A Woman on the Edge of Time

by Gavron, Jeremy;

  He doesn’t know anything about Anne telling Hannah that John Hayes would never marry her, though she was right. He did know that Anne was ‘very down on’ The Captive Wife, and that ‘Hannah took these criticisms very seriously’. She told Hannah it would ‘ruin her reputation’, though he can’t say why.

  To my surprise, he says that Anne wrote to him not long before she died, asking to meet him. What did he do? I ask. Tore up the letter and threw it away, he says. Did he think she was writing because she knew she had cancer? He didn’t know, he says, didn’t want to meet. What good would it have done?

  I AM ONLY MORE INTRIGUED, though. What kind of friend was Anne Wicks? What kind of person? Are my father’s, my grandfather’s, accusations justified?

  My grandfather kept only two of the transcripts of his interviews for his book about intellectuals: Hannah’s and Anne Wicks’s. Hannah, I presume, recommended Anne to my grandfather.

  ‘From Bromley, Kent,’ he noted. ‘Father, bricklayer. 11-plus. Went to Bromley Grammar School. Why not try for Oxbridge? It seemed out of reach.’

  Like Hannah, she started a PhD in sociology at Bedford ‘but gave it up. Felt that working in too much isolation.’

  Instead Hannah gave her an introduction to my grandfather’s friend Mark Abrams, whose name had helped Hannah get into Bedford. Anne got ‘a good basic training’ in social and market research at Abrams’s company, and went to work at Thomson newspapers, where she was made head of market research at the age of twenty-six.

  ‘I don’t take any notice of the fact that I’m a woman,’ she said, ‘and I don’t let anyone else do so.’ She no longer had ‘much contact with girls at Bedford College but knows that a high proportion of them have a husband and two children and have stopped working entirely’. Single again herself, she said that when women marry, they seem to her to ‘turn into cabbages overnight’.

  INSTEAD OF ANNE’S CHILDREN, I hear from Di Hibel, a friend of Anne’s they ask to contact me. Di was at Bedford, too, she tells me when we meet, though a couple of years behind Hannah and Anne. She remembers seeing Hannah once in the library. She was pregnant with me, and wearing a man’s shirt.

  ‘Annie,’ as she calls her, as Hannah had on her suicide note, ‘was very angry with Hannah for what she did to her,’ Di says. ‘She told me she did it in her flat, and she didn’t want to talk about it.’

  Anne never married — ‘was wedded to her job’ — though she had three children by two different fathers, Di says. She had a successful career in market research and account planning. She became a Thatcherite in her later years, and even considered trying to become a Tory MP.

  DI DOESN’T KNOW ABOUT — Anne’s children didn’t mention — any diaries or letters, but instead serendipity opens another door. Tony Wicks had talked of some friends of Anne, a couple who lived in Chalcot Square, but I have almost forgotten about them until I hear my sister-in-law mentioning their uncommon name. Margaret and Rainer Schuelein, it turns out, are her next-door neighbours — were my brother’s neighbours for the last fifteen years of his life.

  I have often seen them, I realise, have even said hello to them on the street. Now I call them, and they invite me round. They are gentle, soft spoken. ‘Annie,’ they say, was ‘the most wonderful friend.’ She was ‘charming, bright, opinionated, full of life’.

  They knew Hannah a bit — they had dinner with her and my father and Anne and Tony a couple of times. They moved to this house before Hannah died, and Margaret even remembers Hannah coming here once. She doesn’t think she came in, but can remember her standing on the front drive with Anne. She was with her son in a pushchair — with me, it must have been.

  I ask if they ever said anything to Simon. No, they say, they weren’t sure he would have wanted them to tell him. ‘Once something is said it can’t be unsaid,’ they say. It might have created unease between neighbours.

  Were they still friends with Anne when my brother was living next door? I ask. ‘Oh, yes,’ they say. ‘Annie often came here.’

