A Woman on the Edge of Time (13 page)

‘Wherever she was she was always the centre, throwing off sparks in every direction,' Sonia wrote. ‘It's true about Hannah what Frieda said about [D.H.] Lawrence — she lived every moment of her life to the fullest possible extent. Perhaps you can't live at that pitch of intensity for seventy years.'

IN MAY 1966
, six months after Hannah's death,
The Captive Wife
was finally published. It was a single-handed piece of research by a woman in her twenties, based on her doctoral thesis, and put out by an academic house, but the findings contained in its catchy title, that some women felt trapped and depressed rather than happy and satisfied at home with their children, were picked up by almost every newspaper and magazine, from the
Evening Standard
to the
Morning Star
, the women's magazine
Nova
to the
British Medical Journal
.

‘Is Your Wife just a Bird in a Plastic Cage?' ran the headline in the
Sunday Express
, above a half-page article suggesting that, ‘in terms of human happiness',
The Captive Wife
‘could be the most important book of 1966'. ‘Is mother a nuisance?' asked a column in the
Daily Mail
. ‘And if she isn't why does Britain insist on treating her like one?'

The
Observer
ran an extract from the book across its op-ed page, below a drawing of a woman looking through bars. The following week, most of the paper's letters were given over to responses, including one from a woman who wrote that her husband regarded her desire to work as ‘an understandable wish, like wanting a holiday in Greece, but not as a need that society is under an obligation to notice', and signed herself, ‘Another Captive Wife'.

This phrase was widely taken up. So many people were thinking about ‘the captive wife', one article claimed, that ‘far from being the most inconspicuous member of society, she is now one of the most controversial, sought after and discussed'. ‘O Captive Wives, Belt Up!' ran another less sympathetic one.

Many of these articles acknowledged the ‘untimely' or ‘tragic' death of the book's young writer. But not one revealed how she had died, or asked, as newspapers surely would today, whether there might have been a connection between the subject of the book and the fate of its author.

In many cases, the writers of the articles wouldn't have known that she had killed herself. But at least some must have known. Her inquest had been reported in at least two local papers in north London, where many journalists and book reviewers lived. There was no internet, no texting or social media to disseminate gossip, but news still spread. The review in
New Society
was written by Donald MacRae, the sociologist who had hosted Hannah at a dinner two nights before her death, and whose letter of condolence to my grandfather made clear that he knew how she had died. But in his review he did not mention this. Silence, it seems, whether out of respect, or manners, or Alvarez's shameful avoiding and tidying away, was the natural response of the times.

MY GRANDFATHER EMPLOYED
a cuttings agency to make sure he did not miss any references to his daughter, but the success of
The Captive Wife
seems only to have deepened his torment. ‘If you had been alive,' he wrote in his diary, ‘how you'd have enjoyed it! What might you have achieved?'

His diaries in the months after his daughter's death are agonising to read. He remembers ‘her cold body in the mortuary. I stroked her brow. Should I have kissed her?' Everything is poignant. Leaving our house after a visit, he hears my father putting on the radio, and this simple domestic act overwhelms him. Things Simon and I do or say remind him of Hannah, but we are not Hannah, not ‘substitutes'.

His diaries were mostly a receptacle for his despair, but here and there they chronicle his attempts to find some sense. He must have heard, perhaps from Anne Wicks when she came round to tell them that Hannah was dead, that there had been an argument with John Hayes, for early in January he recorded a talk with Susie, who told him that ‘Hannah could not bear rejection'. He went over his memories of Hannah's visit on the evening before her death. She sat ‘talking to me in detail' about her work, his work, my father, Susie. ‘The only conclusion,' he decided, is that ‘what happened had not been planned before Tuesday.'

On January 29, six weeks after Hannah's death, the doorbell of his house rang. It was Anne Wicks again, ‘wanting to talk'.

