A Woman on the Edge of Time (12 page)

JEANIE REMEMBERS
my father coming downstairs that morning with a couple of suitcases, and Hannah saying something about him going on a business trip, though later, over their morning coffee, she told Jeanie that things had been difficult between them and that they needed a bit of space.

My father stayed at first at the Ritz. Later, he moved into a muse house behind Harley Street owned by a doctor friend. Jeanie remembers him coming to see Simon and me in the evenings.

Hannah didn't confide directly in Jeanie about her affair with John Hayes, but she talked about a colleague who had been homosexual but was now seeing a woman. ‘She never told me the woman was her,' Jeanie remembers, ‘but after a while I worked out that it must be.'

ON THE AFTERNOON
of my father's departure, my grandfather wrote that Hannah was ‘cautious, controlled, determined. Tells me her side.' My father was ‘impossible to live with! Fighting for her identity as an individual. His determination to dominate. I am being talked round as we sit there — on H's side.'

But that evening my father visited my grandparents. Hannah was ‘pushing him towards declaring divorce', but he suggested a ‘trial separation'. ‘Hannah could draw cheques, run the house, see her John. Must see a psychiatrist.' After this, my grandfather's ‘heart — and head — warmed to him. Now I'm on his side.'

In the morning, Hannah came round to my grandparents' house to hear my father's terms. ‘She agrees, wearily, half-green,' but ‘demurs at psychiatrist'. She will ‘see her John — but not in the house'.

Afterwards she drove my grandfather to his office in Bush House — ‘like a lunatic — disregarding traffic — a psychopath's drive — my hair stands on end'.

RATHER THAN A PSYCHIATRIST
, Hannah went to Sussex University to see an old friend, Tony Ryle, whose general practice in Kentish Town had supplied her with the interviewees for her thesis, and was now the campus doctor.

‘Tony Ryle has helped,' my grandfather recorded when Hannah returned from Sussex on 27 October. A ‘truce' between Hannah and my father. ‘Two dominant characters. They'll go to Tavistock counsellors.'

If, by this, my grandfather meant marriage-guidance counsellors, the talk was in fact now of them seeing a well-known psychiatrist, Anthony Storr. ‘Now what about Storr do you really want to go or are my parents pushing you?' Hannah wrote to my father. ‘I will go willingly if it is your wish. Let me know what you want and whether you wish to arrange it for me. We are all as well as can be expected. I hope it is not too awful for you. I think of you constantly and worry all the time.'

‘If you would go to Storr I would appreciate it,' my father wrote in return. ‘I suggest you make your appointments and I make mine.'

My father has no memory of seeing Anthony Storr, though early in 1966 he wrote out a cheque to him for £12 12s, the charge for two appointments. On 12 December, two days before her death, Hannah wrote a cheque to David Malan, another psychiatrist, to whom Anthony Storr seems to have referred her. Her cheque was for £6 6s — the charge for one appointment.

Anthony Storr is long dead, but David Malan is still alive. Would he remember what was said in a single consultation almost fifty years ago? I am tantalised by this thought, as I am by the thought of the notes he would have taken. But he is old and unwell, and my attempts to contact him are firmly rebuffed.

For what was said in those consultations I have only my father's memory that Hannah was told that there was nothing wrong with her, that she was going through an ordinary life crisis. That and a letter of condolence from Anthony Storr, in which he said it was ‘tragic' that Hannah ‘was not able to accept the help she was offered' — whatever that means.

ON 30 OCTOBER
, Susie married her fiancé in Cambridge. The guests were the two sets of parents and the groom's brother. Hannah was invited, but she told Susie that she couldn't come, as ‘things were too complicated'.

Hannah was still at Hornsey, but she had handed in her resignation and was looking again for a more serious academic post. Her visit to Tony Ryle seems to have given her an idea, for early in November my grandfather wrote a letter to a friend at the University of Sussex, inquiring about sociology posts, though this doesn't seem to have yielded anything. Five days later, he wrote in his diary, ‘Depressing: H no job, no core I think. Confused. I feel sad for her.'