  I try to imagine her sitting in this room while my brother was a few feet away on the other side of the dividing wall. Perhaps she sat on sunny days in the garden while my brother and his boys were playing on their grass. Did the boys ever kick a ball across, did she pick it up, hand it back to her friend’s son, one of her friend’s grandsons? Perhaps it was after such a moment that she wrote to my father, asking to meet him. I ask the Schueleins, but they can’t say, didn’t know that Anne had written to my father, though she knew who their neighbour was.

  They show me some photographs of a young Anne — a tall, large-boned, good-looking young woman, her short dress emphasising a belly swollen in pregnancy, her hair in a similar Mary Quant bob to Hannah’s.

  They have something else to show me, too: Margaret’s diary from 1965. Anne and her boyfriend, it reveals, had supper with them the night Hannah died. She shows me the page: ‘Supper Ghriam and Annie and pheasant here.’

  I stare at these words, try to make sense of them. Of course, once she had told my grandparents, Anne wouldn’t have wanted to go back to her flat, would have sought out her boyfriend, her friends, for company and solace. I understand that Margaret might not have wanted to write about Hannah’s suicide in her diary. But there is something about the ‘pheasant’ that upsets me — that this was what she chose to note in her diary on the day of Hannah’s suicide in Anne’s flat, that she and Anne and their men supped on pheasant.

  I COMPOSE MYSELF, can hardly blame acquaintances for the evasions that my own family were guilty of, that I have been guilty of. And there are questions I still need to ask, about my father’s and grandfather’s allegations.

  It was true, they say, when I ask about Anne encouraging Hannah to have an affair, that Anne thought my father too ‘manly and controlling’, though the way they saw it, the two women ‘egged each other on to reject their husbands’.

  They agree, though, that Anne was ‘negative’ about Hannah’s book. ‘She thought Hannah had based it on too small a group of people, too small to be serious.’ As they say this, I think I understand. The Captive Wife was a work of qualitative research, based on conversations with ninety-six women. Anne, in contrast, was a quantitative market researcher, used to polling thousands of people. To her, Hannah’s book would have been statistically meaningless.

  Though it is only later that the irony sinks that it was Hannah who introduced Anne to Mark Abrams, who trained her in statistical research.

  AS I AM LEAVING, I mention my hopes about Anne’s papers, thinking that the Schueleins might put in a good word with her children, but Margaret tells me instead that she has some letters from Anne — from the period just after Hannah died. They went abroad for a year, and Anne house-sat for them and looked after their affairs, dealt with their post, ‘forged our signatures on everything’.

  She’ll have to find the letters, Margaret says, and the next day she calls, and I go back and read them on a table against the party wall with my brother’s house.

  The top one is dated 14 January 1966, exactly a month after Hannah’s death. Anne writes of being invited to supper with Hannah’s Hornsey colleague, Michael Kidron, and his wife, Nina. ‘It was a rather nice evening, slightly saddened for me because Nina had only the day before heard of Hannah’s death and was anxious to know why it could have happened. I filled in some of the background for her because she knew the basis of the story anyway.’

  Anne feels ‘a bit bad about having broken a sort of promise’ to my father, presumably not to talk about Hannah’s death, ‘but the story Nina had was worse for him in that she thought he had left her’. She put off seeing some other people, she writes, ‘because I don’t want to go through the Hannah saga again’.

  ‘Incidentally,’ she writes, ‘isn’t it a small world?’:

  Wicks knows Schueleins

  Schueleins know Kidr
ons

  Wicks knows Gavrons

  Gavrons knows Kidrons.

  In the next letter, a month or so later, she writes of deciding to stay on in her flat rather than buy a place, ‘because it is just too complicated and I thought it would be nice to have a bit of spare cash for a while rather than taking on another heavy financial commitment now’. She has had ‘a bad patch’ when she ‘replaced my Hannah miseries’ with miseries about the two men she is seeing, but is better now. She ends by sending her affections to the Schueleins’ son, Max. ‘I am terribly sorry to miss several months of Max growing up.’

