by Yehuda Koren
By that time, Brenda Hedden was separated from her husband Trevor. She recalls:
We were nicely spaced out: Assia was in London, Carol in North Tawton, and I, in Welcombe, 40 miles away from North Tawton, with my two daughters, aged four and one year old. Ted wished to diffuse the female power, and told me that after Sylvia, he no longer wanted to be dependent on one woman; he felt it was weakening and suffocating him. He kept us in the pecking order: we were the chickens in the coop competing over the rooster’s favours. Assia was the chief hen, I was number two, and then there was Carol, and maybe others.
Brenda got the impression that it was Sylvia’s death that left Ted glued to Assia but it was also their stumbling block. In her view, ‘Assia fooled herself that she could have a life with Ted, but he had no intention of marrying her or anybody else, nor did he wish to break up with her.’ A drawing that Hughes made at that time on a long strip of paper tells it all: two snakes, one blue, one pink, locked in an embrace which creates the shape of a heart; they hiss at each other, unable to break apart, each move of the one strangling the other.
But gossip travels fast and Assia was distraught to learn that Ted was conducting affairs with other women. On a torn-out diary page from 4 September, she spelt out the naked truth: ‘It is only inevitable that the life I have led should end like this. That I should be subplanted (sub-planted!) by others.’ Assia knew all about Brenda Hedden and Carol Orchard but she was discreet in her diary entry, not naming her rivals. Five years earlier, she had made a scene when Ted invited Susan Alliston for Christmas in Court Green; but this time, although having much greater grounds for alarm and fury, she did not confront him with his infidelity. In their surviving correspondence from that period, there is no reference to his unfaithfulness. Assia usually aired her difficulties with Ted in minute detail but none of her friends recalled that she spoke about his philandering. Did she belittle the threat that Brenda Hedden and Carol Orchard presented, thinking that neither woman was an obstacle to her own future with Ted? Or, on the contrary, was Assia so apprehensive and uncertain of her place and so desperate to be with him, that she was willing to turn a blind eye to his transgressions?
Peter Porter recalls reading a report that Ted Hughes submitted to the Arts Council, suggesting that it should set up a special rendezvous for poets in London, ‘providing facilities for poets to meet and make love to a special corps of handmaidens assigned to the task of catering to the masculine muse. This was a joke, but much of Hughes’s conduct supported a literal interpretation of the notion. The other parties to his affairs tended to feel that they were involved in the highest reaches of shamanism.’ Conducting a number of parallel affairs was Ted Hughes’s modus operandi. Invariably, he was not the one to terminate a relationship but, rather, he let his women do it; it was Plath who demanded that he leave home and, in later years, at the time of Hughes’s second marriage to Carol Orchard, it was his mistresses who realised that he would never commit himself and broke off with him.
But he did not let Assia go, feeding their relationship with a constant drip of hope. There was no marked erosion in his outward treatment of her and he kept writing to her, ‘I’m really missing you’, and sending drafts of his Crow poems for her review and comment. When he was invited to a poetry reading at the Peacock Theatre in Dublin, it was Assia who was at his side. The Irish poet Eavan Boland, later a professor at Stanford University, recalls that at a party after the event, Ted introduced Assia to her: ‘Standing in a smoky living-room in Dublin, with a fire sparkling behind us, her face oddly lighted, she was as polite as he was. We said a few words, that was that. Later, I would remember those two people, caught in the grind and ordeal of their moment, tied in a terrible Racine-like fashion to the events that were coming.’
In October, Ted’s mother was driven in an ambulance to Yorkshire, followed by his father. The coast was clear but Assia was not invited to return. On the face of it, Ted acted as if he had agreed to live with her, but not in Court Green. They scouted estate agents’ letting offers, glanced through brochures, and went house-hunting separately and together. But his quest lacked the energy and determination with which he set out for the country with Sylvia; then, he found the house in Devon in less than a week. Now, months passed and still nothing satisfied him. Time and again the deal was somehow aborted for no apparent reason.
