by Yehuda Koren
Some months later, Assia phoned Wilkins again and asked to meet him: ‘Assia asked me if I would mind being the executor of her will.’ The 23-year-old Wilkins was startled. ‘Partly because she seemed too young to be thinking about a will, and partly because I didn’t feel myself a close enough friend to take on such a responsibility.’ Assia did not look distressed, and retained ‘her whole outward style and manner, lavishly colourful and seductive’. She led him to believe that making a will was a normal procedure for a responsible adult of her age, and explained, in a matter-of-fact way, that it was her solicitor who had instructed her to appoint someone younger than herself as executor. She told Chris that in the event of her death, he would have first choice of any three objects in her flat, including her precious netsuke collection.
The change of executor from Assia’s sister, who was just two years her junior, to Wilkins, who was almost half her age, could be interpreted as a rather positive sign: that Assia was not expecting her death to be imminent and therefore had picked an executor who would probably be around when her time came. But it was just the opposite: she felt it was unrealistic to appoint her sister, who was living in Canada and tied down with a husband and three small children. In her practical mind, she chose Wilkins because he was the only one of her friends who lived nearby; some ten minutes’ walk from her flat. Following Wilkins’s consent, she revised her will but, once again, as in all previous cases, left it unsigned. It seems that she could not yet sign her own death warrant.
In mid February, she got a letter from the court to the Principal Registry of the Family Division, that the decree of her divorce from David Anthony Wevill was made final and absolute and that the marriage was thereby dissolved. She wrote a postcard to Wevill in Austin, ‘I wish you happiness – you deserve it so much.’ She sent it without knowing that he was about to marry an American student named Sharon, whom he had just met at the university. Wevill did not reply; months later, he composed an imaginary monologue for a lifeless Assia: ‘I’m so restless, so cold. I must see. Please give me eyes. Give me back my eyes. A woman can’t live alone. She’s only half herself, by herself.’ Though they had not been living together for three years, Wevill felt that he could read Assia like an open book, and slip easily into her state of mind. The monologue continued:
By that time, I just wanted a little peace and quiet. I had my vanities. My wigs. My dresses. My faces. Certain opinions people held to be vanities, which were just my uncertainties, really, and a certain brightness of saying them. I had my small passions, netsuke, little ivory walnuts, children, animals, grace in welcoming strangers. If my grand manner was not working so well now, it was because I saw I could not hold on to things. People were my passion, and I could not change. It was amazing how suddenly my magic went, after you went, and you went, and no one else came, and when I cried for help the cracked hag voices of former confessors and friends were not on the phone, began to talk about me behind my back, and to my face as Anna Karenina or the demon mistress, whoever happened to suit their demonology of the moment, and salvage their straight selves, all striving to be good people and saints after lives that contradicted that.
For several months, the Mendelsons and their two children, Andrea and Mark, had been Assia and Shura’s refuge. ‘They used to come for Sunday lunch, and I can still see her, a cigarette in one hand, dancing in the kitchen with my little Andrea. Shura was jealous and ran to the door, sulking,’ recalls Patricia. In a thank-you letter after one of those Sundays, Assia chastised herself for her choice of a partner, ‘It’s them bloody artists that bash up women’s souls. I’m telling you.’ It was self-evident that Shura’s fourth birthday would be celebrated at the Mendelsons’ spacious house in Hampstead. It was held on 2 March and Ted failed to attend. The hosts and guests tried to make up to the little girl, by showering her with presents and much attention, to distract her mind from the deeply felt absence of her father. A photograph depicts a sombre girl, surrounded by smiling children, as she holds her presents up to the camera.
Underneath, there was seething lava but, on the surface, it was still business as usual. Assia called Tom Boyd, with whom she had collaborated on the TV jingle for Vesta Curry, and invited him for lunch at her favourite Mayfair restaurant. She tried to rally him to a project she was contemplating: like many Britons in the past months, she was endlessly humming ‘Those Were the Days, My Friend’, an Apple Records release, produced by Paul McCartney and sung by Mary Hopkin. It stayed 21 weeks in the chart, six of them at number one. ‘Assia told me that it was based on a Russian folk song, and that through her Russian and Jewish background, she knew many similar songs,’ Boyd recalls. ‘She proposed that we pick one and translate it into English, turning it into a hit.’ Boyd said he would think it over, and discuss it with her the following week.