She had finished proofreading
The Captive Wife
, and was eager for it to come out. She wrote to Brian Southam at Routledge ‘that she would do anything to avoid delaying' publication. The ‘vital date to beat is Christmas'.

Why Christmas? Her concern surely wasn't to get it into the bookshops in time for the seasonal rush.
The Captive Wife
, for all the attention it would get, was hardly a stocking filler. More likely, perhaps, is that she was hoping that the publication of the book might help her find a job.

As it was, the publishers scheduled
The Captive Wife
for the following spring, and it was the other book she was supposed to be writing that Southam was more immediately concerned about. ‘Our production department is wondering about the Introduction to Sociology,' he wrote on 5 November. ‘I wonder if you can let me have a note of its progress and a likely date of delivery.' It is the last letter in her file of correspondence with the publishers.

‘HANNAH, ADRIFT!'
my grandfather wrote soon after. ‘The house dirty — Jean — uncertain. Whither?' A week later, he wrote of Hannah telling my father: ‘return, let's try. Can't promise more.' My grandfather was ‘enormously relieved'.

But two days later, an ‘early telephone from H. Final break. Not bearable.'

THROUGH ALL THIS
, Hannah continued to fulfill her teaching duties at Hornsey, and even took up other work. In the last two weeks of her life, her bank statements record that she was paid £31 10s for acting as a jurist for students' work at the Architectural Association, £8 8s for book reviews from the
Economist
, and £6 6s from the BBC for her contribution to a radio feature on
Women at Work
.

On 2 December, my grandfather wrote in his diary that Hannah had finally secured a job: ‘at the Institute of Education. £2000 a year and a secretary. With Basil Bernstein — plus endless prospects.'

He didn't say what the job was, but it would probably have been a mix of research, perhaps on the sociology of education, and supervising graduate students. The institute didn't teach undergraduates, it wasn't the LSE, but it was a prestigious establishment, and Basil Bernstein was a rising star.

‘Dec 5,' my grandfather's diary records. ‘Hannah for supper. Slowly she thaws. Talks of her new job.'

The following Saturday, 11 December, Hannah seems to have gone shopping for clothes, for among her returned cheques is one made out to Zing Boutique for £2 12s. Perhaps she wanted an outfit to impress her new boss, for on the Sunday evening she went to supper with Basil Bernstein and his psychologist wife, Marion, at the home of Donald MacRae, a supportive older sociologist.

‘She spent Sunday evening with us and won the instant admiration of our daughters,' Donald MacRae would write to my grandfather later. ‘She seemed to look forward to her work at the Institute, and when she left we all felt that it had been a happy evening. Marion and Basil Bernstein shared our feelings for her and felt as we did.'

The next evening, Monday 13 December, Hannah visited my grandparents. She was ‘cheerful', my grandfather wrote. My father was being ‘more flexible, much nicer', and Hannah seems to have suggested she was cooling on John Hayes, for my grandfather wrote hopefully of my father having a chance with her, ‘if he plays a long shot, since there is no other man on the scene'.

THE FOLLOWING MORNING
, Tuesday 14 December 1965, Hannah phoned through an order to a grocery shop in Highgate village, as she often did, to save time in her busy schedule. The groceries were delivered an hour or two later, and Jeanie unpacked them as usual — though not so usual was the half bottle of vodka she found in the box. In the year she had been with the family, drink had always been ordered from a wine merchants', and when Jeanie put the half bottle on the sideboard she noticed a bottle of vodka already there, still almost full.

It was the last day of my term, my last day at nursery school, and there was a Christmas party in the afternoon. When it was time for Hannah to take me, she told Jeanie that she wasn't sure when she would be back, and asked Jeanie to collect me. Jeanie often picked me up from nursery school — it was only a few minutes' walk from our house. But she thought it strange that Hannah hadn't said where she was going or what time she would be home. Hannah always told Jeanie what she was doing, and was never late. It was how she was able to manage all the different parts of her life, by keeping to a schedule.