One day, after years of silence, Assia surprised William Trevor, her advertising colleague from J Walter Thompson, asking him to meet her in the lounge of a bar near Waterloo station. She was chain-smoking, drank Coca-Cola and the time they spent together seemed to him ‘like hours spent in a cinema’. Though he had known her well, it was the first time that Trevor heard Assia call herself ‘a displaced person’, complaining, ‘she had created the woman she seemed to be’. She asked for his advice: would it be wise to enrol at the Heather Jenner Agency – an upmarket marriage bureau in New Bond Street – and look for a widower somewhere in the countryside? She had had enough of poets, she said. ‘With her eyes half-closed, against the stream of smoke from her cigarette, she even referred to a cottage garden, with lupins and fuchsia, and wisteria round the porch. She gave the impression that she meant every word of it.’ She said that she wanted to do it for the sake of Shura, to give her conditions to thrive in, and – ‘I think I might make a farmer happy.’ She spoke with increased conviction about living in the country beside an elderly gentleman, having no doubt that she could make it happen, and ‘nowhere in her features was there any sign that she felt sorry for herself. Her eyes were full of yet another Alice in Wonderland future.’ However, when they bid farewell outside the pub and she turned up the collar of her smart tweed coat, for a single instant she seemed to him weary. ‘“Actually I’m afraid,” she murmured, before she smiled again and went away.’
Fay Weldon remembers that Assia did enrol at a marriage bureau and actually dated five or six men. ‘Being a single mother in the late 1960s was difficult on all levels, and Assia found it hard to support Shura and herself. She felt that time was against her, she was getting older, and it was her last chance. For a woman as striking as she was, it was humiliating to revert to dating services, and it showed her degree of despair.’
Assia was lamenting her lost years and beauty but, at 42, men still found her attractive and craved her company; some of them were almost half her age. She used to bring her antique furniture for restoration at John Chambers’s carpentry shop in St John’s Wood: ‘At that time, I did not know that she was fifteen years older than me. She mesmerised me, and I always felt uplifted in her presence. She complained that while in Devon, Ted used to disappear for long walks in the hills, while she’d rather be talking to him.’ An unemployed musician, Guy Jenkin, gave Chambers a helping hand in his workshop and, when Assia learned that Jenkin had mastered the recorder, she was intrigued and asked if he could teach her to play. Jenkin was 23 years old, married with a young daughter, and he too found Assia strikingly beautiful; he was drawn to her aloofness, poise and a certain air of mystery about her. ‘I fancied her, there was sexual tension on both sides,’ but there was also a motherly, older-sister quality about her that stopped Jenkin from flirting with her.
Once a week, he drove from North London to Assia’s flat in Clapham Common to give her music lessons. He never asked for a fee: ‘I was not interested in money but in her, and wanted to find out more about her.’ Assia would give the au pair the evening off, and Jenkin would come in the early hours of the evening and stay almost until midnight. Assia was a diligent student and showed considerable musical progress, playing on the cheap plastic recorder that she bought. Sometimes Jenkin brought his violin with him and they played together.
‘It gives me such immense pleasure,’ Assia wrote to her friend Patricia Mendelson, urging her to learn to play the recorder as well. ‘The repertoire of music written for it is very large. We could play duets?’
After the music lesson, they would go to her kitchen for a light meal. On several occasions
he brought his two-year-old daughter Sarah to play with Shura until falling asleep. They would return to the sitting room, which was full of Assia’s drawings. Near the door Jenkin noticed a framed pencilled portrait of Ted Hughes, a vertical scar across his face. Jenkin did not dare inquire whether Assia slashed the drawing out of anger and pasted it together when she and Ted made up, or whether the slit was an integral part of her depiction of the ‘dark and broody’ Ted. Still, Jenkin could not feel Ted’s presence in the flat. ‘It was a woman and her daughter’s flat and there were no signs of a man around,’ he recalls. ‘In the many evenings and the numerous hours that I spent there, the phone never rang, and no one dropped by.’ Several times he went with Assia to concerts on the South Bank or to recitals at the Wigmore Hall.