  I understand, as with Margaret’s diary, that these letters do not tell the whole story, that what we say and what we feel are seldom the same thing. But I still can’t help being taken aback by some of the things she writes, her tone, what she does not write. The ‘Hannah saga’, for example, as if the main thing about Hannah’s death was that it was irksome to her. The dance of people who know each other that doesn’t mention that one of these people has stopped dancing. When she writes of her sadness at missing months of her friend’s son’s life, I wonder whether it occurred to her that Hannah would be missing all of her own sons’ lives — that we would be missing all of Hannah’s.

  The last letter is dated 14 December, the date of Hannah’s death, and at first I assume it is a year later, but as I read it I realise that it is from a year earlier. Anne has been to the ballet with Hannah, and ‘absolutely loved it’. She has also ‘found a flat — in Chalcot Square. There was a board up so I phoned the agent, and then I went to see it this morning.’ It is the flat where Hannah died, and I read her description of its rooms — the kitchen ‘smaller than yours but larger than mine and quite large enough to eat in comfortably’.

  I HAVE HAD John Hayes’s telephone number for a year now, without finding the courage to call him. A friend of my stepmother knows him. He still lives, she told me, with the man he was living with when he was seeing Hannah, who is also called John. The two Johns, she calls them.

  Not for the first time, I sit with the number and a phone in front of me. Even this makes me nervous. This is the man who had an affair with my mother, ‘cuckolded’ my father. Over whom she killed herself.

  It is mid-morning. He is probably out, I tell myself. What if I just dial, listen to his voice on the answer machine?

  I watch my finger move from one key to the next, listen to the echo of the rings. One, two. Before I can hang up, a man’s voice answers, says that he is John.

  I panic. Which John is it? I am looking for John Hayes, I say.

  ‘This is John Hayes.’

  The voice is softer, posher, more velvety than I have imagined — though what I have imagined I do not know, only not this, perhaps not anything.

  I could still hang up, but I do not. I explain, as well as I can, my hand shaking, who I am, what I want, and the velvety voice responds slowly, calmly. Yes, he will see me, he says. He is going to the physio for his neck tomorrow, and it always hurts for several days afterwards, so he suggests we meet one day next week, at the Charing Cross Hotel, in the upstairs café.

  An hour later, he calls back. There is a tremor in his voice now. He has been disturbed by my phone call, he says. We should meet sooner. Tomorrow. He will come into town after his physio. The same place.

  I hardly sleep. I arrive early at the hotel and I go upstairs, but there is a function in the café, so it is closed to the general public. I come down to the lobby and walk up and down until I realise that I have twice, three times, walked past a man hunched in a scarf and coat in a chair in an alcove.

  I look at him. He looks at me. John? Yes.

  He stands up; we shake hands. He is smaller than I imagined — in my mind he has always been tall. He is older, too — I was looking, I realise, for a younger man. Though he is no older than his age. White hair, a squarish face, watery blue eyes. In an email later, he will tell me that he, too, hardly slept the previous night.

  We sit. Perhaps we discuss drinks, order them. I do not remember. I explain again my need to know about Hannah. He will answer any questions, he says, though when I ask if I can take notes he looks alarmed. Better not, he says. His voice seems less velvety in person, more pained, kindlier.

  I suggest we start at the beginning, his first meeting with Hannah, and he says it was 1964 — no, 65. ‘What year was it?’ he says, fumbling over his words.

  I help him work out the date, my journalist self taking control. It was the autumn of 1964 — he arrived at the college a year after Hannah.

  What was his impression of Hannah? I ask.

  ‘She was the princess of the college,’ he says.

  ‘I have to write that down,’ I say, and he says okay, and from here on I take notes.

  What does he mean by princess? I ask.

  ‘One she was beautiful, and two she had an intense clarity of mind that burned like the sun,’ he says. ‘By princess, I mean she was the person in control — she quickly established herself as the leading member of our group, and put others in the shade.’