On Tuesday, 18 March 1969, Assia took several days off from work and travelled to Manchester, leaving Shura with the au pair. House-hunting was her ‘oxygen mask’ and, in high spirits, she waited for Ted in Manchester Central. But when he got off his train, he was angry and sullen. They travelled around Yorkshire and Northumberland. Assia fell in love with Green Farm, near Hexham, and the salmon in the nearby river added to the house’s charm. Even the rent was ridiculously low. The next address, Dower House, near Manchester, had magnificent gardens. A third house, in Manchester, included bed linen with no additional charge. Assia was ready to move right away into any of them, but Hughes found faults in them all, claiming that the houses were either too expensive or too remote from anywhere.
Assia lamented not so much the loss of the beautiful palatial houses as the missed opportunity to set up a family home: ‘A pity about the three children. “They’re just in average despair,” he says. About F & N. Poor little Shoe isn’t even mentioned,’ she wrote in her diary. She was not pacified by Ted’s promise that next time they would be looking for a house in Devon. When she voiced her disappointment, he reprimanded her: ‘I can’t bear any more show of temperament from anyone.’ She interpreted his short temper as a clear proof of repulsion: ‘He feels as though he has already buried me – that feels hideously accurate. That which allowed his previous graces was desire – and I know it’s dead in him.’ And still she continued to inquire about possible dwellings.
The actual reason for taking the trip was Ted’s television reading in Manchester. However, Assia was left out of that too, not allowed even to watch it in the monitoring van and, when Ted was basking under the studio lights, she was pacing indignantly in the hall outside. During the meal afterwards, Ted got drunk, and in the lounge of the Elm Hotel, they had a ‘terrible talk’, and the truth came out. Later that evening Assia wrote in her diary: ‘“It’s Sylvia – it’s because of her” – I can’t answer that. No more than if it were a court sentence.’ So it was not his parents who stood in their way, not even something that had to do with her own shortcomings. Assia could have handled that but she had no chance against the glowing presence of the dead wife. The lot was cast and the verdict was horrendous: ‘It says die – die, soon. But execute yourself and your little self efficiently,’ she wrote in her diary. ‘I can’t believe it – any more than I could believe hearing of my own death.’
The following two days, Assia was left on her own in the hotel, since Ted would not take her with him to visit his mother in hospital in Yorkshire. She walked into a surgery and talked the doctor into prescribing 35 Sonemyl sleeping pills and bought them in a nearby pharmacy. She felt criminal. ‘My Shura. Feel totally bankrupt … I’m sinking – further and further inwards.’ Alone in her room she tried to read Zbigniew Herbert’s Selected Poems, but was left cold. The bedside light went out because of a fault and she switched on the radio, listening to a programme on the tragic life of Dorothy Wordsworth, the devoted sister of the well-known poet; ‘she ended mad and old,’ Assia wrote in her diary. ‘The tenderness with which these terrible relationships are evoked once the players are dead. Their lives are so compost for the sentimental bouquets
of “compilers” the future.’ She fell asleep to Beethoven’s String Quartet No 13, Op 130: ‘I couldn’t bear the dark with the quartet playing. It was sinister. It’s thawing, slowly. Bricks of ice are heaped in the car park, twigs of oak lie spread over the yard … the house looms, genuine, terrorising, closed, as the tomb it is.’
On Saturday morning, 22 March she and Ted bid each other farewell on Manchester station. Assia boarded the train to London, and he travelled down to Court Green. She seemed to him in good spirits and he promised to call her the following day. However, her au pair had a different impression: when Assia walked into the flat that afternoon, she looked extremely depressed and told Else Ludwig that ‘Mr Hughes didn’t want her any more.’