After Hannah and I had left, Jeanie set about cleaning the kitchen and sitting room. She wasn't the most enthusiastic cleaner, and a few months earlier she had overheard Hannah discussing her attitude with my father. He had advised Hannah to ‘give her hell', but instead Hannah had raised her pay by ten shillings a week, to encourage her to try a little harder.

Dusting now, Jeanie tried to concentrate, but coming around the corner from the kitchen into the sitting room she noticed that the half bottle of vodka she had left on the sideboard was missing. It could only have been Hannah who had taken it, and it planted another seed of doubt in Jeanie's mind. What would Hannah be doing with a half bottle of vodka?

Jeanie picked me up a couple of hours later. She had grown used to me, ‘had grown fond' of me, but I was still a handful, and took up most of her attention. Even so, she couldn't stop thinking about the vodka and Hannah's failure to say when she would be home; and when her friend Sheila phoned later, she mentioned it to her. Sheila dismissed her worries. It was Christmas, Hannah was probably going to a party at the art college. That was why she had taken the vodka and why she didn't know when she'd be back.

Sheila's explanation was reasonable, but Jeanie's worries continued to play on her mind, especially when the neighbour, Barbara Weeks, brought Simon back from school, and the afternoon darkened into evening, and Hannah was still not home.

Ten

THE DOORBELL RANG
in my grandparents' house at around five o'clock that afternoon. It was Anne Wicks. She had come home to her flat in Chalcot Square to find the police there. When they explained what had happened, she walked the two hundred yards to my grandparents' house in Chalcot Crescent to tell them.

It is fifteen years since I opened my grandfather's diary from that day and dropped it back into its box as if it might burn my hands — and it is no easier now to read the words he wrote that evening. He usually wrote in blue biro, but his entry recording his daughter's death is in red, the letters three times their normal size, as if their colour and shape could express the horror that the words could not convey, could draw out of him some of his pain.

After phoning my father, he took a taxi to University College Hospital, where Hannah had been taken. ‘The faintest hope — artificial respiration?' he wrote. ‘No hope. Dead. In the ambulance, said the doctor. I go to see.'

Jeanie remembers my grandmother and father arriving at our house and going upstairs to Simon and me, though they could not bring themselves to tell us that evening and we were put to bed. Later, my father came down and told Jeanie he had some bad news, and Jeanie, who had been holding that uneasy feeling inside her all afternoon, asked if it was Hannah, whether it was a car accident, which didn't make sense of her earlier worries but was all she could imagine.

My father didn't correct her, nor did my grandparents. It was only at the inquest that Jeanie learned that Hannah had killed herself. As far as she remembers, though she stayed with us for two more years, my father never spoke Hannah's name in her presence again.

He did say she should come into the sitting room to be with him and my grandparents, though soon afterwards my grandmother suggested she go to see her friend Sheila. She remembers running through the streets to Sheila's house.

My grandfather wrote of friends and family gathering at our house as the evening drew on. At one point, my father said, ‘What are we waiting for? Nothing is going to happen.' At another, the phone rang, and my father picked it up, listened for a moment, and said, ‘She's dead,' and hung up.

THE NEXT DAY
, my grandfather drove to St Pancras coroner's offices to meet ‘a friendly investigator'. ‘I put my cards on the table,' he wrote in his diary. My father ‘not there. Separation. Of course — she may have met someone at the flat.'

Though these weren't quite all his cards. He didn't reveal that he knew that Hannah had been having an affair, or that the man's name was John Hayes. In fact, he seems to have tried to suppress this information. He wrote of Anne Wicks telephoning him, ‘angered at being asked to be reticent' — asked, presumably, not to say anything herself about John Hayes.

Jeanie, too, remembers mentioning the half bottle of vodka to my grandmother, and being advised that she ‘didn't need to say anything about that at the inquest'.

What was the purpose of these concealments? To protect Hannah's reputation? To lessen the shame? Though perhaps it was simply to do something, to wrest some small control of a situation in which any meaningful ability to influence events had been taken from them.