  He is more confident now, and he talks with a quiet, staccato eloquence about Hornsey, how the general studies course was new, how he and Hannah and others were forging it together, would have discussions, arguments. He and Hannah were ‘quite antagonistic to each other at first, belligerent even’. He was a grammar-school boy who had been to Oxford to study philosophy, he says, so he was ‘quite confident himself, quite bright and brash’.

  ‘Hannah and I were the children, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, the youngest in the department,’ he says. ‘The belligerence grew into affection.’

  I have to understand the times, he says. ‘There was an effervescence in the air. A feeling that we could do things, Britain itself seemed at that moment capable of creating a dynamic new culture, cinema, theatre. Hannah and I were drunk on this metaphorically, and it created an alliance between us.’

  It was an uneasy alliance at first. ‘Hannah used to drop in halfway through my lectures and sit at the back and make herself conspicuous, as was her style. The first time this happened I said, “What are you doing snooping on my lecture,” and she said, “I want to see what you’re like. You’re new, are you any good?” ’

  He remembers one occasion. ‘We were interviewing candidates, students, and she said I should start, so I asked this schoolboy whether he thought flowers could feel pain. I wanted to ask him something he wouldn’t be prepared for. And Hannah snorted. I ignored her, asked my questions, and she asked hers, but at the break I asked her why she had been so ill-mannered, and she said I was being so Oxford and pompous.’ They laughed; the ice was broken.

  He and the other John met at Oxford and had been together for ten years by the time he met Hannah. They had both had affairs, but he had never slept with a woman before Hannah, and has never done so since. So why her? I ask. ‘I was intoxicated by her combination of beauty and clarity and candour.’

  He had ‘always been attracted intellectually, emotionally, to women’. But with Hannah there was a ‘physical intensity’, a passion, that intrigued him.

  Hannah made the running, set up their meetings in Anne Wicks’s flat, though they only met there three or four times in total. He wasn’t very good with her in bed; she had to encourage him, as he found it a bit tawdry. ‘That step to me was a step I shouldn’t have taken,’ he says. Before the summer, the relationship had been ‘all about affection, a hidden affection, which produces an intensity in itself’. It was only after the summer that it became sexual.

  What he cared about was the ‘wonderful mutuality’ they had with each other, the excited intellectual talk. ‘We were in a highly combustible state in our excitement over ideas. We had the feeling that what we talked about mattered.’

  But once they had taken the step into bed, Hannah started getting more serious. He didn’t know that my fath
er had moved out and, when he did, John was ‘disturbed morally’. He came ‘from a small rural community in Lancashire and had a very ethical system of living’. He was pulled along by Hannah, but ‘after a time I felt I didn’t want to go any further, and I began to pull back’.

  A couple of Saturdays before Hannah died, she hosted a party at our house for staff and students from Hornsey. My father was there, too. ‘It was the first time I met your father, or at least saw him. I don’t think we actually met. But I looked across a room and knew who he was, and I was sure that he knew who I was.’

  This was ‘crucial’ for John — coming to our house, seeing my father, seeing my brother’s and my toothbrushes in the bathroom. ‘I saw her family, and realised I was committing adultery.’ He got ‘very drunk, and went into the bathroom and covered the mirror with messages in shaving foam’.

  There was another episode the week before Hannah died. He went out for lunch with her, and she said she wanted to show him something, ‘and we walked along a street and she pointed up at a flat and said, “That’s where we are going to live,” and I said, “We?” and she said, “Yes, you and I! We can make a go of it. I’ll have the children with me, of course.” ’

  John had a ‘major recoil’. He suddenly realised she was being serious, that this was more than an adventure for her.

  They had arranged to meet on the afternoon of Hannah’s death at Anne Wicks’s flat, but he rang her the night before or that morning to say he wasn’t coming, that they had to stop. ‘We argued, and she said, “I’ll still be there if you change your mind.” ’

  He had a six o’clock lecture, but afterwards he decided he ‘wasn’t dealing with this in the proper manner’ and that he needed to talk to her face to face. ‘I went to Chalk Farm station, and when I got out I thought I’d ring the flat to see if she was there, but I got no reply. I called her home, and your father answered and said she was dead.’