I sensed her underlying unhappiness and isolation, filling her times with activities, going through the motions of normality such as learning to play the recorder. I felt there was something inside she needed to let go or get rid of, but it seemed she lacked the inner resources to find a means of exorcising her demons. I wanted to love her, to be her friend, to make it all OK for her, but was too aware of her darkness.
Assia remained obsessively loyal to Ted. None of her suitors could overcome her addiction to him and he remained her idol; the unrivalled Ultimate Man. Daily she waited in anticipation for a letter from him; the evenings stretched out as she waited for the phone to ring. Days passed as she awaited his occasional visits. She felt she was suffocating in the increasingly shadowy reality of him, yet she could not, and did not, wish to escape the spell that he seemed to have cast over her. Only she could not bear it much longer.
Twenty
The Die Is Cast
London, winter 1969
In a razor-sharp diary entry from September 1968, Assia dissected her life: ‘I was endowed with too many minor qualities, but with neither the will or the huge intelligence to bring them a life of their own.’ Her father expected from her nothing and too much, and so did she. Unsparing, she pronounced her own verdict: her past was a letdown, her present a mess and her future a cul-de-sac. In her defeat and helplessness she made Hughes her saviour or her doom.
About that time, Hughes invited the Hungarian poet Janos Csokits to have tea with them on the terrace of a tearoom near Paddington Station. Csokits happily complied. ‘Then, we walked to the train station with little Shura. All of a sudden, Ted said a quick goodbye, and walked straight to the train, without looking back. Shura understood only too well what was happening, and flew into a tantrum, crying, shouting, Daddy! Daddy! She was stamping her feet, and Assia wept.’ Csokits was bewildered, unable to soothe either mother or daughter. A long time passed before Assia finally composed herself, dried her tears and consoled the little girl. ‘It was then that I understood why Ted had asked me to meet them that morning.’
Only two photos of Ted with Assia and Shura survived. In one of them, Assia holds Shura’s hand, helping her to stand up; in the other she is pushing the pram. In both photos Ted stands reserved, uptight, his hands deep in his jacket pockets. They hardly look like a family, unlike a similar photo found in Assia’s album, taken a few months after Sylvia’s suicide: Assia and Ted are relaxed and smiling, standing close together, with the three-year-old Frieda between them, hugged in Ted’s arms. In December 1968, her colleague from Ogilvy, Martin Baker, dropped in at Okeover Manor with his camera and took a whole sequence in black and white of the mother and daughter. Assia is detached, solemn and thoughtful, hardly smiling when hugging her daughter. Shura is posing for the camera, inquisitively gazing at objects around her. She looks vulnerable in her small white dress; a bracelet hugs her thin arm, her hair is clasped behind. Baker recalls:
Shura was hyperactive, running around and couldn’t sit still. Assia did not restrain her; she let her express herself freely. I was writing a children’s book about armour without a knight. My publisher said that children would never understand it, but Shura said, it’s such a good idea. A funny, bright little girl, after a few minutes you forgot she was a child of four. She was very advanced for her age, and Assia treated her as an equal. They were inseparable.
Gerald and Joan Hughes came from Australia for the holiday season and Ted introduced Carol to them; Frieda Hughes remembers the wooden toy boxes that she got from Carol that Christmas. The Hughes family celebrated in Yorkshire, while Assia and Shura were left in London on their own. On Christmas Eve, she cooked a festive dinner and ate it with Shura in the living room by the decorated tree. Of all the games, toys and books that the child had received in her four years, only one survived; the large, illustrated Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales, a Christmas present from her mother. It was Ruth Fainlight, Sylvia Plath’s close friend, who tried to mitigate Assia’s sense of desertion by inviting her and Shura to Christmas Day lunch. Assia spoke only of ‘Shura. Money. Loneliness’, Fainlight told Elaine Feinstein, Ted Hughes`s biographer. The Sillitoes were renting a house from Mira Hamermesh, Assia’s friend from Israel, and years afterwards Ruth heard from Mira that her Christmas invitation had stopped Assia ‘from killing them both during the empty days of that endless, dead-of-winter northern festival’.