In his poem ‘Flame’, that he published 21 years later, Hughes referred to a ‘signed bit of paper’ that awaited Assia upon her return. It is unclear whether it was an official document of some kind or a private letter with disturbing news or gossip. Olwyn Hughes believes that it concerned the final decree of Assia’s divorce. Either way, it agitated Assia so much that she did not wait for Ted to call but phoned Court Green. It was noon, Sunday, 23 March. They had another intense, heated argument and Ted felt that she was questioning his commitment to her. There had been occasions in the past when she had threatened to kill herself but, this time, she made no mention of it.
Later that day, Else Ludwig asked permission to go to her friend Olga, who lived just a short walking distance away. She left at 7.30. An hour later, Mrs Margaret Jones, the elderly neighbour from flat Number 2, smelled gas. Mrs Jones, a shorthand tutor, hurried into her own kitchen and saw that all the taps were turned off. Then she checked her meter and it seemed all right. She sniffed around and noticed that the smell was stronger by the front door, so she opened it and stepped into the passage that connected her flat with flat Number 3. As she reached Assia’s door, the smell got stronger. Mrs Jones rang the bell but there was no reply. She returned to her flat, went into her living room, where she could see into Assia’s lounge. It was in darkness, so she presumed that all three were out. She decided to stay ‘by the front door, awaiting their return, as I wanted to warn them of the gas leak’.
For about two hours, the old lady was standing in the hall, behind the glass front door. The first person to walk in, at about 10.45, was Mr Goronwy Owen Roberts, who had just returned to London from a weekend at his family home in Wales. She asked Mr Roberts if he could come with her and verify whether it was indeed gas that was coming out of flat Number 3. He put his face against the door, and pushed the letter opening inside, inhaling deeply. Since he was not sure that the smell came from within, there was no point in alerting the fire brigade, and he went up to his flat. Mrs Jones was still not pacified; she returned to stand guard in the cold, when some minutes later Assia’s au pair turned up. ‘I told her not to strike a match in the flat without turning off the gas and opening a window. Immediately I said that, she screamed and said, “something has happened.” I said, “What do you mean, is there something wrong?” she said, “yes”.’
The au pair opened the door warily with her key. She saw light at the end of the corridor and the fumes of gas hit her face. She became hysterical. Mrs Jones pulled the screaming, weeping Else out, and led her into her own flat. She then went up and banged on Mr Roberts’s door and he immediately accompanied her down. As he entered Assia’s flat, it became clear to him that the source of the smell was behind the shut kitchen door. Pushing it open, he turned the kitchen light on and saw the two bodies.
He quickly switched off the gas taps, pushed the window up as far as he could, and telephoned the police. Meanwhile, as they were all waiting for the inspectors to arrive, Mrs Jones suddenly remembered that a charge nurse lived in flat Number 6 and rushed upstairs to fetch her. ‘Mrs Wevill was lying on some blankets on the floor on her left side, and her daughter was lying on her back, with her face inclined towards her mother,’ the nurse, Mrs Jennifer Margaret Bangs later testified. She took their pulses but there weren’t any. She looked at their pupils, discovering to her horror that they were fixed, dilated. ‘The little girl was much colder than her mother.’ Helped by Mr Goronwy Owen Roberts, the nurse did some cardiac massage on the mother and on the little girl but it was hopeless. The police doctor who had just arrived declared them both dead. The post-mortem examination report stated that the cause of the mother and daughter’s death was carbon monoxide poisoning; there were no external marks of recent injury on Shura’s body and, unlike with her mother, there were no signs of barbiturates and no evidence of alcohol. The pathologist, Professor Keith Simpson, remarked, ‘The child bears every evidence of proper care and attention.’