HANNAH'S INQUEST TOOK PLACE
two days after her death, on Thursday 16 December, at the St Pancras coroner's court — the same place where Sylvia Plath's inquest had been held two years earlier. ‘The drab, damp coroner's court,' Al Alvarez wrote in his account of Plath's death in
The Savage God
.

My grandfather recorded in his diary that he swore his oath ‘with a handkerchief' on his head, and told the court ‘how nicely Hannah had spoken' of my father at his last meeting with her.

The coroner asked if he had ever ‘feared she could do such a thing as commit suicide. The coroner's eyes rested on me. No — never imagined.'

Asked the same question, he noted, Anne Wicks replied, ‘No — nothing crossed my mind.'

‘The only possible verdict,' the coroner concluded, ‘was that in a state of mind we cannot know Hannah Gavron deliberately and efficiently took her own life.'

THE FUNERAL WAS HELD
that afternoon at Golders Green crematorium. My brother and I remained at home with our grandmother. There were five mourners: my two grandfathers, my father, Susie, and the family solicitor. ‘Jews with caps bear the coffin,' my grandfather wrote. ‘An organ plays. I weep and weep and weep.' If anyone spoke, he did not record it.

A couple of days later, my grandparents fled to Israel to stay with relatives; a day or two after that, my father took Simon, Jeanie, and me skiing with friends in Switzerland. My only memory of this holiday is that we were snowed in and I was excited by talk that we might have to fly out by helicopter — though in the end the snow must have cleared, for we left by train.

I HAVE ALWAYS KNOWN
that Hannah was cremated, but it is only now that it occurs to me to wonder about her ashes. I have seen no mention of ashes in my grandfather's diary — and everything of importance went into his diaries. I ask Susie and my father, but they do not remember.

I call the crematorium. I am hoping only to learn what might have happened to her ashes, but the woman I speak to asks for Hannah's name, and tells me to hold. A couple of minutes later, she comes back. Records of ashes have been retained since 1962. Hannah's were kept for six months, she tells me, and were then, like all unclaimed ashes, spread on the crematorium lawns.

She asks for my address and a few days later a map arrives. Hannah's ashes were ‘dispersed' on section 4-M of the memorial lawns, alongside the thorn bed by the east boundary wall.

A MONTH OR SO
after Hannah died, my father received a letter from University College Hospital, asking him to collect ‘some clothing and a watch which belonged to your wife'. I ask him about these items, but he doesn't remember whether he collected them. If he did, they were not kept. I have seen no watch of Hannah's, have seen her clothes only in photographs.

Jeanie, who spent those days ‘tiptoeing around the house in silence, not knowing what to say', remembers that Hannah's clothes went quickly, presumably to charity. My grandmother asked her if she wanted anything, but Jeanie already had an anorak Hannah had given her, and she said this was enough.

Hannah's work papers went to my grandfather, his diary records, though they had gone, perhaps long before, by the time Susie and I sorted through his house.

Most of her jewelry disappeared, too, though when my brother got married my father produced Hannah's engagement ring from a bank security box. My brother gave it to his wife at the ceremony, but when she washed her hands later that day, the ring slipped off and disappeared down the plughole. The plumbing beneath was taken apart, but the ring was never found.

What happened to Hannah's wedding ring I do not know. Perhaps she took it off in those last weeks, and it disappeared with everything else. Or perhaps it was still on her finger when she died, and went missing at the hospital. The nanny who looked after Simon and me when we were small, who I looked after in the last years of her life, died in hospital, and her wedding ring, which she always wore, was not among the possessions returned to me. It may be that Hannah's wedding ring is sitting now on a stranger's ring finger.

IN ONE OF OUR AFTERNOON TALKS
about Hannah, I summon the courage to ask my father about the way things were handled after her death — why so little of hers was kept, why we fell into such complete silence about her.

He doesn't remember her possessions being given or thrown away, he says, but he agrees that they must have been. He suggests that perhaps he felt it wasn't fair on my stepmother to be surrounded by signs of Hannah, though my stepmother has told me that most of Hannah's possessions had gone by the time she moved in with us, and it was she who saved the few papers that remained.