He had written in his diaries of my father's anger with Anne Wicks. He noted now my grandmother's ‘anguished face'. Fortunately, perhaps, Simon and I were there. ‘Anne realises — it's awkward — steals away.' But my grandfather decided he needed to talk to Anne, and a week later he met her. ‘Smiling. Young. Composed,' he wrote.

‘There had been a row between Hannah and John Hayes,' she confirmed. Hannah ‘wanted to rush John, a revolution in his life, but he didn't want to be rushed'. Hannah ‘stormed out', but John ‘did not think it final. They'll telephone, talk again.' But by the time John tried to make contact, it was too late.

Anne found him ‘on her doorstep in evening. Hysterical. Had to be sedated by doctor.' He wanted to write to my grandparents, ‘despairing apology, that too weak to help Hannah in her hour of need', but Anne had dissuaded him.

She suggested that there was no point in my grandfather meeting him. He would discover only ‘a nice handsome affection-giving young man'. Anne had been ‘utterly against her taking up with him', but Hannah would not listen.

My grandfather told her that my grandmother said there was ‘no-one who such good brains and so little control on her emotions', and Anne ‘agreed'.

Hannah had told Anne that if John rejected her she would kill herself, but she hadn't believed her. Hannah was, though, ‘genuinely afraid of being alone — would be an old maid if John did not marry her — would find it difficult to find a man who'd take her on, a tough proposition, and she herself was choosy'.

Anthony Storr, the psychiatrist, had been ‘hopeless', Anne said. She ‘felt like writing him an angry letter'.

She had spent the first month ‘with fantasies in which I was saving Hannah — arguing with her'. ‘Like myself,' my grandfather added.

‘Not as much a villain' as my father suggested, he wrote. ‘Saw her off.'

DESPITE ANNE WICKS'S
advice, my grandfather wrote to John Hayes, and a couple of weeks later the two men met for lunch at my grandfather's club.

‘Young, nice looking. Recognised me,' my grandfather wrote. ‘Yes — have a drink. A large double gin. We talk.'

‘I discover: He ex Rochdale Grammar School. To Oriel, schoolmaster, now MA in sociology.'

My grandfather asked what Hannah wanted from him. ‘Well, marriage and a declaration. To be married by Christmas, as a plan. She, only she, would make him into a whole human being.'

And the quarrel? ‘Hannah wanted him to spend a night at Jacksons Lane. He, no — Jean, the kids. A ‘semi quarrel'. Anyhow, Hannah stormed out. Angry.'

In the evening, ‘since Hannah so angry', he had called her at home, intending ‘to say that yes he would stay the next night. Only to find' my father ‘answering' — presumably the call to which my father had said, ‘She's dead,' and hung up.

From here on, my grandfather's notes are increasingly elliptical:

He wasn't ready — the children — afraid.

His ‘nature'.

Had not suspected such action. Hannah joked: always carried sleeping pills, her poison.

Drove recklessly. Would laugh. Take life lightly.

I talk of her death. He breaks down. Weeps. I hold his hand.

I say goodbye to John Hayes. Bust. Shattered. So ordinary a boy.

‘The mystery has deepened!' my grandfather wrote, and for me, too, these conversations raise more questions than they answer. Was Hannah really afraid at twenty-nine that she would be on the shelf if John Hayes didn't marry her? How exactly was Anthony Storr ‘hopeless?' Why Christmas again? How come Hannah ‘always carried sleeping pills'? And how did so apparently little add up to the decision to take her own life, to the act, the step, the leap, of doing so?

As far as my grandfather's diaries record, this was the end of his active efforts as a detective, though he continued to ask others for their opinions — provoking them, it almost seems, to unsympathetic judgements.

She ‘was a narcissist', one female friend told him. ‘Other people real to her only in the part they played. The whole enterprise with John was a fiction.'

‘Were her feelings for other people limited?' asked his sister-in-law, Eva (who had made the comment about Hannah being clever in the hours after she was born). ‘Must have been. If she left such burdens.'

‘Oh my darling,' he added. ‘I am aware that you could be ruthless.'

