happened. But he tells me now that they were younger. It was during the war. Shirley's mother, his favourite aunt, was friends with Hannah's mother, and took him to Hannah's house somewhere out in the country. Amersham? I suggest. No, he says, something farm. Scarlett's Farm? That would have been the summer of 1940, when Hannah was three or four and he was nine. That sounds right, he says — and there is something about the idea of them meeting when they were so young that moves me again, and I sense that my father is moved, too, at the memory, though we do not say anything.

Instead he talks about the next time they met, at a fancy-dress party, when Hannah was seventeen and he had recently come down from Oxford. He had heard talk from his mother and aunt about the ‘difficult' Fyvel girl, but as he had always been told by his mother that he was difficult, that didn't put him off — if anything, it made Hannah more intriguing.

There was a band, and he asked Hannah to dance. He had learned to dance on his national service in the army, in Berlin, during the airlift. His sergeant-major's wife had been the south-west England ballroom dancing champion, and because her husband didn't dance she taught my father the foxtrot and the quickstep, and he was her partner at the dances in the sergeants' mess.

He had a girlfriend from Oxford, a very nice girl. Her aunt ran a hotel in Bermuda, and invited her to come out for a year and work there, and she came to my father and asked him whether he thought she should take up the offer. She was asking, he thought, whether they were serious, whether they were going to get married. Before he met Hannah he might have told her to stay, but now he told her he thought she should go — it was an opportunity she shouldn't pass up.

Hannah was at RADA, by then, and when I ask him if he can think of anyone who was there with her, he says, or seems to say, Lady Bear; though what he is actually saying, he explains, is Lady, or Diana, Baer, or Diana Robinson as she was at RADA.

He still sees her socially, he says, saw her just the other day in fact, which disconcerts me, though of course he cannot avoid bumping into people who were friends with Hannah. He has lived with this all these years, this world of ghosts. It is new only for me.

DIANA BAER STARTED
at PARADA at the same time as Hannah, she says, when I go to see her in Kensington. She loved it there. It was her first time out of school.

She shows me some photographs. They are of young people dressed up in period costumes on stage — though none is Hannah. She talks about movement lessons, voice projection, breathing. I ask about Hannah. She doesn't think Hannah ever really wanted to be an actress, she says. She talked incessantly about my father. She can't tell me any more, but she suggests I speak to another RADA friend, Sue Westerley-Smith, and when I get home I call her.

Sue was also at PARADA, which was in Highgate — a short walk from the house where we were living when Hannah died. It was very old-fashioned. There was a daily assembly, which Hannah decided was too much like school. Sue remembers Hannah ‘sitting at the back on a window sill playing cards'. ‘I adored her,' she says. ‘She made me laugh.'

IT IS NOT MUCH,
but I am learning to make do with fragments, to construct a whole out of pieces, like an archaeologist conjuring a jar out of a few shards.

Though perhaps I have always been doing this, have seen the world in this way since I was a boy imagining my mother out of the little I was allowed to know. My first novel was narrated by a man ‘who spent most of my childhood at the edge of things, listening to my own thoughts, or talk I was not supposed to hear, piecing together the world like a forbidden jigsaw, the pieces stolen one by one'. It was set in Africa, before I was born, and I didn't think of it as my own story, though I see now see how much of myself I put into it, that it was not coincidence that the final act of the main narrative is the mother's suicide.

My subsequent two novels had little in subject to do with Hannah, but both are fragmented narratives, collections of half stories that are left for the reader to piece together, find some greater sense in.

A COUPLE OF FRAGMENTS:

1. SUSIE MENTIONS A RECORD
Hannah made of herself reciting poems while she was at RADA. She says she listened to it again and again as a child.

I have some old cine films of our family, of Hannah, which I have put onto DVD and have been watching. But they are silent. I have no tape of her voice, no idea what she sounded like, and for weeks afterwards I think about this record, mourn its disappearance, its loss.

2. MY FATHER SAID
he met Hannah at a fancy-dress party, and I think of the email I received about Hannah as a ‘ravishing Carmen' at a fancy-dress party. Could it have been the same party? I contact the woman who wrote it. She doesn't remember my father being there — though it was a joint party for her sister and a cousin of Shirley's, so it is quite possible he came. It was September 1953, shortly after Hannah turned seventeen and started at PARADA.

I ask my father, and though he can't remember whether this was the party, I decide that it must have been. I am pleased to have discovered the night that my parents met, or met again. I know from my daughters that it is one of the stories children like to hear, how their parents met, the moment their own lives began to take shape — and I am happy that I have identified my own beginnings.

IT HAS BECOME
a little easier talking with my father, and he continues his story on two or three afternoons. He had studied law at Oxford, but when he came down he needed to earn some money, and the year Hannah was at RADA he taught Latin and history at a boarding school near Reading.

He and Hannah weren't a ‘proper item' initially. She had ‘other boys on the radar', including an Israeli boy called Mike she had met through Shirley, while he was having ‘a passionate affair with the under matron at the school'. But as the year went on he would often drive down to London and pick her up from the RADA cloakroom, as Sue Westerley-Smith had remembered. He had a ‘very nice pre-war sports car, a Wolseley Hornet Special', he says.

Hannah had signed up to go on a tour of Israel for the summer of 1954, but my father and Hannah were growing more serious. Hannah told my grandparents she didn't want to go, but they insisted — perhaps because they had paid for the trip, though my father suggests they also wanted her to have a break from him.

By chance, I discover that the novelist Elisabeth Russell Taylor was on the same tour. The party, she remembers, was made up mostly of ‘young, rich, and uninteresting' girls. Elisabeth was a few years older and ‘politically antagonistic to the privileged'. But Hannah was more interesting. She ‘clearly didn't want to be on the trip' and was ‘argumentative, contentious, and self-opinionated'.

She talked about marrying my father ‘in a black dress with red roses'. She was ‘a bit of a pain'. But Elisabeth also uses the word ‘courageous' to describe her. Hannah wasn't prepared to behave the way women were supposed to behave, and Elisabeth felt she would ‘do something substantial with her life'.

WHAT HANNAH DID
on coming back from Israel was give up her place at RADA and decide to marry my father. An announcement of their engagement appeared in
The Times
that November. My father was now studying for the Bar and living with his parents in Hampstead Garden Suburb. Hannah was also at home in her parents' flat near Regents Park, though what she was doing is less clear.

I have put off reading my grandfather's diaries, but I can't defer it any longer, and early one morning I fly with an empty suitcase up to Edinburgh, where Susie has been storing the boxes of diaries in her cellar.

In his later years, I remember my grandfather keeping a brief daily journal in the kind of desk diaries that have a page for each week below a reproduction of a painting of flowers. These were often open on his desk, and I saw once that he had written in the same word, ‘weltschmerz', for every day of the week. I asked what it meant, and he explained it was the German for world-weariness, or ennui, and grinned ruefully. But most of the older diaries, like the one I looked at when sorting through my grandparents' house, are thick ring-bound notebooks, a hundred sheets in each, filled with his dense scrawl. Susie spends the day teaching me to decipher it, and in the evening I fly home with some of the diaries, Susie bringing the rest later, and begin to work my way through them.

Apart from a volume covering a Fulbright fellowship to America in late 1951 and early 1952, though, the diaries don't begin until the mid-1950s. The only reference to Hannah before this is in the last page of the American diary, when he describes coming home to find his daughter a ‘bright, self-centred child'.