When Assia had left Court Green and moved to London a year earlier, Ted was constantly phoning her from Devon. Judge Martin Graham was present during one of those calls: ‘Assia put the receiver down and said, “he’s so possessive, he rings all the time when I’m away from him.”’ But now the telephone was dead and when she tried to phone him, more often than not he was unavailable.
Mira Hamermesh heard Assia talk several times about killing herself.
We had all been through the humiliation of waiting for a man to ring, so we didn’t take it seriously, especially as Assia always said it with a smile, out of the blue, in the middle of dinner. We had all been in therapy, and were told that people who sound the alarm never commit suicide. We became so fed up with her theatrical threats, that once I silenced her and said, go ahead, do it. Had I the slightest suspicion that she was serious, I would never have dared even to joke about it.
Martin Baker, who frequently went with Assia to see the netsuke collection in the Japanese rooms of the British Museum, had a similar impression: ‘in the 1960s, people in our circle either divorced or killed themselves. There was a general feeling of depression, and Assia was even less depressive than most of us.’
One day, Assia phoned Royston Taylor and asked to lunch with him. They met in a bright, busy, smart restaurant in Mayfair and talked about psychiatrists and injured parties in love. Assia told him about her discord with Ted Hughes, but said that they were trying to work something out. She described in detail house-hunting with Ted in Yorkshire, and Royston assumed ‘that they hadn’t quite crashed, if they were looking for somewhere to start afresh’. Well into the main course, the object of the lunch became clear: would he sell his service revolver together with ammunition? She offered one hundred pounds, which Royston thought was a very fair price. Assia knew about his revolver from their days at the agency, since he once brought it to work and fired accidentally through the floor of somebody’s office. ‘I said I didn’t want her committing suicide, made a joke of it, and she was in quite high spirits. She laughed and said, no, she merely wanted a “terminal machine” for her bottom drawer.’ Then they moved to other topics, laughing a lot, and before departing, Royston promised to think it over. He phoned her the next day, saying that if he thought she really needed it, he would not ask for money, but he had decided not to let it go. ‘By that time, I speculated that she could do something bad with it, maybe shoot somebody. But suicide didn’t really weigh on my mind,’ he said.
Like many of Assia’s friends, Edward Lucie-Smith had heard her threaten to end her life. ‘I remember that she spoke about it in Bernard Stone’s little book shop. She walked in, and declared that she was going to commit suicide. Her tone was like that of a person announcing that he’s off to Paris or to Italy. It wasn’t the tone of a depressed person.’ However, when Guy J
enkin arrived once at Assia’s flat for the scheduled music lesson, he was alarmed when she failed to answer the bell. He buzzed again and again and finally Assia came to the door, looking distraught. ‘Oh, thank God, you’ve come,’ she said. Stepping inside the flat, Jenkin had a sinister sensation. ‘My arrival had interrupted a train of events. She didn’t explain things, and I didn’t ask her. I knew exactly what she meant and what she intended to do, and yet was dumb to help her.’ There was no music lesson, and the evening was full of awkward silences. Little Shura was bouncing around in her pyjamas, as joyful as ever. Guy was suddenly alarmed by the countless jars of pills that he had always seen on Assia’s bedside table. He left quite early but sat in his car outside her house, stunned, helpless. ‘Should I go back and confront her? If so, then what? Who could I contact? I knew of no one other than Ted Hughes. What would I say even if I could find him? Would he be of any use?’
Assia’s options narrowed to two: she scrutinised the newspapers for country houses to let, studied leaflets sent by estate agents, made phone calls, and every now and then travelled with Ted to inspect a house. Equally diligently, she was contemplating her demise. Already in the summer, she confided in Chris Wilkins, with whom she used to share an office at Ogilvy, that she was worried about her insecurity, and wanted to marry again and settle, but things were not going right with Ted. Chris and Assia went for a walk along the Embankment Gardens, and she told him ‘that she couldn’t stand the state of things as they were, and if it didn’t change, she would kill herself’. Like all Assia’s friends, Chris Wilkins thought it was just a passing depression. They were all dazzled by her lust for life and gushing vivacious demeanour, which she did not lose, and were misled by her tendency to hysteria and over-dramatisation.