He mentions a child psychiatrist Simon and I were taken to see, how she advised that we were too young to be told that our mother had killed herself. He and my grandparents were worried that if they talked about Hannah we would ask questions, he says, that they wouldn't be able to keep the truth from us.

I understand the first part of this. I remember my own anxieties about telling Leah about Hannah. I have read, too, that Ted Hughes also tried to protect his young children from the bleak facts of their mother's death.

The second part — the silence, the putting away of all photographs, the clearing out of her possessions — is harder for me to understand. My grandmother kept some photographs of Hannah on display, told us her stories about Hannah. I have, too, a letter the psychiatrist wrote to my father about Simon in which she emphasised that ‘in order that the mourning is satisfactorily accomplished it is very important for him to be able to think about his mother and face his grief'.

For as long as I can remember, my father's gaze has been directed at what lies ahead. He doesn't believe in worrying about the past, or lingering over problems that can't be solved. ‘The arrival, not the journey,' is one of his sayings. ‘A for achievement and E for effort,' is another. But how much is this his nature, and how much was he shaped by the events of that afternoon?

Had he never thought, I venture, of putting aside a few of Hannah's things for Simon and me, for when we were older, for when we might want to know more about her?

‘The feeling was that the thing to do was to make a fresh start,' he says, as if he is talking about someone else's feelings, someone else's decisions.

‘The feeling was,' he says again, ‘that her book was the thing to keep. It was her achievement.'

He is almost eighty when we have this conversation. What does he see when he looks back across half a century? Does he recognise the man he was then? ‘I was punch drunk for a long time afterwards,' he says. ‘I was so off balance, I couldn't think about anything properly.'

THOUGH SO MUCH
of Hannah's was discarded, both my grandparents and my father kept the letters of condolence they were sent after her death. These tell me little about Hannah, but seeing how wordless, helpless, the writers were rendered by her act helps me to understand a little more the need to turn away.

‘There cannot be anything which I can do or write to be of any use,' reads a typical letter. ‘One would write a lot but at such a time feelings rise above words,' goes another. ‘I have to accept that news of this nature is not lightly put about,' wrote a third, ‘though I find it almost impossible to believe.'

Even Anna Freud, at whose clinic in Hampstead my grandmother was now working, could write nothing more helpful than, ‘I think I can feel the whole weight of it because I had a sister who died at the age of your daughter and also left two little children of the same age. We all tried to fill her place for the children, and the ups and downs of that struggle are very much on my mind.'

Few of the letter writers attempted to remember Hannah, to find solace in the death by celebrating aspects of the life, as letters of condolence conventionally do. How, seems to be their message, do you remember someone who erased herself? How do you mourn someone who so completely rejected you? How do you carry on your own life in the face of such a thing?

In
The Savage God
, his 1971 study of suicide, Al Alvarez wrote that after centuries in which suicide had been a mortal sin (suicides buried at crossroads with stakes through their hearts or stones over their faces), and a criminal offence (people were still being imprisoned in England for attempted suicide until the late 1950s), suicide had become by the 1960s ‘a private vice, another “dirty little secret”, something shameful to be avoided and tidied away, unmentionable and faintly salacious, less self-slaughter than self-abuse'.

If words like ‘little', ‘tidied', and ‘faintly' seem to me strangely evasive, as if Alvarez was writing of a suburban affair rather than the devastating legacy of the suicide of a young mother, the secrecy he writes about was certainly true in Hannah's case. Not one of the letters of condolence refers directly to the manner of Hannah's death, and only a few even hint at it.

The only letters that attempt to offer some understanding or consolation are from two of Hannah's childhood friends, Jill Steinberg and Sonia Jackson. ‘I feel very much,' Jill wrote, ‘that Hannah gave so many people so much help — she did more for her fellows in a very deep, real sense in such a short time, than most of us do in 60 years — that when the time came, she had nothing left for herself.'