To rule out the possibility of an accident, Mr F W Lucas, a service supervisor at the South Eastern Gas Board, was sent to the flat. He found no faults in the gas installation and appliances. His expert calculations showed that ‘a normal healthy person would be expected to succumb to CO poisoning within one and a quarter hours’; so when Mrs Jones first smelled gas and frantically rang the bell at flat Number 3, Assia was most probably still alive. The police called Chris Wilkins: they found his name as executor of the will. ‘They were investigating, rather than informing, and seemed interested in my interpretation of the facts,’ Wilkins recalls. During that weekend, his telephone was continuously engaged, because his sister-in-law was staying in his flat, having advertised for accommodation for herself and her child. For all the years since he has never stopped tormenting himself that perhaps Assia had ‘tried in desperation’ to call him, but had been unable to get through. ‘I could have reached her flat in five minutes.’
‘I handled this one badly,’ Hughes told his sister Olwyn when he put the receiver down after his last conversation with Assia. But he still did not grasp how close she was to death. The next morning, he was dumbfounded when policemen knocked on his door. He was summoned immediately to report to Southwark Mortuary in London. There, he identified ‘the bodies of Assia Wevill and Alexandra Wevill’, his daughter. Det. Sgt Loakman asked him to describe his relationship with the deceased woman; ‘I first met Mrs Assia Wevill about seven years ago in London. I knew her husband, David Wevill, through the profession. Assia and I became very close friends, and eventually the friendship blossomed into love. We became intimate, and there was a girl born of this union.’ Hughes told the detective that Mr Wevill knew of this association and that, eventually in February 1966, Assia left her husband and lived with him in Ireland, and then at his home in Court Green. ‘She felt persecuted living at my home address, as we were living with my parents, and also because of gossip.’ As things did not work out, he said, Assia left for London and he often visited her. Recently, they had been house-hunting, and she was hoping that one day they would ‘find a place and live together’. Hughes later told Brenda Hedden that the police were unpleasant to him and very suspicious.
It was Assia who led the police to Hughes; Sgt Brian Lutley found two stamped envelopes on her bedside table, one typed and addressed to Dr L Gutmann in Canada, and another, handwritten, to Mr Edward Hughes, North Tawton, Devon. But of the latter, the coroner’s file contains only the envelope, complete with stamps. The letter itself has mysteriously disappeared.
The other letter, to ‘My dearest Vatinka’, had been written two months earlier, in January of that year. It began with: ‘If you ever receive this letter, you will know that I have not taken this decision lightly’. Always sensitive to the meaning of words, Assia did not write ‘when you receive’, but, ‘If you ever receive’, indicating that despite her abysmal despair, she still nurtured some hope that somehow, she would stop before it was too late.
The prospect before me is so bleak, that to have lived my full life-span would have entailed more misery than I could possibly endure.
It is the life alone. Insecure, dependent on an au pair to look after my little Shuratchka properly – dependent on the sort of people for whom I work – a very bad, 3rd rate agency who would fire me in case of illn
ess. No husband. No father for Shura.
I’ve often thought of this – but the pain it would give you, and the criminality perpetrated on my little Shuri – these thoughts often stopped me at the last sane moment, in the past.
I have lived on the dream of living with Ted – and this has gone kaput. The reasons are immaterial. There could never be another man. Never.
She expressed regret for not having the necessary resilience, to have recuperated from her disillusion.
Believe me, my dearest Vatinka, my friend, my colleague in exile and disaster, that what I have done was necessary – you wouldn’t have wished another 30 years of hell for me – would you?
Life was very exciting at the beginning – but this living death was too much to pay for it.
Thank you for all your kindness to me throughout my life. I did so love you, my dearest father – and don’t grieve for me. Believe me, I have done the right thing.
Please don’t grieve for me, my darling Vatinka – life was infinitely worse – infinitely. I lived a full and comparatively long life. It is necessary to know when there’s no more life to live.
Perhaps there is another world – and if there is, we shall meet – Mutti, and you, and I. You were excellent parents – and you both did everything you could for me. Please don’t think that I’m insane, or that I have done this in a moment of insanity. It was simple accountacy. And I couldn’t leave little Shura by herself. She’s too old to be adopted.
Goodbye Lonya. Father. My past protector. I miss you very much. Goodbye my dearest.
And she signed ‘Assia’ on the bottom of the typed page, in her firm, dense, steady handwriting.