Susie's husband of a few months told him, ‘Hannah so forceful — personality clear to him after only four meetings! We all only had walk on parts in her life.'

Another man whose name I don't recognise ‘wants to talk about Hannah — he's had experience of suicidees. He says Hannah had few friends, found personal relations difficult. Did we know?'

He had lunch with Fred Warburg, his old publisher friend, who brought a message from his wife, Pamela. ‘Hannah was always an outsider, unusual, solitary, and so on — she, Pamela, understood.'

In the months after Hannah's death, my grandfather began seeing a psychoanalyst, who ‘probes and probes about Hannah' and concluded: ‘A schizoid gifted young woman. I agree — schizoid.'

MY GRANDFATHER'S DIARIES
were, I understand, not written to be read. They were a safe place for him to pour out his darkest thoughts. But reading these comments, I bristle. Who were these people, some of whom hardly knew Hannah, to decide she was a narcissist, had no friends, thought only of herself? Who was this psychoanalyst who diagnosed her after her death as ‘schizoid'?

The word itself sounds like an insult. I look it up in the Oxford dictionary: ‘Resembling or tending towards schizophrenia, but with milder or less developed symptoms; pertaining to or affected by a personality disorder marked by coldness and inability to form social relations.' Is this the Hannah I have heard about from friends like Tasha, Shirley, Carole Cutner, Erica, Gunilla Lavelle? Ambitious, strong-minded, dramatic, even selfish at times — but a personality disorder marked by coldness? Unable to form social relations?

Of all the friends my grandfather records talking to about Hannah, only one — Cherry Marshall — spoke with any softness and generosity towards Hannah, advised him to be understanding, forgiving.

Cherry told him how when she had herself fallen in love with a man outside her marriage, ‘husband, children, work — all vanished. It was like catching a disease. Suddenly her life had a different point, it had not been fulfilled, it was a different drama entirely.'

‘Be light on Hannah,' Cherry pleaded. ‘Her passionate, hopeless love.'

‘The intelligent woman is worse off,' she said. ‘She can't cling, plead, blackmail, even console herself.'

This is the only one of these conversations I can read easily, but it seems, in its kindness, to have been the most difficult for my grandfather, to have stirred his pity, his guilt, for he wrote, ‘The talk upset me terribly.'

GUILT IS ONE OF THE MOST
devastating legacies of suicide. Phyll Willmott wrote in her diaries of her ‘guilt that I did not do more, see more, understand the desperation of her state'. For my grandfather, his guilt must at times have been overwhelming. ‘I had a wonderful daughter,' he castigated himself, ‘and did not take proper care.'

The burden of his guilt explains, I think, why he was so ready to believe these harsh judgements of his daughter's character. In November 1966, he wrote how the prospect of a lunch he had arranged with Donald MacRae ‘oppresses me. Perhaps meeting with all who loved H oppresses me.'

Remembering Hannah as his ‘darling child, the most enchanting sprite ever', as he describes her once, was too upsetting. It was easier to think of her as fatally flawed, unable to control her emotions, schizoid. If there was something cracked inside her, then he couldn't have helped her, didn't need to feel so guilty.

In his diaries, he returns again and again to memories of her childhood melodramas, wilfulness:

‘Aged 2, frantic with joy, too frantic to keep still.'

‘Aged 4, we force her to give in, come to us. She cries, cries, then comes running, overborne.'

‘You must have been six or seven, it was on the Edelmans' lawn, you played a game whereby Sonia and Natasha and another girl had to catch you and as they came at you from all sides suddenly you stood still and screamed — in panic. No way out?'

My grandmother's ‘mother had died, the telegram had come, you were twelve or thirteen and going to London with your friend, and there was only one thing you wanted, to be away, while Susie comforted her mother'.

One of these memories — or rather memory of something he was told — is even the solitary reference to the headmaster in his diaries: ‘Hannah, the story goes, hurt at 15–16 while skiing, assisted off by K with his arm around her — this leading to her affaire.'