A Woman on the Edge of Time

by Gavron, Jeremy;

  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.’

  ‘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 a
n 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 gif
ted 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.’